Darryl Cooper — #16 – God’s Socialist, pt. 6: No Driver At The Wheel

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): Hey, everybody, this is Daryl Cooper, and you're listening to the Martyr Maid Podcast. You're about to hear the sixth episode of God Socialist, the rise and fall of People's Temple, better known as the Jonestown

Speaker 2: Suicide Cult

If you

Speaker 3: haven't listened to the previous episodes in this series, I highly recommend you go back to the prologue and work your way up from there. You'll get a lot more

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): out of the story. There's a lot of detail, a lot of things, a lot of moving parts that you have to kind of follow along with to get the full context, I think. If you

enjoy this

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): series, please consider subscribing to my Substack page, which can be found at martyrimade.substack.com

That's

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes available to subscribers only for just $5 a month or $50 a year. To

all of you who are

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): already contributing, I really appreciate you allowing me to do this, and I hope you enjoy this episode. Here we go. I'm

content to die for

Speaker 4: my beliefs. So

cut off my head. I let you

Speaker 5: know. And

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): here we go. All right, no fancy intro, no intro music. We're picking up right where we left off last episode

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): This is part two of a single long episode. So if you're hearing this and you haven't listened to the previous episode, stop, go back and listen to that one first. Even if you don't listen to the whole series, go back and listen to the previous episode if you haven't heard it before you listen to this one. Because I'm just picking

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): right where I left off

So I was describing

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): how Jim's paranoia went parabolic after his failed trip back home to Indianapolis

About how he'd

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): faked an assassination attempt to rally his people to the flag and afterward

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): began surrounding himself and the church with armed guards and security measures

You would think

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): after that experience

in

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Indianapolis. He would think twice about putting himself out there and taking a big risk again, but that is not Jim Jones. It never was, and it's not going to be going forward. A few months after the Indianapolis thing, he made the trip to Philadelphia for his attempted coup d'etat on Father Divine's

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): peace mission movement, which we talked about in an earlier episode. And if you remember from

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): that episode, it did not go well. And

He had

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): fantasized about inheriting Divine's large and wealthy movement for over a decade, and he had spent the whole winter after the failed Indy trip preparing 200 of his people for their role in facilitating the Mau Mau takeover. They

all knew

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): how important it was to him. He talked about what he was going to do when he was in charge of it and everything. And if something was this important to Father, how could they fail? But, of course, they did fail immediately

And

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Mother Divine ran them off, and they limped back to San Francisco with nothing but a dozen or so elderly ladies that they convinced to defect for their trouble. And

they spent that summer in

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): a back-and-forth war of words with Mother Divine, making accusations and trying and failing to draw in more peace mission defectors, accusing Mother Divine of various things. Jim did not take rejection well to understate the point about as much as it's possible to understate anything

Okay. So even

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): as the temple continued to grow, money's starting to flow in hand over fist, Jim's paranoia and the paranoia of his people is continuing to spiral out of control. And

in the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): late summer, something happened that made things immeasurably worse. The

reporter at

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the Indianapolis Star said

who

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): had written about his healing show back in Indianapolis, was following

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): up on the story and wrote a letter to the San Francisco Examiner newspaper seeking some local insight into what Jim Jones and People's Temple were all about

That message

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): was passed to the San Francisco Examiner's religion editor, a guy named Lester Kinsolving, who had already received a letter or two from his readers about the church, and

so

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): he gets curious. And one day in the summer of 1972

This

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): would have been right around the time that the last buses returned from the peace mission failure, which was in June of that

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): year. Ken Solving took an examiner photographer, and the two of them drove up to Redwood Valley to see what was what

They tried to follow

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): people as they

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): filed into the church for the Sunday service, but they were intercepted by four or

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): five sharply dressed young guys who said that they couldn't go in

One of the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): young guys went to check with Jones and after some conversation it was decided that they could go in but they had to leave the camera and any recording equipment outside. The photographer said, "No way Jose, I'm not leaving my camera," so he waited outside to take pictures of the exterior

and Kinsholving went

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): in. The photographer, as he's making his way around the grounds, is followed by security guards at every step

He

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): noticed that three of them are wearing handguns on their belts, another one's holding a shotgun, which

they explained by

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): referencing the assassination attempts that had taken place against Jim. Kinsolving

documented what

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): he could, but the

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): people were cagey with him around, and so he didn't get much, but now he was really curious. And

so he begins making some

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): phone calls for more information

Word got back to the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): temple that a major San Francisco newspaper was now investigating the movement

We'll see you

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): next time

And

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Jim and his people went ballistic. Kinsolving

was not

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): some local reporter. He had a nationally syndicated column. He had recently received a full-page write-up in Time magazine, just the previous year, actually

He was a former

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Episcopal priest, and he didn't like these new religious movements, and he pursued stories about them like a prosecuting attorney

Okay. and

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): so the temple soon learned that he was working with the Indianapolis star on the story so they were going to have background like that and the temple went into hyperdrive Jim

did what he

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): always did he went on the offensive over 50 temple members

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): wrote letters to the examiner praising their pastor he had his best man Tim Stone a lawyer in the Mendocino District Attorney's Office a pillar of the community he was the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): one to interface with Kinsolving to answer all his questions and try to put them off but

he was the one You

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): know, he was the wrong guy for that job. He was just too much of an overzealous true believer. And Tim Stone apparently

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): couldn't help himself and just made things worse

In a letter to

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): answer Ken Solving's questions, Stone wrote, quote

In case you wonder why I

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): am so deeply

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): interested in the matter of publicity of Jim Jones, it is this. It hurts him. Even good publicity. He is anti-totalitarian, whether communist or fascist, and therefore we have extremists who recurringly try to do him in

Whenever there

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): is publicity, the extremists seem to show themselves

He goes on. Jim has been the means by

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): which more than 40 persons have literally been brought back from the dead this year. I have seen Jim revive people stiff as a board, tongues hanging out, eyes set, skin graying, and all vital signs absent

So

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): yeah, great job, Tim. That should dampen his curiosity. As you can imagine, the letter didn't have the intended effect. Less

than a

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): week later

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): both the Examiner and the Indianapolis Star ran the first of a series of stories to expose the

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): temple. The

first of Ken

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): Sullivan's

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): articles began, Redwood Valley. A man they call the prophet is attracting extraordinary crowds from extraordinary distances in his people's temple. His followers say he can raise the dead

He used quotes

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): directly

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): from Tim Stone's letter in the story

The next

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): day, the second of seven planned installments

Speaker 17: ran

This time

Speaker 17: quoting a member proclaiming that Jim Jones was the incarnation of God himself

The third

Speaker 18: installment the next day went after Tim Stone directly. Bringing up the strangeness that

one of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Mendocino County's assistant district attorneys was enthralled at some strange preacher claiming to be God. And

he also started to

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): hint toward the

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): temple's practice of collecting welfare checks of members and social security checks of people who were living communally

and

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): working off the books for the temple

Each

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): day, Jim set members around the city to buy up and destroy all the copies of the examiner that they could find to try to limit the exposure of the stories. About 150 people were quickly organized and shipped to the examiner's office in San Francisco, where they picketed out front

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): all day, holding up signs that says, This paper has lied. They saw healing undeniable and would not print. And

so Ken Solving

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): he's kind of a clown. He's enjoying the whole thing. TV cameras show up to the protest. to record everything that's going on, and Kinsolving goes downstairs and goes out front to just make fun of them

Pickets or no pickets

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): the fourth story runs on

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): schedule

And this time it

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): reveals that another minister had asked the state attorney general's office to investigate People's Temple and reported on the ubiquitous presence of security guards and loaded weapons at all the services

This time

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): 200 Temple members show up to the Examiner headquarters to protest. They

form a line

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): around the entire block and march around all day, and Jim was with them. And

so the paper

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): city editor comes

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): out to interface with Jim, and they agreed to get the Temple side of the story

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): And so Jim calls off the protest for now. I

told you, Jim goes

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): on the offensive. He does not wait for things to

happen. So the next

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): day he calls up the paper and he tells the city editor his ground rules for the interview. The

editor invites

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): him to come into the office to talk and Jim says, no, no, no, I'll send someone to pick you up

Okay, so the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): editor gets

a call

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): that in a little while the editor gets a call that someone's downstairs waiting for him. And he goes down and Jim has sent one of his followers named Chris Lewis, big black guy from the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): inner city in Oakland, 6'2", 230 pounds

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): or so. A violent criminal who has literally been in trouble for choking a public official at a meeting the year before and who would murder another man the next year before later being murdered himself. He's a rough customer and

he looks

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): the part

And so Lewis

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): marches the examiner editor

to a

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): waiting limousine down the block and they get in and the editor finds himself crammed in with lewis on one side of him and jones on the other and another big black dude from the church driving and tim stone turned around glaring at him from the shotgun seat in front as soon as he gets in jim and tim stone just start verbally assaulting him berating him and the limo is just driven around in circles so he has no way out

And Jim

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): starts pointing

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): out some minor inaccuracies in the story, and Tim says that this

is

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): grounds to sue the examiner for libel personally. That's something that the church is looking into. Jim

claims that the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): series has been motivated

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): by personal enmity against him on the part of Kinsolving, and Tim backs this up by pointing out that Kinsolving had come down and mocked their picketers, started trouble with them outside the examiner's office. That argument made a dent

But the city

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): editor explained that Kinsolving worked in a totally different department than him directly under the executive editor. He couldn't tell him to cancel the story. And so this goes on for an hour. But

as it's

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): happening, the examiner's management team and lawyers

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): had gotten together

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): to discuss the issue

You

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): know, Kinsolving's beat was religion, but here he was beginning to border on accusing the temple of criminal misconduct, and so the lawyers worried that he might be outside of his expertise and exposing the paper to a real lawsuit, and so they decided to hold off on the story until

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): they could review the information. And

so temple members start

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): calling desks at the paper until they get someone to give them the home phone number of the city editor with whom Jim had been speaking in the limo

The first

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): call he received was from Tim Stone, who demanded that the paper now print a retraction and agree not to pursue any further investigations of the temple, but the city editor refused. And

so a half hour

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): later, the phone

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): rings again. Is

this John

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): Todd? That's the city editor's

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): name. Yes? You're

presenting a story

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): about our Reverend Jim Jones, and what you're doing is hateful. May the devil never forgive you

The caller

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): hung up

Five

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): seconds later the phone rings again Todd picks it up and gets a similar message And then hangs up Immediately it rings again And

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): again and again and again And three hours later it's still ringing

There's no

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): break And

so he

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): takes his family to a motel for the weekend Because he doesn't know exactly what's going on here And when they get back on Sunday It's still ringing

and

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): continues to ring until another full day has passed. You

might expect

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): a big newspaper like the San Francisco Examiner to bite down on the mouthpiece and be like, hell no, and just go in swinging after behavior like this against one of its editors. But

that's not

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): what happened. The Examiner backed down

It killed

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Kinsolving's series

In

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): event, no

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): publication in the city went near Jim Jones or People's Temple for years until 1977, and that was the last time because immediately after that he took his people and fled to the jungle in Guyana

In the end, the story was not

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): really a big deal. Nothing really came of it. This was San Francisco in the early 1970s

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): People's Temple was hardly the only wacky cult or commune around the way, and the whole thing

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): kind of passed without incident. Except for the effect that it had on Jim and his people

They did not take

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Kin Solving's investigation as the meddling of a curious

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): columnist looking for a juicy story. They saw this as part of a clear and growing conspiracy against them. Part

of the same

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): conspiracy that had been taking down left-wing movements like the Black Panthers for years. That's how they

saw it. And with

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): everything that they, the People's Temple, were accomplishing for the poor and disenfranchised, for black people, it was only natural in their worldview that the fascists would eventually come for them, and now they were. And

more proof came immediately

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): when a man who would become one of Jim Jones' most serious and dedicated followers came to the temple for the first time

His name was

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Mike Prokes. Michael Prokes and he was a TV news editor and a reporter in Modesto, California

He was

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): actually a station

chief. And so he had

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): been following the Kinsolving series and he was dismayed at how it had been killed under pressure and so he decided to take up an expose of the temple himself. And so

one

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): day he calls the Redwood Valley Temple and asks to set up an interview with Jim and the woman who picks up tells him to try the San Francisco location. And by this point, the temple had established a permanent presence in San Francisco. And

so he

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): does. He calls San Francisco, but he's told that Jim's not available and to try back on the weekend. And

I'll let Mike

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): Prokes himself explain what happened from there. Quote

A few days later, I

Speaker 21: received a call at my office from a man who asked if I would meet with him to discuss

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): People's Temple. I

found the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): request very curious. I said, OK, and we met the next day in a Stockton restaurant

The man

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): told me his name was Gary Jackson. "'I asked him what he did, and he said that he worked for the government, "'but I couldn't get him to be more specific. "'He

asked what prompted

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): my interest in People's Temple. "'I

asked him how

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): he knew I was interested in the temple. "'He paused for a few moments, then

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): said something to the effect, "'There are ways if you think about

it.' "'The

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): answer was obvious. "'Jim Jones' phone was tapped

I told him

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): that a series of articles in

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the San Francisco Examiner prompted my interest. I said I wanted to look into some of the things the article said about Jones and the Temple, and if I found them to be true, I was planning to do an expose for our TV news program. Jackson, somehow I doubt that was his real name, said there was a lot more to the Temple than what the Examiner wrote. He

said it was a

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): revolutionary organization led by a dangerous man, bent on destroying our system of government

he

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): talked to me a while longer telling me various things jones jones had supposedly said and done then he made a proposal he

said if i could

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): be successful at joining the temple full-time

as a

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): staff member and report regularly on what was going on inside the organization he would arrange for me to be paid 200 a week that's over 1200 a week today so it's pretty

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): good money i'm

thinking back

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): in thinking back on

it I must

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): have been checked out and considered to be a good prospect, since I had been a dedicated

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Christian churchgoer, attended college in conservative Orange County, a good student with no involvement in any

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): kind of organization or activity that could be considered questionable. I

told the man that I

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): found his offer intriguing, but that I first wanted to pay a visit to the temple. He agreed, saying that I wouldn't be able to join on the first visit anyway

But he

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): said I wouldn't be able to get a good picture of the organization until I was inside it, because the public meetings were only so much posturing. I

arranged to attend a

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): service at which I heard Jones preach. Later

I got to

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): talk with him privately. I was

surprised to

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): hear him speak so openly against the system in my presence

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): particularly so soon after the negative publicity about him. But

I was

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): fascinated by his ministry, and I thought it would make great stuff for a book or screenplay, which I thought I might like to write

i talked

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): with jones for at least two hours i asked

him

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): if he needed more staff he said he could use as many as were willing to work voluntarily with the temple providing only living expenses

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): i told him it was something i wanted to give serious thought to and he said he would be thrilled to have

me jackson called me after

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): a couple of days and i told

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): him that i was going to quit my job and accept his offer

i didn't tell

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): him i wanted to write a book about the temple

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): arrangements were made for me to be paid

The

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): payments were left for me at various pre-designated locations, always in the form of cash enclosed in plain white

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): envelopes

My reports were made

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): verbally, from payphones at which I was called, because it was too risky to write anything, as

there was

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): a lot of suspicion within

the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): temple, as one might imagine, of a reporter who quit his job, his rather prestigious job, as a bureau chief, to join an organization that didn't pay any salaries

As time

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): passed

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): I gradually began to feel conflict over my role as an informant

even though I

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): wasn't providing what one might call valuable or sensitive information. I was

starting to identify with the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): problems and sufferings of the members. As I observed various ones' troubles being resolved by the Temple's

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): programs, the conflict I was feeling turned to guilt. I

had been

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): watching Jones for some time, as

closely as

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): possible without drawing attention to myself

His

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): schedule was unbelievable. He

was up

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): at all hours, calling people on the phone, consulting, reading reports, and staying in touch with every phase of the organization. It

was obvious he

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): worked harder than anyone, but

I questioned

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): his motives

Personally, I didn't like

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the man after the first few months I was in the temple. But

I recognized that

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): it was for reasons that were subjective and which I didn't want to affect my judgment of his

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): character

One thing I

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): was noticing was that he was almost always the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): first to notice someone's

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): need and point it out

A senior in a packed

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): auditorium without a chair, for example, or interest in someone's health who lived alone

He was always dealing with

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): needs and often ones that weren't obvious to others

He seemed

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): unusually sensitive

every

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): time i saw him he was expressing concern or doing something for someone or asking that it be done but he didn't leave it at that he was keen on following up on whether the thing he had asked

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): to be done for someone was actually

carried out

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): still in view of all this i didn't give him the benefit of the doubt i had to be sure

about him one day i had taken

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): some letters to his apartment in the

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): san francisco temple just as he was coming out

the door he was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): late for an appointment and "'So he told me to put the letters on a table inside

He left, and

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): then I went out

I started

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): back to my office and then changed my mind "'and went downstairs to get a drink from the water fountain

Down the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): hall, I noticed Jones had stopped "'and watched for a moment as an elderly woman "'moved slowly up another staircase

Jones didn't

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): see me as he was facing the other

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): way "'and there was no one else around

Even though he was

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): late for his appointment,' He was going to take another five minutes to help that woman up the long flight of stairs. She could not have seen Jones, as her back was to him

He went up and

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): began assisting her, and then I intervened and told him to go ahead to his appointment

That act of

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): kindness did it for me. I

had become

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): virtually convinced of Jones' sincerity. I

had finally

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): seen him do something, in private, that I had suspected he only did in public or when others were around to see it

I became

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): even more convinced of his basic integrity on subsequent occasions in which

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): I observed his actions, for example toward animals, when he was unaware that I, or anyone for that matter, was around. But

that first occasion

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): was enough for me

I

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): could no longer justify informing on Jones and his organization. During

my next

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): contact, I told Jackson what I thought of Jones, and he desperately tried to convince me that I was wrong

I

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): told him that I had to act according to what I had

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): seen and experienced, and my conscience simply wouldn't allow me to continue selling information that might be used against an organization I believed in

I told him that even

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): though I didn't particularly care for Jones, and I didn't agree with some ways in which his organization

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): was run, I felt it was making tremendous achievements in terms of human rehabilitation and improvement in the quality of people's lives and character. He

asked me what I

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): planned to do

I told him I

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): was going to stay with the temple and possibly write a book about it

He urged me

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): not to tell Jones about him, and I told him I saw no reason why I should do that unless I suspected somebody else was taking my place. End quote

Well, Mike Prokes did

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): tell Jim Jones. And

now, I

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): want you to imagine the effect on someone like Jim Jones in 1972 of hearing that story

Jim

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Jones, who, when he'd been

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): spotted at a communist lecture in college, had had G-Men visit and interrogate his mother at work

Who, as early as

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): 1958, had been convinced that Nazis and the KKK and run-of-the-mill local racists in Indiana were conspiring to assassinate him

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Who, in

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): 1960, had had a paranoid breakdown when he thought he was receiving extraterrestrial messages warning him of nuclear war

who

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): had fled to Brazil

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): after that, following in the tracks of a childhood acquaintance who was now down there working for the CIA to train Brazilian secret police in methods of torture and counterinsurgency, an acquaintance who two

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): years before, by the way, in 1970, Dan Mitrione, had been kidnapped and murdered by Tupamaro guerrillas in Uruguay. Jim Jones, who posted followers outside the community college history class that he taught history, Because he feared that government agents were going to be listening in to his socialist teachings. And who had his people regularly sweep all temple locations for listening devices for the same reason. And who went nowhere without an entourage of armed guards now

Who lived in terror every

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): day of nuclear war initiated by a U.S. government that he had become convinced

had

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): inherited the mantle of fascism from the Axis powers after the Second World War and would stop at nothing to subvert and destroy movements like People's Temple. A man who often refused to sleep for fear of

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): threats and had to knock himself out with barbiturates every night because all day every day he was chomping on paranoia amplifying amphetamines. A guy who... had just had two of the country's big city newspapers run simultaneous hit pieces on him and who worried every moment

about

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): internal traitors

He had just had a

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): man who'd come to the movement from a TV news station, a man he had known

for some

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): time by this point, tell him

that his

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): phones were tapped... And that he himself, all

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): this time, had actually been engaged and paid as an informant

by a

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): government agent who believed the temple was a dangerous movement whose goal was to overthrow the U.S. government. I

want you

Speaker 24: to imagine the reaction of that guy to

hearing

Speaker 25: that story from Mike Prokes

Whatever you're

Speaker 26: thinking, that's right. That's how he reacted

Speaker 18: Plus some added craziness, because you're only trying to imagine how someone

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Like this maniac paranoid would react to something like that. And Jim Jones actually was a paranoid maniac

It was

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): everything you've already heard taken up to 11

The man is

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): starting to tip over by now

Along with

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): much of the leadership and the dedicated inner circle members of People's Temple

And you might think the whole

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): thing sounds crazy. Why would the government

be

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): interested in some church that, you know

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): yeah, it's leaders, kind of a lunatic, and it was left-wing and even communist, you know, when they were behind closed doors, and even

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): committing what was probably, you know, almost certainly welfare and social security fraud and so forth, but, you know, but that's not what Mike Prokes is

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): describing. This

is not the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): FBI looking into people's temple for possible welfare fraud

he's

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): talking about spying on people's temple because it was considered

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): an ideological national security threat which is nuts, right? but it's not nuts and for one, I tend to believe Prokes I believe the story

or I at least

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): believe that he believed it mainly

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): because of the way he went out

Mike Prokes

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): was a true believer but

he

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): wasn't present when the mass suicide went down in 1978 if he was, he would have gone out with everybody else

Jim

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): had sent him off on a mission, so he was away when it all went down

In that event, the mass

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): suicide did not disabuse Mike Prokes of his illusions about the movement. He believed that the whole thing was the culmination of a concerted

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): campaign by the U.S. government and former members of People's Temple to destroy the church

That passage from

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): him that I just read was part of a longer letter that he delivered to reporters at a press conference a few months after the mass suicide in Guyana. He

called a press

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): conference at a motel where he was staying, and the reporters were there, and he delivered his message for the cameras and the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): microphones, and then he said, excuse me, and he went into the bathroom in the motel room and blew his brains out to join his brothers and sisters in death. I

believe

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): him

But my belief

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): does not require Mike Proke's credibility. For years, the government

had

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): been running a secret illegal program of subversion against left-wing and civil rights groups called COINTELPRO, short for Counterintelligence Programme

a lot of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): what happened back then has been lost in the mainstream narrative even though it's all out in the open you just don't hear about it unless you go looking or you happen to be a follower of left-wing or

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): anti-government websites it's all there in official documents the FBI, which was

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): still under J. Edgar Hoover at the time the world's leading law enforcement organization and if

I have any

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): bureau listeners don't take it personally I think you know where

I'm coming from You know

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the FBI once delivered a secret tape recording of Martin Luther King Jr. having an affair with a woman to his wife, which, you know

the man had his

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): weaknesses, whatever, but this is the FBI. And

then when he was

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI sent him a letter purporting to be from an anonymous black

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): man in the South informing him that his, quote, low-grade, abnormal personal behavior, which was lower than that of a beast – would be revealed to the whole world if he didn't do the dignified thing to spare his family and the civil rights movement the

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): shame by committing suicide within one month

That FBI. The

Speaker 28: FBI made Dr. King an official target

The

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): thing that caused them to make him an official target of COINTELPRO was his I Have a Dream speech in 1963. That was the official reason

An internal

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): memo said

In the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): light of King's powerful demagogic speech, we must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security. I don't

know how the FBI

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): still exists after

Speaker 29: that, but that's nothing. Or

not nothing, but

Speaker 29: it's just the tip of the iceberg

Who were

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): some of the other people Targeted by COINTELPRO Oh you know nobody Let's see I'll go alphabetical With

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): the help of Wikipedia here Martin Luther King's aide Civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin Fred Hampton, the Chicago Panther I mentioned earlier we know what happened to him Tom

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): Hayden, Ernest Hemingway Stanley Levison, Gene Seberg You know what they did to Gene Seberg

She was an

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): actress Very well known

Who

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): publicly supported the Black Panther Party

And she was

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): married and pregnant

And

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): the FBI invented whole cloth and spread the rumor that she had been having an affair and was made pregnant by a Black Panther leader. And

when the story

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): starts showing up in the tabloids, the stress sends her into premature labor when she's overseas and her baby dies. I

mean, or was

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): killed as far as I'm concerned

She was

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): destroyed by this. Completely destroyed

You

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): know, she brought the, this poor woman, she brings the corpse of her baby back home to

Iowa

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): in a glass coffin because she wants people to know that she had not been unfaithful to her husband. And

on the anniversary of

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the baby's death, she attempts suicide

After that, she

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): just becomes depressed and paranoid, alcoholic, as you can imagine, and eventually she does commit suicide. So

this is

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): what's going on, okay

It hadn't

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): all been revealed yet in 1972 when Jim Jones got word that he was being spied on, but some of it had. And it was well known in left-wing

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): circles anyway that there were these things going on. It was well known because part of the point was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): to make people paranoid, to break up their organizations and subvert their ability to

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): organize by making them think that they couldn't trust anyone. By 1969... The FBI had turned that eye of Sauron onto the Black Panthers

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): became a primary focus, and they just tore that organization apart. I

mean, the Panthers

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): made it easy for them in a lot of ways. You know, I know we've spent time on it, but you've got to keep in mind how the Panthers came about

Up to the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): mid-60s, the whole

Speaker 9 (lower-pitched voice): Black rights movement was pretty much a Southern thing

You know, you

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): had Malcolm, James Baldwin, some people up in Harlem, some strong roots in Chicago going back to the old days of the Defender, but it was all – that was

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): mostly inward-facing. It was inward-facing black people talking to themselves about things that are going on. The wider movement was in the South. 1966 was the first year, the first time Martin Luther King Jr. ever took his movement up

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): to

a northern city. And that was

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): when he got hit in the head with a chunk of concrete and run out of Marquette Park in Chicago. Nobody

had ever

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): heard the term black power until Stokely Carmichael got it going that year, 66. The next year, the Panthers start out as just

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): a couple of dudes in Oakland tooling up with some of their friends and patrolling the ghetto to provide overwatch when they find a policeman stopping a black

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): resident. They

have a few

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): camera-friendly incidents picked up by the national news, and by the end of that summer

The

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): Panthers are a national phenomenon

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Thousands of recruits pouring into dozens of cities looking to join up

And, you

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): know, these guys were not prepared to manage something like that. And I mean that in the most rudimentary sense. I mean, that's a job for a CEO-level manager

And Huey Newton

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): was a smart guy, but I don't care how smart you are. Jumping right into a job like that

At a

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): time when law enforcement is doing everything within and without the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): law to come after you. It's just not realistic

And anyway, Huey was out

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): of the picture before

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): that first year was over. He was locked up with a bullet hole in his belly and a dead cop on his jacket

Bobby Seale was

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): his number two, but there was a reason that Huey was in charge, even though Bobby was several years older than him

Bobby Seale

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): was a capable man

You

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): know, make things happen kind of guy

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): but he was not a CEO type

And anyway, he was

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): in and out of court and jail nonstop too

He did some

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): time when he left

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): well, shoot, let's see the first one

Well, that first

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): year when he led the armed Panther squad into the California state legislature session, he did like six months for that. He did some more time for inciting a riot at the 68 Democratic Convention in Chicago

In

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): 70 and 71, he'd be on trial for murder. In his 1973 book, Revolutionary Suicide, Huey Newton describes how there was so much pressure

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): from law enforcement that he puts it this way, quote, It always seemed that time was measured not in days or months or hours, but by the movements of comrades and

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): brothers in and out of prison and by the dates of hearings, releases, and trials

Our

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): lives were regulated not by the ordinary

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): tempo of daily events, but by the forced clockwork of the judicial process. Eldridge Cleaver

was probably the

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): third one that might have taken the

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): mantle, but

he fled the country

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): after his 1968 shootout with police

You

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): know, the Panther organization rose so fast

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and spread so fast, and then the prestige leadership was taken off the board so quickly that as a result

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): there was just no one out there with the juice nationally to exert, you know, sort of coordinating control and who was actually free and around and able to do it

The organization

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): became so shot through with informants and agents provocateur that

You

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): know, paranoid panthers

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): very quickly were torturing and murdering other panthers they suspected of snitching for the cops, and by 1969, they had to close their roles to new members altogether just because they couldn't vet people

One of the most

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): well-known incidents involved the torture-murder of a panther named Alex Rackley

After the Panther 21

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): plot to murder those NYPD officers was stopped by informants, the West Coast Panther headquarters sent out some of its own to instill some discipline into the East Coast chapters

The

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): paranoia about informants by this point was endemic, and Alex Rackley was one of many who came

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): under suspicion. So

the incident

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): occurred in New Haven, Connecticut, in the bedroom of a local Panther's seven-year-old daughter to whose bed Rackley had been tied. They

tortured him for

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): days to get a confession, and then held a phony trial to

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): issue his

sentence

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): And recorded the whole thing on audio tape, actually. I'm not going to play it for you here. It's ugly, but you can go listen to it

You got

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): male panthers berating Rackley, beating him in the head and groin and lower back with a blunt object. While panther women can be heard in the background attending to auxiliary tasks like preparing the pots of boiling water that they poured all over Rackley's body. For days

The Panther

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): No. 2, Bobby Seale, visited New Haven for one day, arriving just a few hours before Rackley was killed, and the chief torturer and killer on the tape, George Sams, one of the Panthers who was sent out by Oakland to instill discipline, confessed that Seale had personally ordered Rackley's murder. Rackley's

body was found

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): soon after bound and mutilated, burned by the boiling water and cigarettes

cut up

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): with an ice pick tied around the neck with a noose made from a coat hanger

shot to

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): death and dumped in a river

and so the chief

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): culprits are arrested Bobby Seals arrested a short time later after George Sams confesses

and the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): trial blows up and becomes a national story known as the New Haven Nine Celebrities took up the Panther's cause and Panther activists as well as veterans of the student movement like Tom Hayden flood into New Haven to stir up protests, especially at Yale University, which kind of becomes the headquarters

Everyone who was

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): anyone in the celebrity left

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): was there. Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Abby Hoffman, everybody had to be there. The whole thing became a big festival

And

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): radical attorneys and activists held a Panther fundraiser in one of the Yale University halls, where Yale University was denounced as one of the biggest pig organizations by the

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): Panthers' New Haven area captain, Doug Miranda, who

also accused the

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): university of clearly having something to do with this whole conspiracy against the Panthers. He told his audience

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): of... nice Yale students that

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): basically what we're going to do is create conditions in which white folks are either going to have to kill pigs or defend themselves against black folks. We're going to turn Yale into a police state

And so

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): they're holding meetings. They're just taking over Yale campus. And at meetings, campus radicals are floating ideas such as kidnapping the university

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): president, who is

a

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): A guy named Kingman Brewster, a thoroughly befuddled old-school liberal who is completely out of his depth. I mean he's actively

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): doing everything he can to try to appease these people, but he's completely out of his depth

Others are suggesting

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): shutting off New Haven's water

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): supply and using it as ransom. Others are demanding a moratorium on classes and making Yale pay a half-million-dollar donation to the Panther Defense Fund. The radical lawyers representing the Panthers love that one, as you can imagine

And

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Doug Miranda, the Panther captain, told a group of

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): students that only they had, quote, the power to prevent a bloodbath at Yale. And students were marching around the campus saying, if Bobby dies, Yale fries. Two bombs were set off at the campus

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): hockey rink. The

position of the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): Panthers and the students, as well

as a

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): good chunk of the Yale professors who jumped onto the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): bandwagon, was made explicit. It didn't matter

what

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): had or hadn't happened to Alex Rackley. American courts had no legitimacy to decide the fate of the Panthers

Reflecting on this period, this wasn't

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the only one, and this is not even close to the most dramatic of these student takeovers from this period. Reflecting on the period, the scholar

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): John Silber wrote, academics developed a novel meaning for the term political crime

which at

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): once meant an action rendered criminal solely by its political content, but which now came to mean a crime, however vicious, justified by its political motivation

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): The new definition of political crime found swift adoption not merely on college campuses, but throughout the world, as hijackers, kidnappers, killers, and Watergate plumbers justified their contempt for the law through inappropriate appeal to political motivation

Not

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): only was political

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): crime given a novel meaning, the concept of academic freedom was transformed. Once, it entailed an immunity for what was said and done by dedicated, thoughtful, conscientious scholars in pursuit of truth or the truest account. Now it came to entail, rather, an immunity for whatever is said and done, responsibly or carelessly, within or without the walls of academia, by persons unconcerned for the truth

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): who, reckless, incompetent, "...frivolous or even malevolent, promulgate ideas for which they can claim no expertise, or even commit deeds for which they can

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): claim no sanction of law." Well, it worked. In the end, the jury was deadlocked, and the judge, siding

with the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): activists' claim that there was no way the Panthers could receive a fair trial by an unbiased jury, dismissed the charges on Seal and one of the Panther women

whose

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): lawyer claimed that her participation in the interrogation and casual assistance in the torture, which was all on tape, was actually done under

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): duress, and that she had participated only out of intimidation by the Panther men

While Bobby Seale

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): had been in jail, his wife got pregnant by another Panther named Fred Bennett, and shortly after Seale got out, Bennett's body was found mutilated in a

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): Panther hideout

And the cops

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): couldn't find any direct evidence

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): to put the murder on seal. So when it

became clear

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): that they weren't going to be able to charge him, he

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): wrote a provocative article called One Less Oppressor where he crowed that, quote

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): the people have now come to realize that the only way to deal with the oppressor is to deal on our own terms. And this was done, end quote

seal's a

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): funny guy in

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): 1973 he actually ran for mayor of oakland came in second out of nine candidates he just lost a runoff to the incumbent or he might have been mayor of oakland um the next year he and huey newton got into a fight over a panther movie that somebody wanted to produce and so huey and his bodyguards beat down bobby seal and the two kind of officially split that

was later

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): than the time we're talking about right now

though My

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): point I was getting at was in 1969

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): 1970, Panther leadership's all over the place. And law enforcement is riding them hard and the organization's in disarray. And

also that

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): as horrific as the murder of Alex Rackley was, incidents

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): like that were explicitly part of the goal of COINTELPRO as it concerned the Panthers

you

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): can't organize if no one trusts each other

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): and encouraging internecine conflict even bloody murderous conflict was exactly what the FBI was going for here

Eldridge

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): Cleaver the best-selling author of Soul on Ice and he was the Panther

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Minister of Information after 1967 he became the guy with Huey in prison and Bobby Seale being in and out of court but that didn't last long either

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): um

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Spring of 68, after

the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Martin Luther King assassination, he goes out with some friends, gets into a shootout with the cops, surrenders

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): after he runs out of ammunition, but he was let out on bail and he fled to Cuba in 1968

Cleaver is always

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): kind of a nut. He

arrived in

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Cuba hoping to set up training camps for black guerrillas who were going to prepare for war in the United States, but Castro would never even meet him

And so

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): Cleaver hung around Havana for six months or so before he was spotted by a news reporter. Castro decides it's not worth the trouble

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): keeping him around, so he puts him on a plane and sends him to Algiers. Algiers was revolutionary central in the late 60s, had been since

Speaker 36: gaining its independence from France in

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): 1962

The

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Algerian government had established close ties with the Soviet Union and gave official cover to dozens of revolutionary groups from around the world. Radical groups

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): like the Palestinian Liberation Organization and famous individual revolutionaries. They were given offices, equipment, funding, official diplomatic recognition

It took

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): some doing, but Cleaver eventually

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): got official recognition as the head of the Black Panthers International Section from the Algerian government, and they put him up in an embassy building that had previously been used by the North Vietnamese. Once

he's in there, he

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): calls a press conference, and Cleaver announces that he was now calling on all Black Panthers members. across the united states and all black people across the united states to rise up the time had come he told the press that the nixon clique had begun to group the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): black people in concentration camps escalating repression to the level of overt fascist terror against those who dare resist the oppression of the diabolical system under which the blacks of the united

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): states are suffering

We

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): reject the Temple of Slavery, which is the United States of America, and we intend to transform it into a social system of liberty and peace. How

would the transformation be

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): accomplished? If you know anything about Eldridge Cleaver, you know he had only

one

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): speed. The time had come to begin waging urban guerrilla war in the United States

Those who could

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): not themselves fight had a responsibility to help in any way they could

and

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Cleaver was joined in Algiers soon after that by more Panthers who were fleeing charges in the United States one was named Sekou Odinga very serious guy who had been born in Queens as Nathaniel Burns in 1944 the Panther 21 would have been known as the Panther 22 but Sekou Odinga was the only one who avoided capture during the mass arrests

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): Odinga is probably the hardest guy

out

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): of this whole period. Maybe I'd put Willy Morales of the FALN at the top spot

The FALN

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): was a revolutionary Puerto Rican terrorist cell operating in New York in the 70s, and Morales was one of its

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): leaders and bomb makers

And one

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): day, Morales is making bombs in his apartment in New York, working off a homemade manual full of notes with a cover that read, In this we trust

One of the bombs goes

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): off in his

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): hands

The

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): explosion is heard up and down the street

Both of

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): his hands are almost

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): completely blown off. Nine of his fingers, all but the left

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): thumb, are blown all over the apartment

His face is

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): burned up. A chunk of metal goes into his chin, breaks his jaw in five places, and knocks out a bunch of teeth. His lips are completely ripped off, and his left eye is toast

Somehow

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): Morales gets himself together

He

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): realizes that this explosion is going to bring police and that the apartment is full of documents that are going to

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): implicate his friends in F.A.L.N. And so he somehow gets the documents into the bathroom and starts flushing them down the toilet, tearing them up and flushing them down the toilet

Later, the cops were

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): able to follow his trail of blood

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): all around the apartment to retrace his steps

and. There

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): were bloody stump smudges all around the bathroom doorknob because apparently the door had closed behind him and he had to get it back open with just his stumps

Once the documents were

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): disposed of in the toilet, he locks all the windows and the door to the apartment and then he blows out the pilot lights on the gas stove, turns the gas up to high and lets it fill the apartment and then sits there and waits for the cops to arrive

And

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): when they did, the plan was he would, you know, they would have to turn a light on or maybe he could stay awake long enough to make them shoot at him and the place would blow

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): up so that any remaining evidence in there would be destroyed and he could take a bunch of cops with them on the way out

But in the event

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): firefighters got there first and Morales is about passed out by that point. The firefighters, a little

more alert

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): to what's going on, they smell the gas, they back out and call the cops

The

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): situation is diffused and Morales is put in handcuffs and sent to the hospital

Once he's awake in

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): the hospital, face all covered in bandages, you can imagine, the cops come into his hospital room to see if they can ask him some questions

When they try to say

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): something to him, he manages to get out through all his bandages, out of a mouth

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): with no lips or teeth and a broken jaw, fuck you, fuck yourself

and so then he

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): goes to prison of course some years later a supporter manages to smuggle a wire cutter to him

he still has

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): no fingers on his hands and most of his hands are

gone over

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the next two nights he uses his stumps to cut through the wire grate covering his cell window and he punches out the screen

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): with one of his stumps

but his

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): windows 40 feet off the

ground so

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): several supporters are waiting below with a ladder but the ladder

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): doesn't reach anywhere close to his window he manages to tie 10 feet of bandage to one end of his bed struggles through the window opening and he starts shimmying down the wall of the building using the bandage but it breaks almost right away and he falls about 20 feet down onto a window mounted ac unit and from there the rest of the way down onto the

grass and

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): no one at the prison knew a thing until the next morning and by then it was too late. He was gone

So

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): yeah, maybe Willie Morales

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): gets the nod But one of the supporters who'd helped him get out was Sekou Odinga And Odinga's on the short list too He

grew up hard

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): in Queens He had a reputation as someone who was not to be messed with By the time he was a teenage gangbanger He

was in

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): prison for mugging by the time he was 16 And

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): prison was where he discovered Malcolm X Not in person, but his writings

One of

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): his childhood friends was already in the same prison, and he was a little ahead of Odinga on the path of black radicalism. His

name was actually

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): still Nathaniel Brown at this point. He wasn't Sekou Odinga yet. When

they got out

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): in 1963, they wanted to go join Malcolm's

entourage

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): his circle, but they only even saw him once before he got assassinated, so that was

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): discouraging, but they stayed on the path

They

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): start wearing dashikis after Odinga. He's

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): asked to model some traditional African clothing at the 64 World's Fair. And before long, he's making

them for

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): himself and others, really getting into African history and black American history. By

1965

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): the year Malcolm got killed, he was all in. He had changed his name from Nathaniel Brown to Sekou Odinga after the Guinean nationalist Sekou Torre

And he

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): and his friend from prison eventually join up with the New York Panthers

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): and before long, he's made the section leader of the Panthers in the Bronx. He

was 24 years

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): old when the cops came up the stairs of his apartment to arrest him for his role in the planned mass murder of the New York cops in January 69, the Panther 21 incident. He

was sleeping

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): when they came

From Brian

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): Burrow, quote

Odinga woke when he

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): heard a noise

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): pressing his ear to the door he sensed what was happening he heard footsteps on the roof he was surrounded

he stepped

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): into the bathroom glanced around and saw what he would have

to do struggling into

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): his clothes he grabbed a carbine by his bedside and yelled who's

there the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): police open the door give

me a

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): minute i'm putting my clothes on

once he had the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): speaker's attention odinga

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): stepped to the front door and loudly clicked around into the gun's chamber He's got a gun, came the shout. He's got a gun

As the

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): police scattered for cover, Odinga raced into the bathroom, where a tiny

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): window, no more than 12 inches wide, was open

Outside was a

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): four-story drop to an alley below. Leaving his rifle behind, he squeezed through the window and slid one hand onto a concrete drain pipe that ran down the building. Leaving the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): safety of the window, he clasped the drain pipe with both hands and both feet and began shimmying down

He

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): managed to descend about ten feet when a voice cried from

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): below, There he is! There he is! Odinga sprang from the wall and jumped, landing nearly thirty feet

below

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): on the roof of a one-story garage. As he landed, his knee struck his chin and nearly knocked him unconscious. He stood, woozy, and heard the cries

of

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): policemen all around. Stepping to the edge of the roof, he leaped into a tree, only to have the branches break, dropping him to the pavement below

he

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): limped to a nearby brownstone tried its door found it locked then tried another and another and another until he found an unlocked basement door inside he curled himself into a ball and hid behind an oil tank police cordoned off the block and began a house to house search for hours odinga listened as they tromped about his luck held no one came into the basement when

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): darkness fell He uncoiled his aching body, stepped from the basement, hailed a gypsy cab, and vanished. End quote

The next I know of

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): his whereabouts

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): is when he shows up in Algiers to be with Cleaver at the end of the summer of 1970, right as the Panther 21 trial was gearing up and the Panthers began their final descent into madness

The Panther 21 trial

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): was a major cultural event. Lawyers for the Panthers turned the defense into a cause celeb, building on and perfecting the strategy that was used for

Speaker 33 (lower-pitched voice): Huey Newton in the Free Huey campaign in 68 and 69 and for the New Haven 9 in 1970. The

lawyers

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): realized that at a moment like the one America was in

things had

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): changed. Press

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): conferences and protest rallies were as important to the defense as jury selection and closing arguments

A

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): straightforward case about a conspiracy to commit mass murder of police officers was turned into a referendum on where you stood

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): on the civil rights movement and on the history of and treatment of black people in America

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): as a whole. If you thought the Panther 21 were guilty, then that meant that you were on one side of that culture war. If you thought they were innocent, it meant you were on the

other side. If you

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): can accomplish that in a polarized environment where roughly one half of the country falls on each side and

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): nobody's really neutral, the chances that you can get a jury of 12 people to agree on a conviction

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): are pretty slim. Big-name left-wing celebrities were enlisted to raise money for the legal defense and also to turn one's position on the Panther 21 into a political fashion statement

To believe

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): in the Panthers' innocence was to indict the conspiracy against them, hatched by the same people who dragged us into Vietnam and who had elected Nixon and

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): everything like that

who had

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): defended Jim Crow and slavery before that, and to believe in their

guilt was

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): to be a reactionary defender of all those things. The

Panthers' defense lawyers used the

Speaker 37: opportunity to turn themselves

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): into celebrities

One of

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): the ultra-posh celebrity fundraisers for the Panther 21 was given by the famous composer Leonard Bernstein and provided the material for Tom Wolfe's famous book, The True Account, called Radical Chic. That

evening's events

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): consisted primarily of these ultra-wealthy celebrities giving self-congratulatory speeches to each other about the plight of

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): African Americans between sips of expensive champagne and caviar and coffee

Speaker 38: oohing and aahing over these beret-wearing Panthers who had been brought in just to stand around in Bernstein's

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Manhattan penthouse as party props

It's a

Speaker 39: hilarious book

But for all the support

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): that the Panther 21 were getting from these wealthy white celebrities, they

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): were getting much less than they expected from the party leadership in Oakland, which was still reluctant to associate itself with these growing calls for violence that had been coming out of New York

even to the

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): extent that Oakland wanted to help. They just lacked the financial resources to make much of a dent. With

much of the New

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): York leadership locked down, Oakland sent some of its own people out

to New

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): York to take over the chapter, and this made relations between the two cities even worse. In

addition to their

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): basic difference in approach, which we kind of talked about earlier in the first part of this episode

You

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): know, the New York set felt disrespected by the California members who, you know, they kind of smirked at the dashikis and the whole Mother Africa thing. They weren't into that and they thought it was kind of ridiculous and they let that be known. One

New Yorker

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): named Blood

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): McCreary years later said

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): Panthers on the street

we felt

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): put upon, abused, distrusted. You don't trust our new leaders? They

treated us like a

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): bunch of idiots, fucking our women and stealing our money. Those motherfuckers, they were running amok

Thank you. And Huey

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): Newton's

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): lawyers had managed to get his conviction overturned in August of 1970

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): a month before the Panther 21 trial was getting going. But by that point, the rift between the two groups, the two cities, was very deep. It's

doubtful that Huey

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): could have done anything to repair it, even if he had been operating at full capacity the day he stepped out of prison. But that was not true either. He'd been locked up for three years, and things had changed

In

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): those three years. When Huey went down, Martin Luther King was still

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): alive. LBJ was still president. SDS still existed. Nobody had

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): ever heard of the weathermen or of white kids trying to assassinate cops with nail bombs

Alex Rackley had not

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): been tortured to death by other Panthers. And Fred Hampton hadn't been murdered by the police

Huey had considered the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): possible dangers of what he was doing when he founded the Black Panther Party. But this

None of

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): this had been part

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): of the plan. He

just had his

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): first taste of prison, and he did not like it. He did not like the idea of going back. As

he began to make his

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): first public appearances, there

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): were people out there who were whispering that he seemed like a tentative shell of his former self. There

were rumors that he was

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): living like a recluse, holed up in an Oakland penthouse, just doing mountains of cocaine, never coming out

There were rumors that he was living like a recluse, holed up in an Oakland penthouse, just doing mountains of cocaine, never coming out. when

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): Eldridge Cleaver announced from Algeria that it was time for armed revolution Huey dismissed the idea and so Cleaver starts questioning Huey's leadership and the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): New Yorkers are siding with Eldridge Cleaver Cleaver is safe out in Algiers

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): and so this is when he decides to make his move he starts denouncing Huey Newton's reticence

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): calling him soft and praising the New York Panthers for their militancy

Huey

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): turns it around, denounces Cleaver, and Panthers around the country begin to take

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): sides, with most chapters outside of New York sticking with

Huey, but

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): again, New York is New York

and they

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): carry a lot of weight. The

FBI is watching all

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): this unfold and loving it, and they use it as an opportunity

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): to turn up the heat. They start forging letters between Panthers, describing plots by Huey Newton to kill Eldridge Cleaver and the New York Panther leadership. Other letters describing plots by Cleaver and the New Yorkers to do the same thing to Huey Newton and his people

They're forging notes

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): claiming that Panthers are sleeping with each other's

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): wives and girlfriends and sisters. I mean, they're really trying to start a war and get these people to start killing each other

And they would

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): get their wish. That's exactly what would happen. Panther chapters all over the country start arming up in anticipation of a coming

war. There are

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): rumors that Eldridge Cleaver is trafficking drugs and guns from Algeria, and that he's plotting a coup d'etat, and that he'd gone insane. When

one SoCal Panther working on

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): Cleaver's orders was arrested in the South trying to organize a guerrilla force

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): in the urban areas down there, Huey Newton expelled

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): the arrested guy from the party. Some

New York

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): Panthers objected to that, and so Huey expelled them from the party

And so

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): now Cleaver's openly denouncing Huey, and people are beginning to talk about like an official split

In an attempt to roll back

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): this unfolding crisis, a phone call is put together for Newton and Cleaver to work out their differences in public

From

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Burroughs, quote, The

call was to air

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): live on Jim Dunbar's AM San Francisco

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): television talk show on February 26. It's in 1971 now

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): cleaver reluctantly agreed but he suspected he was walking into a trap both men went ahead it was a disaster as

newton

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): sat in a bay area television studio cleaver opened the conversation by insisting that the new york panthers be reinstated newton again refused saying those purged had plunged into counterproductive avenues of violence

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and adventurism cleaver was just getting started Terming the Central Committee inept, he demanded their resignation. When Newton again refused, the two men simply talked past each other

The high

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): point came when Cleaver denounced Newton personally, called for immediate guerrilla warfare against the U.S. government, and said that he would now direct the real Black Panther Party from Algiers. Afterward, Newton expelled

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): Cleaver. Cleaver then expelled Newton, end quote

So everything's

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): chaos after

Speaker 41: that

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): There's no organization or leader in any position to do anything other than make it worse. Calls

start

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): flooding in to the Oakland headquarters from chapters all over the country looking for guidance on what they should do, and most chapters stuck with Oakland, stuck with Huey Newton

Leaders from sectors

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): up and down the eastern seaboard met in Harlem, and most of them decided to stay the course, but Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): sided with Eldridge Cleaver

The New York

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): chapter seceded from the Black Panther Party amid rumors that Newton death squads were prowling the streets of New York looking for them

The only constant was the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): rumor of imminent warfare between East and West Coast Panthers. One popular New York Panther told reporters

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): that Newton had dispatched as many as 75 robots to wipe out the New York leadership. overnight the panther offices in harlem and the bronx were transformed into

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): fortresses guns were stockpiled windows were boarded at any minute they believed newton's assassins would strike end quote

so it's only a

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): matter of time when when this is how it is before a spark lights the tinder and cointel pro provided the spark

as it happened the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): spark had floated over to nyc from the West Coast, but not in the way that the New Yorkers had expected it

It

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): came in the form of a 22-year-old Bay Area Panther field marshal who had been sent out as part of the Oakland delegation to get things under control a year earlier. But

once he

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): got there and spent some time with these hardcore Africanist militants in New York, he liked what he saw and he decided to stay with them

And the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): truth is, nobody actually knows what happened. I wouldn't want to be unfair to COINTELPRO, after all. There was a memo written to J. Edgar Hoover one month after the fact that credited COINTELPRO with causing this Oakland-turned-NYC Panther to be shot in the back of the head by an unknown assailant's 357 Magnum on March 8, 1971. And

from there, it

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): was on. As

far as everyone

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): was concerned, all the rumors were true

Things

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): began to happen fast. Panthers began to

drop

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): as scores were settled all over the place. New York Panthers, who felt pinched between the police on one side and Huey's assassins on the other, began to organize and go underground as part of what was about to be called the Black Liberation Army. The

name Black Liberation

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Army

Speaker 43: had been tossed

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): around before, but this is where the real thing got started

One of the initial

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): cells was made up of heavy hitters out of the jamaica section of queens washington heights and brownsville others started popping up out of brooklyn and the bronx and other parts of the city as panthers who were looking for action made their way to new york

to be a part of it they

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): set up a bunch of safe houses and a makeshift clinic and a townhouse for bla members who ended up getting wounded as they expected and knew would

be the case the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): first task was to get

money for

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): rent and weapons and other supplies and needs

One of

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the Panthers explained how they went about that

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): Quote, I

knew all these

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): major drug dudes, Nicky Barnes, Tito Johnson, Albie Simmons, from the Bronx and from prison

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): It

was a natural

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): place to get money. So when we first went underground, we started taking down heroin dealers. We were really rolling these motherfuckers. They gave us information too. When we rolled Tito, he says, there's a lot of pressure. We can't work. The cops are all over us wanting information on you. That's how we found out the police were trying to use the dealers against us. We bashed down a lot of doors, man. We were like black cops

End

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): quote. Another BLA leader remembered, quote

There were

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): actions all over the five boroughs. There were people in the drug business who were setting up others for us to move on. We raised a lot of money that way, and we were letting them know that drugs would not be tolerated anymore. End quote

Their first

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): targeted

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): action

not

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the drug takedowns, but their actual action

was to

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): take revenge on Oakland for the

murder of

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): their

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): comrade. So in mid-April, a bunch of them pile into a U-Haul truck and drive up to the Queen's office of a Panther newspaper that's still loyal to Huey Newton. It

was run

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): by a 32-year-old named Sam Napier

They bust

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): into the place

and And

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): tie Napier up with a cord from a Venetian blind, torture and mutilate him for a while, shoot him four times, and then burn his body

Two days after that

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): killing, three BLA Panthers were overheard on the street discussing a robbery. They were overheard by an ordinary citizen who goes and flags down a police cruiser and tells them about it

And so the cops

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): approach those Panthers, and when they do, one of them pulls a pistol and just starts shooting

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): And

And

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the air fills

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): up with bullets as the officers start shooting back. One of the cops is hit in the face and he goes down and the other was shot in the thigh

The one who was hit

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): in the thigh stays in the fight. He kills one of the men, injures another, and the third, who had taken a bullet in

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the shoulder, manages to escape. At

the time, the cops don't

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): know what they're dealing with. The cops think that they've just gotten into a firefight with some criminals

And so the man

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): wounded in the shoulder who got away, he makes his way back to the Panther Townhouse Clinic and has his wounds dressed

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): by Assata Shakur, later

on one of

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): the more important members of the BLA, and he tells everyone about what happened. The

BLA cadres began

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): planning their revenge on the cops immediately. It

would come one

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): month later on May 17th from

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): Burroughs. Quote

At 9

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): p.m., a green and white cruiser relieved the watch outside the home of New York District Attorney Frank Hogan, who'd faced threats during the trial of the Panther 21. Inside

the patrol

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): car sat a pair of 39-year-old patrolmen, Thomas Curry and Nicholas Bonetti

Darkness had

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): fallen barely 15 minutes later when, to their dismay, a dark maverick suddenly sped past, going the wrong way down 112th Street, a one-way street. officer benetti wheeled the car into a sharp u-turn and gave chase as the maverick swerved left onto riverside drive six blocks later at 106th street benetti managed to pull alongside the maverick

at that moment

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the driver one of two or three black men inside crouched in his seat from the passenger side the ugly nose of a 45 caliber submachine gun appeared

in a

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): split second a geyser of bullets blasted the patrol car the windshield exploded officer benetti was struck eight times in the neck stomach and arms officer curry was hit in the face neck and chest one bullet severed his optic nerve the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): patrol car veered to its left and smashed into a stone staircase beneath the statue of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): civil war general

franz siegel the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): maverick roared away vanishing

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): into the gloom a few moments later after briefly losing consciousness officer benetti came to Glancing to his right, he saw his partner lying outside the car, his uniform stained with blood. Before passing out once more, Benetti managed to palm the car radio. 26 boy Charlie, 26 boy Charlie, he

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): murmured. We've been shot. We've been shot

two

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): nights after the shootings on riverside

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): drive two officers from the three two waverly jones 33 and joseph piagentini 28 stepped from their squad car and walked into colonial park to answer a call about a woman hurt in a knife

fight when the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): woman refused their help the two ambled back to their car

as they did

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): they passed two young black men lounging on the fender of a parked car the men fell in behind them a moment later the men drew pistols and opened

fire

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): officer jones who was black was struck three times first in the back of the head then twice in the spine he died instantly

the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): second gunman fired repeatedly into officer piagentini who fell to the sidewalk but as the gunman cursed him refused to

die the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): first gunman then reached down and removed officer jones's 38 hefting it in his hand feeling its weight as if as if he were taking a souvenir the second gunman wrenched piagentini's

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): weapon from his holster even as the dying officer flailed at him once he had it he fired every bullet in its chamber into the fallen

cop

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): still piagentini wouldn't die the first gunman stepped to his prone body pointed his own 45 downward and fired a single shot

then

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): both

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): shooters turned and walked

away

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): Behind them, Officer Piagentini, in his last moments of life, began crawling toward the safety of a green hedge, a trail of blood in his wake

The next morning, the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): coroner would count twenty-two bullet holes in his body. End quote

So that night, two

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): packages were

delivered, one

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): to the New York Times and another to a Harlem radio station

Inside

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the packages are the license plates of the Maverick, which would have been called in by officers Benetti and Curry in the minutes before their shooting, and a.45 caliber cartridge matching the murder weapon from the second

Speaker 44: Quote, May 19, 1971. All

power to

Speaker 44: the people. Here

are the

Speaker 44: license plates sought after by the fascist

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): state pig police

We

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): send them in order to exhibit the potential power of oppressed peoples to acquire

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): revolutionary justice

The armed goons of

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): this racist movement will again meet the guns of the oppressed third world people as long as they occupy our community and murder our brothers and sisters in the name of American law and order

Just as

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the fascist marines and army occupy Vietnam in the name of democracy and murder Vietnamese people in the name of American imperialism are confronted with the guns of the Vietnamese Liberation Army

The

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): domestic armed forces of racism and oppression will be confronted

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): with the guns of the Black Liberation Army, who will mete out justice in the tradition of Malcolm and all true revolutionaries' real justice

We are

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): revolutionary justice. All power to the people

End quote. Three nights

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): later, the radio station received a second package with this note. Quote

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Revolutionary justice has been meted out again By righteous brothers of the Black Liberation Army

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): With the death of two Gestapo pigs gunned down As so many of our brothers have been gunned down in the past But

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): this time no racist class jury will acquit Acquite, actually, they mean acquit Them

Speaker 44: Revolutionary justice is ours Every policeman, lackey, or

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): running dog of the ruling class Must make his or her choice now Either side with the people Or poor and oppressed or die for the oppressor

trying to

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): stop what is going down is like trying to stop history for as long as there are those who will dare live for freedom

there

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): are men and women who dare to unhorse the emperor all power to

the people

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): end quote now

this sudden

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): dive into revolutionary murder had come quickly and without a plan

They

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): had jumped into it and gone underground

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): because they thought that they had law enforcement on one side and Huey Newton's assassins on the other and they had to do something and get out of here. So they got started ahead of schedule

and the BLA

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): members were not

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): ready for the heat that came down on them

the head of the

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): police union called a press

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): conference and he told reporters that the cops were straight up in a war it's open season on cops in this city i refuse to stand

by

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): and permit my men to be gunned down while the mayor does nothing to protect them accordingly i am instructing them to

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): secure their own shotguns and carry them on patrol at all times Asked if he thought that would make a difference He said, I don't know

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): but we'll do whatever's necessary If we have to patrol this city in tanks, that's what we'll do This is a war

And one of the

Speaker 43: BLA members, Blood McCreary, remembered We

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): had no idea, no idea what we were up against We

had really

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): hoped that established revolutionary organizations That they could point to us and say that Unless certain things are dealt with in society This is what you're going to be dealing

with But we

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): were so young. We didn't know what we were doing

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): The cops, the government, man, they were killing us. Everywhere we looked, there were cops. End quote

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): See, the authorities were monitoring all phone calls to

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Cleaver's base back in Algiers. But it didn't really make much of a difference. They didn't hear much more than bickering and complaints. After a while, even making the calls was hard. This is the early 70s, and it was very expensive to call another continent to

And

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): mostly they did it using stolen credit cards, but as police pressure ramped up, it got more difficult even to procure those without undue risk

They couldn't go near

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the Panther

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): offices in Harlem, or any of the people who were still on the grid because the cops were on them 24-7

Another BLA

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): leader said, To follow Algeria, that was the initial plan

When the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): split went down, we were following the instructions of Eldridge in D.C., He means Don Cox, that's D.C., who's actually the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): panther that Leonard Bernstein used as his party prop at his Radical Chic fundraiser in that Tom Wolfe book. By now, Don Cox had fled to Algeria to get out of a

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Baltimore murder charge

Anyway, we were following

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): the instructions of Eldridge in D.C. and Algiers. Denise Oliver, the editor of Cleaver's Quarterly Magazine, brought back these audio tapes from them, with guidelines so we could read them out to people, our people, but also ones Geronimo Pratt, another panther, had organized in California and in the South. But then everything changed. The reality on the ground was people were scrambling and running for their lives. After the police shootings on May 19th, it became a real war between the police and us. It got harder

to

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): talk to Algeria

and

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Cleaver was not going to be much help to them even if they could talk to him for one, he had ordained from the beginning that the BLA was supposed to have no centralized organizational structure each cell was just supposed to go off and kind of run its own independent revolution do its own thing there's nothing that a cell of a dozen or two dozen people can do against the institutions of the United States government except for create a little chaos and wait for their number

to come up And there's

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): some evidence, too, that Cleaver's mind had already begun to slide toward its eventual fate by this point. He

spent his time

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): secluded in the embassy in Algeria, smoking hash and talking on the phone most of the time. He was riding these

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): delusions of grandeur, thinking he was the leader of some global uprising, writing

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): these overwrought violent screeds and poems for his magazine

and

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): imagining that something was going on back in America very different from what the people on the ground were actually dealing with

Most of the money

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): that he raised was coming from a Panther fan club in Paris, and he spent most of that on a Marxist library and a bunch of electronic equipment that he imagined would be used to make videotapes to be distributed to revolutionaries around the world. He had commissioned this giant wall-sized interactive electronic world

map that

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): he showed to a British reporter who stopped by for a visit

This

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): is from the reporter, quote

Cleaver begins

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): flicking switches on a console, and slowly, all over the world, lights come up. There's one color for the Panther headquarters in America, another color for liberation groups engaged in armed struggle in Africa, Brazil, Vietnam. There's another color for solidarity groups. We

have a

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): solidarity group in China, Cleaver says with a laugh. Its chairman is Chairman Mao. finally one last

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): light goes on much bigger than all the rest in bright red it is in algiers that is the witch doctor cleaver says with a grin

he

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): gesticulates in

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): the direction of the map

we will make

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): videotapes of the struggles going on all over the world but we don't call it videotape we call it voodoo because it has like magical properties you know

how

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): electricity moves it's kind of mysterious it's invisible

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): End quote. Sekou Odinga, who was in

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): Algiers with Cleaver throughout this period, said that the reality was that once the BLA went underground, Cleaver became more of a figurehead than

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): a real leader. Quote, Cleaver was not a military man. He only thought he was. It was Don Cox who had the military mind. He was a brilliant strategist. It

may have

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): looked like Cleaver was leading

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the BLA, but he wasn't. He just talked the talk. But the decisions... The decisions were made by D.C. and me and Setawayo, which is a guy named Michael Tabor who we haven't talked about

Cleaver didn't even know

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): most of these guys, but they were our

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): comrades

But Odinga says that

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): even their role was overstated. The BLA was really on their own. Quote

Outside of

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): an advisory role, we had no role. I made suggestions, sure, but they were not listening to what I said. They made their own decisions. I was not leading anything

As

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): far as I know, no one person was leading anything. I kept telling them, go slow, organize, get yourselves together. But once Webb, the former West Coast Panther whose murder

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): initiated the whole thing, got killed, things got out of control. Lumumba and Zade, two leaders, one in

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): Algiers, the other in NYC, they're trying to control things, but they can't

I said, slow

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): down, I'm

going to

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): come help. And they said, nah, it's too late for that. Things just got too

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): crazy. End quote

So by

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): July of 71, 50 or 60 of these guys, men and women to be fair, mostly

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): men obviously, but had gone underground, primarily in two cells in Brooklyn

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): and another in the Bronx. Supporting that many people off the grid takes money and money was a constant problem for the BLA while it operated. They

didn't

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): have the wealthy above ground supporters like the weathermen did. So

they stepped up the

Speaker 42 (lower-pitched voice): pace of drug robberies

They

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): start knocking over clubs and banks

The robberies

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): themselves are risky, though. Drug dealers and security guards shoot back, and each one of these brought the possibility of police showing up

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Soon, Black Liberation Army guys are being arrested one by one, picked off. Before long, many of them make the decision to leave New York City and set up somewhere else. Some go to San Francisco. They go to Chattanooga, New

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Orleans, Atlanta. In Atlanta... 17 BLA members rent a large house and set up a makeshift training camp. Asada Shakur trains people in

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): first aid there. They're learning maintenance care and proper handling of their guns

They learn

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): to make maps and use compasses and practice robbery scenarios. They're learning wilderness survival skills, which, you know, these guys are from the inner city. A lot of them don't know anything about that

When they need

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): cars, they steal them

They hadn't

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): just fled from... New York to hide from the NYPD. They were still operating. A few Panthers took some shots at a cop in San Francisco, but they missed and they were captured. Two members of the Atlanta cell were tasked pretty soon with assassinating a random cop in Atlanta, and on November 3rd, 1971, they went into town and killed Officer James Green. Four

days after

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): that, three more members

went

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): hunting again in atlanta but before they could get off a cop saw them with their guns in their car and they were all arrested and so most of the atlanta cell transferred over to chattanooga tennessee

others decided to head back

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): to new york but on the way one of the cars was stopped by a sheriff's deputy in north carolina a bunch of them opened fire and the deputy was left paralyzed

another four

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): members were

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): arrested though They're just going off the board, one at a time, two at a time, four at a time. Some

more of

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): them decided to go down to Florida to regroup, where they robbed a bank and a gun store. And

they had a

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): run-in with police at a hotel near the end of 1971, which ended with two more of them arrested and another dead. Now

the BLA was an

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): organization, but it was not very organized. They

were fierce, but

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): they did not have the skills or the connections necessary to survive very long

Not when

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): you're going to be killing cops. I mean, when you're just going to bring down the wrath of God on your head. By

the end of

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): 1971, they're scattered all over the eastern U.S., mostly. Hardly in contact with anyone other than their immediate running partners

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): spending more time planning and executing robberies to keep themselves fed and sheltered than planning a revolution. But

they kept

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): killing cops. Burrow, quote, The

night of

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): January 27, 1972 was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): freezing. frigid winter winds whistled down the garbage-strewn streets of new york's east village

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): snow was on the way

down down on

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): avenue b two young patrolmen were walking their beat greg foster who was twenty-two was black rocco lorry a year older was

white the two

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): had served together as marines in vietnam and as close friends had received permission to be partners patrolling one of new york's most dangerous and drug-ridden neighborhoods

The

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): two were walking south along Avenue B around 1030

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): when they noticed a car parked in front of a hydrant

They ducked

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): into a luncheonette across the street, the shrimp boat, and asked the owner if he knew the

car. He stepped

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): outside and shook his head no. Satisfied, Foster and Laurie turned and began to walk back north. As they did, three black men passed, parting to allow the officers to walk between them. One of the men wore a long black coat and they

had to walk back

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): north. another a green fatigue jacket and a black australian style bush hat a

moment after the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): officers passed the three men suddenly turned and drew pistols a 38 automatic and two nine millimeter automatics foster and lorry were a few strides away when the men

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): began firing directly into their backs foster was hit eight times and fell into a heap on the icy pavement six bullets hit lorry

all

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): but one struck his arms and legs and the last one pierced his neck and he staggered forward clutching at his throat before dropping to his knees and falling slowly onto his side as the

two men

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): lay dying their assassins marched

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): calmly toward them a witness later claimed one of the shooters hollered

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): shoot him in the balls and all three again opened fire three bullets were fired directly into foster's eyes two were shot into laurie's groin

when

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): both men lay still two of the assassins reached down and wrenched loose

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): their pistols they ran toward a waiting chrysler while the third man apparently intoxicated by the moment reportedly danced a jig over the dead men's bodies firing his pistol into the air wild west style startled to be left behind he ran off alone disappearing into

the night The whine

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): of police sirens echoed within minutes, and the first several officers to respond, all answering a disturbance call two blocks away, were quickly on the scene. What they found was stomach churning. Greg Foster's head had been destroyed. A sludge of blood and brain matter formed a three-foot puddle around his corpse. Rocco Laurie had been shot to pieces, bullet wounds up and down his body. End quote. End

quote. But these

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): killings, the killings of officers Foster and Laurie, brought the known total of straight-up assassinations to the number up to 10 in the last nine months. Despite

the mayor's

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): orders to keep the existence of the Black Liberation Army on the down low, the police had had enough, and they

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): finally went public with what they said was a conspiracy against them, and

not just

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): random acts of violence

On February

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): 17th, the cover headline of the New York Times read, Evidence of Liberation Army Said to Rise. The

BLA continued to

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): inspire robberies and murders as black militants as well as ordinary criminals who needed a reason and support from the underground continued to kill in its name

Some

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): people have the body count, some people who have studied it and looked into it have the body count into the 30s before the NYPD managed to hunt down and kill the last of the original BLA members late the next year. Jim

Jones was a daily

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): reader of the New York

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): Times. He saw that headline. He

knew about

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): the Panther Civil War and he saw the call to arms in Cleaver's quarterly magazine too. He

talked to his

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): people about it

And he got

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): reports on what they were talking about among

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): themselves. His younger followers were especially turned on by this idea of armed revolution, especially as paranoia gripped the church more and more and became an increasing focus of Jim's public sermons. Jim

eventually sided

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): with Huey Newton over Eldridge Cleaver once it became clear that Cleaver was off the rails, but he echoed Cleaver's talk. about blacks being put in concentration camps, things like that, and his own prophecies

Now, sister, you

Speaker 45: come to get healed or see healing, but you can't get healed until you hear the truth

And you just won't

Speaker 45: sit down long enough. Look at it. If you would sit up here like we sit up here and look at this audience, you would know why America is headed for concentration camps

Speaker 46: Right now, they're preparing to set up a dictatorship. It's already written into law that will give the president power to move people Wherever he wants to

Speaker 47: to put them in concentration camps, to take over every streetcar line, over every transportation, over every farm, over every office, over every factory. The

Speaker 48 (lower-pitched voice): Ku Klux Klan spawned the alliance with the Nazis and the white citizen council. And they're circulating hate literature all through the towns to scare the goddamn people. Every city in America, state in America, saying that blacks are planning to kill off white people. And they've got an Uncle Tom group that was set up to do it. But even the Grand Dragon admitted

Speaker 49: Imperial Wizard, whatever his damn is. idiot name is duke i think

Speaker 50: those who are unemployed how many heard what i spoke last night on mutation of genes

dna the

Speaker 51 (lower-pitched voice): common experimentation they're going to experiment to make a certain type of human species who will not be able to think only do physical work they're messing with the genes in the same process of doing this they can create viruses that will kill the whole of the United States because they don't want to hell to do their altering lifestyle

Speaker 52: there's a plan called Garden Plot there's a plan called Cable Spicer there's a plan called King Alfred Plan that has not only concentration

Speaker 53: camps in store for we who are black but the absolute annihilation

There's

Speaker 54: not a scientist that gives a chance for the United States to last 14 years

Just

Speaker 55: turn around and watch for the next five minutes and you'll see what I'm talking

about

Speaker 45: Cybernetics, mutations created by messing with genes now. Do you realize that most welfare mothers throughout the South and the Southwest that are black or Mexican get sterilized before they get their

welfare

Speaker 56: He'll put serial numbers and a mark of the beast right on you You'll not be any more a person, you'll be a number. And every

Speaker 46: black and brown and poor white will be done away with. It's already in law

As I've said

Speaker 57: repeatedly, we have no choices, but fascism or communism

For

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): apocalyptic revolutionaries, who had long sought a constituency to rise up and fight alongside them, black inmates seemed to represent the holy grail. weatherman after all had invested thousands of hours attempting to rally working-class youth high school students and black liberals and had earned little in return but snickers and shrugs finally in california's toughest prisons radicals found what appeared to be a loyal following

By

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): 1968, black inmates were reported to be forming clandestine chapters of the Black Panthers in a hardcore Marxist group called the Black Gorilla Family, both of which operated extensive secret Marxist political education groups, including courses on revolutionary theory and bomb-making. In 1971, a House subcommittee identified the most popular books requested by black inmates as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown's Die, Nigger, Die, and Cleaver's Soul on Ice

It

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): was Cleaver, starting in 1968, who loudly and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): repeatedly began predicting that black inmates would soon rise up and form the leading edge of the revolution. This

kind of talk

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): produced something approaching

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): rapture in a certain brand of white revolutionary, to the point that, in a phenomenon

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): the author Eric Cummins terms convict cultism, by the early 70s, convicts who were released from California prisons frequently enjoyed instant hero status in radical organizations

as a

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): movement radical named betsy carr put it i was completely fascinated with black inmates the glamour the bizarreness it was my hollywood i had never discussed anything with any of them just watched in total

awe more than a few of the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): black inmates they befriended however

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): turned out to be opportunists who parroted marxist philosophy in hopes of luring their new white friends into helping them make parole or in extreme cases escape

The

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): classic case came in October 1972, when several members of Venceramos, a leading Bay Area activist group, ambushed a car transporting a black prisoner named Ronald Beatty outside Chino's California Institute for Men. A

guard was

Speaker 58: killed in the ensuing gunfight. Their plan, authorities learned later, was to form guerrilla training

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): camps in the California mountains, from which they would launch the long-awaited revolution in American cities

These

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): hopes were

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): dashed, however, when Beatty was recaptured. He not only implicated much of the Fensoremo's leadership, he also said he had only pretended to be a revolutionary to gain his freedom, end quote. Now

Jim's young

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): followers were eating this stuff up. You know, they were in this environment, and especially the ones in the college dorms. They fantasized about what they were going to do when the time came, when the day came

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): that they were going to have to defend themselves and their loved ones against the U.S. government

Many of them saw no

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): reason to wait for the enemy to come to them

Young people

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): around the world were acting now. In Germany with the Red Army Fraction, better known as the Badermeinhof Gang, in Italy with the Red Brigades, in Uruguay with the Tupamaros, and in the U.S. with the Black Liberation Army, so why not them

They read

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): everything they could get their hands on from prison authors like Eldridge and George Jackson. George

Jackson was

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): the most well-known and most revered of the California prison

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): authors from this period. His

family had

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): moved from Chicago to Watts in the year of the Watts Riots, 1965, when Jackson

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): was 14, and

He

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): was extremely violent, very angry, even as a child, and had begun mugging people by the time he was 12, according to his own account. He

was locked up

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): for burglary a year after arriving in California, but escaped the youth facility they put him in, and he fled back to Chicago. He

was captured

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): again after knifing

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): a guy there and got sent back to LA, where he escaped again and was recaptured again

He got

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): paroled, but as soon as he got out, he stuck up a gas station in Bakersfield for 70 bucks

pled

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): guilty to that, and so the creative judge sentenced him to one year to life in prison, so that the length of his stay was basically entirely

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): dependent on his own good behavior. He

was 19, and

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): he never left prison again. In

prison, George

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): Jackson was an extremely aggressive advocate. feared ultra violent inmate he received almost 50 disciplinary infractions in the 10 years he served

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): before finally checking out it's like one every 10

weeks burrow has

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): a great section on jackson quote

at his first

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): stop he and his friend james carr best

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): known for burning down his elementary school at the age of nine worked as muscle for mexican gangs then branched out into loan sharking and

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): homosexual pimping Jackson was investigated for a murder, as he would be several times, but nothing came of it. Transferred to San Quentin, Jackson, by then a chiseled six-footer, it

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): was said that he performed a thousand fingertip push-ups every morning, joined the Black Capone Gang, where he established himself as a feared debt

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): collector, so adept at threatening other inmates that he took to buying debts from

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): other prisoners to collect himself. He was angry, sullen, erasable, and legendarily mean-spirited

he was

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the meanest

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): mother i ever saw inside or out a white prisoner once recalled you want to know why he was what

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): dumbass people call a prison leader because everyone was shit scared of him i mean he was into everything when i was

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): inside dope booze peddling ass you name it strong arm hit man john irwin a board member of the united

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): prisoners union union recalled we hated his guts. He was a mean, rotten son of a bitch

He

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): was a bully, an unscrupulous bully

The stories of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Jackson's prowess as a prison fighter, especially after he began studying martial arts, are

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): legion

The time he

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): was seen swinging a length of pipe during a riot in 1967. The times he took

his pals

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): into the showers and, just for the fun of

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): it, screamed, attack, and began beating the other inmates bloody

He was pound for

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): pound the toughest guy I ever knew, an inmate named Johnny Spain recalled

No doubt part of

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): Jackson's anger arose from his 1965 parole review

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): where his own father testified that his son was better off in prison, end quote

And so George Jackson's in lockup, and

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): his rise to fame begins in 1970, when he's being held at Soledad

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): Prison

in soledad

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): at the time black and white prisoners have been

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): beefing for a while actually across the california prison system at the time and so one day a fist fight between black and white prisoners breaks out in the

yard

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): one of the guards in the tower a white guy with no whistle or warning shots or anything like that aims his

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): rifle and fires four shots all at the black prisoners kills three of them

And his

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): supervisor testified that the guard, he openly admitted the guard had been trying to protect the white prisoners. All

through the California prison

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): system, the word went out that there would have to be revenged by the black prisoners against the guards. One

day, George

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Jackson and a few other inmates caught this young guard, new guy, out of position on a third floor cell block, beat the hell out of him and

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): threw him over the rail to the ground below where he died to the sounds of cheers coming from every cell

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): Jackson and two others were charged with the murder a

key

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): figure in their defense was a radical female attorney named Faye Stender who had already represented Huey Newton in his murder trial earlier and

more than

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): almost anyone this attorney Faye Stender understood

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): how the new fusion of the media and the legal system worked and she was a genius at manipulating

it She

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): portrayed Jackson as this put-upon revolutionary who had only attracted the hostility of the penal system for his

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): ideas, not for anything that he had actually done. She

collected letters

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): that he had written to friends and family and gave them over to a good editor who took an axe to him and then published those in a book called Soledad, Brother. It was a massive bestseller and received success. Worshipful reviews in the national press. The New York Times called it one of the most significant and important documents since the first black was pushed off the ship at Jamestown Colony

And so Faye Stender creates an

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): advisory council made up of

white

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): radicals called the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, which blows up into a whole bureaucracy with

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): seven subcommittees and countless radical celebrities like Jane Fonda, Pete Seeger, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Hayden on its roster

And they

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): used their clout to turn George Jackson into a folk hero

and his

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): defense into another

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): national referendum on the system as a whole. Burrow

reports that

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): there were bumper stickers, posters, buttons, fundraisers, which included bake sales and poetry readings, art auctions, even a Grateful Dead

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): benefit concert. Stender wasn't just an opportunist. She was a true believer, and she worshipped the black inmates, not just politically

The woman

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): had a husband and two kids, but she carried on an affair with Huey Newton while she was representing him, and she did the same thing with George Jackson during his trial

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Burrow, quote, Under Stender's guidance, George Jackson emerged as a living symbol of everything the Bay Area left yearned for, strong, black, prideful

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): masculine, and undeniably sexual. John Irwin, who was called to testify for Jackson's defense, noticed how naive and starstruck

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): Stender and her supporters were

It was

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): mostly the women who were doing the organizing, he remembered years later. They had each picked their favorite Soledad brother and were kind of oohing and aahing over them like teenagers were movie stars. I couldn't believe it. A

New York

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): radical named Gregory Armstrong met Jackson and summarized

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): his appeal this way. Everything about him is flashing and shining and glistening, and his body seems to ripple like a cat's. As

he moves

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): forward to take my hand, I literally

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): feel myself being pulled into the vortex of his energy. There's no way I can look away

He gives

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): me a sudden, radiant smile of sheer, sensual delight, the kind of smile you save for someone you really love. As we take each other's hands, I have a sense of becoming almost a part of his very being. End

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): quote

One of the people who

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): was pulled into the vortex of George Jackson's energy was his younger brother, Jonathan. Jonathan Jackson

said, was a

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): good student at a Pasadena high school when he became intoxicated by his brother's celebrity and revolutionary rhetoric

So he was assigned by

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): George to be the bodyguard for one of George's famous supporters, the activist and UCLA professor Angela Davis

Angela Davis bought

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Jonathan Jackson a.380 semi-automatic handgun, and after a long talk with George Jackson at the prison, a shotgun to

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): go along

with it. On

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): August 7th, 1970

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Jonathan Jackson, who had just turned 17 years old earlier that summer, walked into the Marin County courthouse where one of his brother's friends from San Quentin was on trial for stabbing a guard and two other inmates had been called as witnesses

Jonathan Jackson stood

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): up at a certain point, cocked a shotgun and said, all right, gentlemen, I'm taking over now

He

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): pulled out several more guns and gave them to the inmates, to the

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): prisoners, and ordered the judge to step forward. He

pulls out a roll of

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): tape, and he tapes the shotgun tight under the judge's chin

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): and then he and the three inmates walked outside with a prosecutor and three female jurors as hostages

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): As

they left, one

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): of them yelled

Free or

Speaker 59: release the Soledad brothers by 1230 or they all die

And so they

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): all pile into a van, but at barely over 16 years

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): old, Jonathan Jackson doesn't know how to get it started or in gear. So they stall for a few minutes until another inmate switches

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): places with them to get it going. By

then, the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): cops are everywhere. The

whole place is

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): surrounded. So Jonathan gets back into

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the driver's seat and tries to drive off, but from somewhere, either in the van or from the police, I'm not clear on that, a shot was fired

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): and the cops just light up the van

And

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): Jonathan Jackson, once they start shooting, Jonathan Jackson turns around and pulls the trigger on the shotgun and blows the judge's face off. Once

the shooting is

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): stopped, Jonathan Jackson was dead and two of the other inmates were dead. The third inmate

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): and the prosecutor were in the van. They were both critically wounded

Jonathan Jackson was given a

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): Black Panther funeral. And he became a revered martyr among

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): Bay Area

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): radicals, especially

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): young ones in the university students

Angela Davis

Speaker 6 (lower-pitched voice): was charged for her role in the plot, but, you know, there's no law against buying a

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): gun for someone and no one was left alive to testify against her. So prosecutors couldn't prove that she was actually involved with the conspiracy

Angela Davis became

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): a left wing icon. She still is one today. She pivoted later from focusing on

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): so much on racial and prison work to advocating more for communism and for communist regimes like the USSR, Cuba, and East Germany as time went on

After her

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): trial, she was hired to teach at Claremont, where the college arranged to have her teach in secret and to make all

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): of her students swear to secrecy to hide from alumni that she was teaching communist doctrine to her students

That

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): actually remained a feature of her classes throughout her career, even after people stopped caring about college professors teaching communism to students, just because it added to her mystique. She

retired from

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): UC Santa Cruz just a few years back, actually. So

Angela Davis, actually

Speaker 60: another thing, this will come into play later as

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): well, she became a close friend and collaborator of Jim

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): Jones and People's Temple in the 1970s. She would come to services and give talks, have private meetings with Jim

And Jim

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): Jones would develop working relationships with a lot of radicals and political leaders over the years, people like Davis, Huey Newton. He had some of Newton's cousins in the church, and he knew Newton personally, met with him a

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): lot. He

was very

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): close to the leader of the American Indian movement, Dennis Banks, very close, very, very close with Harvey Milk. We'll talk about

that

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): a little later. I mean, Harvey Milk, if he was not a member of People's Temple, I mean, he was about as close as you could get without officially being

so. And so these

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): relationships did more than probably anything to increase and maintain Jim's credibility among his people. You

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): know, his people were the type who worshipped these figures. And their pastor, Jim Jones, would speak to them on the phone on a regular basis. You know, these people would come to your church and speak to you and offer Jim their support and respect. He just did a huge amount for his prestige and credibility within his movement

And for the

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): type of people that made up Jim's congregation, it gave him more clout than having movie stars or pro-athletes show up

But Jim had to

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): walk a fine line. And

he felt certain that he

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): was under surveillance by the authorities, and he worried that they were going to use any talk of violence by his

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): people against him and against the movement. But

he took the talk

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): seriously at the same time

He wanted to be

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): accepted, he didn't want to get in trouble for something like that, but he also wanted to be known as a big revolutionary

And

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): so he let the people in the movement, in the temple, who wanted to participate in that kind of thing, have their say. And

it started to become

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): a debate within the church. And things started to get heated, actually, especially behind the scenes, as people argued over which direction to take. And got especially heated after George Jackson was killed in August of 1971. And then after a book he had written was published in early 72

One

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): year after his brother Jonathan was killed, one of George Jackson's lawyers... Authorities could never pin it on a specific person, so whoever it was got away with it. Managed to smuggle him a gun in prison. And

so George

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Jackson used it to take over a cell block at San Quentin, and he took six guards and two white prisoners hostage. As

negotiators

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): are trying to talk him out, he's just shouting back curses and over and over screaming that the dragon has come. The dragon

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): has

come. Finally

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): George took off into the yard and a sniper put him down with one bullet to the back, but before he'd run out, he'd killed six of his hostages by cutting

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): their throats

2,000 people

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): showed up for George Jackson's funeral in Oakland, as armed Black Panthers lined the church inside and out under paranoid suspicion that government forces were going to try to

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): attack the place

And

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Weatherman detonated two bombs in his honor, one in San Francisco, one in Sacramento, while the funeral was going on, kind of as a show of solidarity. His

last book

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): his posthumous book, was called Blood in My Eye, and

he had written

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): it from solitary confinement after his brother had been killed and while he was awaiting trial for murder in the Soledad brothers' case. I haven't read this one myself. I read

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): his first one, but I haven't read this one. But Burrow describes it, quote

It is an

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): amazing document, a straightforward call for a bloody, black-led revolution in the streets of America and a

vivid

Speaker 43: testimony to how thoroughly he had internalized everything he had read in Debray and other revolutionary sources. Later

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): friends would come forward to

Speaker 61: say how totally he had lost touch with reality in his last year. Jackson wrote, and now quoting from Jackson's book, We

must

Speaker 62: accept the eventuality of bringing the USA to its knees. Except the closing

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): off of critical sections of the city with barbed wire, armored pig carriers crisscrossing the streets, soldiers everywhere, Tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked in, the commonness of death, end quote

Blood in My Eye didn't get the same

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): play in the mainstream that

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): Jackson's first book, Soledad Brother, did, but it was read ravenously

in

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): the radical subculture. Jim Jones read it, and he played George Jackson up as a

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): hero and martyr in his services

His people

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): read it, and many of them wanted to follow George Jackson's example

In the end, though, Jim

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): Jones himself laid down the law. He overruled the use of violence by members of People's Temple

Because in

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): 1972, he made the final decision on the matter. He said that Although revolutionary violence was justified and the BLA and George Jackson, these people were heroes, that everybody had a role to play. They had to do everything that they could to help those who were engaged in armed struggle where it was appropriate, but the People's Temple just had too many children, too many senior citizens to worry about, to engage in that kind of action

Many of the young

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): people

did

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): not like the decision but once it was made jim jones tolerated no dissent

Speaker 63: about what george jackson that when they when they isolate him that don't you

Speaker 64: dirty the name of george jackson

Speaker 65 (higher-pitched voice): don't don't you dirty the name of george jackson if george jackson had this movement he'd be alive don't you dirty his name you're not

worthy

Speaker 66 (higher-pitched voice): of his goddamn name don't you speak his name you prick Don't you mention it because this organization will have saved George Jackson. It's bricks like

Speaker 67: you that sold him down the river that calls him to be dead. You're not a George Jackson. You're a punk

Speaker 68: you goddamn miserable punks you gangsters they want to

Speaker 66 (higher-pitched voice): identify with george jackson and if he'd had some of you miserable punks working with him he wouldn't have been killed by the pigs

If he'd

Speaker 66 (higher-pitched voice): have had this organization, he talked about it. You haven't read his books. He talked about this kind of organization we have. You miserable

Speaker 65 (higher-pitched voice): goddamn punk. Don't you ever dirty his name again until you can learn to cooperate and follow rules, you miserable punk. You're so... Punks like you killed

Speaker 69: George Jackson. Don't you think you ought to make up for it? Yes, Dad. I didn't say I was trying to be like George Jackson. You didn't

Speaker 70: have to say you

Speaker 69: don't like him. You quoted him. You're quoting

Speaker 71: him, and you're not worthy of quoting him

Do you want

Speaker 72: to be like him? That ain't the question. Do you want to be like him

Speaker 73: You know, I know what I really want to be like, but I know I ain't going to never be

there like that

Speaker 73: So, you know

Speaker 74: Well, that ain't what you said, man, you

fucker! Hey, you see, Dad? You

Speaker 75: have to kick the shit out of any

fucking one of us as

Speaker 75: many

Speaker 76: at a time as he wants. And you don't see him walking around doing it, so tell me you want to be like him, alright? He's lying

He's lying. This

Speaker 77: morning, I asked him the very same goddamn question, and he said he wanted to be like Chek O'Var. He

said a

Speaker 78: rebel, I mean... And also

Speaker 80: when we tried to explain to him that he

Speaker 77: should try to follow Father's example, he said, I couldn't do that in a thousand lifetimes

Look

Speaker 81 (higher-pitched voice): Willie, I remember well what you said about Father a few months ago

Right

Speaker 81 (higher-pitched voice): father bleeds father bleeds father bleeds and I remember what you said yesterday morning you said father you're hostile against father and against me don't look look all your words of manipulation don't convince me one bit your goddamn

liar And

Speaker 83: also, and also this morning when mother was talking to him, it was nothing but

Speaker 84: just pure hostility on his face. He had nothing but a glare in his eyes

Hold

Speaker 85: it, hold it, hold it

Speaker 86: hold

Speaker 87: it

Speaker 88: hold

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): it. Jim Jones played both sides as best he could. He played himself up as the most radical of the radicals. While trying to keep his people from spilling out into the rest of the world in ways that might come back on him or the temple

But there's only

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): so much you can do. You can only ride that line for so long in a heated

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): environment. Especially since, you know, it's not like Jim was just play-acting himself

His people were

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): paranoid and they were radical. But he was more paranoid

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): than any of them

It was

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): inevitable that his people were eventually going to start bumping up against the people and the world that he was telling them, had been telling them for years, was out for their blood. Once

in January

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): 1973, he and

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): a bunch of temple members were down at their Los Angeles location for services

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): and an elderly black parishioner fainted and was feeling sick, and since her condition was real and therefore not subject to his healing powers, someone called an ambulance

And. And so the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): medics come and start loading the woman up, and temple security are watching this go down, many of them in their uniforms with guns on their hips. And

so inside the

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): ambulance, the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): medics have the woman sit down on a bench instead of lie down on the gurney, and when they do that, one of the temple security guys starts demanding that they let her lie down. And

the medics

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): just close the door to the ambulance, but the temple people open

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): it back up, the medic closes it again, and they get into a tug-of-war with the temple people over the door

and they're like, And

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): they start shouting and arguing, and the temple people are accusing the medics of being racist toward the old woman, and so the medics call for

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): backup, saying that they've got armed men here trying to obstruct their medical work

As soon as they do

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): that, two of

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): the temple security guys jump on the medics. who start defending themselves and a scuffle still going on when the cops arrive the cops see a bunch of random people attacking the ambulance people when they get there so they charge in with their batons and temple members are fighting with the cops more cops show up and there's a helicopter circling over it was practically

a riot

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): right at that moment jim jones comes out and orders his followers to all drop to their knees immediately and they just hit the ground

in an instant mike

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): prokes and the two security guys were arrested

and Jim

Speaker 40 (lower-pitched voice): and Marceline went down to the police station

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): to talk to the cops, but the cops were not interested. They were adamant

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): They were angry. And so Jim grabs one of them by the arm and says, if you're going to arrest anyone, arrest me. And so they do for a bit, but there's nothing really there, so they let him go. Things

like this

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): happen, and you and

I hear

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): about them as an outsider, and it all seems pretty straightforward. The temple people were out of line. The medics and the police basically

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): acted appropriately

but

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): it's hard to get inside the heads of people who

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): are viewing things through a paranoid lens. Go read Stefan Au's book about the Badr-Meinhof gang in Germany. All right, you can actually just watch the movie. The book is better. It's more detailed, obviously, but go watch the movie, The Badr-Meinhof Complex. It's a good representation of the nonfiction book. And

one of

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): the things that just

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): hits you again and again

is, Is how

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the people he's talking about, the members of Botter-Meinhof

are really

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): they're operating kind of in their own reality in a lot of ways. I

don't mean that as if

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): they're psychotically delusional, like where they think their dog is telling them to go do this stuff

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Nothing so dramatic as that, although Botter, Andreas Botter probably was psychotic in

Come to

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): think of it, the group did recruit a lot of its members from a movement called the Socialist Patients Collective, which was organized by some radical psychiatrists

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): and made up entirely of mental patients. But

I just mean that

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): you had this group, the Bader-Meinhof gang, this radical communist

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): terrorist group in Germany back in the 70s, and they're running around doing prison breaks, blowing things up, kidnapping people, murdering dozens of people

And

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): yet there'd be these scenes where the police would find one of them on the street, and the person would just pull

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): a gun and start firing wildly at them in daytime

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): traffic, and so the police would fire back and kill the shooter. And then afterwards, the other members would get together, and there's just no recognition of their role in what had happened

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): They would just rant and fume about how the fascist police had viciously assassinated their martyred comrade, and they were serious about it. It wasn't in bad faith

You

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): know, their idea was that they were essentially living under a reincarnation of the Nazi regime and any kind of resistance

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): to that regime and those complicit with it is legitimate and obligatory. And so whatever they did to resist, it was right

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): And if the police found you, it doesn't matter what you had done or what you did to defend yourself. They're the bad guys. They're hunting you and you were merely acting in legitimate self-defense

It

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): didn't matter that you shot first or were shooting in traffic or that they were after you for kidnapping or murdering a random

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): civilian. That's how they saw things. When

one of their

Speaker 7 (lower-pitched voice): imprisoned cadres went on a hunger strike

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the fascists were to blame for letting him starve. When the prison authorities said, OK, and put a tube down his throat and forced him to eat, the fascists were abusing his human right to protest. And again, they weren't being disingenuous about it. It's just this is really how they saw things

And when

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): incidents like the one I just described with the ambulance and the cops in Los Angeles happened, People's Temple had a very similar experience and way of looking at things. They

had had a

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): run-in with the armed agents of this fascist state. That's how they saw it. There

was no

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): discussion to be had of who was to blame. The fascists were to blame. What kind of question is that to even discuss? And

so every one of these

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): incidents... small and large no matter what happened it just

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): pushed their mentality in one direction one direction only it was just more evidence as if they needed any more

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): evidence that they were being targeted and harassed by this oppressive system that would stop at nothing and never let them live in peace

jim had another run-in with the

Speaker 8 (lower-pitched voice): los angeles police at the end of the same year this time he was by himself

One