----- Original Message ----- From: Sandeep Vaidya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: STOP NATO: ¡îO PASARAN! <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 4:28 PM Subject: [STOPNATO] FORMER PANTHER IN NORTH BELFAST STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM North Belfast News 12 May 2000 FORMER PANTHER IN NORTH BELFAST On first appearance Lorenzo Kom'boa Boa Erwin could be your grandfather or the old man living across the street writes Barry McCaffrey. Approaching 60 and getting the grey hairs that only grow with the hard knocks of life, is the only hint that for him America is not the land of milk and honey. Lorenzo grew up in the southern town of Chattanooga in the 1950s in which being black meant that you knew your place and it wasn't at the front of the bus. But then came the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party - for Lorenzo sitting at the back of the bus was no longer an option. "When I grew up in Chattanooga it was normal for a black man to be murdered by the police. As the majority of the police were members of Klu Klux Klan it was run of the mill for a couple of black men to get shot dead every week." But even though he initially supported Martin Luther King's crusade it wasn't long before the young student began to question the effectiveness of non-violent protest against the might of the White Establishment. "Even before King was killed he himself realised that sitting down on the street wasn't going to get you equal rights. Malcolm X had been murdered as part of the political assassinations. But even with Malcolm's death there were young black students who had decided that enough was enough and that if they weren't going to give us our rights we were going to stand up and take them, by force if necessary." The Black Panther Party was started in October 1966 and within a few months its power base had spread throughout black urban ghetto-colonies across America. "One of the things that people remember is that we used the gun laws so that we went out on to the streets and took on the police at their own game. Where they turned up with guns so did we. And to be honest that did get us support and people saw that we were a force to be reckoned with. Here was black people standing up to the police with the only thing they understood, force." But Lorenzo Erwin says that the Panthers mushroomed because of its social policies rather than the use of weapons. "We weren't reformists like King tried to be, we didn't want to change the system, we set out to break the system so that black people, and anyone who was being oppressed by the state would have their say in any new society." The Panthers' ultimate power came from their commitment to working in the ghettos. "We set up free breakfast clubs for the people, we had after-school clubs, we had advice centres and became involved in anything which affected our people. If there was an issue affecting the Black community we were part of it. "That why the people supported us, that's why we ended up with 5,000 Panther members in less than two years. We mobilised the people so that they took ownership of the streets and ghettos." Lorenzo Erwin says that one of the proudest moments of his life was when Bernadette McAliskey shocked White America by handing over the keys of New York, which she had been presented with by Mayor Daly. "Bernadette McAliskey came to New York and was treated like a queen by the white establishment but after she got the keys of the city she came straight down to the neighbourhood and handed it over to Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers. "The White Establishment were so angry that they wanted to lynch her there and then. But what Bernadette McAliskey did was to show that we had the support of the outside world." But with the growth of the Black Panther Party came interest from the FBI and J Edgar Hoover. "The White Government couldn't take us fighting against the conditions in black communities. We stood up to police brutality and showed that we would fight back and they didn't like it." Fearing for his life after he was put on an FBI death list for leading the Panthers, Erwin hijacked a plane and fled to Cuba. "The FBI had already murdered 39 members of the Panther Party and it was clear that I was next after I refused to testify to a grand jury against one of our leaders Willy Ricks. "Hoover had set up a secret department called COINTEL which just went out and assassinated anyone who they believed was a danger to the White Establishment. "If I hadn't made it to Cuba I was dead within weeks." But little did the former black student know that Cuba was no longer a sanctuary for the Panthers and before long he found himself in jail."When we got to Cuba we thought that as a socialist country we would be safe. But Fidel Castro didn't see it that way when we started to protest against the treatment of black people in Cuba."When I was deported I was told that I was going to Guinea where we had political asylum but instead they flew me to Czechoslovakia where the Secret Police handing me over to the Americans who proceeded to torture me for a week." Standing trial in Georgia in 1969 for hijacking a plane, Lorenzo felt that things may not go his way when he first set eyes on the all-white jury."It was a farce and I ended up getting two life sentences, the longest sentence ever handed down at that time for hijacking."The judge actually told me that he was going to bury me alive, and I didn't think he was joking." But in another twist in his amazing life story the Chattanooga Panther not only survived Indiana jail but ended up controlling the jail for a period in the early 1970s. "The mistake that they made was putting all of the political prisoners such as the Panthers and the Mexicans and everyone else, in the onejail. While it was run by the Klan we had unity in numbers and over a four-year period we cleared the jail of not only Klan prisoners but warders as well." For his protests Lorenzo received another 35 years on to his sentence. Since his release in 1983 white supremacists have forced his deportation from Australia during a speaking tour while he is due to appear in the courts in America for allegedly running a pirate radio station devoted to black consciousness. And although he is now middle-aged and the Black Panther Party has long since been smashed Lorenzo Kom'boa Boa Erwin insists that the beliefs of the movement are still relevant to this day. "We didn't have a Bloody Sunday or someone like Bobby Sands dying on hunger strike and perhaps if this had happened things might have been different in that there might have been a more powerful uprising. "But obviously that didn't happen and the government was able to suppress the black community by deliberately flooding it with drugs and buying-off black leaders. But there will come a time when this generation stands up for the rights of the Black man and at that time the legacy of the Black Panther Movement will still be strong. They can kill the revolutionary but they can't kill the revolution, white or black." ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________________________________ Advertisement: 15% off Ashford Collection jewelry for Mother's Day! Mom will love these gorgeous pieces handpicked by our expert jewelry buyers - now 15% off and shipped FedEx overnight FREE! 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