New Pittsburgh Courier

Former Black Panther chair does the town

ELAINE BROWN
ELAINE BROWN

Author, musician, lifelong activist and former Black Panther Party Chair Elaine Brown gave Pittsburgh a taste of her revolutionary rhetoric as she recently visited her old comrade Rashad Byrdsong and made presentations at his Community Empowerment Association and at the University of Pittsburgh.
Brown made it clear that she is still about revolution and that she has no time for posers, as she said last year when she said Black Lives Matter had a “plantation mentality.” She likewise has no patience with the New Black Panther Party. For her, it comes down to the difference between talk and action.
“There is a single agenda and that agenda is revolution. We started with an ideology. What are you gonna do–talk about housing, that somehow it will magically happen? What we did happened because we did work,” she said during a question and answer session following her Pitt presentation.
“People really liked the Party when we put guns in the street—now there’s something you can do. You want to put some guns in the streets that will get people who will hear you. If you’re not willing to do that then let’s just talk about nothing.”
In California, in the 1960s, Brown said the Panthers found a way to get things that needed to be done—most of the time with no money or resources.

RASHAD BYRDSONG
RASHAD BYRDSONG

“When we started feeding children in every big city that was huge—we couldn’t do it for everyone, but by the time we finished people demanded the schools provide breakfast and they did,” she said.
“We did work—and did it where you could see it. We had free clinics. We had an ambulance service in Harlem, which was unreal. Nobody could call an ambulance in the hood. If it wasn’t officer down, you better drag your shot-up ass to the hospital on your own cause nobody’s coming into that neighborhood to get you.”
Brown, originally from Philadelphia and who trained as a classical musician thanks to the selfless toil of her single mother, moved to California in 1968 to be a songwriter. She joined the Panthers that year and rose through the ranks, publishing their newspaper, writing songs and eventually succeeding Huey P. Newton as Party chair.
Along the way, she founded a school and, in 1977, managed Lionel Wilson’s successful campaign to become Oakland, Calif.’s first Black mayor.
Her message—if it wasn’t already the slogan of capitalist oppressor Nike—remains, just do it.
“You have to do the work. People will come if you’re doing it. You can’t just have a meeting,” she said. “And you have to recognize the need we have for each other. Look at Rashad. He has a program. He came out of the joint with nothing and just did it—the ‘how’ is always about just doing it.”
For instance, she said, if she were a student at Pitt, she’d recommend taking all the food that isn’t eaten in the dormitories and serving it wherever people are hungry.
“That’s something you can do that would be meaningful and it wouldn’t cost you anything but some time,” she said. “That’s what I recommend—do something. And it goes like fire because people see something happening. When they don’t see something happening, then they do nothing.”
Brown is the author of  “A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story” and “The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America.”
(J.L. Martello contributed to this story.)
 
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