Free Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang

striking students, workers and
les Enragés
poured, while the spraypainted walls cried, “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible.”Young radicals thought they could smell revolution in the air. “We thought it would take five years, at most,” says Gabriel Torres, a former member of the Young Lords Party. “Maybe by 1973.”
    But the urgent spring soon descended into a long hot summer. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot dead on April 4. Bobby Hutton was shot dead on April 6. Bobby Kennedy was shot dead on June 6. The generations clashed at the Democratic Party Convention. By September, J. Edgar Hoover had announced war on the Panthers, “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Perhaps it was a bad season for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to set up their New York offices.
    The Panthers’ discipline and fearlessness drew in disaffected kids from the ‘hood to their offices in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and across the country. Many pushing the ten-point program—demanding freedom, jobs, justice, housing, education and an end to police brutality—had been former gang members. In Chicago, Panther leader Fred Hampton was forming alliances with the powerful Blackstone Rangers, Mau Maus, and the Black Disciples gangs. 1 He believed that the gangs collected the fearful and the forgotten. If gangs gave up robbing the poor, terrorizing the weak, hurting the innocent, they might become a powerful force for revolution.
    In a March 1968 memo, J. Edgar Hoover had laid out the objectives of the FBI COINTELPRO operation against “Black Nationalist-Hate Groups,” including the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. Hoover’s last goal was to “prevent the long-range growth of militant Black nationalist organizations, especially among youth.” 2 To that end, the FBI joined with local police agencies to sweep up the Panthers, netting 348 arrests. On April 2, 1969, twenty-one Panthers from the New York leadership of the Party were rounded up and arrested on charges of conspiring to set off Easter day bombs in the midtown shopping district.
    One of the New York 21, a woman named Afeni Shakur, addressed her captors in a letter she composed in her cell. “We know that you are trying to break us up because you can’t control us. We know that you always try to destroy what you can’t control,” she wrote. “History shows that wars against oppression are always successful. And there will be a war—a true revolutionary war—a bloody war. No one not you nor us nor anyone in this country can stop it from occurring now. And we will win.” 3
    The charges did not stick and after two years behind bars, the Panther 21 walked free. But amidst constant internal and external harassment from authorities, the Panthers imploded in convulsions of bullets and bodies. Newton himself expelled the New York chapter, and the Party split into armed camps. The revolution that Afeni had fought for—full employment and decent housing—left her with nothing. She raised her son Tupac Amaru alone, often jobless, sometimes homeless.
    When the Young Lords Party brought their purple berets from East Harlem across the river to the South Bronx in early 1970, local gang leaders were not impressed. The Savage Skulls’ leader Felipe “Blackie” Mercado told his gang members, “Politics is only about bullshit.”
    Richie Perez was a South Bronx native who had grown up on Kelly Street, where the Skulls had taken over. He returned there with his cadres as the Young Lords’ Minister of Information and got a rude welcome: “One night after we had finished our work for the day, we closed up the office, and were sitting out front on some chairs and just talking. We got hit with three firebombs, Molotov cocktails from across the street. The grapevine had it that it was done by some gang members.”
    But later that summer,