[News] A Black Panther love story

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.newframe.com/part-one-a-black-panther-love-story/ 
<https://www.newframe.com/part-one-a-black-panther-love-story/>


  Part one | A Black Panther love story

By: Jaclynn Ashly <https://www.newframe.com/writer/jaclynn-ashly/>- 
February 16, 2021
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Charlotte Hill O’Neal is known by several names. Residents of the Arusha 
region of northern Tanzania, where she has lived for decades, call her 
Mama C as Charlotte is difficult for Tanzanians to pronounce.

Others call her Mama Africa because of the scarification on her cheeks 
and the ring piercing her nose, and because she encourages the local 
youth to be proud of their culture and heritage.

Her Orisha spiritual name is Osotunde Fasuyi. She was initiated several 
years ago as a priestess in the Yoruba belief system, which originated 
about 10 000 years ago in present-day Nigeria. Enslaved Africans brought 
it to the Americas and the Caribbean, where it syncretised with other 
belief systems and is now practised throughout these areas.

Charlotte is bedecked in jewellery and beads. Some items represent 
Orisha deities and others are traditional Maasai beadwork.

She is a former member of the Black Panther Party, who fled the United 
States with her husband Pete O’Neal half a century ago.


Undated: A portrait of a young Charlotte and Pete O’Neal taken some time 
in the 1960s. (Photograph supplied)

Charlotte speaks Swahili with a Midwest drawl and her skin is decorated 
with tattoos: a black panther on her left shoulder and Sankofa, a symbol 
the Akan people of Ghana use to represent the importance of gaining 
knowledge and wisdom from the past, on her arm. African instruments, 
including the stringed nyatiti traditionally played by the Luo of 
present-day Kenya, replace the gun once strapped across her body.

Charlotte, 69, and Pete, 80, have lived in Tanzania since 1972, when 
local authorities targeted Pete because of his activities as chairperson 
of the Kansas City chapter of the Panthers. They run the United African 
Alliance Community Center (UAACC <https://www.uaacc.net/>) in Imbaseni 
village outside Arusha city, where murals of Malcolm X and Martin Luther 
King Jr, along with other icons of the black power and civil rights 
movement, are splashed on to the walls.

Charlotte and Pete’s story intertwines with the revolutionary spirit of 
thousands of young African-American men and women who attempted to stand 
up to injustice and change the world, but were met with prison 
sentences, assassinations and government repression.


    *A confusing, beautiful time*

While their relationship is a testament to decades of love and support, 
“I just really didn’t like her,” Pete says, laughing as he relaxes in 
their bedroom. Pete joined the Black Panther Party in 1968 after having 
an “epiphany” during a visit to Oakland, California, where the Black 
Panthers were founded in 1966. “I was not a very good person,” says 
Pete, who was incarcerated as a teenager in California. “I was a crook 
and a thief. My life mirrored so many young Black men and women growing 
up in the ghetto and who were attracted to the street life.

“My friends had convinced me to go with them to Oakland to see this new 
organisation, but I had no interest in trying to do anything to 
participate in the uplifting of our people or community. I thought maybe 
I’d go out there and do some hustles and make some money.”


February 1969: Pete O’Neal talks about the formation of the Kansas City 
chapter of the Black Panther Party. (Photograph supplied)

Like many young Black Americans, it was the Panthers’ focus on police 
violence that initially attracted Pete to the party. He met co-founder 
Bobby Seale and high-ranking party member David Hilliard in Oakland and 
told them: “I’d be willing to do anything to get even with them [the 
police].”

“They stopped for a minute,” says Pete. “And they said, ‘Brother, that’s 
really not what we’re all about. We’re not about getting even. We’re 
trying to change the world.’”

Pete stayed in Oakland for several weeks and participated in the 
Panthers’ political education sessions, learning about revolutionaries 
from Che Guevara in Cuba to Mao Zedong in China.

“I suddenly just had an epiphany,” he says. “I would imagine that this 
is what happens to born-again Christians when they see the light. Well, 
I saw the light. They talked to me about the suffering and the 
sacrifices that were made, and the beauty of stepping outside of your 
own desires and aspirations and embracing something larger than yourself.

“It was a confusing, yet beautiful time. It was like my mind was 
expanding and I could see things that I had not been able to see before. 
When I left there, I was a former street hustler imbued with the desire 
to bring about revolutionary change. Not just for Black people, but 
people of the world.”

Pete, who was 28 at the time, returned to Kansas City. “I severed ties 
to the people who were involved with me in my former life. I tried to 
take some of the people from my former life with me on this new path. 
But they thought I had lost my damn mind.”

He founded the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther Party in the 
state of Missouri.


    *Far from love*

Charlotte, meanwhile, was finishing high school in Kansas City, just 
kilometres from the city of the same name in neighbouring Missouri. “I 
was always raised to be very proud of who I am and my Africanness,” she 
says, the clinking of her jewellery as she gestures adding percussion to 
her speech.

“This was during the civil rights movement. Then I saw people like 
Malcolm X and then later with Stokely Carmichael, and then I started 
hearing about the Black Panther Party. It was amazing for me to see 
these young brothers and sisters with their black leather and shades, 
and their berets and all this marching,” she says.

When Charlotte was a senior, she started seeing Pete in the newspapers 
and would cut out these pictures of him and paste them on her bedroom 
walls. “But I never thought I would actually meet him.”

Charlotte would soon meet Pete, though, and it would be far from love at 
first sight.

Charlotte was a successful student, but she often bunked school and 
crossed over to Missouri to attend political education courses at the 
Kansas City chapter. About two months after graduating, Charlotte 
officially joined the Black Panther Party. Pete was on a speaking tour 
and helping other branches, so he wasn’t there when Charlotte joined.

Charlotte was 18 and began living in a “panther pad”, where young Black 
Panther members would live in a communal environment and set an example 
of the revolutionary socialist society they hoped to build. “We cooked 
and cleaned together, and we would go out into the fields and have 
weaponry training,” Charlotte explains.


11 Feb 2019: Charlotte O’Neal at her home in Tanzania. A Black Panther 
tattoo adorns her left shoulder. (Photograph by Jaclynn Ashly)


    *Strict code of conduct*

The Black Panther Party had a strict code of conduct and warned its 
members against using or possessing narcotics, marijuana or alcohol 
while doing work for the organisation. “You’re not supposed to do hard 
drugs or anything when you’re on duty,” Charlotte says. “You were 
supposed to be very alert because the police were on us all the time. We 
weren’t supposed to give them any kind of excuse or reason to bother us, 
because they would harass us and arrest people just so they could 
deplete our finances by making it so we were constantly bailing people out.”

Signs around the panther pads and chapter offices warned members against 
being “non-functional”, Charlotte says. “But we were teenagers and this 
was the 1960s, right?” She tilts her head back, chuckling mischievously.


5 August 1969: A member of the Black Panthers peeks around the 
bullet-pocked door that police blasted with gunfire during a pre-dawn 
raid in Chicago. (Photograph by Getty Images)

She and the other young Panthers decided to drop pills called Red 
Devils, the street name for secobarbital, a sedative-hypnotic pill used 
to treat insomnia and epilepsy that was used for recreational purposes 
in the US throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

“So we dropped them and we were out of it,” Charlotte says. “We were 
having a good time. Everybody’s smoking, doing this and that. We were 
thoroughly non-functional.”


    *Talking back*

The young Panthers were unaware that Pete was scheduled to return to 
Kansas City that day. He said: “I walked into the house, and I could get 
the aroma of illicit substances wafting through the air. I said, ‘What 
the hell?’ You could smell weed everywhere. And they were just partying 
on the porch with the music turned up loud. This is a political 
organisation. And they were just having a good time and I came up on 
them unexpectedly.

“Bear in mind,” Pete adds. “I was a father figure. Most of them were in 
their teens and, quite frankly, a lot of them were scared of me. So I 
came in and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And their mouths fell 
open and they were just staring at me and everyone was silent.”

Charlotte was finally meeting the man whose image had adorned her 
bedroom walls. “I was so out of it,” she says. “I could hardly talk and 
I remember him being so mad.”

Pete, furious with the young Panthers, looked to his right and saw a 
young woman he did not recognise, a “skinny little girl with a big fat 
head”. He glanced at her and asked angrily, “And who the hell is this?”

The skinny girl with the fat head replied in a nervous stutter: “I-I-I’m 
Ch-ch-arlotte Hill. I-I-I’m from K-K-Kansas City. And I-I joined the 
B-B-Black Panther Party.”

“Who the hell let her join the party?” Pete responded furiously. He 
turned to Charlotte and said, “Shut up and don’t say another word.” But 
Charlotte retorted: “You can’t tell me not to talk. My daddy told me 
that I always have the right to talk.” The other young Panther members 
let out a collective gasp, Pete recalls. “They were thinking, ‘Oh Lord, 
she’s dead now.’”

“He was real mad at that,” Charlotte says, smiling from ear to ear and 
slowly shaking her head as she remembers being introduced to the man who 
would become her lifelong partner. “Brother Pete ran a real strict ship 
and here I was talking back to him.”


1969: Pete O’Neal chats with children eating a free breakfast provided 
by the Black Panthers. (Photograph supplied)

“I remember thinking that I can’t stand this girl,” Pete recalls. “I 
thought this girl was definitely going to be a disruptive force in the 
party. I didn’t like her.” As punishment, Pete made the young Panthers 
run, carrying each other on their backs, and then locked them in a 
storage cabinet. “I can’t remember if I left them there for a few hours 
or I left them there all night. I really can’t tell you,” Pete says, 
grinning. Charlotte, meanwhile, says she passed out soon after being 
locked inside.

But Pete and Charlotte were living together a few weeks later and soon 
after that, they married. “How did that happen? I really don’t know,” 
Pete said. “But what I do know is that she has been the love of my life, 
my greatest inspiration and my best friend.”

/Part two of the O’Neals’ extraordinary story tells of their escape from 
the US and how they ended up in Tanzania./

______________________________________
https://www.newframe.com/long-read-part-two-a-black-panther-love-story/ 
<https://www.newframe.com/long-read-part-two-a-black-panther-love-story/>


  Long Read: Part two | A Black Panther love story

By: Jaclynn Ashly <https://www.newframe.com/writer/jaclynn-ashly/> - 
February 17, 2021
------------------------------------------------------------------------

More than half a century before a police officer would kill George 
Floyd, sparking mass protests, Black Panther Party co-founders Huey 
Newton and Bobby Seale understood that police brutality was the most 
immediate and pertinent concern for the Black community.

Their organisation was envisaged and established in the back room of the 
North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center, where Seale was employed 
in 1966. Charlotte and Pete O’Neal’s relationship was birthed and 
nurtured by the Black Panther’s evolution, from its moments of triumph 
to its downfalls.

“Newton and Seale understood police brutality as an issue of dignity and 
disempowerment experienced by individuals,” writes Robyn Spencer in /The 
Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in 
Oakland/. “For Blacks, hostile and violent interactions with the police 
were part of the fabric of daily life, and negative experiences with the 
police linked people across age, gender, and class.”

Panther members came from the military, gangs or had learned to use 
firearms to hunt, says Spencer. “In many ways, the panthers’ connection 
to armed self-defence was visceral … But if you came because of the 
guns, you also had to learn political education, and if you came for 
political education, you still had to learn how to use a gun.”

Soon after founding the group, Newton and Seale launched patrols to 
monitor police activity in Oakland and Newton learned the intricacies of 
the city’s open-carry gun laws.

The two would observe the police while they made arrests and intervene 
with cameras, tape recorders, legal books and licenced firearms. “The 
sight of two young black men, carrying guns, loudly asserting their 
rights to bear arms and warning the police not to be aggressors 
repeatedly drew crowds,” Spencer says.

“The idea of picking up a gun was very central because in a sense the 
gun was something that can be used for self-defence and it was something 
that had been racialised,” Spencer explains. “They saw the rights of gun 
ownership and the rights of self-defence as things that were 
historically denied to people of African descent. Those laws were made 
for white people and the Panthers took those same laws and repurposed 
them for a revolutionary end.”

Emory Douglas, who acted as the minister of culture for the Black 
Panther Party, often designed caricatures of police officers as pigs in 
his drawings printed in the Black Panther newspaper, once again flipping 
the power dynamic between Black communities and the police.

“The Panthers replaced fear with action,” says Spencer. “The Panthers 
took police officers, which were these all-powerful authority figures, 
and transformed them into an image of a pig. Even in the way they used 
language, like ‘off with the pigs’, and how Emory Douglas and other 
Panther artists drew the police as pigs against a united community 
standing up and conquering the fear and moving into collective action, 
they were telling a story in a way that the people could understand that 
they actually had the power.”

When Californian authorities – in response to the Panthers’ armed 
patrols of police activity – tried to ban them from carrying loaded 
firearms, dozens of mostly armed members barged into the capitol in 
Sacramento in protest. This audacious stunt and the 1968 assassination 
of Martin Luther King Jr caused membership to swell.

Black Panther chapters opened across the US to address the needs of 
communities. The Panthers established education programmes and the 
Breakfast for Children Program, and set up free medical clinics with 
volunteer doctors and nurses. They saw their movement as part of a 
global class struggle and partnered with other organisations, including 
on the white Left.


Undated: From left, Black Panther Party co-founders Bobby Seale and Huey 
Newton at the party’s headquarters in San Francisco, California, in the 
United States. (Photograph by Ted Streshinsky/ Corbis)

One of the first programmes Pete O’Neal implemented in Kansas City gave 
free breakfast to children. At one point, they were feeding 700 children 
a day, says Pete.

The Kansas City chapter set up clothing and food distribution programmes 
and free health clinics with registered nurses. “The news media focused 
on one thing: ‘A Black man has a gun!’ But they didn’t want to talk 
about the beauty of our community [upliftment] programmes,” Pete says. 
“I was very proud of all of this and it was something I had never 
participated in in my life, something as grand and altruistic as this.”


    *‘Down for doubles’ *

The FBI created a counterintelligence programme in 1967 dubbed 
Cointelpro, which targeted Black nationalist organisations. Then 
director J Edgar Hoover said in 1969 that the “Black Panther Party, 
without question, represents the greatest threat to internal security of 
the country”.

The FBI flooded the organisation with informants and forged letters, 
correspondence and even cartoons to create or build on existing tensions 
between Panther members and their allies. Panther leaders, including 
Pete, had their phones and homes wiretapped illegally.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms arrested Pete on 
30 October 1969 for allegedly transporting a gun across state lines. 
About two weeks earlier, Pete and other Panther members had stormed a 
Senate hearing in Washington DC after receiving information about the 
Kansas City police confiscating guns and giving them to right-wing 
organisations such as the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and the 
Minutemen.

While he was already on the Kansas City police’s radar, after his arrest 
Pete began to fear for his life. “When I would go to court, the police 
would laugh while they were searching me. They would tell me, ‘When you 
go to jail, you’ll be on our turf and you’re coming out in a box,’” says 
Pete.

A Black officer warned Pete that the police were planning to kill him. 
“I knew he was telling the truth. I made my mind up in that moment that 
I was getting out and dodging.”


11 April 1969: Black Panther Party members demonstrating outside the New 
York County Criminal Court during the Panther 21 trial of members 
accused of shooting at police stations and a bombing. All were 
acquitted. (Photograph by David Fenton/ Getty Images)

But Pete went to his trial and was sentenced to four years in prison. 
Despite already having a record, which included an escape from prison, 
the judge allowed him to stay out on his current bail agreement during 
the appeal process. “That was unheard of,” Pete says. “I think he knew I 
had a record of escape and thought it would be better if I just got out 
of their hair … I spoke out very strongly and continuously against 
police brutality. They didn’t want to make me, or anyone, a martyr and 
give us more power.”

Hoover had issued a directive under Cointelpro to “prevent the rise of a 
‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist 
movement”.

University of Florida professor and /Black Panther in Exile: The Pete 
O’Neal Story /author Paul Magnarella says there was “no justice” in 
Pete’s 1970 trial. It was riddled with “constitutional defects” that 
ensured the trial was “neither fair nor just”.

Pete knew he had to, but did not want to leave the US. “Charlotte was 
enchanted by the concept. But the idea of leaving the States sounded 
horrible to me,” he says. “But it was the best thing that ever happened 
to me … It’s funny how life works sometimes.”

The Left had what Spencer calls a “modern-day underground railroad”, 
people who could smuggle activists wanted by the authorities out of the US.

The couple began planning their escape to Algeria, where Eldridge 
Cleaver, a prominent leader in the Black Panther Party, had launched the 
international section of the party after being charged with attempted 
murder and fleeing the United States in 1968. At the time, newly 
independent Algeria was a hub for anti-colonial movements around the world.

Charlotte and Pete could not tell their families about their plans. 
Charlotte remembers visiting her father at the station where he worked 
as a firefighter. “I was trying so hard not to cry. But we didn’t think 
we would be gone for long. Maybe two years.”

There was 24-hour police surveillance on their home, according to 
Charlotte, and they had to sneak out the back wearing disguises. 
Charlotte wore a wig, “looking all bourgeois”, she says, and Pete 
straightened his hair. The couple hid in the boot of a car until those 
helping them escape had crossed state lines.

They ended up in Long Island, New York, where “rich white communists” 
set up their documents and a lawyer drove them to the airport. Pete took 
Charlotte aside. “I told her that she didn’t have to go. She had gotten 
a full scholarship to go to medical school in Texas … You don’t have to 
do this,” Pete remembers.

Still a teenager, Charlotte’s response was confident: “No, brother 
chairman. I’m down for doubles. I’m with you all the way.”


January 1969: Pete O’Neal points a finger at Barney Myers, the 
administrative assistant to mayor Ilus Davis, in the anteroom of the 
mayor’s office. (Photograph supplied)


    *A life of exile*

The O’Neals spent several months with activists in Sweden before flying 
to Majorca, Spain, and from there to Algiers in Algeria. “When we got 
off the plane, we stayed in a bug-infested hotel,” Pete says. Not having 
an international contact, he took a leap of faith and asked the hotel 
owner for a number for the Black Panthers.

Pete spoke to Cleaver, but he was “very suspicious of me”. A bitter 
split had formed in the Black Panthers between Newton in Oakland and 
Cleaver in Algiers over the trajectory of the party. Newton said it 
should focus on community programmes, while Cleaver wanted to focus on 
the militant aspects and creating connections with international 
revolutionary movements. Newton eventually expelled Cleaver and the 
entire international section from the party, which led to spats of 
deadly violence between the Panthers and its dissidents.

These tensions were compounded by the FBI, which was wary of Cleaver 
developing international alliances hostile to the US, according to Spencer.

“I was worried about this split,” says Pete/./ “A lot of people died in 
the Black Panther Party because of this split. I gave Charlotte all the 
money that I had and told her, ‘If I don’t come back, get out of here 
and go back to Kansas City.’”


Undated: Charlotte O’Neal on one of the traditional instruments she 
learnt to play in Tanzania. (Photograph supplied by Charlotte O’Neal)

But when Pete arrived at the Black Panther Party’s office, he was 
greeted with open arms. “I felt like I had finally come home.” The 
Algiers office was a place where Panthers could meet and socialise with 
revolutionaries from around the world, from Vietnamese communists to 
Palestinian anti-Zionist fighters.

But relations between the party and the Algerian government began to 
disintegrate, exacerbated by two plane hijackings to provide the 
Panthers with hefty ransoms. The Algerian government intercepted both 
ransom payments and returned the funds to the US.

The Panthers, increasingly low on funds, publicly denounced the Algerian 
government, which cut the Panthers’ lines of communication and placed 
them under house arrest for six days. This, along with Algeria’s 
softening diplomatic stance on the US, was the beginning of the end of 
the international section of the Black Panther Party.


    *‘Pole by pole’*

“When things began to fall apart in Algeria, I wanted to go back to 
Sweden,” Pete says. It was Charlotte who convinced him to consider 
Tanzania. Hundreds of African Americans were living there, including 
former members from the Kansas City chapter. “I took her advice and it’s 
the best advice I’ve ever been given.”

In 1972, the couple went from Algeria to Libya and then Egypt, where 
they were detained for not having a cholera vaccination card. Charlotte 
forged their yellow fever documentation to read cholera and the Egyptian 
authorities released them the next day.

“We had our honeymoon at a really nice hotel next to the Nile River,” 
Pete remembers, until they received their visas. The Tanzanian 
government welcomed them as “freedom fighters and political refugees”, 
says Charlotte.

“That was the last commercial plane I ever got on,” Pete says.

Charlotte was “overjoyed by the beauty” of Tanzania, he says. She “was 
excited and was looking at the colours and cloth. But it took a while 
for me to adjust. I grew up my whole life in the city and coming here, I 
saw the rusting tin roofs and I thought this was going to be hard. But 
slowly I got used to it. Now you couldn’t drag me out of here. I will be 
buried here.”

The couple lived in former capital Dar es Salaam for about a year. But 
the hot and humid coastal environment had adverse effects on Pete’s 
health, so they migrated inland and rented a home in Ngaramtoni village 
in the northern Arusha region.

Charlotte and Pete learned how to farm and became self-sufficient. They 
soon obtained four acres of land in Imbaseni, a quiet village about 25km 
from Arusha, where they live today.

They recycled everything and Pete learned how to build windmills to 
provide electricity to the area. They raised chickens, milked cows, 
hunted and began farming beans and making sausages, which they sold for 
15 years.

The O’Neals built a centre for children and teachers would congregate to 
offer classes. But Charlotte says its popularity soon rendered it too 
small and the daily trips to and from the city became a hassle. Pete and 
Charlotte decided to build a centre at their home.

“The first classroom was to teach computers,” says Charlotte. “We didn’t 
have the internet and it was those big giant computers with tiny little 
screens. And then the elders asked us to teach English and so we built 
another building for that. And it just kept growing after that.”

The couple founded the United African Alliance Community Center (UAACC) 
in 1991. The centre offers free classes in art, sewing, jewellery, yoga, 
ecology, hip-hop, music, photography and video production and editing.

Pete has not been able to return to the US, but Charlotte does speaking 
tours there each year to help raise funds for the centre.


March 2020: Pete O’Neal at his home in Tanzania. (Photograph by Jaclynn 
Ashly)

One donor, former Black Panther Party member Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt, 
gave Pete and Charlotte $10 000 to help access water. He won a 
$4.5 million settlement for a wrongful murder conviction. Often referred 
to as “Papa Rage”, he lived in Tanzania for about 10 years with his wife 
and child before dying there in 2011.

“This drill company came here and … when they struck water, we had this 
big celebration,” Charlotte says. “The first thing we did was install a 
water tap so people wouldn’t have to walk for miles to get water. Later, 
we ended up helping to dig and erect 36 electricity poles. Now everybody 
[in the area] has access to electricity.”

Other former Panther members who have visited and contributed to the 
centre include Douglas, who gave art classes to the students.


    *A homebody and a grandfather*

Pete and Charlotte established the Leaders of Tomorrow Children’s Home 
in 2008, which gives 28 disadvantaged children a home at the couple’s 
house, education and healthcare. These children have become part of 
their family. Malcolm and Ann Wood, the O’Neals’ children, are now in 
their 40s.

“I did not particularly believe in romantic love,” says Pete. “I was 
well travelled and well schooled in the university of life. I brought 
her [Charlotte] on her first plane ride. She was a child compared to me, 
but now it’s almost as if the roles have reversed. I stay home and take 
care of the children.” Charlotte has become the energetic one, making 
videos, movies and music with the youth in the area, while Pete has 
become the homebody. “I never thought I had a grandfather bone in my 
body. Now they hang out with me all day. At night, I have 20 children 
crowded in my bedroom … and I love it. This is what my exile has become.”


Undated: Pete O’Neal with some of the children at the centre he and 
Charlotte set up in Tanzania. (Photograph supplied by Charlotte O’Neal)

But decades later, Pete continues to experience post-traumatic stress 
from the police brutality he faced in the US. “If the police stop me on 
the road, they all know me. They wave and say, ‘Mzee [elder in Swahili], 
how you doing?’ But I still can’t help but feel nervous.”

The Black Panther Party finally crumbled in the 1980s. Relentless 
targeting by local authorities and the FBI led Newton to become 
increasingly paranoid and suspicious. He created an authoritarian 
atmosphere in the party and allegations of corruption and Newton’s drug 
abuse began piling up. In 1989, he was shot and killed on one of the 
same street corners of Oakland he had attempted to revolutionise. But 
Newton remains one of the most brilliant and well-respected minds of the 
black power movement.

Charlotte and Pete say they have continued the legacy of the Black 
Panther Party in Tanzania. “I’m a deeply flawed person,” says Pete. “I 
was then and I remain that way today. But my goal and aspiration is to 
try and be just a little bit better today than I was yesterday.

“I don’t always succeed. I backslide. But I hold on to this thought, 
philosophy and intellectual liberation I discovered back in 1968, and I 
continue to hold on to it dearly. And I think that will be my salvation. 
I’m not a religious person. But if I’m wrong and heaven exists, I’m 
going to get in there.”




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