and Huey Newton, party defense minister.
By 1966, the Civil Rights Movement, defined by peaceful protests such as the 1960 Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, the 1961 Freedom Rides, and the 1965 marches led by Martin Luther King, Jr. from Selma to Montgomery to register voters, was in decline.
The Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had been formed in 1960 as a college-student auxiliary to Dr. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition, made a sharp pivot away from non-violence in 1966, when its new leader, Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), said in a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi:
Carmichael’s speech birthed a popular chant at “Movement” demonstrations: “Ungawa! Ungawa! Black Power! Black Power!”
(Some interesting insights into the origin of the term “ungawa,” including the ways it appeared in children’s games and rhymes):
http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-real-origins-of-word-ungawa-various.html
The night after Carmichael’s speech, however, King repudiated the term:
Some people are telling us to be like our oppressor . . . telling me to stoop down to that level. I’m sick and tired of violence.
And Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, called the idea of Black Power “the father of hatred and the mother of violence.”
But by 1966, young blacks were beginning to drift away from from what they saw as the incrementalism of the Civil Rights movement, and starting to embrace the more radical vision of Carmichael and Malcolm X. The next head of SNCC, H. Rap Brown (currently serving a life sentence for the murder of a sheriff’s deputy in Georgia), famously said, “Don’t love [the white man] to death! Shoot him to death!”
Watch Brown and Carmichael address a gathering in honor of Huey Newton’s birthday in Oakland in 1968 (Newton was in prison for the shooting death of an Oakland police officer). Brown begins and Carmichael comes in at 2:32.
Later that year, two college students in Oakland, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founded the Black Panther Party (both men were born in the South and moved with their families to California with the second wave of the Great Migration). The BPP was founded on what Newton and Seale called the “Ten-Point Program”:
- We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine
The Destiny Of Our Black Community.We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny. - We Want Full Employment For Our People.We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
- We Want An End To The Robbery
By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community. We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make. - We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings.We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
- We Want Education For Our People That Exposes
The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society.
We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History
And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else. - We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service.We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
- We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People.We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self- defense.
- We Want Freedom For All Black Men Held In Federal, State, County And City Prisons And Jails.We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
- We Want All Black People When Brought To Trial To Be Tried In
Court By A Jury Of Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black
Communities, As Defined By The Constitution Of The United States.We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being, tried by all-White juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community. - We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect of the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
Compare the Panthers’ Ten-Point Program with Tupac Shakur’s Code of Thug Life, which he wrote with his stepfather, Mutulu (see below). The Code provides a series of directives for what might oxymoronically be called the ethical selling of crack.
Code OF THUG LIFE:
1. All new Jacks to the game must know: a) He’s going to get rich. b) He’s going to jail. c) He’s going to die.
2. Crew Leaders: You are responsible for legal/financial payment commitments to crew members; your word must be your bond.
3. One crew’s rat is every crew’s rat. Rats are now like a disease; sooner or later we all get it; and they should too.
4. Crew leader and posse should select a diplomat, and should work ways to settle disputes. In unity, there is strength!
5. Car jacking in our Hood is against the Code.
6. Slinging to children is against the Code.
7. Having children slinging is against the Code.
8. No slinging in schools.
9. Since the rat Nicky Barnes opened his mouth; ratting has become accepted by some. We’re not having it.
10. Snitches is outta here.
11. The Boys in Blue don’t run nothing; we do. Control the Hood, and make it safe for squares.
12. No slinging to pregnant Sisters. That’s baby killing; that’s genocide!
13. Know your target, who’s the real enemy.
14. Civilians are not a target and should be spared.
15. Harm to children will not be forgiven.
16. Attacking someone’s home where their family is known to reside, must be altered or checked.
17. Senseless brutality and rape must stop.
18. Our old folks must not be abused.
19. Respect our Sisters. Respect our Brothers.
20. Sisters in the Life must be respected if they respect themselves.
21. Military disputes concerning business areas within the community must be handled professionally and not on the block.
22. No shooting at parties.
23. Concerts and parties are neutral territories; no shooting!
24. Know the Code; it’s for everyone.
25. Be a real ruff neck. Be down with the code of the Thug Life.
26. Protect yourself at all times.
Biggie Smalls paraphrased and expanded on these principles in his 1997 “Ten Crack Commandments,” a song focused on the behavior of the individual crack dealer rather than on his obligations to the community:
Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur (above, with baby Tupac) was a prominent member of the New York City chapter of the Black Panther Party. In 1971, she and 20 other New York City Panthers, who were known as the Panther 21, went to trial for a conspiracy to bomb various locations in New York City. Just one month after being acquitted, Afeni gave birth to her son.
Tupac memorialized her in the 1995 song “Dear Mama”:
Tupac’s stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, is currently serving a 60-year sentence for his part in the 1981 robbery of an armored car in Nanuet, New York, which left one Brink’s guard and two police officers dead (also convicted were the parents of current San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. Chesa was a baby at the time).
In the years following his untimely death in 1996, Tupac’s own politics, as well as his music, has been studied and analyzed by scholars of popular music, Black studies, and American history alike. Some commentators see him as the legitimate heir of the traditions of black nationalism, a “Homegrown Revolutionary.” Others view Tupac’s prioritizing of money, his calls for Black-on-Black violence, and his misuse of women (he did a prison sentence for rape in 1995 and was killed in a drive-by just a month after his release) as a squandering of the legacy of his mother’s generation.
What do you think? Did Tupac move from conscious rapper to gangsta? Or were these two strains always present in his music and his life?
Tupac’s godmother was Assata Shakur (above), born Joanne Chesimard (Chesa Boudin was named for her). Assata, a leading member of the New York Black Panthers, escaped from prison in 1979, where she was serving a life sentence for participating in the murder of a New Jersey state trooper. She was smuggled to Cuba, where she still lives, and she remains on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list. Tupac dedicated the song “Words of Wisdom,” off his 1991 album 2Pacalypse Now, to her.
Common released a song in 2000 called “A Song for Assata”:
Underground Chicago rapper and lawyer Capital D refers to her in his song “Start the Revolution” (2004), along with other Black revolutionaries Fred Hampton, Geronimo Pratt, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Jamil Al-Amin (a.k.a. H. Rap Brown):
They ain’t fighting poverty, they fighting the poor/And every couple of years they just declare a
new war/Cold war, drugs, gangs, terrorism, et cetera/Man I been seen it coming got my vision
ahead of ya/They be BSing me because I didn’t enlist/That be their hatred boy that I refuse to
resist/That be they hate a brother because of this black fist/But nah, they probably just chasing
young Muslims for kicks/Ya know same story brothers face and constantly chanting/Meanwhile
in my brain I’m thinking about Fred Hampton/Geronimo, Mumia, and Assata Shakur/Imam Al–
Amin plus a whole lotta more/But waiting for the opportunity to settle the score….
Another song off 2Pacalypse Now, “Trapped,” appears to rationalize violence as an appropriate response to systematic oppression, and even suggests that black-on-black violence has the transformative ability to earn respect for those who engage in it.
Tupac is, in a sense, a pivotal figure between the Black Power generation and the hip hop generation.
And what about the aesthetics of black revolution? Take a look at the image above of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in their black leather jackets and berets, outfitted with guns and bandoliers. As Angela Davis recalled about seeing an image of the Black Panthers in a German newspaper while a graduate student in Frankfurt:
In her halftime show in the 2016 Super Bowl, Beyoncé ignited a minor media firestorm for her use of Black Panther aesthetics: the leather jackets, black berets, bandoliers and afros.
From Spirituals to Hip Hop MUS 113 SUNY Broome 
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