Biographical Issues of Flores A. Forbes - Essay Example

RESEARCH PAPER Based on Flores A. Forbes memoir “Will You Die With Me? My Life and the Black Panther Party” Flores A. Forbes, former Black Panther, discusses his memoir and experiences as a Black Panther member. He was recently profiled in Crains New York Business, as the Chief Strategic Officer, for the Abyssinian Development Corporation in New York City. He was the youngest member ever of the Black Panther central committee. Introduction Man tends to think of the future as if it were a distant country, across an ocean of time. From the viewpoint of the historian, each decade has a character and often even a language all its own, and the passage from one period into another is a real, if invisible border crossing in human lives. Trying to determine that language and that character ahead of time is a hazardous venture. No one in 1959 foresaw the turmoil of the 60s, especially the rebellion of the young. Assassinations can rob a nation of its leaders, unexpected wars can desiccate the vitality of a race, and the unaccountable gift of leadership can create hope where despair existed. Many of the major trends, visible and subterranean, that will shape mans life in the future are present today. "Ask not what your country can do for you," said John F. Kennedy in his inaugural speech as President. "Ask what you can do for your country." The words uttered for the century. The classically balanced cadences, the summons to duty and patriotism sound incredibly nostalgic to ears grown used to a decade of shouts of raw passion, cacophonous protest and violence. The bright promise that began the 60s turned to confusion and near despair as the decade ended. President Kennedys version of U.S. manifest destiny seemed to be followed by what Psychiatrist Frederick Hacker calls "a rendezvous with manifest absurdity." The absurdity was evident in the contrasting trends of the decade. It was an era of phenomenal prosperity, and of the discovery of poverty, hunger and social injustice at home. Rebelling against the liberal timetable, the angry black and the harassed white, the G.I. in Viet Nam and the protester at home would scarcely recognize the decade as romantic. Knowingly, or unknowingly, the period has become overregulated, over systematized, over industrialized, spontaneity was lost; instead, there was uninhibited release of emotions. Summary of the memoir To a large extent, the essence of Forbes’ memoir can be summarized through a beautiful sonnet written by Claude McKay during the early period of the 20th century; well before the eventualities; detailed in the book, have occurred. If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, let it not be like hogs So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us, though dead! Oh, kinsman! We must meet the common foe; Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men well face the murderous, cowardly pack Pressed to the wall, dying, but--fighting back! • (Ref. www.gutenberg.net) Synopsis The memoir, on a serious note is a look back at the turmoil of the 60s and 70s, which also highlights and scrutinizes the Iraqi Prime Ministers address to Congress and more from the Spitzer/Suozzi debate. It begins with his experience, as a 12-year-old in 1960s Southern California. He got his first taste of police brutality and racial profiling, and before he was of legal voting age, became a full-fledged member of the Black Panther Party. Forbes loyalty to the party enabled him to swiftly climb the ranks, and of all the figureheads talked about in this book -- Elaine Brown, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver, to name a few -- its Huey P. Newton who had the biggest impact. Newton was like The Godfathers Don Corleone, personally initiating the 20-year-old Forbes to the BPPs inner circle and elevating him to assistant chief of staff, which put him in charge of the armed military force of the organization. Forbes took his duties very seriously, to the point of taking a bullet and watching one of his comrades die while attempting to eliminate a witness that could put Newton in prison. Forbes then went underground for three years -- including a stint in Chicago -- before rethinking his life and turning himself in. The memoir can be considered as an effort to give fresh treatment to the history of the black people in the United States, and to present this from a distinct point of view, the social. No one can write about the subject so comprehensively, since Forbes was in the forefront of the activities, during the period. It is worthy to note that more outstanding political phases of the subject have been frequently considered; an account of the people involved; and a clear study of the actual life of the people, in connection with the eventualities. It thus becomes not only a memoir of an individual but social history of a race, which is the first formal effort by a personally effected individual. It is obvious that Forbes, in view of the enormous amount of events woven around his personal life, had confined himself within very definite limits. He was fully aware that a thorough study of all the issues relating to the political and social eventualities would fill volumes, which would indeed touch upon all the great problems of American life. No attempt is made to perform such a task; rather is it intended to fix attention upon some touchy events itself as definitely as possible. Such are many of the questions revolving around the turmoil of the period, vital as that is, as to record the effect of these events on the life of the great body of people. In view of what has been said, it is natural that the method of treatment varies from phase to phase of the book. Sometimes it is general, as when we touch upon the social life, and sometimes it is intensive, as in the consideration of the political events. However it is beyond doubt, that the memoir is an attempt to unleash details for the consideration of all who are interested in the nations problems, and to try and keep in mind the highest welfare of the country itself. In this fascinating and moderately well-written biography, Flores Forbes reports on his decade of membership in the BPP. The story reveals the BPP as an idealistic cult centered on Newton but able to rationalize any crime for any reason. As the group stumbled from one humiliation to another, Forbes paints their actions in the best light possible. He uses terms like "Military Operation" and "Technical Equipment" to describe robbery, murder, and shakedowns of the drug operations in Oakland, California. He portrays many of the Black Panther Party as barely literate street thugs, with the women-attracting magnetism of the beret and jacket as no small inducement to join. Forbes joined the Black Panthers at the end of the 1960s and worked his way up until he functioned as a bodyguard, an enforcer and a gunman in the inner circle of the party. As the onetime head of the Panthers "military arm," he has eyewitness things to tell us that have never been made so clear before. In a very low-key, matter-of-fact style that takes attempted murder, gunplay, beatings, extortion and arrests as normal occurrences, Forbes pulls the covers off Newton with so much authority that the case his book makes against the Black Panther legend will be hard to dismiss. In unparalleled detail , we are given the inside story of a left-wing group of "revolutionaries" whose organization evolved into a lucrative criminal enterprise — the first step of a grand design in which the political structure of Oakland would be taken over. The Chicago of Al Capone may have been a model. The books descriptions of gatherings at Newtons apartment give us insight into the power he had over his followers: "The menu at these sessions was a steady diet of cocaine, Cognac and cigarettes. Huey didnt smoke weed, like most of us, because he said it made him paranoid. Anyway, most of the time he talked about the plan to take over the city of Oakland and other territories nearby, like the speakeasies and drug dens in South Berkeley. We would sit around while Huey roamed the house telling long, intricate stories that always led to a fascinating climax." The story is fascinating, even if the full drama available never leaps from the page. We spend quite a bit of time "getting down" with the brothers, smoking dope, and talking big. Occasionally, some kids were fed or educated, but mostly we see half-baked plots, fatuous pronouncements, and misogyny as bad as any stereotype available. The irony is that most of the Panthers spent years in prison, where gang connections served them well. Forbes book is a peek into a time and thought process now obsolete. Were mayhem and murder the liberation of Black America? It sure looks like all these guys did was push the ghetto into anarchy as whites fled to the burbs and invented Wal-Mart. At least Forbes made something of him and tells the tale well enough to fill in the dark corners of this dim period of American history. By the time Flores Forbes was twenty-five years old, he had just a GED and sixty college credits to his name. But he had gone far in his chosen profession as a revolutionary. In 1977, Forbes had been in the Black Panther Party for almost a decade and had become the youngest member of the organizations central committee. In this remarkable memoir, Forbes vividly describes his transformation from an angry youth into a powerful partisan in the ranks of the black liberation movement. Disillusioned in high school by the racism in his native San Diego, he began reading Black Panther literature. Drawn to the Panthers mission of organizing resistance to police brutality, he eagerly joined and soon found himself immersed in a culture of Mao-inspired rigor. His dedication ultimately earned him a place in the Partys elite inner circle as assistant chief of staff, charged with heading up the "fold" — the heavily armed military branch dubbed by Huey P. Newton the "Buddha Samurai." "My job was one of the most secretive in the party," writes Forbes, "and to this day most of the people who were in the Party over the years had not a clue as to what I really did..." With intimate portraits of such BPP leaders as Elaine Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey P. Newton, "Will You Die with Me?" is a riveting firsthand look at some of the most dramatic events of the last century and a brutally honest tale of one mans journey from rage to redemption. The murder of Betty Van Patter, the white bookkeeper for the Panthers who disappeared after she threatened to go public with illegalities she had uncovered in doing the books for the Panther bar, the Lamp Post, does not appear anywhere in Forbes’s book. At the time Elaine Brown was running for an Oakland City Council seat, and Van Patter’s going public could have sunk her campaign. Van Patter was last seen alive at the Lamp Post, where she’d been summoned. Her body was found 35 days later in the San Francisco Bay. Whatever Forbes may know about this and other murders, he has not chosen to share it with readers. Furthermore, it is with great skepticism that I regard Forbes’s assertion that the idea for the (botched) assassination attempt on the witness in Newton’s murder trial was Forbes’s own idea. Throughout the book he details his absolute loyalty in a rigid top-down organization. He was the youngest of the squad of enforcers and the most disciplined. He is covering up in my opinion, and quite possibly it is to protect those who orchestrated it and are still very much alive. We can learn a few new things from Forbes’s book: Mayor Lionel Wilson spared Forbes — when Wilson was a judge — on an early charge after Elaine Brown promised him full Panther support for his first mayoral run and, far more surprising, Forbes writes that he considered the Oakland “pigs” (cops) to be downright decent compared to the police in Los Angeles. Who knew! Forbes wasnt the first 16-year-old boy to be smitten by the romance of revolution, but he is among the handful in recent American history who became top-ranking members of the Black Panther Party. His autobiography reads like a modern-day Crime and Punishment, tracking Forbess evolution from a comrade who thought he could "do almost anything" to achieve a revolutionary objective to a prisoner in existential crisis. Unlike Dostoyevsky’s protagonist, Forbes does not generally regret his past, but reproaches himself for his vulnerability to "years of ideological and philosophical conditioning," despite the worthiness of the Panther cause. A survivor above all, Forbes straddles passion and cynicism with equanimity, and is as willing to demythologize major figures as he is to canonize them. He treats Huey P. Newton with particular subtlety, alternately revering the Black Panther founder and cult hero as a genius of real politic and criticizing him as a cocaine-snorting, iron-fisted gangster. When Newton is accused of murdering a 17-year-old prostitute and Forbes risks assassinating the star witness to save him, one realizes that Forbess story is really a case study of powers allure and attendant moral compromise, no matter how righteous its origin. "Of all the books on the black panther party, few are as honest, self-critical, and chock-full of gripping detail as Flores A. Forbess Will You Die with me? It is at once a cautionary tale and a compelling story of a survivor." The story is the essence of what it means to pay personally for ones beliefs. He removes the romanticism from the legendary panthers and replaces it with a young mans journey through a world filled with violence, racism, and lies. There are not many who can recount this saga. In many ways, it is the American story and one well worth the wait." When the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, one of its central aims was to stop the incidents of police brutality occurring in black neighborhoods. Drawn to the party’s mission of aiding African American victims of abuse and racial prejudice, Flores A. Forbes began reading Black Panther literature and soon embraced its doctrines, which were inspired by Mao Tse-Tung’s The Little Red Book. Disillusioned by school and a victim of police brutality himself, Forbes joined the organization and became one of the youngest members of the BPP’s Central Committee. As Assistant Chief of Staff, Forbes was in charge of the “Buddha Samurai,” the heavily armed military branch of the party, which he notes was one of the most secretive positions in the organization. “I never wrote anything down, or least that’s what I told people, Forbes says. “But in fact, behind a picture on a wall in my apartment, was the Black Panther Party’s complete armory inventory list. It included the type of technical equipment: guns, ammo, and accessories; and a code to indicate the various locations throughout the San Francisco-Oakland Bay area where we stored the TE. To this day, most of the people that were in the Party over the years had not a clue as to what I really did on a day-to-day basis.” In his provocative memoir Forbes chronicles his childhood in San Diego, his rise to the inner circle of the Black Panther Party and finally, his prison sentence and release. Forbes describes in honest detail the feelings of powerlessness and fear he felt as a black teenager growing up in southern California and after an altercation with the local police, he experienced a political awakening. Forbes then turned to the Black Panther Party and identified with its struggle and goals. In the midst of an organization that became obsessed with armed revolution, Forbes worked twelve- to twenty-four hour days and was expected to quickly respond to situations that were urgent and deadly. “My mission was clear: I was willing and able to do anything that would further the cause of my people and the BPP,” Forbes notes. “I was not bothered by negative criticism or the fact I could lose my life. Foremost on my agenda was securing the safety of my prince: Huey P. Newton, the leader and founder of the Black Panther Party.” In addition to a candid portrait of Huey Newton, Forbes also provides details about other BPP leaders such as Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, and Eldridge Cleaver. With unflinching objectivity, Forbes offers an insider’s perspective of a group who brilliantly galvanized African Americans but also succumbed to in-fighting, rivalries, and power struggles. Tracing the growth and emerging philosophies of the BPP as well as Forbes’s own personal evolution, WILL YOU DIE WITH ME? is an insightful and page-turning examination of the struggle against oppression and opposition. Much more than a journey through a turbulent time in American history, it is, more importantly, the story of one man’s odyssey to define him. The book accounts for many facets of personal life – which includes family life, activism and resistance, gender issues, economic and social conditions, and obviously racism that market the beginning of the turmoil of the period. The book is an insight to a deeper understanding of these social problems, which is indeed important, the narrow focus on problems obscures the complex ways in which youth responds, challenge and sometimes transform the conditions in their communities. As a result of this narrow focus, we are left with an understanding of African American youth that centers primarily on understanding problems, prevention and pathology and does not sufficiently explain how they engage in civic and political behavior. The need to maintain family life shaped the work habits and choices of blacks in general and black women in particular during the period. Like a silent, underground river, family priorities run through the work choices blacks made after and during the period. It was strange to notice that agents of the law, the economy, the academy and the Government began to view the black family as problematic in every way. The education of black children, the employment of black adults, housing, medical care, food - whites suddenly began to regard these normal needs as insupportable burdens, and supposed solutions to the problem of the black family destroyed some families and disfigured others. Attempts to annihilate black families were so spirited that every effort to protect those families was seen as nothing less than sabotage. Parents, whether they are the birth parents or other members of the family or other people, parents are essential to the growth of good and healthy people. The black people believed that nothing in this world happened before they were born, and that their achievements have everything to do with themselves, and nothing to do with the struggles that went behind them. The loss of jobs to mechanization and low-wage overseas factories affected all industrial workers, black and white, but the persistence of overt and covert discriminatory employment practices rooted in white kin and friendship networks made black workers and their communities especially vulnerable to economic down swings. Of the women at work, many were engaged as farm laborers or farmers, cooks or washerwomen. In other words, maximum were engaged in some of the hardest and at the same time some of the most vital labor in our home and industrial life. It was strange to notice that African-American unemployment rates persisted at well over the white rate, especially among young black males. At the same time, the beneficiaries of existing affirmative-action programs--the middle class and better-educated members of the black working class--experienced a degree of upward mobility and moved into outlying urban and suburban neighborhoods. They left working-class and poor blacks, disproportionately single women with children, concentrated in the central cities, where violence, drug addiction, and class-stratified social spaces intensified, and causing acute tensions in day-to-day interracial as well as interracial relations. Activism and Resistance: HEROES are made by luck, will, circumstance and the kind of exaggerations that always follow exceptional actions of some sort. Huey P. Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense with Bobby Seale in 1966, the year that black power darkened the skies of the civil rights movement. In beret and black leather jacket, Newton presented himself as a man who had no patience for nonviolence and would no longer accept violent action against black people without retaliating. According to Forbes in an interview : “So I think that is something that I believed then. You know, today obviously I believe that we have to do in terms of seeking self-determination, you have to use other means. I think many former panthers are actually doing that”. This sums up his attitude to the entire episode of the political issue. We can point to at least two factors that lead to political activism among the black people. First is the consistent attack on them and their families through hostile public policy. For example, zero tolerance policies in many urban schools highlights how negative perceptions of African American youth held by policy makers shape hostile policy. The longstanding belief that young people need support from institutions such as schools have been replaced by the idea that youth are becoming more violent and therefore need more discipline and tougher punishment. Rather, many find remarkable ways to struggle collectively to improve the quality of their lives. It was evident that the blacks were socially isolated and institutionally disabled by joblessness and by the exodus of the middle classes, has . . . obscured the struggles that black urbanites have continued to wage against racial injustices” However, our understanding of these forms of resistance is thin. Black youth in urban communities struggle to “not get caught up” in complex systems of control and containment, and their identities are often constructed in resistance to racist stereotypes and unjust public policies. Their struggle for identity is played out through the expression of new and/or revived cultural forms such as hip-hop culture, rap music and/or various forms of political or religious nationalism which redefine, reassert and constantly reestablish what it means to be urban and black. On the one hand, unsatisfied minorities might raise their protests to ever higher levels of violence. On the other hand, the majority might feel increasingly justified in hitting back, through the police or through personal action. While there is a good chance that the black revolt will turn to peaceful outlets—so long as white society responds to its legitimate demands—it is certainly possible that militant blacks will turn to small-scale terrorism and urban warfare. Much of the 60s and 70s civil rights rhetoric was that black political power was necessary for economic power. In 1967, Clevelanders heeded Malcolm Xs infamous "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech with the election of Carl B. Stokes, who became the nations first black big city mayor. Those were the early years of resistance for me. In the middle 70s along came the anti-nuke movement and the threat of the Diablo Canyon nuke to my old home town. I was living in Sonoma County by then and I joined with others to form SONOMoreAtomics and the Abalone Alliance. Economic conditions /Social class: The more important point we must consider is to what extent we can reasonably expect to affect the future living conditions of blacks and what role equality will play in realizing that change. For the ordinary person, whats more important: economic power or political power? I think it nearly goes without saying that economic power empowers the individual; it gives him the power of self-determination. Political power empowers, and even enriches, the political elite; for them, getting out their constituent vote is the be all and end all. This observation has nothing to do with race. Economic power empowers people of any race, and political power empowers the political elite of any race. While black politicians have preached that political power is a means to gain economic power, whether it has done so is a testable proposition. We only have to examine the socioeconomic status of black Americans in cities where blacks hold considerable political power, cities such as Washington, Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis and others. What well find in those cities are grossly inferior education, welfare dependency for much of the population, unsafe neighborhoods and citizens, both black and white, who cant wait for the first opportunity to get out. The blacks were not allowed to move on up and out. They were forced to stay overwhelmingly in these areas. They were contained in these areas, and so the population density went up tremendously. And the same thing happened in Chicago. Families moved to Chicago and then they tried to move to some of these places like Berwyn and Cicero, which are sort of reactionary white enclaves around Chicago, and they were literally attacked by mobs in which the police (on and off duty) often played a major role. Here again, Black people were forced out of these areas. When they bought houses in these areas, their houses were burned, and so on. They were maneuvered and they were terrorized out of moving into those areas then, because the system could not allow this without throwing the whole structure of society, the base and the superstructure, into the air, and basically ripping apart the very fabric of the whole society. Racial subordination and racial hostility pervaded American society. Indeed one scholar, whom I greatly respect, has not only stated that racism is a permanent fixture on the American landscape, but that equality itself does not produce real change, and instead causes despair. While these sentiments are understandable, especially given the declining living conditions of African Americans, they are wrong and dangerous. Institutional racism was also deeply rooted in the economy, because of the legacy of individual and institutional racism in business and education, and modern procedures operating in credit markets. The legacy of individual and institutional racism is partly, though not entirely, responsible for low levels of wealth accumulation among minorities, especially African Americans. A final word Forbes does with marvelous ease is present a harrowing self-portrait of a man who willingly chilled his own heart, brutalized a number of others and nearly paid the ultimate price in the process. Amid the social turmoil of the 1960s and,70s, the young man found his purpose in the rise of the Black Panther Party, made a deadly mistake that cost him his freedom, and ultimately got his life back, having learned the true lessons of the Buddha Samurai. It’s encouraging and worthy record of history to read of Forbes’s escape from his former life and his obvious rehabilitation. Ideally the review can be summarized with the touching words of the Iraqi Prime Minister to the Congress, which spelt the uneasiness and chaos prevailing in that country: “The coming few days are difficult and the challenges are considerable. Iraq and America both need each other to defeat the terror engulfing the free world. In partnership, we will be triumphant because we will never be slaves to terror, for God has made us free. Trust that Iraq will be a grave for terrorism and terrorists.” Bibliography : 1) Journal of Negro History (after 2000) 2) Journal of Southern History 3) American Historical Review 4) Journal of African History 5) Chicken Bones : A Journal Ref Links : http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/schrag/wiki/index.php?title=The_struggle_for_black_equality%2C_1954-1992 http://www.sonomacountyfreepress.com/nudge/gn-0992.html http://hnn.us/roundup/archives/11/2006/11/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/26/AR2006072600872.html Read More