He was arrested, tied up and gagged on trial only 5 months after this one for protesting the “Democratic” National Convention and the Vietnam War. Speech still sounds about right.
Now, the papers call the organization hoodlums and thugs. I’m going to show you how smart brother Huey is. He says now the paper’s gonna call us thugs and hoodlums. A lot of people ain’t gonna know what’s happening.
He said, but the brothers on the block, who the man been calling thugs and hoodlums for 400 years gonna say “thems some out of sight thugs and hoodlums up there.” The brother on the block is gonna say who is these thugs and hoodlums? In fact, them dudes look just like me. In fact, I know John, I know George Dow. In fact, I know Bobby Hutton. Hey man, I know that dude over there. Hey man, what you cats doing with them rods?
[…] When the man walks up and says that we were anti-white. I scratch my head, I say you hear that dude say we anti-white, what does he mean by that? He says, well I mean you hate white people. I say me, hate a white person? I said wait a minute man, let’s back up a little bit. That your game. That’s the Ku Klux Klans’ game. I say that is the Ku Klux Klan’s game to hate me and murder me because of the color of my skin. I say I wouldn’t murder a person or brutalize them because of the color of their skin. I say yeah, we hate something alright. We hate the oppression that we live in. We hate cops beating Black people over their heads and murdering them. Thats what we hate.
If you got enough energy to sit down and hate a white person just because of the color of their skin, you wasting a lot of energy. You better take that same energy and put it in some motion out there and start dealing with those oppressive conditions, and you gone find just what you hate and what you gone stop.
[…] Now they got a thousand cops patrolling Black people. San Francisco’s doubled its police force, and every area, major metropolis where Black people live all across this country, they’ve doubled, tripled, and quadrupled their police force, equipped them with tanks. Uh-uh, we’ve got to stop it brother, let’s get together and unify.
Full transcript. Be aware that the transcription software struggles with southern accents.