And lets not forget the Greensboro Massacure either, GUEST,GUEST or that the last known lynching of a black man also occured in the 60's... Yeah, it was a very violent decade be it here or in Southeast Asia... And then the '68 Democratic Convention really showed the ugly side...

And, yeah, when it came to big demostrations aginst racism or the Vietnam war, the divisions (which they weren't) between SNNC, SCLC, SOC and various independent radical groups (like Richmond's Radical Student Union) were non-existent... We all got it... Stokley got it... Julian Bond got it... Dr. King got it... Ben Spock got it... GUEST, GUEST got it... I sho nuff got it... That's the most important thing about the 60's... By 1969 almost everyone that was gonna get, got it...

It's kinds silly now, though, to rehash what went on as some kinda of competetition... I had tons of respect for Stokley... For Julian Bond... For Malcolm X...

I guess the only reason that I felt so close to SCLC is because my mother was involved with SCLC and I at least had contacts thru her as to what was happening... We didn't have SNNC or SCLC in Richmond... We did have SOC but the folks who staffed it weren't all that interested to doing much... I mean, a lot of it was regional and not ideaological... You organized what you could where you were and with the materials that were most readilly available...

Then there were the biggies... For us Richmonders that generally meant Washington, D.C. where the rallies would draw folks from all kinds of communities that had been organized under under different, but complimentary, organizations...

So, I'd just rather leave my thouhgts about competing interests as mythology rather than reality...

But, inspite of my dealings with the Panthers- which BTW had nothing to do with my anti-war organizing but anti-poverty organizing- yes, I was turned off by the images they crafted for themselves... They did too much good for all that be trumped by an image problem... Same with the White Panthers... These guys weren't at all peacefull... They wore violence on their sleeves.... I mean, it ain't like I was afraid to be with them but, maybe it was my new found peace of learning how Ghandi and King could change so much without violence, I was not comfortable around many of these folks... Not all, minnd you, but many... I must also confess that maybe the years have dampened my images of the WPP becuase I attended what was supposed to be a 3 or 4 day event in Ann Arbor, drove all night to get there, went to a concert the next night and got busted for no reason other than I was driving in the black neighborhood in a VW bug with a big peace sign painted on the back and spent two days and nights in a Detroit jail??? I donno???

(BTW, John Sinclair, as in "Free John Sinclair", is alive an well and has a radio show in Louisiana and has become quite the blues historian...)

Well, I am ***stuck*** in the library waitin' on my wife so no Dr. King quotes now but I'll fire up a couple tonight...

BTW, GUEST,GUEST... How 'bout firing up a few Stokey C's quotes... I just don't have much stuff on ol' Stokley...

B~