Not a competition Bobert--erased. I don't like seeing the truth of history erased, and that is definitely what the MLK Day has become all about. Shit, look at the horse race! This year, mainstream media made MLK Day all about another chance to play their race card games.

Also, there was a definite gangster element with some of the Panthers, mostly the Oakland wing of the movement, as everyone knows. But all that gun shit was, for the most part, blustering that the mainstream media distorted and glorified. Things did get really strange around that time with all the movements. Same thing was happening in terms of the Weathermen. The mainstream media absolutely sucks at showing us the nuanced, developmental changes in people and the power structures, and at times like the 60s, that results in tremendous distortions of reality being beamed at us. How many Americans ever had one single personal encounter with an armed member of the Black Panther Party? I never did, despite them being active and around where I was in those days. But I was an anti-war activist and on the periphery of the civil rights movement in Chicago--at the intersection of the two groups. I kept my distance from most of them, but not all of them because some of them were really right on. Just like the SDS kids were. Kept my distance from the majority for sure (especially the Chicago headquarters of the SDS), but I used to hang and organize outside the city, so I never had much contact with all the "national organizers" who took over for awhile around the time of the '68 convention.

Stokely, in my opinion, eventually dissembled and went off his rocker with the whole moving to Africa, Marxist pan African thing, though he was always right on, straight on down the line, about the black middle class in the US. But then, he had some cultural distance, because certain groups in the black communities made sure he knew he would never be "one of them" because he was from Trinidad. I'm totally shooting from the hip here, but I think that ostracization may be what drove him out of the US.

That us vs you dynamic still plays itself out today. In front of me, it played out last year with Black History Month politics in my school, when an African American teacher from NYC told me our Afro-Caribbean principal wasn't "one of us". Bullshit, all of it, no matter what color, what ethnicity, what gender, what nationality, what EVER!

Peace out y'all--I GOTTA get back to work here!