tatmovementmoderator:

“My Mother never let me forget my history
Hoping I was set free chains never put on me
Wanted to be more than just free
Had to know the true facts about my history” - Panther Power

“And then having said that, let me say that I was a member of the Black Panther Party. I joined in 1968. When I joined, I wasn’t a student. I did not come off the college campuses like a lot of known Panthers did. I came from the streets of the South Bronx. I had been a member of the Disciples Deads, which would have been the women Disciples in the Bronx.. What the Panther Party did for me, I used to always say it gave me home training. The Party taught me things that were principles to living, and those principles are the principles I think most Panthers have tried to pass on to their children and to anybody else that would listen to them. You know that one of those principles was like don’t steal a penny, needle or a simple piece of thread from the people. It’s just general basic things about how we as individuals treat a race of people, and how we treat each other as a people! And those are the things I think the people recognize in Tupac….

We discovered, that within the BBP, that is you try and live by these principles and you have attached to those principles a willingness and a desire to protect and defend your family and your people.. also if you have a large mouth and your willing to speak openly about those things, that you are going to be the victim of all kinds of attacks. That’s basically what has happened to all of us. Tupac was and remains in my mind a child of the BBP. I think that I always felt that even through this society that they had destroyed the work of the BBP. I always felt that Tupac was living witness to who we are and who we were. I think that his life spoke to every part of our development and the development of the Party, and the development in this country that I don’t think will die.”