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CHAIRMAN BOBBY SEALE FOR MAYOR!

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ANGELA INTRODUCES ERICKA'S NEW BOOK!

Finally, the struggle of oppressed women, Black women particularly, has been captured in writing, an expression in words of the concrete horrors.

All that has been theorized about women's struggles cannot reveal what the up-coming book of poems by Comrade Ericka Huggins, of the Black Panther Party, does. There is no theory imagined which can tell what a Black, or other oppressed woman has experienced, except the living of the experience itself.

The struggle of Black women has been captured and set down so well by Comrade Ericka and can be so well understood because that struggle is part of our whole people, it is the struggle of all our people. Ericka is, of course, a beautiful Black woman, but more importantly, she is part of a community of beautiful people, who have heroically survived instituted racism, barbarism. That is what is so beautifully told in Ericka's poems, with and from the perspective of a Black woman.

The book will be published this year. As an introduction to the book, Sister Angela Davis has written a statement about the poems, which are about Ericka, which reflect the beauty and strength of our Black and oppressed communities. We would like to share Angela's statement, here, as a prelude of what is to come:

There is a much publicized photograph of Ericka Huggins: her fist is raised high and animating her features is the firm beauty of struggle. In another well-known picture, her arms are gently encircling her then infant daughter; her face is the tender beauty of an intense personal love. Contemplating the two photographs, they are, in the beginning, still separate, although they clearly complement one another. But coming alive, they merge towards unity; the two postures become gradually indistinguishable.

Ericka is a revolutionary. For many

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who must rely on the abstract, third hand and mismolded information of the media, a revolutionary is a passionately dispassionate human being who cares little about humanity and is striving to implement aims of little-known alien powers. Her/his life would be thoroughly incompatible with a multi-dimensional human love and compassion; thus love has come to be seen as sealed off in the unreal worlds of the romantic pacifist, utopian dreamer or woman/man in love.

The sheer beauty and humanity of Ericka's poetry makes the publication of this volume a crucial event. Her poetry elevates life, love, revolution to the domain of art without ever encasing them in an impenetrable aesthetic realm. As art, it can have a powerful impact on the real world of poverty, racism, alienation which has already been poetically transformed. The publication of these poems is singularly important, not only because they convey something of the totality of a unique and remarkable Black woman, but also because the stereotyped image of the revolutionary is dealt a significant blow in these pages.

Some four years have passed since I first met Ericka, during a period of peak activity in the Black Liberation Movement. Later, I worked on a day-to-day basis with the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party. There her leadership was critical; it assisted the impetus of a steadily mounting freedom-seeking collective. I can see her now, her body growing with her unborn child, the central office pulsating with her presence. (The L.A. office was later demolished during a fascist-like police raid.) Ericka always greeted new sisters and brothers who desired to join the thrust towards liberation, love and solidarity enlivening her words and gestures. One would think that people having grown to maturity during sterile, oppressive American influences would have long since become incapable of expressing such feelings toward those who are supposed to be strangers.

Ericka had a way of relating to other people, and especially the not yet initiated, that could almost bring tears to your eyes: tears at once happy and painful -- happy because of the strong collective links she was forging; painful because as love, as solidarity, this was only a hint of what might have been and what might still be when the nexus of oppression is shattered.

Ericka always incisively presented and fiercely defended our aspirations towards Black Liberation. She would graphically discuss the revolutionary overturning and recasting of structures and relations to which the oppressed the world over are tethered. In doing this, she was never cold and manipulating in the way the oppressor would misrepresent us all through their familiar propagandistic stereotypes.

Ericka reached out to others; these political motions always immediately assumed intense personal contours. The personal did not -- and could not -- lessen the impact of the political as it can when abstractly pursued. On the contrary, it gave new dimensions, new sparks of life to a movement whose success would greatly depend on the depth of the human solidarity which animated it.

When I spent a brief period working and traveling in Cuba, the inexpressible beauty of the people there, the love that welded them together in their common strivings towards socialism evoked memories of Ericka.

At that time she was locked up in Niantic Prison - conceiving many of the poems contained in this volume.

There have been people presumably in the liberation movement towards whom the media have been magnetically drawn, precisely because the former have opportunistically played at being revolutionaries. (Many of these people are now passing their lives in successful anonymity, though some are still what a comrade brother sarcastically called "media freaks.") One thing about them was obvious from the outset: there was always a conspicuous rupture at the heart of their existences. Their rhetorical utterances and exhortations were a blatant contradiction to their own personal lives. Even at the height of emotional paroxysm, their appeals were abstract and static, too studied and artificial, visibly lacking a personal reaching out and interchange with those before whom they stood. All this was especially true of the male chauvinist who doggedly refused to acknowledge the existence of chauvinism in himself or others. Such a polarity belies a fatal flaw in revolutionary commitment itself.

From the time I first met Ericka, it was clear to me that her commitment was authentic and total. The same should be said of another of this

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era's outstanding Black revolutionaries, who was brutally torn away from his people. I am referring to George Lester Jackson, who loved and fought for "all the innocents." In this love and struggle was the sole, yet infinitely rich, meaning of George's existence, expressing itself in his compelling literary defense of the oppressed, in the battle stances he was continually compelled to assume, and also in each personal man/woman man encounter with whomever had not already sided with our enemy. Much of George now lives on in Ericka.

Ericka spent over two years in prison without bail, awaiting a trial whose outcome would reveal the political retaliation and repression inherent in the prosecution of herself and Bobby Seale. Her poems record myriad experiences of prison life and are a fiercely persuasive critique and indictment of the special impact of the penal system on women.

In recent months, many pivotal episodes in the continuum of liberation have unfolded in and around prisons. These incidents have embodied the particular intensity which flows from the reigning, brutal circumstances of the prison system itself. The August 7, 1970 prisoner revolt was a compelling indication of the need to expose and contest the most openly devastating oppression and repression - the "normal" routine of prison life. At the same time, as police and prison guards mindlessly murdered Jonathan Jackson, Willie Christmas, James McClain, severely wounded Ruchell Magee and killed a judge and wounded a D.A., this episode was a sign that drastic measures would be inexorably invoked to push back the tide of prison resistance.

On August 21, 1971, George Jackson, our leader and love, was finally struck down by those who had relentlessly pursued him and the revolutionary ideals he represented and transmitted through his writings and practice. Other San Quentin revolutionaries were indicted. Days later, the Attica Revolt erupted as if to prove that the new, more tightly woven fabric of prison repression could not disassemble and destroy omnipresent, ineluctable and collective desires and efforts to break the chains of unfreedom.

In the midst of the stirrings and explosions of tensions and contradictions in prisons throughout the country, women's prisons and the unique problems of women captives are still largely ignored. Against this backdrop, the significance of Ericka's poetry acquires yet another dimension. Many of her poems are moving evocations of the visible realities, as well as those that are subtle and unseen, which women in prison must suffer and, becoming conscious, must strive to combat and transfigure. The song of the Sisterlove collective evokes the sisterly solidarity, the common journey towards consciousness and, honed in the vissicitudes of captivity, their motivations and practice of love and struggle. Women are breaking the chains.

Ericka is a Black woman. For all the cliches and myths (Black Matriarch, Emasculating Female) through which we, Black women, are prejudged and further oppressed, Ericka and her poems are a jolting demystification. Such cliches have been summoned up to discredit and transmogrify the incredible strength with which Black women have counterpoised themselves to interminable suffering and oppression. To this strength, its reality, Ericka's poems bear incontestable witness. They provide striking glimpses into a painful voyage: the murder of Jon, her comrade husband, when Mai, their daughter, is only a few weeks old; Ericka's arrest; her two-year life in prison…. This pain, the pain of the slave woman, of a Rosalee Ingram, a Norma Gist, of Black women prisoners, of Black women everywhere, is repeatedly surmounted with an ever more indomitable strength and the joyous visions of ultimate victory.

This is the process in which resistance at the very highest level is rooted. This is the exemplary experience of Black women, the most oppressed cluster of people in the American life-nerve of global subjugation. Ericka's poems attest to deep, powerful sources of energy, love and revolutionary guidance which, fully unleashed, can surely begin to break the orbit of oppression.

Angela Y. Davis
Santa Clara County Jail
December, 1971

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Let this be his epitaph:

George
Jackson

Blood in my eye.

(author of Soledad Brother)

This angry, passionate, eloquent book -- which takes up where Soledad Brother left off -- was completed only days before George Jackson was shot to death at San Quentin prison during an alleged escape attempt last August.

George Jackson spent the last eleven years of his life behind prison walls, seven of them in solitary confinement. During that time he developed a radical world view, a deep understanding of politics and history in relation to social change, as well as a remarkable voice as a writer. Blood in My Eye speaks out to the poor, the black, the jailed, the disenfranchised throughout the world. Born of a spirit that refused to be crushed, yet filled with a prophetic sense of his own impending doom, this powerful book from prison presents George Jackson's burning vision of the world that could be -- a world reshaped by "total revolutionary war."

George Jackson lived and died for the revolution. Blood in My Eye explains why.

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IMPEACH NIXON!

AMERICANS CALL FOR NIXON'S IMPEACHMENT TO STOP
VIETNAMESE WAR AND PREVENT WORLD WAR III.

In the current, 1972 Presidential election campaign, many candidates for that office have travelled across the country, addressing themselves, through their speeches, to the American people. Each candidate has his way of manipulating his position on major political issues in an effort to convince the people that our oppression will be eliminated with their election to office. Many are very obviously lying to the oppressed masses when they promise this-and-that, in exchange for votes. Still others are actually able to dupe the people, through flowing oration, into believing that they (the politicians) will be effective vehicles for progressive social transformation. Once elected, these pig politicians conveniently seem to develop amnesia in regards to the campaign promises they made to the people. Black people in the United States certainly know this, having been tricked into voting for one racist politician after another. We are now organizing our collective voting power to insure that whoever gets into office will relate to the Black Community's needs and desires.

One political issue that all the presidential candidates are concerning themselves with is the war in Vietnam. There have been many speeches emanating from politicians on this subject. Some of their speeches have been in opposition, or seemingly so, to the war; other pig politicians have given their outright support to Nixon's aggressive policies in Vietnam.

The vast majority of the American people want the war to end, immediately, by withdrawal of U.S. forces in Vietnam. The Peace Movement, initiated on the college campuses throughout the country, has played a great part in bringing the fascist nature of the war, initiated by the U.S. ruling class, to the people's attention. Black people, in general, have little faith in any white politician presently running for president, to end the war, seeing no difference in any of them, despite what they say to the people. However, to many young whites who had demonstrated against the war, and to an unfortunate number of misguided Blacks, Senator George McGovern offers a "progressive alternative" to pig Richard Nixon and the Vietnam conflict. Convinced of McGovern's "sincerity", they began to organize rallies and demonstrations in support of McGovern's candidacy for president. After all, had not George McGovern always condemned U.S. involvement in Vietnam and seemed to support "Black liberation". Wasn't it he, in fact. Who had called the war, "immoral, unwise and absurd"?

It came as no surprise to most Black people, however, when McGovern recently showed his true racist

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nature when he condemned the successful North Vietnamese offensive against occupying forces of the U.S. and the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese puppet army: "I condemn North Vietnam's invasion invasion of South Vietnam." McGovern's "horror" of U.S. bombing raids inside North Vietnam suddenly turned to vicious and unjust criticism for the liberation forces of Vietnam, who are using every means at their disposal to rid Vietnam of Western fascists' domination and thereby insure freedom for the Vietnamese people.

Pig McGovern went even further in revealing his allegiance to the State, to American racism, when he voiced his support for SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) which are pacts the U.S. government formed with reactionary countries in Southeast Asia and Western Europe. These fascist pacts give Nixon the "right" to wage war without consent of Congress in case of an "armed attack" against one of the parties to the treaties. We know that "armed

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attack" means liberation struggles initiated by the people themselves inside the reactionary SEATO and NATO countries. With these statements, George McGovern openly joined George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie, and, of course, Nixon himself. There is little difference among any of them. They are all one and the same person, representing fascism, imperialism and the U.S. ruling class.

On May 8th, 1972, Nixon went on nationwide television and delivered one of the most outrageous speeches in his political history. He stated to the American people and the world that he had ordered a naval blockade of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and that hundreds, perhaps thousands of delayed-action mines had been planted in the territorial waters of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, blocking access to the ports by ships from socialist countries. The mines were activated on May 11, 1972, just three days later. He also said that U.S. planes would cut all rail and communications lines inside North Vietnam. In effect, he was telling not only the North Vietnamese people they have no right to survive, but he was telling North Vietnam's allies, such as China, that they cannot supply North Vietnam with the necessary tools of survival. Of course, this did not exempt the U.S. from continuing to supply pig president Nguyen Van Thieu's South Vietnamese puppet army with weapons of war. With these acts, fascist Nixon has clearly demonstrated his frustration and humiliation in attempting to win an impossible military victory in Vietnam.

Nixon told the oppressed people of America that he knew we wanted the U.S. to get out of Vietnam, but he did not care. He suggested that, like the American people, he wanted peace, and that he was only making sure that when peace came, it would be "honorable". This madman continued to say that the U.S. has "exercised restraint (in Vietnam) unprecedented in the annals of war", before he took his present aggressive actions against the Vietnamese people.

This is the record of U.S. "restraint" in Vietnam: Nixon's "scorched earth" policy has created, through shellings and bombings, over 21 million craters in South Vietnam, the country it is supposed to be defending; 21 million craters where rice paddles used to be sustaining Vietnamese life. Over 26 billion pounds of explosives, twice the amount the U.S. used in all of World War II, have been dropped on Vietnam, which amounts to over 1,000 pounds of explosives for every person in South Vietnam, or the equivalent of 363 nuclear bombs of the type U.S. pigs dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. U.S. planes have created massive land erosion in Vietnam, destruction of precious farmland and forests, and have left hundreds of thousands of innocent Vietnamese people homeless. This is the miserable history of U.S., so-called "restraint" in Vietnam.

Nixon ended his address to the nation by calling for the people of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to lay down their arms and return all American prisoners of war, saying that only then would the U.S. leave Vietnam.

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This is truly absurd. In January of 1972, Nixon called for a ceasefire and withdrawal in Vietnam, after the settlement of "outstanding political and military issues". He was only biding time then, in an attempt to fool the world into thinking he was actually trying to end the war. Nixon wanted then, as he wants now, a military victory in Vietnam.

Now, in May, 1972, Nixon again calls for a cease-fire, just when the Vietnamese liberation foreces have brought about a military situation, through the recent courageous and just offensive, that is sure to lead the Vietnamese to victory in their struggle for freedom. The Vietnamese people did not accept this sham "offer" of Nixon, and naturally are continuing to press forward with military gains.

After Nixon made his warmonger speech, his lackey, pig president Thieu, of South Vietnam, had nerve enough to declare martial law in South Vietnam, which he casually called a "strict tightening of security, with some civil rights suspended". As a result of this "tightening of security", there have been widespread roundups of innocent people in South Vietnam, whose loyality to the Saigon regime is considered "questionable". He will have to arrest the whole people, his own people, in order to really effect such an absolute state.

In the United States, the people responded with Anti-Nixon demonstrations all across the country. As usual, police were overwhelmingly present, attacking everyone on whom they could get their hands. A few members of Congress, who have not been completely bought by Nixon, have begun a move to impeach Nixon for his war crimes in Vietnam; indeed, against all Black and poor people, in America, and throughout the world.

One of the main exponents for the impeachment of Nixon is Black, Congressman Ron Dellums, of California, who knows that Nixon would destroy a whole country and its people, annihilate the entire world, in order to soothe his bruised racist ego. In calling for Nixon, the murderer's, impeachment, Brother Dellums said, "In carrying out an expanding, an unconstitutional, undeclared war, Mr. Nixon is guilty of high crimes against mankind." Brother Ron Dellums also gave a press conference the day after Nixon's television statement, excerpts of which are below:

"President Nixon thinks he can get away with anything. I don't. The real question is whether the Congress will justify his contemptuous opinion of it, or whether Congress will start doing its job. The president fools only himself in believing his grandstanding can solve problems. Those of us in Congress must have a greater sense of reality -- and a great sense of responsibility both to the Americans who are pawns in Mr. Nixon's games, and to the Vietnamese whose society we are turning

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into a smoking ruin.

"I am amazed by the cynical and maniacal irresponsibility with which the President presumes to blackmail the American people. Is he so obsessed with his personal prestige and power, is he so removed from the human realities of his decisions, that he no longer cares how many lives he endangers through his cruel and reckless meglomania? After wantonly exposing American troops and installations and the lives of American POWs, he then tries to use their endangered position -- for which he alone is responsible -- as a weapon to silence criticism…

"In the last year of the Second World War, after the Germans knew they were defeated, they went on an orgy of killing that exceeded the horrors of the earlier part of the war, haunting the conscience of mankind ever since. This is the choice that faces us now. No longer able to impose our will in Southeast Asia, will our removal be in the same

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frenzied manner? Or will the American people get down to the job of preventing the needless sacrifice of lives and of preserving the sense of honor that is sickened by senseless and cruel destruction?"

When the lives of the entire Vietnamese people are threatened by America's need to maintain a self-proclaimed image of power, there can be no doubt that the war in Vietnam must be stopped.

When thousands of so-called advisors are sent into Vietnam by Kennedy; hundreds of thousands of troops, by Johnson; and millions of tons of bombs, by Nixon, no one can believe that the United States entered Vietnam to safeguard elections.

The latest maneuver on the part of the present chief spokesman and administrator for the United States, Richard Nixon, to push this aggression to its limits with a kill-all policy is pushing what was once called a local war to the brink of World War III. What is worse, this is not just the whim of the murderer Nixon, but the carrying out of a pre-planned, long-range policy on the part of the U.S. of genocide of the Vietnamese people.

Has America become so blood-thirsty that Nixon will set a stage for World War III and even his so-called opposition will back him? George McGovern denounces the Vietnamese for refusing to accept genocide; Humphrey silently stands with his racist cohort.

This murderous machine must be halted. Along with many other Americans, the Black Panther Party calls for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. He alone presently stands in the way of world peace and in position to destroy this planet with the total destruction of a third world war. Months matter. We cannot wait for scheduled elections. The lives of the Vietnamese people are at stake; our lives are at stake.

Impeach Nixon, keep the racists, the warmongers, Wallace, McGovern, Humphrey, all of them, out of power, and install into the leadership a people's candidate. This is our right, our duty, and the immediate task history demands.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

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LIFE AFTER DRUGS

SYNANON'S SUCCESSFUL SURVIVAL PROGRAM
FOR ADDICTS AND OTHERS.

You walk into the Oakland facility of Synanon and rather than the expected, a new type of community begins to reveal itself.

Recently, in Oakland, California, members of the Black Panther Party were invited to visit Synanon and get a first-hand view of the work. It's hard to tell at first glance what is happening there. Many people, Black and others, seem very involved in some undefined activity or program, Realizing that Synanon started out, in 1958, as a program to cure drug addiction, one is prone to look for treatment rooms or listen for the sights and sounds of misery coming from hard-core users trying to quit.

It is certainly no secret that within the United States a large portion of people have turned to using drugs. Because it is no secret, because the U.S. government has produced all types of studies on the statistics of drug users and all kinds of racist and fascist laws concerning drug use, you might think the government would have at least pretended at providing a program for the treatment and cure of drug addiction.

With even a slight analysis, it isn't hard to figure out why no such government- sponsored program exists. Firstly, heroin, cocaine, etc. are big business to this fascist government, Millions, if not billions, of dollars are exchanged yearly in the traffic of drugs. From organized gangster operations, the largest of which is the U.S. government itself, to the small-time dealers and pushers, the transport and sales of so-called hardcore drugs are big, profitable business, Secondly, anyone with an iota of common sense knows that people who use drugs can't be just conveniently categorized as criminals, psychopaths, neurotics, or whatever other labels with which drug addicts are often associated. In other words, people are not addicted to drugs because they're crazy.

Black people, particularly, poor people in this country don't have any trouble understanding what kinds of conditions push, drive a person to drugs: the daily indignities; constant hunger; indecent housing with the accompanying rats, roaches, etc.; the constant frustration of trying to make ends meet under a system that never intended you to live at all; the rapes, beatings, murders at the hands of racists and pigs over more than four centuries; having nothing in a land of plenty. Black and poor people don't have too much difficulty understanding why so many of our people have turned to something that will seemingly easeup the misery of our existences, to bear the unbearable; let us smile through tears; love in the midst of haired; maintain a semblance of sanity in the midst of insanity; dignity, in indignity; one's own humanity in the midst of barbarism.

As we understand this, most of us understand the alternative misery of a "shot of shit", a snort. Most of us understand that no matter how temporarily beautiful "skag" or "smack", "girl" or "snow" may be, they cannot, do not, in fact, transform the actual misery. For some time in our communities, therefore, we have had to face the added misery of the "pain killers" themselves. Some want to eliminate the local pushers and dealers, in sincere efforts to rid the community of dope addiction. Some have created medical treatment centers to medically treat addiction.

Because the Black Panther Party believes that hunger cannot be eliminated for our people simply by boycotting a food store because it charges too much, but by discovering and implementing a concrete program of getting food, we believe that addiction to narcotics will not be eliminated unless and until the existing, barbarous government is transformed and transferred out of the hands of the few, rich racists who are presently in power into the hands of all the people. This is not to say we must

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wait for such a point to alleviate the misery, for unless we begin now, we will be unable to make it to the point of transformation. In fact, the basic concept of our Survival Programs is to provide a way to survive to the point of transformation, knowing that the program is not necessarily revolutionary or reformist, but a means to an end.

Therefore, when members of the Black Panther Party entered the Oakland Synanon facility, we began to see that a kind of survival program was in operation there, a survival program, a lifeline for hard-core drug users.

We wondered what Synanon had done that so many handreds of other programs which claim to do the same had not done. Throughout the country, handreds of "drug-cure" programs have emerged, only to often be discovered as, really, easy marks for the dope dealers and pushers, with thousands of dollars going into the pockets of so-called administrators: another game evolving, keeping the addict still victinized, still locked in, with only a temporary stay of execution. The government and its lackeys have created still another game, to make a joke of our 12-year olds, 17-year olds, our youth, our people, who have suffered murder by the needle, or maximum security imprisonment for desperately seeking the needle's temporary satisfaction.

At Synanon, they play a different game. That is what it's called, in fact. Synanon's doors are open to everyone who wants and needs help in getting rid of drug addiction. The only requirement is that a person be willing to play the Synanon Game and commit himself to non-violence. The Synanon game is simply a gathering of a dozen-or-so persons who sit down together and talk, talk about each other. It's not any bourgeois psychiatric group-therapy program, because there's no doctor asking subtle or leading questions. There's no hourly fee, and no high and mightly "authority" telling you about how sick you are.

There are professionals, however, who play the Synanon Game. They are the other members of Synanon, 80% of whom have been addicted to drugs. In Oakland, there was one Black woman, Joyce Carter, who is one such "professional". She had spent 15 of her 40-some years addicted to heroin. She was one of many who told their stories, gave testimony to years of misery as addicts, who had necessarily become prostitutes, pimps, two-bit hustlers, light-weight gangsters, who had all found a kind of peace at Synanon, and had no use for drugs. This Sister explained that she had come to Synanon, five years ago, because after having a baby while still addicted, she had come to realize that she could not go on, could not even give love to her only son, while daily going through the changes of heroin addiction.

The testimony was plentiful: a thousand such stories seemed to be there. However, seeing with one's own eyes offered the greatest testimony, the clear reality that the Synanon program had given new life to thousands, that words could never witness.

For Synanon members, all basic needs are provided free. There is a community dining room with decent, healthful food. In the very same building, the over 500 people who live there, in modern, clean and beautiful rooms, can learn a trade; send their children to school; enjoy swimming at any time in the Olympic-sized pool, or some other recreation; make their own clothes in a large community sewing area; receive adequate medical care; see a movie or learn to make one; can learn to live a collective life with other human beings, men and women who represent every racial background, and come from all areas of the country.

The Oakland facility is part of a large, national Synanon community, which has other facilities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and recruitment centers in Detroit, New York, and Puerto Rico. Also, in California, Synanon's main base area, Synanon has a 1600 acre ranch in Tamales Bay (north of San Francisco).

Synanon has created an alternative for the addict, a real alternative for living without drugs. This was created out of love and understanding by a man who, although he was never a drug addict, was an alcoholic. When Chuck Dederich founded Synanon in 1958, he was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Knowing what it felt like, because he had been there, to seek and need an alternative to the frustrations of life in this country, he formed Synanon, based on his own kind-of common sense philosophy. He was able to analyze, through his own experience, that people turned to alcohol or

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drugs in search of relief, relief from a life that offers few human rewards.

Synanon, then, does not just operate to cure drug addiction, but has become a new way of life for many other people. It's a kind of projection into a new world, where human beings' needs and desires are met, not because they do as they're told, but because they are human beings, because it is their right to live. As Dederich himself put it: "Our purpose is to help all people, and not just dope addicts. What the hell is a dope addict today? It's often a kid who can't get to living. He's confused by adolescence and he doesn't buy the values that our generation holds up: get up early and work and by the time you're 45 you make the last payment on your first house. Who needs it?"

This program of giving to, of sharing with other human beings is the alternative Synanon offers drug addicts: a life free of worry about day-to-day needs, and involvement in work and activity which will bring about a greater understanding and unity among people. At Synanon everything is shared and distributed among members according to need. This sharing is even extended beyond the Synanon community, for many other people and organizations receive help from Synanon, which help includes Synanon's donations to the Black Panther Party-sponsored Survival Programs.

At the Oakland facility, like the others, the strange feeling of being in a new and better world eventually arises. One begins to realize the fact that, unlike the pigs propagandize that drug addiction is a physiological problem, that the user's physical body actually needs drugs, drug addiction is a direct result of the miserable conditions in our communities, and that its cure can be found not in more drugs (methadone, etc.) but in a transformation of those conditions. Until the total society can be transformed to operate in the interests of all of us, together, Synanon is providing those new conditions for the drug addict, or anyone else who wishes, to tide people over until complete liberation.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE

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EX-BEATLE TOLD TO “LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT”

U.S. TO DEPORT JOHN LENNON
FOR SINGING FOR THE PEOPLE.

The United States government, acting through its Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York City, is currently attempting to deport ex-Beatle John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, who have applied for citizenship in this country in order to gain custody of Yoko's 8-year old daughter, Kyoto, born to her during her first marriage to an American banker, Anthony D. Cox.

After Yoko's divorce from Cox, she was involved in a lengthy court battle with her former husband, for custody of Kyoto. If Yoko had been a white woman, instead of Japanese, she would have automatically been awarded her child by the U.S.courts; but, judicial racism and preference for her former, white husband drove the case on to a ridiculously long period of time.

Finally, in a Texas court, John and Yoko were granted custody of Kyoto, but with one stipulation: they had to raise the child in the United States. Since that decision was made, however, the Lennons have had to search in vain for Kyoto. It seems that Cox, in defiance of the court order, has disappeared with the child.

In the condition imposed by the court that the Lennons become United States citizens, the fascist U.S. government saw its chance to "get even" with John Lennon, who had previously, on many occasions, used his talents as a song writer and singer to criticize American aggression in Vietnam and oppression of the masses of people in the United States itself.

John has been no stranger to oppression and poverty, having been born of working class parents in one of the most miserable sections to London England, the ghetto of Liverpool. John Lennon was able to escape his poverty, just as a few Blacks in America have been able to do, by becoming an entertainer. He joined with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison. Together they formed a group called the Beatles and were highly successful in the musical field. Eventually, the Beatles disbanded, with the former members pursuing their separate endeavors. John Lennon, the same as the other ex-Beatles, continued to make records. His, however, were of a highly political nature. He recorded songs like "Give Ireland Back to the Irish", which was an indictment of British occupation of Ireland. A few of his other releases were "Just Give Me Some Truth", a critique of lying politicians, including Nixon, and "Attica" a condemnation of the fascist events that led to the murder of the many prisoners and even guards of Attica State Prison by U.S. pigs. It is because of this very concern for the oppressed, that the U.S. government does not want him in the country.

The pigs said that since John's wife, Yoko, had been married to an American citizen, she could stay in the country, but John would have to leave. They used, as an excuse for this, John Lennon's four year old conviction in England for alleged marijuana possession. This would force Yoko Lennon into making a choice of leaving the country with John and abandoning her daughter or remaining in the country to be re-united with Kyoto.

This is what the U.S. government is willing to do in order to "punish" anyone who has the "audacity" to speak out in behalf of the oppressed victims of the world. John and Yoko Lennon go to court on May 17th, 1972, to hear the decision of the immigration and Naturalization Service. With the people's support, they can beat the pigs.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE

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CRUIKSHANK FOR JUDGE

JOHN CRUIKSHANK was born in West Oakland and educated in Oakland schools. He received his B.A. in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, and his L.L.D. from Hastings Law School. After being admitted to the bar, he first practiced with the firm of Vaughns, Dixon & White. Presently, he is practicing with the firm of White, Cruikshank & White.

John is well aware of the community's problems and needs. John feels there is a strong belief among the poor and deprived that the laws do not work for them. The role of judge is to insure these people that they are included in the phrase "our law."

Let us provide more justice in our municipal courts. John is a man of integrity and honesty. He knows the law.

VOTE CRUIKSHANK JUNE 6, 1972 OAKLAND, CA.

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BLACK PANTHER PARTY PROGRAM MARCH 29, 1972 PLATFORM

WHAT WE WANT

WHAT WE BELIEVE

1. WE WANT FREEDOM. WE WANT POWER TO DETERMINE THE DESTINY OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.

We believe that Black and oppressed people will not be free until we are able to determine our destinies in our own communities ourselves, by fully controlling all the institutions which exist in our communities.

2. WE WANT FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR OUR PEOPLE.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every person employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the American businessmen will not give full employment, then the technology and means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE CAPITALIST OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people. Therefore, we feel this is a modest demand that we make.

4. WE WANT DECENT HOUSING, FIT FOR THE SHELTER OF HUMAN BEINGS.

We believe that if the landlords will not give decent housing to our Black and oppressed communities, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people in our communities, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for the people.

5. WE WANT EDUCATION FOR OUR PEOPLE THAT EXPOSES THE TRUE NATURE OF THIS DECADENT AMERICAN SOCIETY. WE WANT EDUCATION THAT TEACHES US OUR TRUE HISTORY AND OUR ROLE IN THE PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society and the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else.

6. WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE.

We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventative medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give all Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide ourselves with proper medical attention and care.

7. WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE, OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR, ALL OPPRESSED PEOPLE INSIDE THE UNITED STATES.

We believe that the racist and fascist government of the United States uses its domestic enforcement agencies to carry out its program of oppression against Black people, other people of color and poor people inside the United States. We believe it is our right, therefore, to defend ourselves against such armed forces, and that all Black and oppressed people should be armed for self-defense of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces.

8. WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO ALL WARS OF AGGRESSION.

We believe that the various conflicts which exist around the world stem directly from the aggressive desires of the U.S. ruling circle and government to force its domination upon the oppressed people of the world. We believe that if the U.S. government or its lackeys do not case these aggressive wars that it is the right of the people to defend themselves by any means necessary against their aggressors.

9. WE WANT FREEDOM FOR ALL BLACK AND POOR OPPRESSED PEOPLE NOW HELD IN U.S. FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, CITY AND MILITARY PRISONS AND JAILS. WE WANT TRIALS BY A JURY OF PEERS FOR ALL PERSONS CHARGED WITH SO-CALLED CRIMES UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS COUNTRY.

We believe that the many Black and poor oppressed people now held in U.S. prisons and jails have not received fair and impartial trials under a racist and fascist judicial system and should be free from incarceration. We believe in the ultimate elimination of all wretched, inhuman penal institutions, because the masses of men and women inprisoned inside the United States or by the U.S. military are the victims of oppressive conditions which are the real cause of their imprisonement. We believe that when persons are brought to trial that they must be guaranteed, by the United States, juries of their peers, attorneys of their choice and freedom from imprisonment while a waiting trials.

10. WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE'S COMMUNITY CONTROL OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their 1st powers from consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

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PEOPLE'S PETITION

FOR IMMEDIATE PAROLE OF BROTHER DAVID
HILLIARD FROM THE CALIFORNIA PRISON
SYSTEM OR AN APPEAL BAIL BOND WITH
A RETRIAL JURY OF HIS PEER-GROUP.

WE THE PEOPLE, RESIDENTS OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY, IN THE SPIRIT OF REVOLUTIONARY INTERCOMMUNALISM, DO HEREBY REDRESS OUR GRIEVANCE AND PETITION THE COURTS OF AMERICA AND THE CALIFORNIA STATE GOVERNMENT AND PAROLE BOARD: THAT DAVID HILLIARD BE RELEASED FROM HIS PRISON INCARCERATION IN THE CALIFORNIA PENAL SYSTEM TO THE PEOPLE OF OUR COMMUNITIES ON PAROLE OR AN APPEAL BAIL BOND.

BROTHER DAVID HILLIARD, POLITICAL PRISONER AND CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY, WAS IN FACT WRONGFULLY CONVICTED ON FALSE CHARGES BY A PREDOMINATELY WHITE RACIST JURY, AS ALL MEMBERS OF THE OAKLAND BLACK COMMUNITY WERE SYSTEMATICALLY ELIMINATED FROM THE JURY SELECTION PROCESS IN HIS TRIAL.

IN LIGHT OF THESE FACTS, WE THE UNDERSIGNED, THEREFORE PETITION THAT DAVID HILLIARD BE GRANTED HIS HUMAN AND CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, THAT IS, PAROLE FROM PRISON OR AN APPEAL BAIL BOND BY THE AMERICAN COURTS PENDING APPEAL OF HIS CASE BEFORE HIGHER COURTS, AND THAT HIS RETRIAL JURY BE OF HIS PEERS, A TRUE REPRESENTATION OF A CROSS SECTION OF THE COMMUNITY. NAME
ADDRESS
CITY/STATE/ZIP CODE
COUNTRY
IF IN THE
U.S.A.
REG. VOTER?

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