Kent Ford and Percy Hampton

Kent Ford and Percy Hampton Transcript
Interview by Michael and Serena
Time: 38:59
Also Present: Arlie Sommer

0:00:00.0

PERCY HAMPTON: One Saturday evening I was on my way, walking to the store and, um, these two police officers, and they were notorious because they already had killed black folks, uh, um, Harmin had already killed anywhere from two to three black guys on different occasions and got away with it and the same with his partner Harnin. And so it was like dusk, it was about 8:30 in the summer, I’m walking up to the neighborhood store, and, um, doin’ nothin’ just walkin’ to the store, just going to get me some candy. These cops came right up to me and pulled over and said ‘Boy where do you think you’ve going?’ And so I said, just a natural reaction from me is that, you know, ‘I’m not your boy.’ And, you know, they say, ‘Oh we got a smart A and well we might need to have a little talk with you.’ I said, ‘Well all I’m doing is going to the store, you guys approached me. I didn’t walk across the street wrong or nothin’.’ And I said well…they got out and said, ‘Well I guess we need to teach you a lesson here.’ I said, ‘Well I don’t want no trouble.’ I said, ‘Well you already got trouble.’ And then they went and swung at me and so I go to protect myself and next thing I know I’m beat up. I get arrested for assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, and they take me to jail. And I got convicted, that was the start of my record.

KENT FORD: Mmm-hm. [inaudible]

HAMPTON: Right there. And, and, I was…I’m two months from goin’ to Portland State, two months. I get a ninety day sentence on this thing that they did to me that I’ve really, to the day, felt that it was an insult and also a [inaudible]. And then, and then, once the judge realized that I was goin to school about, uh, 30 days into my sentence they dropped my sentence and just dropped the whole thing. It was on my record but they dropped the whole thing. So that’s how it started. And then that’s when the Black Panther Party was just getting started.

FORD: Just getting started yeah.

0:02:20.6

HAMPTON: And Kent and them gave me help with the lawyers and this kind of stuff and I became actively involved on the campus as far as with the groups down there with SDS. I was, I was, the outsider.

FORD: He was in Chicago in 68’, at the Democratic Convention.

HAMPTON: Yeah I went to…I didn’t go to the Democratic Convention. That was the other one. I went after Fred Hampton got killed. For the big thing that went on down there, which was a big rally. They were still showing the house. You know, they did it really different then they would do right now. They left the house open where we could do tours and go into the house and see where Fred Hampton and those guys got killed. Yeah I was pretty actively involved down there in the campus.

0:03:06.3

OTHER: Man I don’t know what I would do if-

FORD: So anyway what it did mean. You know where the place is on Fremont and MLK now? It used to be a McDonalds. You don’t remember where McDonalds…there used to be a McDonalds there. Where the place called Bella’s is now. You guys know where Bella’s is don’t ya?

HAMPTON: Yeah-

FORD: Down at Fremont and MLK.

HAMPTON: Yeah.

FORD: Yeah. It used to be a McDonalds. Well they took me in there one night and the whole parking lot was full of, uh, police cars. And they said…one of the cops peepin out in the back seat, ‘He’s runnin’ something.’ And they snatched me out the car and started beatin on me and then they put me back in the car and said, ‘Mr. Fore you’ve been charge with rioting and inciting a riot.’ I said, ‘How do you get inciting rioting out of this, ya know?’ And that’s what I was charged with and so anyway my bail was $40,000, ended up being $80,000. I bailed out. A nice white lady was an heiress of Bluebell Potato Chip bailed me out of jail. Got out, started organizing with Percy and all those guys. People started coming into the party. We had an office right next to the Resistance on Cook Street. Resistance was here, we were right here. The guys are comin’ in there are, you know, resistance against the Vietnam War and it was…uh, oh you know it. Get them on up to Canada. When Carter became President in 1976, first thing he did was pardon all the people who were draft resistance. Who didn’t go to the Vietnam War, there was over 100,000 of them in Canada at the time. Then we had a guy named Tumer Hadin and his mother had a shop right down on...from MLK and, and, and, and, right, right across from, from where McDonalds used to be, a second hand store there. She was moving out and she gave us her place.

HAMPTON: That was our second headquarters.

FORD: Huh?

HAMPTON: That was our second head-

FORD: That was our second headquarters. So we move out of Resistance place and move in there and that’s when the police hit us and shot a guy who came in there for assistance. But anyways-

HAMPTON: It was the same two cops.

FORD: Same two cops. Yeah, same two cops.

HAMPTON: That beat me up during that period of time. In fact this guy is…there’s, there’s a real controversy about this guy because the fact of the matter is he was not a member of the Black Panther Party.

FORD: Yeah.

HAMPTON: First off, he had just got out of the penitentiary and I’m almost sure they sent him in there.

FORD: Yeah, they sent him in through an informant and, and he was addicted to Seconal. You know what Seconal is? They call ‘em ‘reds’ or something. It’s an old drug that-

HAMPTON: It’s a sleeping pill.

FORD: Sleeping pills, ya know, the kids overdo it, overdo it in the black neighborhoods. They really abuse them in all the ghettos, you know.

0:05:47.2

FORD: And so anyway, um, he uh…so anyway, let me tell you this story. The guy who shot..the policeman that shot him, they finally transferred him out years later to Southeast he didn’t like blacks, he didn’t like longhairs. Hubert Humphrey was running for president back in 68’. Anyway, they had a demonstration over…you know the DoubleTree is at the Lloyd Center? That used to be the Holiday Inn. Well anyway this lady who was an activist down on the waterfront for the ILW, the Long Shoreman Warehouse Union, which is one of the strongest unions in the country, you know, but anyway um…Harmen, uh, picture Harmen [inaudible] down over here. She’s 65 at the time and thrown in a ditch. A little old lady about you guy’s size, you know, comin’ at her with a night stick. Anyway they transferred him out to Southeast Portland. Check this out Michael, Serena…and he didn’t like blacks or longhair, and he was after a young white kid. He shot…the young white kid shot him and killed himself and paralyzed him. You see, they wouldn’t take us, they wouldn’t say move him, or get rid of him, you know what I mean? They wouldn’t do that, you know. They didn’t have no power.

HAMPTON: And his partner Kanzler ended up being a lieutenant, uh-

FORD: And the Police Chief of Milwaukie, Oregon.

HAMPTON: Yeah, and then ended up being the Police Chief of Milwaukie Oregon and they uh-

FORD: And they used to kick in your doors or, you know, just…oh another…remember when I told you to think outside the box? Don’t you guys think the FBI is your friend either, okay?

0:07:22.5

HAMPTON: Can I say something? There was a thing that they also did to help destroy the Black Panther Party. It was called ‘Co and Tell Pro’. With ‘Co and Tell Pro,’ you know, I try to remain kinda as uncover with the stuff but...every year, at least once a year if not twice a year, the FBI would come around to my house, you know, and I recognized them right off the bat. I live right in the middle of the black neighborhood and here these guys are coming in their suits with their…just like you see on T.V. with their little hats and they come to your door and they’ll be asking me, ‘Well have you been anywhere this year?’

FORD: Uh, of course not.

HAMPTON: Yeah, of course I’m going to say no and of course I know that they know. ‘Well looks like this is a picture of you in Oakland California doing guard duty at the national head quarters down there.’ And I look at the picture and I know it’s me,

FORD: [Laughing]

HAMPTON: [Laughing] And I just say, ‘That don’t look like me.’ And then they say, ‘Well, weren’t you in Chicago at that rally over there for Fred Hampton?’ I said no and then they start asking me what I think summer is going to be like and everything, you know. They had even in, even in Chicago and all the rest of them, they had infiltrated the Black Panther Party with these ‘Co and Tell Pro’ agents who work for the FBI and, and other organizations in the government to try to disrupt the Black Panther Party because they didn’t like our programs. They didn’t like the-

FORD: No.

HAMPTON: Free breakfast program. They didn’t like the health clinics or-

0:08:51.4

FORD: My, ya know…if the Urban League was doin’ it…they too middle class and Bourgeois to do it, to help out, to help out, to help out the people on the streets, you know. The Urban League was doing in or NAACP be doing it, not word of been said you know what I mean? But one thing the Urban League did do…I mean the NAACP they did do, when Fred Hampton got killed, Roy Wilkins went on national television and he was opposed to and he said, ‘A lot of people don’t know, Fred Hampton was a youth organizer and a voter registration guy for the, for the NAACP before he became the chairman for the Black Panther Party in Chicago. A lot, and a lot of people don’t know that.

HAMPTON: And another thing that you guys don’t…do you have Breakfast Programs here?

FEMALE: Yeah.

HAMPTON: The breakfast program that got you here was started by the City of Portland to counteract the breakfast program-

FORD: That’s right.

HAMPTON: That we had on 9th and Whygan at the Highland Community Church. We started it first.

FORD: And then, and then…let me tell you this here too.

HAMPTON: We started it first.

FORD: Back in, back in, back in New Jersey, there was a breakfast program back there started by the Black Panther Party. It was so successful you guys. Okay. The agents got together…people who, who, who can retire after twenty years, ya know, twenty years on the job. You, you can’t retire. Mr. [inaudible] has been on the job over forty years you know what I mean, still teaching. He retires this year, forty three years. Percy can’t retire after twenty years. When I can find work I know I can’t retire after twenty years. Social Security is so minimal ya know. So anyway, make a long story short, that’s what made the breakfast program so successful. The agents got together, they decided, in a little room like this, and decide what can we do to disrupt it? Well they said, ‘Okay what we’ll do, uh, we’ll get a hold of oranges, ya know, that they give to the kids on the way to the school after the breakfast so they’ll have it for their lunch, and we’ll insert…we’ll take a syringe and insert this syringe…take a syringe and stick it in the oranges with a laxative and the kids will get [cough]-

HAMPTON: And this is documented facts too.

FORD: And the kids will get diarrhea and won’t come back to the breakfast program anymore. And this is not me talking. Bill Keller who worked…used to write for the Oregonian, now he went to the Washington Post, and then he comin’ from the Washington Post back in 1988 and told me the story. They released the ‘Freedom of Information Files’ and this was in the Freedom of Information Files. Okay. And then…now, today he is the executive editor of the New York Times. You even get a New York Times look in there and you’ll see Bill Keller. And he interviews me for the Breakfast Program up at, up at the school back, back in, back in like ’69 and there is a picture of me and the kids at the Breakfast Program. And then, and then he knew to call…he seen this and he called me up, called me up at told me about it back in 1988.

HAMPTON: They did the same type of stuff to counteract us, uh, getting licenses and things for the health and dental clinic.

FORD: Yeah.

HAMPTON: They went and talked to the doctors and, uh-

FORD: Uh-huh.

HAMPTON: The dentists from OHSU because all the doctors and dentists both came from OHSU. What they did, they was trying to discourage any of the doctors and dentists from working in our clinic because we was gonna spread hate because we were gonna do this and that.

FORD: And none of this was true.

HAMPTON: None of this was true and, and what happened was it became so successful that then… once this stuff started getting successful…the breakfast programs-

FORD: Uh-huh.

HAMPTON: The clinics…then they gotta find a way to counteract us from doing what we was doin for free.

FORD: Yeah.

HAMPTON: So they would come up with some kind a-

FORD: And they got all the money in the world ya know and can’t do it. Can’t do it.

HAMPTON: Um, these programs that we kinda started. Now OHSU still has the dental clinic goin’. It’s right there-

FORD: Russell Street Dental Clinic.

HAMPTON: The Russell Street Clinic, which is actually ours same clinic we started back in the 70s…60s and 70s. Um, they just kinda took it over –

FORD: Yeah.

HAMPTON: And kinda kept it goin over the years.

FORD: See that clinic was started by…actually started by OEO.

HAMPTON: Yeah.

FORD: [inaudible] or Owners of Economic and Opportunity, which was put in place on the war on poverty programs.

HAMPTON: Yeah.

FORD: But anyway, the FBI went…wrote down a complete list of all the…got a book of all the doctors in, in, in the, uh, Portland Doctor’s Association and uh, uh, sent them letters, and they wanted to set up a charity clinic out of Southeast Portland.

HAMPTON: Yeah. Discourage them from donating their time.

FORD: And so-

HAMPTON: The problem was we had so many doctors from both clinics.

FORD: Yeah.

HAMPTON: Like you know, we will be coming with…you know, you donate your time once every thirty days.

FORD: Yeah.

HAMPTON: We had so many doctors and nurses, that it would take them once every four months to come in.

FORD: Yeah.

HAMPTON: Because there were so many doctors.

FORD: And, and at Emmanuel, that stuff Percy was talkin about, that we gonna preach hate and uh, and, and discord and all that. All we wanted to do was to see people come in and get healthcare and dental care, ya know what I mean? So anyway, one of the dentists was approached and, uh, they said, ‘you gonna be on a list, on the government’s list.’ He said, ‘Yeah that may be true, but I’m gonna be on God’s List too, you know, for doing this.’ And I know him today. I know him today.

ARLIE SOMMERS: What was his name?

FORD: So anyway-

Gap in recording

0:14:17.6

MICHAEL: My name is Michael [inaudible]…My name is Micheal. I’m 13 years old. I’m at the Boise-Eliot, in the Eliot Neighborhood of Portland, Oregon.

SERENA: My name is Serena. I’m fourteen years old. I’m at the Boise-Eliot School in the Eliot Neighborhood of Portland, Oregon.

FORD: Um, my name is Kent Ford and, uh, sixty seven years old and, uh, I, uh, live and work in the Boise neighborhood for the last forty years.

HAMPTON: My name is Percy Hampton. I’m a native Oregonian. Uh, born and raised here.

FORD: Okay well I came to Oregon in 1961 and when we got started with the party, uh, back in ‘68, ’69, lot of people thought that I come up here to start the party, but I was already here. So the powers that be was gonna run me out of town. They can’t run me out of a place I’ve already been at, ya know. So and so anyway…uh, you know, they say, ‘they gonna run you outta town’. I say, ‘Bullshit,’ ya know.

HAMPTON: Language, language-

SERENA: [Laughing]

HAMPTON: Language. Um, I came, uh, to be involved in the Black Panther Party. My mom was pretty much and activist in civil rights, so I was trying to figure out which organization I wanted to be involved with. I took a stab at the Black Muslims ‘cause they was here during that period of time, but I didn’t want to be involved with a racist organization as the Black Panther…as the, the, uh, Muslims were. ‘Cause I felt that all people needed to have representation and all people should be treated equally and so the Black Panther party seemed to fit my ideal as far as what I wanted to do as far as to help the community and that kind of stuff.

MICHAEL: Why did they call it the Black Panther Party?

FORD: Okay, again that was the um…the Black Panther Party for self defense actually was started in Lawrence County, Alabama, come out of the civil rights movement. And uh, it’s because all the march…civil rights marches and school integration and voters’ registration down in the South, and the Martin Luther King and the SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, CORE Conference for Racial Equality, SNCC, Students for a Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. All these groups got together and were registering people to vote because the blacks actually outnumbered the, the, uh, the whites in some of the counties and in some of these states, but they couldn’t vote and therefore, ya know, the people, the Congress, the senators, they uh, they couldn’t get the benefits, uh, uh, that, that was allowed to them from the Federal Government. So it became…and, uh, elected officials…Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas you know, uh, uh, was integrating in Little Rock School, uh, uh…integrated in Little Rock, Arkansas, you know. Uh, Central High School in Little Rock, I was a little boy, about your age there Michael. And so, um, the Black Panther as an animal, you know, it really doesn’t get violent until it’s cornered and one of the things the civil rights movements, you know, we on the tail of a powerful black panther, you know, and we can’t be stopped and we said…watch these, watch all these old footages of Martin Luther King and these guys, he as actually nonviolence, ya know. Where they’re be beatin’ them over the head, pullin’ them outta the line, beatin’ them on bridges, tear-gasin’ them and everything, you know. We said, ‘Well it’s time to start standing up to this stuff,’ and that’s where we got the Black Panther Party for self defense.

HAMPTON: Now there was a part of that organization, now the SNCC part, is where we really kind of pattern over selves after, because they were more activists. Those were Atrap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, came out of SNCC, and those were the two quote ‘radicals’ of the time. They didn’t quite go along with Martin Luther King and the nonviolent part of it and so when the transformation of the Black Panther Party went over to Oakland, California it was more towards the SNCC part of that Southern, uh, civil rights type movement which was more of a radical type thing. Instead of being a nonviolent, they was self defense.

FORD: Mm-hm.

HAMPTON: Which is what Stokely and Atrap was talkin’ about during those periods of time. Which they really did piss off SCLC and Martin Luther King’s part of the movement. Cause they were a little bit too radical for them.

0:19:03.4

MICHAEL: Who did you work with in the community?

FORD: Oh, we worked with, uh, SDS, Students for a Democratically Society. It was a, uh, university and college based group of, of young whites, uh, and then we worked with Peace and Freedom Party people, uh, which actually ran candidates, uh, to get us out of Vietnam. And we worked with, uh, the White Panthers, which was a group out of Detroit Michigan, out of Michigan, the State of Michigan, on the John Sinclair. And then we worked with, uh, uh Communist Party people. Uh, you know in spite of what you hear about the Communist Party, you know, and all this Socialist Workers Party, all these people, you know, progressive people who really wanted to see change in America, you know.

HAMPTON: Back there in that time a lot of the lawyers that were working with us in the progressive movement were part of the Communist Party but…and they also helped us out on the bails and that kind of stuff but, uh, all the progressive parties, even AIM and all the Indian movements, the Brown Braves, uh, there was a lot of stuff. Our doctrine came from the Red Book which was Mao’s, you know, little Red Book that he gave to all his people so all of our quotes and a lot of that stuff came from Mao Tse-Tung and the Red Book so.

0:20:38.1

MICHAEL: Where did you hold your meetings?

FORD: Uh, we had meetings in friends’ house, you know, Tamier Mills, he had a nice place upstairs, you know. Had to go through a security door to meet, you know, we go upstairs and meet there and then we had centers, you know, that were, were actually open to the public. When we get away from the center, you know, we could really actually pull stuff together, where all of us are. Then we had some houses, you know, where we hold meetings and stuff like that. Then we’d have meetings to the public too, like politically education classes, you know too, down at the clinics, you know, maybe twice a week, uh, in, in, the lobby there. People would come and we’d discuss issue to the community, you know, like the Emmanuel expansion project, where they moved us out of thirty years ago, thirty-five years ago and they still haven’t did nothing to that area there, you know. Why? Because they were able to get the property for dirt cheap then. Cheaper then than they would be able to get it for now, before we got…really got our footing and got established in the neighborhood.

HAMPTON: What, what my job was in the Black Panther Party, I was the distribution manager which I dealt with all the newspapers that we would sell. Um, um we were selling a lot of newspapers during that period of time which helped us get a headquarters. That was our first headquarters on MLK and Cook, and so that’s where our income…we generated income to get our headquarters. Then we moved from that headquarters to the other one off of MLK, right there off Failing, right there. At one time we were probably selling over 1,000 papers a week and so that was my job to kinda generate cash.

0:22:18.5

MICHAEL: Could you talk about the Black Panther Clinic?

FORD: Uh, we had two clinics. We had the health clinic and the dental clinic. We first started the health clinic on, uh, Doctor Brown’s old office, actually it was Doctor Unthank’s, then it was Doctor Brown’s old office, right there on, uh, Williams and Russell right there. Um, we had to petition the Oregon Health Science Center Medical Center…the um, Medical Society and the, uh, the City of Portland just to get a license to run the clinic. Um, they hesitantly gave us a license to run the clinic and then we had to petition OHSU to get the doctors and nurses to help us to go and, and to get that started that like I said before. We had doctors that we would ask to donate their time once a month, once every thirty days. We ended up having more than enough doctors and we did the same thing for the dental clinic which was Doctor Marshall’s old office, now it’s a mortuary. Terry Family’s Mortuary right there, it’s where we had our dental clinic. Or was that one of the two like so it was like that. And so, uh, we did the same thing with the dental society and OHSU and also that’s how we ended up with those two clinics right there.

0:23:34.8

MICHAEL: What was your relationship to the police in Portland?

FORD: Terrible.

HAMPTON: Mm-hm. That was the main reason that we got the Black Panther Party started because of friction between the police and the Black community.

FORD: And right now it, it reminds us right now, that the way it was with the police during the 60s and 70s. You know, there was killings like this going on behind the police…um, you know, shootings, killings and so we was kinda needed to police the police and so that’s how this…how the relationship was not very good between us and the Police.

HAMPTON: Then in the Black Panther newspaper, Michael and Serena, we had a thing, which you called a pocket lawyer, ya know what I mean? So we had, we had, uh, good people out at Reed College. A lady worked out at Reed College; she was actually a part of the administration out there and we cut that thing out and we had over 10,000 pocket lawyers printed up. In case you got arrested there was a number for you to call, you know and somebody would, you know, try to and come get you out of jail…get a lawyer for ya. And we give half of these to the people in the white community. It was in the Vietnam Anti-War demonstrations and we took the other half and passed it out in the black neighborhood and the other half passed it out in the white neighborhood. And they, they couldn’t see blacks and whites workin’, workin’ together for a common good, you know. They didn’t like that all. You know, they try to portray us as being racist and being anti-establishment. You know if that’s, if that’s what it takes to be anti-establishment…again I tell you guys to thinks outside the box, you know. Look at the American economy today, you know what I mean? This a way…you following what I’m sayin’? Yeah, uh, why? Big Business or the Fortune 500 which has a gross domestic product of a lot of countries, you know. Profits, it’s all for profits. Look at the oil spill, you know, look at the two illegal wars we’ve done had in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know. Look at the trouble we had to go through to get a nation healthcare policy, the richest country in the world, you know. All the countries we give aid to, you know, from Israel to Egypt, all these places have national healthcare policy. And we’re just now getting one, and it’s so watered down we don’t know what it is.

0:26:02.6

MICHAEL: Um, if you’re comfortable, can you talk about going to jail?

FORD: Uh, Percy’s got stories and I’ve got stories too, from the time they threw me in jail. I was in there for about thirteen days. You know one thing I don’t like about jail, you can’t organize on the street corner. I like to organize on the street corner. I would leave the house in the mornings; I would have a stack of Panther Papers under my arm, always leaflets under my arm, and I’d catch a group of people standing on the corner like this and I’d say come out down tonight to the meeting, you know, we’re going to talk about what’s going on in the neighborhood. We’re going to try improve the conditions, you know. We’re going to wake-up the neighborhood about this police harassment and police brutality, you know, and so that’s what I would do in the morning. I couldn’t do this from jail and we wasn’t organized enough to have people out doin’ that while you were in jail, you know and that’s, that’s the main thing I wanted to do was get out. If I hadn’t got out and organized my case and hadn’t my witnesses together, I would, I would, I would have went up for 15 years, behind some bullshit.

HAMPTON: Your language Kent.

FORD: Excuse me you young kids. I’m pretty sure you guys heard that before, I’m sorry.

MICHAEL: That’s alright.

HAMPTON: One thing about Portland. Okay, there was a Tribune guy who bought a bunch of papers from the police department. A guy who retired. I don’t know why kept these papers, but there were boxes and boxes and boxes of papers on the Black Panther Party that was in there. And they were constantly trying to build cases on us to send us to jail and this was multi-agencies, you know, it wasn’t just the Portland Police. It was also the FBI, and anybody else that could kinda put us in jail, ya know. From taking pictures inside of Kent’s house to following me and, you know, I have my thickness was like this and I was so shocking and I keep it at home and I read through it once in awhile to see how close I was really becoming to really getting’ a major case out of this stuff. And same with Kent. You know, they tried on Kent two or three times and got stung behind it because on the inciting a riot case he ended up winning a big lawsuit off of that you know so and they dropped the case and he got a bunch of money off that so. Uh, we talk about jail, but we didn’t go to jail as much here as they did in some of the other major cities in the United States in like the New York and the Chicagos and the Philiadephias, and the New Orleans, and still in the Los Angeles.

FORD: Milwaukie, Indianapolis, New Jersey, New York.

HAMPTON: There are still people that’s in jail now that’s from the Black Panther Party that’s going on thirty five, forty years.

FORD: Yeah a couple of years ago, we had the forty year reunion down in Oakland, California. There were four hundred or five hundred of us there from all over American and some from Africa and some that’s in Africa that can never come back here. Our people in France can never come back here. But anyway, what I want to tell you is this. We all got a chance to share our stories from each chapter, you know. All of it was the same, all the repression was the same: the arrests, the beatings, the raids, midnight raids, early morning raids, you know. All us. It was one thing we had in common with all the chapters.

HAMPTON: Geronimo who was head of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles went to jail thirty-five years ago. He ended up getting out of jail about eight, nine years ago. In fact they had to pay him like what, five, six, seven million dollars because, you know, they illegally put him in jail and kept him in jail forever. You know Tupac Shakur? His aunt is still in Cuba. Asada Shakur, is still in Cuba, and she was a member of the Black Panther Party back in Philadelphia. Um, it got so bad on her she hijacked a plane and went to Cuba. And Cuba had a, a open…Cuba and France allowed all of our… and Algeria allowed our Black Panther Party brothers and sisters go to their countries because Eldrige Cleavers went to Algiers and had a bunch of people and went to France and then they went to Cuba also. So that’s why this boy Tupac was so deep into this little rapping stuff because his aunt is one of the former members of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panther Party, Asada Shakur.

FORD: Yeah his mother was one of the New York twenty one, you know. They arrested all twenty one of them. Got them on a conspiracy charge of do this and do that. The trial lasted five and a half hours Serena and Anthony…uh, Michael, and they were acquitted. They stayed in jail for over a year, their bail was a million dollars apiece. This is treatment we got back then and and, uh, anyway it caused a split in the party. The East Coast got divorced from the West Coast.

HAMPTON: And that’s what was…that’s how it started tearin’ apart.

FORD: It was tearin’ apart the party.

HAMPTON: One of my best friends in the Black Panther Party was the distribution manager, Sam Nadar from outta San Francisco, and he was goin back to New York, trying to mend the fences and it was so rough and so tough that they killed him while he was back there, you know, which really split the whole party.

FORD: FBI instigation, Michael.

HAMPTON : Yeah, back and forth so.

FORD : FBI instigation.

HAMPTON: I mean, I had just seen him. I was down in San Francisco probably three weeks to a month prior he was telling me he was going to New York and I said, ‘It’s a little rough back there for us right now and you shouldn’t go,’ and he did and you know I never forgot that one.

0:31:32.4

MICHAEL: Do you think, do you think your time as an activist paid off?

HAMPTON: Once an activist, always an activist.

FORD: Mmm-hmm.

HAMPTON: You know I’ve been fighting fights all my life to the betterment of everybody. I was a union official. Uh, you know it’s really hard for African American males to really get into the unions and push into construction jobs and this kind of stuff and I ended up runnin’ for office and getting hired and getting elected. And you know, my thing is, you know, to open up doors for our youth and our blacks, because not everybody is going to go to college and you need somebody who is going to pay you a decent wage, also be able to support your family, which is what I help…you know, I feel that…all this came from my activist background, as far as helping people try and get jobs and…you know it’s really hard for…once you…once the government get you in the system as far as having a record, it gets really difficult for our young black youth to get passed this.

FORD: Mmm-hmm.

HAMPTON: And to find some kind of decent job that they can get ‘cause, you know, I was helping the felons get a job. ‘Cause if you don’t get them a job, they’re going to do something and go back to jail.

FORD: That’s what the book is about The New Jim Crow. That I was telling you about?

HAMPTON: And so there’s a systematic problem with our system where the first thing they want to get you in jail so they can get you a track record on you so they can follow you and our youth falls into that with the gangs and everything else they fall into this little trap and once you get this tail on you then it’s impossible to get jobs in the federal government for x amount of years and all kinds of other stuff unless you get x amount of time clean behind you.

FORD: Hmm-mmm. You can’t vote.

HAMPTON: In some states you can’t vote and the whole bit. Uh, so, you know I found that the loophole in my union was that, you know, we don’t, we don’t check backgrounds unless you go into some high security area and such, maybe it’s like a nuclear power plant or a federal building. Even at that, or an airport, even at that if you have ten years clean without any record you can get a clearance to go into these kind of stuff’ and, you know, I was helpin some of the federal inmates coming out and a bunch of them stay out and doing well to this day. You know ‘cause you gotta give them some jobs or something.

FORD: So what they’re doing with this…she explains in this book, Michelle Alexander explains in this book, they creatin’ a permanent underclass. We have the largest prison population of any country in the world, over two million people. And this all started with the election of Ronald Reagan back in 1980, you know. Which was a mistake, you know, and George Bush two was a mistake. George Bush one was a mistake, you know. But anyway, make a long story short take your time you got, you got good teachers and stuff like that. If you got any problems with the book you got my e-mail, my phone number, call me up we’ll meet somewhere and we’ll go over it, you know. ‘Cause the main thing is I want you…I would like for you young Black kids and middle school and high school is to pick up on this. You’re being targeted. Jesses Jackson, who came to Portland recently because of the Aaron Campbell killing, you remember…you hear about that Aaron Campbell killing?

MICHAEL: Yeah.

FORD: Police shot him in the back. Demonstrations downtown, demonstrations here in the neighborhood and everything. Anyway Jesse Jackson came to talk about it here up at the Marionary Church; anyway he was on T.V. the other day when this seven year old girl got killed in Michigan, Detroit. Uh, police went into the house lookin’ for somebody else who wasn’t there and they threw a stun grenade in there and killed a seven year old girl.

SERENA: [inaudible]

FORD: You hear about that?

SERENA: Yeah I saw that on tv.

FORD: Huh?

SERENA: I saw that on tv when I was watching-

FORD: Okay, okay let me finish. Okay, He was saying, in the city of Chicago twelve people were shot by the police in a twenty four hour period and seven of them died. And the point being, he’s making a point, is it’s open season on young black men in America and, and that’s just the latest talked about it in this book, The New Jim Crow. And as Percy was sayin they get a tail on ya, they get charges on ya, and, and, uh, it’s creating a permanent underclass you know. It’s alright, ya know, if all of us was moving together you know. That’s what King was doing. King was getting people as young as seven and eight years old and, and, and they’d go and get in these demonstrations. They’d fill up a football fields, they’d fill up all the stadiums and stuff like that you know. And then they’d have nowhere to put them. They’d make the state or the government become ungovernable, you know and that’s why King was so successful. That’s how he got the Noble’s Peace Prize; he was trying to make the Constitution work for everybody and all the civil rights groups you know. I’m not talkin about the mainstream civil rights groups like the Urban League or the NAACP you know. Yeah all these middle of the….fence straddlers, middle of the road people, you know and they didn’t want to be cut into the system. Us, cut us in or cut us out we just didn’t care.

0:36:52.6

MICHAEL: Do you have any advice for people my age?

HAMPTON: Kent told you, you need to go to school. Stay out of trouble.

FORD: Go to school. Get you a good trade where you can make a good livin’. It takes a lot of money to live nowadays.

HAMPTON: Or get you a good education.

FORD: Get you a good education, you know.

HAMPTON: And stay out the traps.

FORD: And, and-

HAMPTON: Those traps there for you.

FORD: Yeah, but the main thing I want to…and always strive to learn, you know. Um, Malcolm X educated himself in prison. Uh, Martin Luther King he, he come from a pretty substantial family, a whole line of preachers, he was able to go to college you know and uh, that is one of the trips that I got against the Muslims. They just don’t got the education trip together, you know. The black…the nation of Islam, the black Muslims, you know. They come out with the paper [inaudible] you know. Nathan MaCall tells you all about it in his book. You know they tried to recruit him into the black, into the Muslims. You know and as he said [inaudible]…but here is a man who did ten years for robbing a McDonalds. Did ten years for it and came out and went to school and got educated and became a reporter for the Washington Post. You know Nathan McCall, make you wanna holler. And he’d say that is why the book is called Makes Me Wanna Holler. He comes out, he goes back to the old neighborhood where he came up at and he looks at the guys on the street doing the same thing he did when we was a little boy, when he was, was out there with him and he said, ‘oh it just makes you wanna holler,’ you know? And it does. You go down to the prison, guys you ain’t seen…OSP, OSCI… you go downtown to jail and guys you ain’t seen on the street in years, you know, and they all in jail!

Wrap up and thank yous