3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

him physically, whipping him with a leather belt or the thin branches of a peach tree
("switches") . He canied a knife for protection ; his sister carved a Coke bottle ("to
coldcock any guy"), and his brother's girlfriend "a razor soaked in garlic and lemon
juice."s ~ . "For us;' he explained, "fighting's like words: a way to work things out. We
fight to make friends, get rid of our frustration and boredom, assert our identities .
Fighting is a creative outlet." s2 Violence was everywhere in Hilliard's world.
"Everything that surrounds me," he wrote, "encourages me to believe in the rule of
force." ss
As a way of understanding the world, violence made sense to most of the
Panthers . Seale conceived of two kinds of violence : that kind "perpetrated against our
people by the fascist aggression of the power structure," and self-defense, "a form of
violence used to defend ourselves from the unjust violence inflicted upon us."~ Newton
added several other forms of violence, too :
We also wanted to show that the other kinds of violence poor people suffer-unemployment,
poor housing, inferior education, lack of public facilities, the
inequity of the draft--were part of the same fabric . If we could organic people
against police brutality . . . we might move them toward eliminating related forms
of oppression . The system, in fact, destroys us through neglect much more often
than by the police revolver . The gun is only the coup de ¢^ce , the enforcer. To
wipe out the conditions leading to the coup de ar~ce--that was our goal . The gun
and the murder it represented would then fade away ss
si~~ 41 .
s2~~ 69.
ss~~ g7 .
~Seale, Seiu the Time, 418 .
ss Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 188-189 .
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