take in letters from the incarcerated and fulfill the best they can through book donations at the store. they send i think about 40 states or so across the country. the numbers are staggering. i think they get about 10,000 packages a year, which represents about 20 to 30,000 books. i think the program since june of 2020 has collected about 7,000 books so far, so thanks to everybody that's made donations at that time. if you want to know more about new york city bookstores you can go to their site, bookstores nospaceco ny.org. they've demonstrated and shown why literacy and access is the human rights. we commend them on that. it's a setback and we want to continue to support the people that are there. i want to give a shout out to our two guests that have a book out just published i think in the last month called "the black panther party." graphic novel history is a category that is hard sometimes. it is the history of the black panther party and david walker is an award-winning comic book writer, journalist and educator. his works include in 1987 he produced and directed [inaudible] best known for his work on graphics novels which is the history that was performed and marcus anderson is an illustrator graduated from the university of new york thank you to both of you and i really appreciate you being here to talk about this. we said briefly how it seems as if when we create these things we will give you credit for your time. >> thank you. wanted to start the conversation just talking about the way of interpreting. why do you think it's important to take on a serious historical subjects in the graphic form? >> for people who don't know graphic novels are essentially comic books that are longer so it is 20 or 30 pages a graphic novel might be 200 or 300 pages. for me, the thing i like about the media is the way that it combines text and image and i think for a lot of people who struggle with reading especially, and i was one of them when i was younger, the imagery helps to process the information that you are reading whether it is nonfiction or fiction. so, for me, that is part of what i love about this whole i guess you could call it the industry and when it comes to nonfiction stuff like the panther party or even frederick douglass, these are topics that are when you read books about them, they tend to be with tons of words and not that many pictures. so i will say that 10-year-old and me is drawn to swift pictures and so that's why i'm doing this. >> with a great educational tool i know myself there was a lot of random trivia i knew about world geographies. they are a great trojan horse for teaching and people take them as just funny books or picture books but they are great for getting information across especially like our book which there is a lot of information there so it is a perfect marriage of the written word and images. >> it can give that more traditional longform history that history cannot? >> i don't want to toot the horn of this particular expression but i do think there is a lot to be said for showing people things. the old adage pictures speak louder than words and for me, even as a kid this is what i was attracted to and as an adult this is what i am attracted to. again i just keep coming back to the fact that this is how we capture people's attention. there's that old saying you can't judge a book by its cover but then why is so much attention put to what is on the cover and it's the same with products that we see at the grocery store and movie posters. there's so much emphasis on the visual and i think that to dismiss it in terms of like comic books are for kids or graphic novels are for kids just because there's pictures, some of the oldest forms of communication are pictures. you can look at the high hieroglyphics and cave drawings. all of these existed before the written language and so i think that we should never dismiss the power and the importance of pictures. >> as an illustrator i'm curious to know how you feel about that. >> i agree and the written word is amazing. i read a lot of both written and comic book form and i think there's ways may be that a written book can allow you to get in-depth, but there is something about the visual media. it's not either or. it's like both dave and i have said in interviews that we hope this book encourages people to do more reading about the panthers and most of that reading is obviously in the traditional form so i think that it's all valuable but i do think that there's something special. i have an inherent bias but there's something special about the comic book medium. a. >> that is a good segue to thei. i'm going to set the stage to talk about the origins or the background to the black panther party. do you want to talk about how the black panther party fit into the broad civil rights movement? >> the black panther party was formed in 1966 in oakland california. both of them were activists, avid followers of malcolm x and very frustrated with the civil rights movement especially the nonviolent side of things where the attitude was turn the other cheek and not so much toward self-defense and that is what drew them to say malcolm x or robert f williams. there were very serious cases of police brutality in the area at this time and they came together and decided to form an organization and called themselves the black panther party named after a political organization, the lounge party democratic something that chose as their mascot the black panthers. this was an offshoot of s's -- sncc and they built campaigns to end poverty and hunger. the organization grew very quickly and one of the things they were known for is carrying guns and they exercised their right to carry guns and in doing so it brought a lot of confrontations with the police and a lot of publicity. there is a saying there's no bad thing as -- no such thing as bad publicity but most of the publicity was bad. just coming back here -- yeah, i was interested in the lcfo. i didn't realize that this was a originator behind black panther party. one of the other things you talk about is there were multiple black panther parties before they consolidated. what was it about that name or symbol? what is the symbology of the black panther party and -- >> with the lcfo which is the lowndes county freedom organization, and it was in alabama if i remember correctly, it was an organization to register black people to vote and in this particular county, there was a disproportionate number of black people but they were not allowed to vote and the clan was very active as part of the state with a lot of violence. the registration to vote as the movement was picking up steam, the violence against them was picking up steam and the organization was formed to defend people it was sort of this attitude is like nonviolence is okay but we are getting our heads cracked open and i think that really appealed to black folks especially in parts of the north and west coast and the panther, the black panther is just very symbolic of a predator who mind is its own business until it is attacked and you would hear these early interviews and he would say a panther is an animal that with its back in the corner will come out fighting and that just appealed to people. if i put myself in that position in the late teens to early 20s black in the mid 60s, i think i could see myself being drawn to the idea of a black panther. >> i wanted to ask marcus, there's something graphically compelling about the book that sets it apart from all the other activist groups of the day. do you think the organizers were influenced at all by comics or contemporary graphic design, and did they find that it was useful as a means to proselytizing the movement? >> i know the black panthers newspaper which was huge in spreading the word of the party and then the party going national, the role that it plays was unquestionable. emory douglas who is an accomplished artist, was the lead artist from the paper and people like lewis also illustrated and provided our work, but either way, the parties newspaper and illustration and graphic images like emory was so gifted with creating compelling images and using them to spread messages and get ideas out, so the imagery and artwork played a huge role. i don't know about comic books. i do know that ironically the creation of the black panther and marvel comics happened to coincide with the formation of the group when it was totally unrelated to so it was a coincidence but i don't know exactly the influence. >> something that i thought about and i never studied it really was the importance of graphic illustration or imagery and information within the black community because for years black people were not allowed to know how to read and how do you convey ideas and information and through this tradition whether it's illustration or painting, whatever, there's a lot of information that can be conveyed and i'm sure that somewhere there is a history of this because just like we talk about the history of the drama or music, gospel music and ways of communicating ideas during the days of slavery so my imagination is being sparked right now and i think i'm going to have to do some research on the conveying information through graphic imagery for people who don't know how to read. how does that sound? one of the dominant narratives sort of the most brutal didn't coalesce but in the north and west so why oakland and not say mobile or atlanta? >> that is a great question. i can only theorize but a lot of other historians have said this, tomac. in the early 19 teens all the way through the 40s there was what was called the great migration where a lot of blacks left the south and went to chicago and los angeles and san francisco, the bay area and they were looking for a better way of life escaping from jim crow and the racism and the clan and honestly they didn't find a better way of life. it was better than essay parts of life in alabama or arkansas or mississippi but it was still pretty bad and i think it was almost a sense of futility like they had gone to the promised land and the promised land wasn't all that it's made out to be and from there when we look at huey newton, they are the first generation raised in this environment in places where it was supposed to be better and it wasn't and so where do you go from there and how do you protect yourself if you're from texas or alabama, there is this dream of we just go north or east or west life is going to be better and then you get there and it's not. part of the reason this wasn't talked about much in the story but as black folks were migrating out and cities like chicago or san francisco or la were growing, the police forces were growing as well and they were actively recruiting police from these places so they were bringing in the source of oppression, the system, the status quo law and order was bringing the same system of oppression so there was never really an escape from it. i think for the panthers it in the bay area especially it was notorious for its police brutality and racism and you had a group of young people who just couldn't take it anymore and i think the reaction in the northern cities and west coast cities you could see the parallels with malcolm x and the nation of islam and some of these northern cities because they spoke to people in a different way. racism and oppression manifested itself in different ways throughout the country. it was all the same but almost like different dialects so racist cops in oakland california are going to be different than the racist cops in birmingham alabama and what do you have to protect you in oakland versus birmingham, not much. >> 100% everything david just said and i also feel like my answer is connected to the earlier point about the timeliness of the book because sadly, this book is timely in pretty much any time in america in the sense that as a nation we haven't learned all the lessons that we should so we are still dealing with over policing and police brutality and all these things and like david said, the nature of the policing kind of became ubiquitous across the country so any city was possibly fertile ground when you think about that. >> to go back to the founders here, how did they meet? >> they met in college. bobby was a few years older than he we and they were going to college in the early 60s and both were somewhat politically active and running and some of the same circles in the bay area and that was how they met. they were both somewhat frustrated with what the other activists were doing recently and they just sort of came together. they had both been involved in organizations that didn't seem to meet their needs so they just kind of have this attitude of if it doesn't work, we need to build our own. in the beginning, it was just the two of them. they sat down and wrote the ten-point program and then they kind of flipped a coin to see who would be the chair man and who would be the minister of information and that is where it took off. there is a famous story bobby would tell how they were out in berkeley one night and this was before they formed the panthers they were visiting an antiwar demonstration and bobby was doing some spoken word stuff and they got arrested, beat up by the cops and it was sort of in that moment they were like we are going to have to do something and shortly after that, they formed the panthers. >> we will show some more slides because i think this is where to me, graphic history as an advantage where you can look at those smaller moments and illustrate relationships in a way that you have to step back and i think you do that beautifully. i'm going to share some of these. maybe just walk us through how you were able to illustrate the kind of connection between these two men who are bonded by certain ideas but have very different personalities. >> sure. one of the things is watching them speak. we may get into this later, but coverage of the various parties, some people were easier to find and others it was harder. bobby and huey were people you could easily find footage, so i looked at a lot of still photographs where i find video footage is really informative for seeing people's personalities and their different characteristics and inflections. i did a lot of just sketching of all of the main figures that would appear frequently in the book. and basically memorize their face and at different expectations so starting with bobby and huey who are central. i watched a lot of footage and listened to them and got a sense of their personalities and voice and translated that into images. >> what distinguished them as people with different personalities but also how did that evolve? >> in some ways it is similar to malcolm x if you study the life of malcolm x, he was born in nebraska but spent a lot of time in chicago, new york and so he was described as more of an urban negro and the black panther party was sort of like there are these guys that were rough and tumble, they were educated but they were not overly educated. none of them were really college graduates. some of them were military vets and they were of a certain age. that is crucial. bobby and eldridge were among the oldest of the original founding members and neither of them would have been in their 30s and so i think it was that combination that was the part of country that they lived in where they were from and we study the civil rights movement in general you really begin to see different aspects and permutations dependent on where you went. it's like when doctor king went to chicago and encountered some of the most very led racism he ever encountered and who would have thought in this northern city. so what we saw in these northern cities was a formation of organizations that i guess you could say grew out of the streets and the civil rights movement in the south grew out of the ground, out of the cotton fields, the tobacco fields then what's an organization that grows out of concrete so we have to think of them as plants growing you have to look at the soil or the ground in which they grew and the panthers grew up in concrete. >> this seems like a good point to ask. black panther has pretty much always been depicted as a monolithic group and aggressively. how true was that? >> i will let you answer often times they do not get their proper due. part of the party they were 50% if not more i think a lot of that came from as the party progressed in 69 or 70 there is a lot of guys in jail. of law enforcement was trying to break the panthers up and they were targeting the men, so there was more men in jail tied up in the court system. later on we started seeing them get caught up in that system, tomac but there is something inherently threatening about the black masculinity and the other thing that is crucial is that black women have never been given their due in history and because they've never been given their due in history, it is reflective of how easily dismissed they are and how easily dismissed they were. the reality that i wasn't able to go in depth in that part of the story as i wanted to, but it also tells me that there's a story left to be told, and i'm hoping that there will be some other creative individual that what they are going to focus on is the women of the party. >> you heard a little bit earlier on the ten-point program. how were these different from the goals of the southern christian leadership conference? >> specifically they put together the ten-point program which is divided into two sections. there was what we want and what we believed and what we wanted was basic stuff. good housing, good education, good jobs. we want to end police brutality and an exemption from military service. everything that they were asking for was relevant from 100 years earlier in 1866 and now 55 years later, it's still relevant and they were addressing things that most of them are guaranteed in the constitution of the united states of america and it wasn't like they were asking for anything outrageous. they weren't even asking 40 acres and a mule. they were asking for what this country claims to be about and they were asking for equity and reciprocity and for that, they were destroyed. >> david sums it up especially drawing the lines on the things they would be asked backwards and forwards. like doctor martin luther king being killed and there's both the first nature of with a broad picture of the things that were being asked for in the program were so reasonable if the country was living up to the ideas that it professed but that wasn't the case. >> to get up off my soapbox, i don't care that the mars rover landed okay if we could put this sophisticated piece of machinery on mars and yet the cops still construed people of color. if we as a society can put a robot on mars, then there's something fundamentally wrong with us because that is a hard thing to do. i can go outside and feed a hungry person right now. if we put the same resources to just feeding the hungry there would be no more hunger in this country. and when i start thinking about this sort of stuff it becomes infuriating because the panthers were not asking for their own colony on mars. they were just asking for decent housing in chicago and oakland and san francisco and la. it's interesting to me what happens and it's not just black folks. it's people of color, it's an amazing thing what happens when all they say is can you treat us like a human being. that is all anyone is asking for. we get beat up and thrown in jail and get killed. the people who stormed the capital on january 6th what they are asking for is don't take our power away and allow us and we will kill for it. and they are not in jail. they haven't been targeted by the fbi or law and order. i don't want to get too high up on the soapbox but all you have to do is look at the path of the panthers march on the capital in san francisco. >> you were setting this up perfectly for me. it's one of the most bizarre episodes that i think people watching this would love to hear about how that -- do you want to set that up and i can show you the images? >> do you want to set it up? >> it's one of the moments in the book in this image you see then governor ronald reagan. the panthers act on the floor that sought to shoot down people's rights which is ironic in today's where people were looking for the opposite. the leadership basically decided that they needed to make a show of course and he was going to read an executive mandate but it was basically approximation of speaking about exactly what the party was representing, speaking about people's need to defend themselves in the wake of american history, period so they went down there and they were not armed, but they went to the state capital and as they got to the capital, you see they were speaking to a group of children and you noticed them arriving and we got the mandate number three but the panthers went into the mandate and wanted to meet again inside and they got turned around and lost which we also illustrate in the book and they end up accidentally on the floor. they had gone through taken away and once they got outside he wanted to mandate again and the news cameras picked that up, so it went everywhere and this was a pivotal moment because this was when the message went nationwide and led directly to people across the country and branches across the country and is subsequently they did leave the state capital but when they stopped at a gas station not far away, the police descended on them but that moment was important because it basically was a moment they went worldwide, and that is due in part to no small part you were asked about the personalities and i think that if you watched bobby speak or listen to him speak, he's definitely a really dynamic speaker and gregarious person and the delivery address at that moment was a perfect timing, both in good ways and bad ways in the sense that obviously the fbi was listening as well so they attracted attention from people who wanted to join and the people that were inspired but to your point, there was no violence committed. they were armed, but they didn't commit any violence. they basically didn't assault and kill police officers like you saw and they were dealt with more swiftly. they were taken more seriously and ramifications that lasted for decades under that so there is a vast disparity in the responses. >> i do say it this way, after the panthers went to sacramento, they passed the most aggressive laws in the history of the country and it was under the leadership of ronald reagan this year the reaction should have been every single gun should be confiscated in the country. there was 20 something members in sacramento that day every single one of them was arrested, and the black people that just happened to be at the gas station where they were were arrested. more people were arrested. there was 100% arrest rate in 67 in sacramento and just in sheer numbers, there were more people in sacramento than in washington, d.c. not a single shot was fired, nothing was destroyed, no one was assaulted. what they were asking for was 100% within the law whereas the people on the sixth were seeking to over overthrow a fair election. someone who didn't deserve to be in power, who legally did not win the election and the fact of the matter is that if black people had reacted that way and had done what they did with that level of violence, we would all be in prison right now. it doesn't matter what we do. i'm a college professor and i would be in jail because they would be rounding us up. anyone who does not believe that has not studied american history because there is a lot of japanese-americans who didn't do anything during world war ii and they were all thrown into internment camps. >> if you have questions, please put them in the question area before we conclude. to speak to that, reading your book it feels one of the threats is how the black panther party was sort of barely born before the fbi and the justice department. can you explain what happened on the black panther movement? >> it stands for counterintelligence programming and this was a hectic the fbi used to infiltrate organizations and they would use paid informants to bring different organizations down. up until that point, probably the most or aggressive organization was the communist party in the united states, but they targeted the black panther party and successfully destroyed them. what we talked about in the book, there was an activist in the area, japanese-american and there's overwhelming evidence that he was fbi informant provocateur. and a okie was the person that gave bobby and huey their first guns. he was a local in the san francisco and even bobby and huey said he was one of the founding members of the panthers. that means the black panthers were actually infiltrated before they became the black panthers which means they were infiltrated from the first day and they were deemed to failure isn't even quite the right word. this was something else altogether. that seems like another transition point. in this trial it's more of a cameo appearance but it goes way further in spotlighting fred hampton came along, came to power in 68 or 69 in the panthers. he was in prison, bobby was in trouble with the law, eldridge was on the run and the leadership of the party was taken up and there were two people that started to emerge at this time, one was geronimo pratt who went for a crime he didn't commit and was locked up for 27 years and then the other leader that came into the store was fred hampton 20-year-old kid out of chicago and arguably the most effective organizer the party had seen. he was young, charismatic. he was attempting to recruit street gangs that had already become politicized so he was trying to build a bigger army of radical activists. but on top of that, he felt allegiances with other organizations so there was the young patriots and the young lords which was a puerto rican organization of the radicals, so he built what was at the time called the rainbow coalition. this is even before jesse jackson's rainbow coalition. j edgar hoover talked about the need to stop the rise of a black messiah and they had identified three people that they felt could be the black messiah. somebody that would bring them together in a way that would be so powerful they could actually change the way the united states was run and those three people were malcolm x, and fred hampton. by the time he had taken power, both malcolm x and martin luther king were dead and americorps was getting angrier and i think more desperate this is what hoover thought. they were too stupid to realize we don't want them around either and so for that, fred hampton was killed. he was targeted by the fbi and there was a paid informant. he drugged the food so fred would fall asleep and wouldn't be able to awake when a team of cops who were plain clothed cops showed up at one in the morning without anyone and came in with guns blazing. jesus and the black messiah is about that whole incident in chicago and what happened in la is la was the first chapter that was trying to criticize the street gangs. they were both murdered very early on and what appeared to be some sort of rivalry but it wasn't. the violence was provoked by fbi provocateur, and carter had been a notorious gangster in la. what he was trying to do is similar to what fred was trying to do later on and that was to politicize the street gangs of los angeles. that was inviting and learning g how to fight and he was such a threat that they framed him and went to prison for 27 years. if you study the history of the gangs in la, you can follow the direct line from the destruction in the late 60s into the emergence of the crips and bloods in the 70s and 80s and it is pretty fascinating to see and discuss these things to see how the destruction of the panthers how it played out and the long-lasting effects. >> we have a few minutes left. on how you address the assassination of the graphic novel sort of ties in. because of the recent film you have some powerful pages in this book i find it's more visceral and how you've rendered it in your drawing. halle lead has all of these bells and whistles at their disposal. what you do i think in a more effective way was that hard to map that out? >> the brief answer to your question is execution wise, it wasn't difficult. as you mentioned fred hampton is a figure that i had a lot of respect for and also anger with how he was killed so i knew that this chapter would be emotionally heavy to draw. as far as the x executing at it wasn't hard in the sense that even in the script phase david had written some very good ideas that i think speaks to the earlier point about the american word and the written word and the visual, but david had the script and the idea that the sound effect lettering would be obscure so as they were laying in bed and they desperately tried to wake him up you see her speaking and trying to wake him up and other panthers that came in to help, but the noise of the gunshot is over so they will read the speech bubble but it re-creates the idea of chaos. it's been said between 99 and like 100 rounds into the building and only one shot came from the panthers gun which was mark clark when he had been shot so his gun literally went off because he had been shot. my point is in the media of comics like you said when we don't have the advantage of audio, these were some of the techniques we used to try to just re-create the sudden chaos of the moment in addition to the color shift to these red and gray tones. i use those in the chapter through the book that deal with violence and racial violence in particular like when i was depicting the history of lynching and i used in this chapter so these are some of the ways i went about conveying the order of the moment. david and i both agreed that we did not want to be gratuitous so when you see the final panel they happened just off the panel. we show the shots coming so that's kind of how we approached it and we wanted to convey how certain and awful it was but also had to have some respect for fred hampton and his legacy and not turn this into something gratuitous. >> it's in the book so we don't want to give everything away. they are discussed and we should take time to recognize there are people living in this affiliation and others who have this to discuss in the book and i think that is important to know. please support books borrowed of new york city and if you want to donate directly you can go to our website, freebird books.com and for a few more days this is featured in the february book drive along with 200 other books and if you want to purchase a book for yourself, you can go to the bookshop or choose another bookstore of your preference to get a copy of. i want to thank david and marcus for helping us out and answering all these questions. there's so much people need to know about this chapter in american history, so much that gets understood. .. >>. >>

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