By January 1969 the Black Panther Party had chapters all over the country. The party, as it then stood, had been built up by Eldridge Cleaver (with the help of countless thousands, naturally) to keep Huey Newton, the cofounder of the party, from being sent to the gas chamber. He'd been charged with the killing of an Oakland policeman in October 1967. Huey was then in prison at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, California, and Eldridge had fled the country and gone into exile. None of us who were left really knew what to do.
Other than the campaign to free Huey, there was no long-range strategy or plan of action for leading the struggle, despite the fact that we now had a national organization in our hands. We hit the books to grasp Marxism-Leninism as a tool that would help us with the task ahead, and political education became the order of the day. Daily community work continued, but every spare minute was used to study. Each branch was to conduct at least three formal political education classes a week, and in addition to attending classes at the branch offices across the Bay Area, we all went to headquarters on Sundays for a general class. The demographic makeup of the organization was such that there were many members who could not read or effectively understand what they were reading, and so we used the tried-and-true method of going through the materials word by word, line by line, not advancing until everything was understood by all.
