http://articles.philly.com/2000-02-11/news/25575822_1_black-panthers-pete-o-neal-era
By Andrew Maykuth, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Posted: February 11, 2000
IMBASENI,
Tanzania — The night before he slipped out of the United States in
1970, fugitive Pete O'Neal gazed out of a New York apartment and
absorbed the ordinary street scene below.
"I told myself: You have
to etch this scene in your memory because it may be the last thing you
see in America for two or three years," said O'Neal, the former head of
the radical Black Panther Party's chapter in Kansas City.
Three
years became three decades, and the vision of a Lower East Side
delicatessen is still O'Neal's last memory of America. Now approaching
his 60th birthday, his dreadlocks and beard gone gray, O'Neal has lived
for 28 years in Tanzania, one of the last American exiles from an era
when black militants were virtually at war with the U.S. government.
O'Neal
has mellowed with age and toned down the threatening rhetoric of the
1960s, but he is still an outlaw. He fled a four-year federal prison
sentence for transporting a gun across state lines. He said he was
convicted unjustly and feared for his safety, but the U.S. government
does not take bail-jumping lightly. He said he has been told that the
Justice Department is unlikely to set aside his case unless he first
expresses contrition.
"They want some sort of mea culpa," said
O'Neal, who escaped with his wife, Charlotte Hill O'Neal, also a member
of the Black Panther Party. "We absolutely refuse to do that. We feel
the things we were involved in were justified and correct. We have
nothing to apologize for."
His wife is free to return to the
United States, but O'Neal rarely ventures far from their four-acre farm
in this village 15 miles from Arusha, near the Kenyan border. His father
died last year, and O'Neal was unable to attend the funeral in
Missouri. He has not seen a daughter from his first marriage for 30
years.
He is a relic from another America, another era. Old allies
have become part of the system that once aroused his ire. His distant
cousin Emmanuel Cleaver was Kansas City's mayor in the '90s. O'Neal's
sister now lives in a Kansas City suburb that was off-limits to African
Americans in the 1960s.
Sometimes he dreams of returning to his
old neighborhood near 12th Street and the Paseo, but the landscape has
changed since his youth. "The Kansas City I knew doesn't exist," he
said. "The America I knew doesn't exist."
Paul J. Magnarella, a
University of Florida anthropology professor and lawyer, filed an appeal
two years ago on O'Neal's behalf, but it was denied. Democratic
politicians have petitioned the Clinton administration to grant him
clemency, to no avail.
'Last of the last'
O'Neal says it is unlikely the standoff will ever be resolved. "No one yields power without a struggle," he said.
"I
am the last of the last," he said. Other Black Panthers died, some are
still imprisoned, and others made their apologies. "Everybody else
worked out their deal."
Although he has grown disenchanted with
Marxism and now thinks a violent overthrow of the government is
"ridiculous," he is unashamed of his Panther past and is no fan of
capitalism. He displays framed photos of himself and Charlotte posing
with .30-caliber carbines, along with shots of him wearing the Panthers'
signature black beret and leather jacket.
He may be in exile, but
he is not isolated from the modern world. He stays in contact with
friends by cellular telephone and electronic mail. The home
entertainment center at the foot of his bed is his window onto the
world: The television is connected to a satellite dish that pulls down
CNN and the BBC. The book shelves are filled with an eclectic collection
of videotapes sent by friends: Malcolm X, Jungle Fever, The Sound of
Music.
The walled compound where the O'Neals live is the most
elaborate residence in Imbaseni. He helped bring water and electricity
into this place a few miles from Mount Kilimanjaro, and is now a
respected elder of the Wameru people.
"We are pioneers here," said Charlotte O'Neal, an artist who was 19 when she left Kansas City.
At
first Pete O'Neal made a living making sausage and selling mustard. Ten
years ago the O'Neals founded the United African American Community
Center, which operates development and education projects in the
surrounding villages.
He built the Malcolm X Theater beside his
house, where rural youths are introduced to the electronic age on three
personal computers O'Neal assembled from old parts.
"We're doing
something positive," he said. "We're continuing the work of the Black
Panther Party, uplifting the community. We're doing it without political
motives, and we're doing it without guns."
He makes his living
now by hosting tour groups from the United States and arranging exchange
programs for Tanzania and American students. The visitors include
middle-class university students as well as teenagers who attend a
Kansas City school for troubled youths. Part of their training is a
five-day climb up Kilimanjaro.
He said he was struck by how many
American youths come from single-parent families, so he tries to teach
them about the strength of African families.
"We believe that a
solid family structure is the foundation of a strong community," O'Neal
said. "We bring young people out and expose them to this. In essence, we
say there are alternatives to what you've known."
Many young
Americans have little knowledge of the Black Panthers, O'Neal said.
"Charlotte has had people ask her: 'The Black Panthers - they were like
the Crips and the Bloods, right?' "
He said he understood the
young people because he was a street hustler and petty criminal in
Kansas City in the 1960s when he was introduced to the Black Panthers.
The party, modeled on Marxist ideology of a class struggle, advocated
confrontation and violence to end racial inequality.
The Kansas
City Panthers organized school breakfast programs and other projects
modeled on Malcolm X's teachings of self-reliance. But the militants
managed to enrage the established order by demanding that businesses in
black areas pay for the programs and by barging into churches to solicit
contributions.
He said the Black Panthers also tried to provoke
confrontation with the police by shadowing police patrol cars. The
Panthers accused Kansas City's police chief, Clarence Kelley, of giving
arms to a white-supremacist group, and they disrupted Senate hearings
when Kelley was named head of the FBI.
In 1969, federal agents
charged O'Neal with transporting a single-shot shotgun across state
lines. A year before, he had bought the gun in Kansas City, Kan. The
police found the weapon in Kansas City, Mo., in the car of another Black
Panther. There was no contention that the gun had been used in the
commission of a crime.
"We had guns galore," O'Neal said. "Maybe I touched that one. But I didn't bring that gun across the state line."
He was convicted and sentenced in October 1970 to four years in prison.
'I'm not a criminal'
"I
was convinced and continue to be convinced that I would have been
killed in prison," he said. "I didn't want to gamble with my life."
"I
am not a criminal," he said. "I haven't robbed anybody. I haven't hurt
anybody. I spoke out very strongly for the things I believed, but I
don't feel I have to go to prison for that."
While he was out on
bail awaiting appeal, the O'Neals bolted to New York, where members of
the Communist Party helped them to flee to Sweden. He later went to
Algeria, then a safe haven for leftist liberation groups and terrorists.
The Black Panthers had an "embassy" in Algiers.
After a
falling-out with the Algerian government, O'Neal moved in 1972 to
Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere had set up a socialist
government.
Tanzania in the early 1970s was a sanctuary for
hundreds of African Americans disaffected by life in the United States,
but their euphoria over their new home was short-lived. Nyerere's
government jailed several hundred Americans on suspicion they were a
"fifth column" against socialism. Only a few dozen Americans still live
in Tanzania today, O'Neal said.
"A lot of us couldn't make the transition to the African way of life," he said.
He
and Charlotte raised their son and daughter in Tanzania, and both
children went back to America - they live in the Kansas City area. But
O'Neal remains.
He would like to visit America, but only on his terms.
But
he knows he will never live in America again. He does not find the
images he sees of the United States attractive: the obsession with
wealth, the violence of youth.
"I think I would probably be terrified of the place, everything moving so fast, people all whizzing by."
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http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-black-panther-20120129-html-htmlstory.html
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