I'm not being a nonviolence advocate in a religious sense. I'm being it in a very practical sense. My opposition to violence is very practical, and I don't want to confuse my nonviolence advocacy as being against self-defense. I'm very much for self-defense. I'm being practical in the sense that you don't fight a tank with a beer can. To me, that's just suicide. That kind of violence simply invites enemies of black people to legitimately use their weapons to do what they want to do.

SEALE: I look at black people basically as a very peaceful people, not a violent people. The Black Panther Party prefers non-antagonistic contradictions. We're not stupid, you know, we're no ignorant. We realize that the power structure, the racists, the bigots, the pigs, the criminal agents for the demagogic ruling class are the ones who make the contradictions antagonistic by murder and brutality. So it's necessary for us to defend ourselves.

It has been necessary for black people to pick up a gun and organize in the black community because we want a lot of things that we are supposed to have had as human beings and we have not had them as one of our human rights and our constitutional rights as a people. We cannot let them continue to deny us this, and when they overtly attack us, we have but one alternative-to pick up a gun to get rid of the gun in the hands of the Fascist.

We oppose the extremism of bigotry, racism, brutality, and murder. We want peace and we understand that to get peace we're going to have to have to fight for peace to get rid of the Nixon-Agnew-Mitchell regime, the extremism of Ronald Reagan, of the Mayor Daleys, of Judge Coxes and Judge Hoffmans, and Carswells, and avaricious businessman who call on the pigs to brutalize and murder people when they peaceful go forth to demonstrate.

TERRY: What is your prescription for ending white racism in America?

BOND: It is part of the human condition, but it can be controlled. Government is the force to control it. If government doesn't sanction it, its manifestations will be less severe.

Some predicted that when lunch counters were integrated, blood would flow in the streets. White people wouldn't tolerate sitting next to a black. But the government said the counters would integrate. As resentful as white people were and as much as white people disliked black people, blood didn't flow. There was no official government sanction for it. I think people behave as they are allowed to behave. If you don't sanction anti-social behavior, then you're not going to encourage it.

Unfortunately, the federal government is sanctioning more racism today than five or ten years ago. You see Nixon trying to kill the voting rights act of '65, the Moynihan letter, trying to curb the beneficial work foundations have done among poor people, trying to reverse the very slow process of desegregation ordered by the Supreme Court in 1954. This is giving rise to overt acts of racism, like attacking school buses.

JACKSON: First, fascism must be seen as a sickness, and not as a means, to be dealt with by psychotherapists and not by white politicians. That's the first thing that must be understood. Pink-skin worship is pathological, and a person is sick who is threatened by people of another color. So racism at that level is a white problem.

At another level, we may not be able to determine the attitudes of the races, but we can determine a white's behavior relative to us. If we've got his margin of profit, we've got his vitals, his genitals. You don't determine the love in his heart, but you can determine the pain in his very being.

When we fought A and P in Chicago, we didn't change their hearts. We said that we wanted black managers in black stores. We wanted the garbage accounts for those stores, the exterminator accounts, the contracts to build all future A and P stores.

We didn't change the hearts of the executives, we simply changed the behavior of the corporation. You don't strive for love between institutions, you strive for love between individuals and justice between institutions. And sometimes justice has its own way of creating, if not love, respect. That's the real issue.

YOUNG: We need to unleash all of the great researchers who have been spending all their time studying black people and making money onto the subject of white people to find out what in the world is wrong with that man that makes him so obsessed with feeling superior.

What is the need? Why does he have to have somebody to feel superior to? I'd like to study why he wants to bring up his children in those bland, sterile, antiseptic gilded ghettos, giving sameness to each other, producing stagnation and uncreative peole in a world that's become a neighborhood. I think there's a sickness here, and it ought to be studied by those same people who've been making their living from revealing the pathologies of black people.

Work must be done in the next few years to project the strengths of black people. We are seen always as a problem and a burden, never as an asset. Everybody thinks in terms of what they must give to us, and not what we are able to give to the larger society.