Elaine Brown, one no-nonsense sistah who spent three of her 10 years with the Black Panthers as party chairperson of the mostly male organization, recently spoke at the annual Thurgood Marshall Lecture on Law and Human Rights, benefiting UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.Boy did this former afro-wearing, gun carrying firebrand have a lot to get off her chest!
As a UCLA student herself in 1969, Brown was present at the infamous Campbell Hall shootings, which erupted out of a meeting to negotiate the leadership and direction of what would become the school’s African American Studies department.
“I continually hear that we’re in a post-racial period,” said Brown, who also edited the famed Black militant organization’s official newspaper and co-established its free legal aid program. “We’re told that there’s no more debt to pay. Yet, we have the highest poverty rates and lowest employment. There are two million people in prison, 50 percent of them Black men.”
Brown says these types of inequality are just a few examples of the modern assault on African-Americans and she was not convinced 'that we're in a post-racial period.'
Now based in Atlanta, the 65-year-old Brown has in recent years focused her activist work on criminal justice reform. In 1998, she formed a local grassroots movement, Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice, and founded a legal defense committee in support of a new trial for Michael Lewis. Also known as “Little B,” Lewis was 13 years-old when he was sentenced to life in prison in 1977.In an early highlight of her remarks, Brown recalled arguing with another African-American on an Atlanta street, as the two debated whether America had moved on from its ugly racial past: “I told him I’m trying to fight for our community, while you’re just trying to get a job on the plantation.”
Later, the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas and Bill Cosby, came under heavy rhetorical fire. In a sweeping historical treatise that condemned slavery, the Jim Crow era and the failings of the modern public school system, Brown attacked what she called “the New Age of racism.”
“This New Age racism completely disregards American history and says that our present condition is all to do with personal choice,” explained Brown. “We have the highest infant mortality rates, Black women and children make up 65 percent of AIDS cases and perhaps the most damning stat, less than one percent of U.S. revenues come from Black businesses. We’re still not free and we’re living in the house of our oppressor.” [Wave Newspaper]