The Black Panther Party
I began my wikipedia trail with The Black Panther Party after doing our reading about the shootout in Oakland in 1968. One thing struck me in this article, when it said that Eldridge Cleaver had actually led an ambush on police officers in 1968, just days after MLK had been assassinated. I found this interesting because it is a completely different story than what was portrayed in our reading.
Eldridge Cleaver
This led me to Eldridge Cleaver's wiki page. I learned here that he actually admitted in 1980 that he had led a deliberate ambush on police officers in the shootout, however some people believe this was due to pressure by the court to avoid serving jail time. I noticed one name in here that I had heard of before, so I decided to explore his page: Timothy Leary.
Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary was a very interesting man. He was responsible for many tests on psychedelic drug therapies and many other studies while at Harvard. He was a very big part of the counter-culture movement during the 1960's and 70's, and was arrested multiple times, mostly for marijuana possession. He was broken out of his minimum security prison and smuggled out of the country, at which point he lived with Cleaver for a while before Cleaver placed him under "revolutionary arrest" for promoting the use drugs.
Weather Underground
Timothy Leary led me to the Weather Underground (or The Weathermen), which is the group that helped him escaped from prison and smuggled him out of the country. They obviously supported Leary and his work a lot, and their main purpose was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow U.S. imperialism.
Hi Anthony,
ReplyDeleteI did the Wikipedia Trail last week and also started with The Black Panther Party. I went a different route with my selections to continue reading about and it led me to the Tupac Shakur Center for the Arts. I wasn’t aware of the big role that Tupac’s mother played in the Black Panther Party and was very interested in how it changed her.