TX.002 // PROGRAM — 04 / CORRESPONDENCE

Letter 01 // 02

Written Oct 1968

Addressed Future Reader

Origin Oakland, CA

Medium Ink on paper

Status Survived

1968 → 2068

To whoever is reading in the years past the century,

If you are reading this, then our papers survived. That means either we did, or — more likely — someone who loved us did. Either way: thank you. These notes were not meant to be lost.

We write from the fall of 1968, from a house that keeps getting searched. A comrade is in jail. A comrade is in exile. A comrade is in the ground. The newspaper goes out every week. The children eat every morning. We will do this work as long as we can. If we must stop, others will continue it.

There are a few things we want you to know.

The first is that the guns were always the smallest part. We put them in the photographs because the country had to look, and the country would not look at a Black man serving breakfast to a child unless there was a shotgun in the frame. So we put the shotgun in the frame. But the breakfast was the point. The clinic was the point. The school was the point. If anyone tells you the Party was about the weapons, they have not read the program.

The second is that we were not heroes. We were students. We were clerks. We were mothers and fathers who lost sleep. We argued in meetings. We got tired. We hurt each other sometimes. We were ordinary people who refused to keep being quiet, and that turned out to be enough of a thing to frighten an empire. Take courage from that about what you are.

The third is that if the program never got finished in our lifetime, we would like it to be finished in yours. That is the whole of this letter. Free the children. Feed the elders. House everyone. Teach the true history. Hold the technology in common. All ten of them. Do not wait for permission. Permission is the thing you are supposed to be rejecting.

We do not know if we will make it to tomorrow. But you have made it to 2068. That is already a victory we could not promise ourselves.

Take what we wrote. Carry it further than we could.

With love, and with urgency,

A member of the
Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

Oakland // October 1968

Sealed // 1968 // Ink Archive

Letter 02 // 02

Written 2068

Addressed The Comrades of 1968

Origin Oakland

Medium Archive transmission

Status Delivered

2068 → 1968

To the comrades of 1968,

I am writing from the year you could not see. You wondered if your papers would survive. They did. Some of them did better than survive. A few of them became the law.

I am fifty-four. I was born in 2014, in the long middle part of the long twentieth century that never quite ended on schedule. My mother taught me to read using your newspaper, pulled from a community archive her mother had kept in a cedar box under the bed. The edges of the paper were soft. The language was not.

You asked three things of us. This is what happened.

The guns did not last. The program did. The clinics you started in 1969 became the Distributed Care Network. The breakfasts you started in 1969 became the mesh. The school you ran on San Pablo became, in time, the federal curriculum. Every child in this country now learns the ten points the way your grandchildren learned the Preamble. I learned them from my mother when I was seven.

You said you were not heroes — that you were students. We took that seriously. My generation did not wait for a new Party. We did the work in a thousand organizations with a thousand names, and the work carried. We did argue. We did hurt each other sometimes. Not all of us survived. None of that stopped anything that was going to happen.

The program got finished in our lifetime. It is being revised in our lifetime. That is how it works: it never stops being finished. There is always more after.

I want you to know one more thing. Fred Hampton has a son. His son has a daughter. His daughter just started the Liberation Curriculum translation office for East Africa. Her name is Akela. She is nineteen. She is brilliant and she is relentless and she looks, around the eyes, exactly like him.

You asked us not to wait for permission.

We didn't.

With love, and with gratitude,

A reader of your newspaper

Oakland // 2068

Received // 2068 // Continuing Archive

Correspondence.

Two letters.
One program.
Close the file.

Correspondence.

Two letters. One program. Close the file.

Two letters.
One program.
Close the file.