Mark Cook - Burning Books Lecture (2021)

Speaker 1: Hello. Thank you for coming out. This is Burning Books, friendly neighborhood terrorist induction center, apparently. So thanks for coming. We've got a really special night tonight. And one other thing I want to mention here is, on this corner of this table, there's a bunch of materials. Most of them actually relate to tonight. This book in particular, Creating a Movement of Teeth, A Movement with Teeth, excuse me. It's all about the George Jackson Brigade, which is what Marc has been involved in and what he's mostly going to be talking about tonight. There's another book, Guerrilla USA. Unfortunately, we've only got one left, also about the brigade. It's more of a narrative. And this book is about— it's written and recently came out by Ed Mead, who I'm sure Marc will be talking about. He's a co-defendant, another member of the brigade. It's called Lumpen, and it just came out.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 1: And we're trying to bring Ed Meade in the spring, if his health is permitting. So check that out if you get a chance. Also, we got a bunch of cool new stickers, including my personal favorite, All My Heroes Have FBI Files.

Speaker 3: Oh, that's good.

Speaker 1: Must-have. So all I got left to say is that it's a real honor to have Marc here tonight. Eliza, my daughter, and I and Marc went out to see Jalil Muntaqim, who's imprisoned. He's a Panther who's imprisoned at Attica this morning. We spent the morning out there talking with Jalil. And, you know, it just really struck home, as I was listening to those two talking, that there's all this history that isn't really written about in many books and isn't talked about in school and usually isn't put on the TV. And we don't hear about it. And it's so rich and so significant. And it's the reason why we have these freedoms that, you know, the few that we do still have, because people fought and struggled for them. Marc is a person who's done that. He's been involved in a lot of different ways.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 1: He was a Black Panther inside prison, and he's involved in really risking his life and his freedom for the betterment of all of us. So, let's just thank Marc and welcome him to Burning Books.

Mark Cook: This is part of my world tour, national tour. That picture was just taken in China. I was invited to the University of Beijing. China and Hong Kong, and spoke there at 3 different colleges, then spoke at various bookshops on the streets. And then they did— the last time I talked, it was at a restaurant. Only about 6 people were supposed to be there. They just wanted to be introduced to me. It ended up with 48 people at night. They got chairs and benches from I don't know where to come and listen. We had 2 interpreters doing Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese. And then we had a few questions. And there were the foreigners, Germans and French. A lot of people came. It was really a fantastic adventure there for me. Before I get too far in, I want to explain to you that I suffer from a disability. I'm autistic. And sometimes I don't understand what you're saying, and I don't understand— you may not understand what I'm saying. Sometimes I don't understand what I'm saying, and I'll stop.

Speaker 2: OK.

Mark Cook: And, cut short, it's not the old age thing creeping up. That's mixed in here now with it. It's not just old age. I found out I had autism when I was about 60 years old. That's while I was in prison. There was a doctor who ran some questions by me. He said, do you understand what I'm saying all the time? And I said, well, no, not really. And he said, what about when you talk to the prison officials? Do you understand what they're saying when they're holding meetings and trying to tell you something? And I said, no. And he went into depth, and he says, you have autism. You've had it all your life. It's not something that just comes up while you're in prison. And somebody should have caught it early— earlier. Last week, I was at the University of Washington listening to some of the medical students give a talk on mass incarceration. And one of the things they do in teaching their— the students is How to go to the source of a problem when you have a patient. And a patient may say, well, I have a rash. Well, that's not the real problem. The rash is— where did that rash come from? They ran this story by about— it's kind of a legend— not a legend, but it's just an allegory, I guess you'd call it, where there's this village. And let's say they're medical students living in this village. I'm just sticking that in. They didn't stick that in. But that's what they're trying to say.

Speaker 6: Right.

Mark Cook: And some babies came floating down the river. And so they ran out and they got the babies and brought them in. They got them all in and they looked— more babies were coming down the river. They ran out and brought them in. And they just kept looking at the river, waiting for more babies. And the instructor said, well, what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to look at the source. You're supposed to go up that river and find out who's throwing those babies in and why they're throwing them in.

Speaker 6: Yes.

Mark Cook: In a sense, we look at a lot of people who ended up in situations, say, prison. I did probably a 210-year sentence as a thief. I never did all that time. I mean, that's what they gave me, 210 years. And nobody looked back and said, well, why is he doing this? What happened? I was raised by my mother. She has 8 children. My father died when I was about 4 years old. And she raised us and kept us all together. And she was our safety net. She worked sometimes 16 hours a day. And it was up to us kids to take care of us. Nowadays, they have this law against latchkey kids. You can't do that nowadays. You'd be violating the law. But there was no law then. And it was the community and our extended family that helped keep my mother going. And I remember one time, I was about 10 And years old. who stayed with us all the way until we all graduated from school or ended up in prison, which was me. I'm the one that fell through that net of all these 8 kids. Nobody else did. And nobody— when I started having problems, the first problem I had was at high school. I broke a window. That ended up doing 3 years. It was really an indefinite sentence, but I only did 3 years, starting at age 17. And it was a brutal treatment. I've been in 17 prisons across the United States. And as a maximum-security prisoner, the highest security, the highest custody. And I've never been treated as an adult, as I was treated as a kid.

Speaker 7: Mm-hmm.

Mark Cook: I won't tell you specifically what happened, but I tell you, it was horrific. And to this day, right now, my main struggle is with juveniles and kids who are in detention, when they're going in and when they're coming out, because I'm— I want to know who's throwing the babies in the river.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Mark Cook: These kids are— some of them are truants. Some are products of domestic violence, family abuse, you know, sexual and violent. And they committed no crime, but they're put in these detention places. The others were like me. You know, they broke a window, stole a car or whatever. And some of them getting these shootouts, you heard about it in the news maybe, actually killed a parent. Nobody cares why. It's just that they did it, and they're going to punish them for it. So that's what I'm doing mostly in my life right now. So I was born, I was raised affluent poor. In other words, I had a place to stay, I had something to eat, and never missed a meal. Mom took care of that. So affluent poor is different than the desperate poor. That book, The Lumpen, is about someone who was desperate, desperate poor. They had nothing. They tried to raise a— during the early '40s, tried to raise money on a chicken ranch. The chicken ranch didn't go good. And it was pretty much chickens one day and feathers the next. Finally, they moved from the Mideast into California, always struggling, trying to find some kind of roof. They lived in warehouses.

Speaker 8: Yeah.

Mark Cook: He— it was him and his 2 sisters to start off with. Their mother was taking care of them, never left them, but was taking care of them. And like I said, that was desperate poor. So, when we look at people on— some of these kids on the streets, people in the house, we're looking at affluent poor and the desperate poor. And that's one of the main issues. That's one of the issues that brought the Panthers together, is the government wasn't doing anything, so the Panthers decided, let us try to do something.

Speaker 1: Right.

Mark Cook: We did free clinics. We did freedom schools, free breakfast for kids, made every— made sure all the kids in the community had breakfast before they went to school. We had a 10-point program. It was organized. A lot of the movements now aren't organized. But it was organized with those basic things in mind. And we did pretty good. In Seattle right now, of course, as you know, the Panthers are pretty much broken up and gone. But we have a clinic that's called Carolyn Downs. Carolyn Downs.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Mark Cook: At one time it was a free clinic. It didn't charge you anything to get in. Now it's a, what you call it, a sliding scale. Carolyn Downs was a Panther. She died of cancer. That's why they gave her the name. There's the, one of the freedom schools. It carries the name of Tyree Scott. Freedom schools were started by the Panthers, but to this day we still have a freedom school going in Seattle. And in California, in Oakland, there's other things that are still existing that Panthers started. And the thing is, the government would not do things for them, so they had to do it for themselves. And then it became a struggle where they're making the government look bad. And that's where the conflict came up between the government and the first— between the government and the Panthers. When I was in prison doing this 210 years ago for the— as being a thief, the Panthers were rising. They came up on Black-and-white TV. I saw them there on the— pictures of them on the Capitol with their shotguns. And it was legal for citizens to carry guns in California openly at that time. Shortly after that, they made a law. The Wild Panthers still existed. They made a law saying you cannot— people cannot carry guns openly in public anymore.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Mark Cook: Well, in a sense, kind of stopped things. Being a felon, Whether it's— how can I put it? I wasn't allowed to carry a gun. But in order to be a Panther, this was a militant group, you had to defend yourself, defend your community and what you were doing. There was a— some of you probably saw the Panther movie recently on public TV. It's— yeah. And it's— they got it up here for sale if you want to see it, if you missed it. It's something really— You should really look at and listen to some of the stories back then. There was one story where the police were on a scene, and it was getting desperate, so they racked up their guns.

Speaker 8: Clacka!

Mark Cook: But then they heard a noise all down the street. Clacka, clacka, clacka! And that was the Black Panthers of the community standing up, protecting their community. In Seattle, the way they made— started a clinic, Was, well, first the free breakfast program. There's a book by Elmer Dixon someplace around here. And he started a free breakfast program in Seattle. He was stealing food out of the icebox, out of the refrigerator. His mother said, where's all the food going? Him and his brothers, they were just teenagers at the time. And they finally broke down and said, well, we're making breakfast for the kids. And she said, that's cool. So it started from that point. They started doing a breakfast program. Then later on, they started going to these supermarkets. And, you know, food is stamped. After it's stamped, they throw it away. But it's still good to eat. And because if you buy something, you keep it in your refrigerator, it passes that date while it's in your refrigerator. You still eat it. And so they gave this food to the Panthers to do these free breakfast programs for the kids. Then it came time to do a clinic. They wanted to do a free medical clinic. Now, these are the Panthers. There's not no NGOs or anybody else helping them. And they tried to figure out how to do a free clinic. And they went to this doctor. And this is Elmer Dixon. And he said, how can we do a free clinic? We don't have— we've got a place, but we don't have no medical equipment at all or supplies at all. And so, they went to the hospital. The doctor worked at the University of Washington. He said, come to the University of Washington at this address, bring a truck and back it up. They backed it up. They filled it up with medical supplies. And that was the first free clinic set up in Seattle. When I was in prison, I formed a Panther group inside of prison. And I wanted to do things along the same lines, but I'm in prison. There's no kids to feed. You know, we got our free medical thing going there. But the jobs are lousy. Nobody's learning a skill that they can carry outside. So I want to start a program inside and up with the Panthers, and I got to get the help of all prisoners to do this. And the way I did it is working with some really immigrants— these were Canadian immigrants, by the way— showed me how to do an underground newspaper using—

Speaker 2: A newspaper?

Mark Cook: Mm-hmm. Mimograph paper and gelatin and mirrors. And, you know, it was a little thing where we had to boil some gelatin down, pour it on the mirror, let it cool, put the mimeograph paper, after we typed on it, on the gelatin. It absorbed the print. Peel the paper off, then take blank paper, put it on, smooth it over, and peel it off. And we had an underground newspaper. In the newspaper, we made sure that nobody knew who was putting this thing out. But it— the information we used Yeah. Was recognizable by all the prisoners. Everybody had the same grievances, you know. Nobody was allowed to have long hair, hair on their face, no sideburns. You had a quarter— your hair had to be a quarter of an inch or less, or you went to solitary confinement. And so we had put a slogan in there, if you care, grow hair. So everybody in the prison started growing hair. That was the beginning of our movement there. And at one point, there was a A movie being shown. This was a racial incident where there was 100 Rifles by— what's his name? Jim Brown and Raquel Welch, I think it was. And some of the white supremacists said, no, you're not going to show that movie in our auditorium. They said, you show it or we're going to lock this joint down. Well, you could lock it down. Just a handful of blacks in the prison.

Speaker 2: Right.

Mark Cook: Yeah, about 17%, maybe, were black prisoners. Said, OK, we'll lock it down by ourselves, but we ain't coming out till we get to see what we want to see. So the black prisoners locked it down, and the white prisoners said, hey, if they're going to lock it down, we're going to go with them. You know, whatever they get, we're going to get our grievances done, too. The whole prison was locked down. That was probably one of the first nonviolent prison takeovers.

Speaker 7: Yeah.

Mark Cook: In the history of U.S. prisons, at least in the state of Washington. So, coming from that, we finally got what we called a 50/50 program. The prisoners could run the— what do you call it? The—

Speaker 9: gosh—

Mark Cook: the recreation and educational and industrial, and the state would run the security and the custody. And it was like—

Speaker 4: 50/50.

Mark Cook: It used to be when you got drunk on pruno, you know, they'd lock you up and give you an infraction. But we got it so, look, they're alcoholics, lock them up, but we're going to sit outside their cell until they sober up, then put them straight back on the population, no infraction. They said, cool. We had things going like that. It was a pretty good move. This was back in about 1969. And it's well documented. They archived all of this stuff at Whitman College, so if anybody ever wants to look at it—

Speaker 10: Yeah.

Mark Cook: I think they still have our little underground newspaper. Nobody seems to find that thing. We called it The Bomb, by the way.

Speaker 9: This is The Final Straw Radio, and you're hearing Marc Cook speaking at Burning Books Bookstore in Buffalo, New York, February 18th, 2016.

Mark Cook: But anyways, as a Panther, I worked that through. We took over the prison. Now the next thing is to set up these jobs. So we asked for a tier where we could have, say, 16 prisoners. And these 16 prisoners would pick the kind of industry they wanted to work in. And so, the warden let us do it. It was— he was ordered from Olympia to let us do it. This is probably a longer story than what I'm telling you right now, but we were able to set up a reupholstery training class, these 16 prisoners. It worked out well. Finally, they gave us a shop in Prison Industries. We worked there, and it was the only shop—

Speaker 2: —in the prison.

Mark Cook: That made a profit in all the prison industries in the state of Washington doing reupholstery. So the next thing we said, well, we want to do this outside of prison. They said, well, it ain't happening. So our thought was this. They had a women's quarter, old women's quarters, dilapidated kind of thing. And they built a brand new one for women in a town called Purdy. And so we asked them, If you give us that women's quarters, we can set up an industry there, you know, where we could work more— work freely and make more money for you. And he said, you're not making any money for us out there. He said, I'll tell you what we're going to do. If you can get enough money to pay for all of the costs of running that thing, he said, we'll do it. And chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, right? So we sat down, and we got $250,000 grant, if we could find matching funds. We're prisoners. We ain't got nothing to match.

Speaker 4: Right.

Mark Cook: And, you know, prisons are nothing but institutionalized poverty. People don't have anything in there. They make sure you don't have anything. They shake your cell out constantly, taking things away from you. But we had— it was the Ford Foundation, and I like to say that the CIA, which was Correctional Industry Agency, OK? But anyway, we called them the CIA. They gave us the money. And now we needed matching funds. So, we got this idea from what happened with the Panthers in Seattle— try and get some equipment.

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm.

Mark Cook: Well, first thing is, they said that building is part of our matching funds, but we needed more than that. So we got carpentry equipment, upholstery equipment, power speeding machines. And, you know, so that was all together. We went to the warden and said, OK, we've got it all together. Give it to us? He said, yeah. He said, only if we can screen the people. That's us 16 would screen the prisoners coming out and going out into that thing. They allowed us to do that. OK, so it was set up for a 2-year program. I don't know if they got mad at me or what. I was doing 3 50-year terms at the time, being a thief.

Speaker 2: Right.

Mark Cook: A robbery. And they decided to get rid of me. The governor came down and told them to get me out of there and get me into a halfway house in Seattle. A couple days later, I was in that halfway house. And the halfway house didn't know who I was or what I was doing there. I said, well, I'll just go on home. And they said, no, not until we find out what you're doing here. Because I still had a mandatory 15-year sentence to do. So they eventually found out who I was, and so they kept me there. They kept me there a year. While I was there, during that year's time, I founded a group called CONVENTION, capital C-O-N, little stuff after that, you know. It was for convicts. My idea was, I'm going to get judges and prosecutors and victims and ex-prisoners, and maybe prisoners in the prisons to come to this thing, guards and wardens, you know, we're going to do this thing. I'm in a halfway house, still doing time.

Speaker 4: Right.

Mark Cook: I walked around Seattle to various organizations, and they liked the idea, too. They were giving me money for this thing called convention. We were going to hold it about a year later. They were giving me cash. I'm in a halfway house getting these checks coming in. And the halfway house said, OK, we'll go along with this. Nobody's blocking it. And so, we did it, did get the money. And also we got the promise from the institution to send us prisoners.

Speaker 10: OK.

Mark Cook: In handcuffs. The victims came. The— what do you call it? The dean of law at the University of Washington, he came, along with other lawyers. There were judges and prosecutors there. And we ran that thing for about 3 or 4 years. And money-wise, it was always in the black. We never had— really had to beg money. People were just giving us money just to come to see this thing. So, again, that's a documented program. But it— And you were doing this in Seattle? It's something I was trying to do and still be a Panther. When I went to Seattle, I finally got out of the halfway house, after being in there a year. Anyways, I got out of the halfway house, and I looked for the Panthers, and they were gone. They were all down in Oakland being bodyguards for Elaine Brown. I don't know if you remember. Elaine Brown became the chairperson of the Panther Party while Huey Newton was in Cuba— or—

Speaker 4: Jail.

Mark Cook: No, he was in jail. Brazil or Cuba? I think it was in Cuba. I don't know.

Speaker 9: Yeah.

Mark Cook: Yeah. And so, I still wanted to do something. I said, well, still, let's get this job thing going. And one of the Canadians that got out— he got kicked out of prison with me— and he helped form that program. We called him the mayor. He's the one who figured out how to get the stuff out of the University of Washington. He came to me and he said, hey, how about starting the program out here? We'll get all of the people coming out of halfway houses, people on probation, you know, etc. And I said, how are we going to do that? They said, they're getting ready to shut down that program inside.

Speaker 9: I said, why are they going to shut that down?

Mark Cook: They said, it worked. I said— that's what his way of thinking it. And I think he's probably right. So we went down there and told them what we wanted to do. Well, we had to get that grant, though. We had to get grant money again. And we did the same thing, wrote them grants, ex-convicts on the street. We got $250,000. Again, they wanted matching funds, too. So, what are we going to do? We went to University of Washington once. They will never let us go again, because this time we want more equipment. We're going to do micrographics, landscaping, you know, reupholstery, laying carpets, all of that. So we need to—

Speaker 4: Right.

Mark Cook: Equipment for all this, a lot of power equipment. So we did a— made a try. We went to the University of Washington and said, hey, can we see what you got in your warehouses? Because what they had in their warehouses, it's already paid for. They can't sell it again. They could throw it in the dump if they want to. But what they're doing, they're keeping it stored. Every college around here has that right now, if you ever want to stop and check it out. And we told them, we need matching funds. We've got this cash. We want to put this work program together.

Speaker 2: And what did they say?

Mark Cook: They gave us all of that machinery. We called it PIVOT.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

Mark Cook: PIVOT ran for quite a while. I was interrupted from that with the George Jackson Brigade. There was some white groups in Seattle that wanted to be a little bit more militant than they had been. They got tired of marching around in circles, going down to the courthouse, waving their signs and speaking, and going home. So they wanted to get involved with the program 24/7. And so, as they didn't know what to do, they didn't have any funding. Now, this time, we weren't going to do no grants. These were— they wanted to go underground. These are some of the Weather Underground people and some Panthers. And there was some— well, Native Americans. They weren't out of AIM, but they were militant, too. They wanted to go with this thing.

Speaker 8: Right.

Mark Cook: So we put it together, and we did what we call armed propaganda. The armed was specifically bombing, targeting property, not people, as the main thing. Always property, not people. We made one mistake, and that was where we did a bombing at a Safeway. We called in and told them to get everybody out of there. There's a bomb in there. And they thought hogwash. It was in a bag of dog food. And that was in 1979? It went off and 2 people were hurt. Nobody was killed. 2 people was hurt. And we got lambasted by the community, the radical community, even the so-called militant community in Seattle behind that thing. So we did write a letter of apology to the— what you call it— the alternative press. Nobody really knew who he was, so we had to get all this stuff done underground. Every time we did a bombing of a A place supporting a union strike, or it's either abuse in the prison. Like one of the bombings we did, we blew up the Department of Corrections in Olympia because of some brutality that was going on in Walla Walla in the prison there. And they fired the warden and some of his associates, corrected things, and it was a lot better. This was armed propaganda. That was— OK, that was back in the days when It was happening all over the United States. It wasn't just there. The other Panthers— I was the only Panther out of the prison that was on the streets, but there were other Panthers working with us underground. And we were lucky. We never told people anything they didn't need to know. We did an escape, broke one of our prisoners loose, one of the Captured prisoners loose from custody, I shot a cop. And I thought he was trying to fast-draw me. And I just wounded him. And so I got— well, eventually, 30 years in prison by the feds, 2 life sentences and 10 years for the attempted escape, running consecutively, one right after the other.

Speaker 2: Wow.

Mark Cook: I was in the feds system. I did all of the time there. They wouldn't give me a parole. You know, I went to parole board every 2 years. They turned me down. They had these letters in my file saying never to parole me, coming from police departments, etc. So, like I said, I did all that time and eventually— oh, curious thing, just before I got out of the feds, I got transferred out of there after I did my time, but my last year there, I was a homeless Prisoner. In other words, I had no cell. I had a laundry bag, you know, one of these, uh, uh, kind of laced or whatever, you know what I'm talking about? And all my property was carried in this bag. I had to walk around the prison with this thing. No place to live. When it came time for a count, I'd go to the hospital, and they'd count us there. There was a whole group of us. And then, after they counted us, back out into the yard, on the compound. And they'd let us hang out at some of the, uh, Uh-huh. Uh, cell blocks. We did have cells there, but we could hang out until it was time to get locked up. When it came time to get locked up, they took us up and put us in the hospital. All the beds in the hospital were filled up. We slept on the floor. That was being homeless in prison. This is a federal penitentiary. That was my last year there. So, I was finally kicked out of there, sent to the state to do my parole violations, 2 life sentences and 10 years. I got partway through my parole violations, and in a sense, the parole board just said, you've done too much time, and just kicked me out. Never did life sentence at all. None of the life sentences, none of that stuff for the escape. So, and back on the streets, and that's where I'm at right now. And I'm, like I say, I'm doing my tours, like in China, any country. Who wants to call on me? Any state? I've gone to Oregon, California. Now I'm back East here talking. And, you know, I'm just a rank-and-file. I was inside. I was a lieutenant of information. I had to teach the people, the prisoners, what the Panther program was about. But I was really just a rank-and-file Panther, loyal to the Panthers all the way. We got a lot of respect out of those guys in Seattle.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Mark Cook: In Oakland, you know, but I was just rank and file. But I, for some reason, people want to listen to me talk. Maybe it's because I'm one of the survivors, you know. But there's plenty of survivors still in prison.

Speaker 4: Right.

Mark Cook: And in a sense, they've done less than I did. I'm technically the worst of the worst. When they talk about prisoners, I'm the worst of the worst. They want to keep us in solitary confinement, not for infractions, but just to keep us from organizing the population. I had one infraction in 24 years in prison. That's for crossing— walking across a grass lawn. I was supposed to go around it. That's the only infraction I had in all that time. It kind of made them angry.

Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.

Mark Cook: They said they have no political prisoners. The U.S. says no political prisoners in the U.S. In my file, prison file, the very— when you first open it up, there's a document that says, the political statement of the George Jackson Brigade. That's the first thing you see when you open that file up. And I got a glimpse at it, and I asked them, well, what do you got that in there for? That was printed after I was arrested. And they said, well, that's what the government wants. They want this in there. And in a sense, that's just saying I'm a political prisoner. I mean, there's no other reason. It had nothing to do with the crime. Everything was printed after I was arrested. There's about 200 other political prisoners locked up right now, men and women. who have done more time than most people do for homicides. That's a fact. And they're not letting them out. Ed and I kind of caught them while they were weak. Ed caused a lot of problems in Walla Walla. He was organizing a group called Men Against Sexism down there, and they were stopping the— Yeah. The selling of prisoners for sex and abusing them. He did pretty good, but they had to arm themselves. He made shotguns and hand grenades while he was in that prison. People smuggled in firearms. And when they searched his cell down once, they couldn't find anything. Went back again, opened his radio up, and there were the hand grenades and the pistols. And so they had decided they've got to get rid of Ed out of the Washington State Penitentiary.

Speaker 6: Right.

Mark Cook: And they stuck him in with the feds. So he's doing— he was doing a state sentence at that time. To go with the feds, they said, well, he has to start his fed time, so they're going to run them both concurrently. They didn't intend to do that. So they ran them both concurrently. So he finished his federal sentence. Well, they sent him to the state. The state said, well, your sentences are running concurrently, so you only have to do a couple of years and you're out. So, like I say, he got over. Well, I was in— Prison, they transferred me to the state. Had a lot of support from the people on the streets. They hooked me up with Mumia as a defense committee for our freedom committee for Mumia and Mark Cook. And they did a lot of stuff on the streets. They did street theater, you know, burning of effigies in the street and stuff like that, and hassling the police, writing to various officials. And you were in prison for how long? State officials and the prison authorities. And they raised a lot of support on the street. In fact, when I got out— they finally did get me out. The state prison said, well, you just— you've done enough time already. In fact, and they admitted, yeah, you're the only person left in of George Jackson Brigade. You're black. All the others were white. They never busted the Native Americans or anybody else. And I was in there for 3 years. Just, uh, just, uh, 3 of us. Well, 4 of us, one got killed.

Speaker 9: This is The Final Straw Radio, and you're hearing Marc Cook speaking at Burning Books Bookstore in Buffalo, New York, February 18th, 2016. Here's a little content warning coming up that Marc talks about Ed Mead's experience with childhood sexual assault. So if that makes you uncomfortable, you may want to skip ahead or Turn down the radio for about 3 minutes.

Mark Cook: But if you get a chance, if you read Ed's story, he was raped when he was a preschooler— not a preschooler, but a preteenage kid. Some guy had offered him and another kid some comic books if he had, you know, come on up to his place. And then when they got up there, they trapped him, wouldn't let him out. Raped them both. The other kid told, and both Ed and him were punished for being abused, you know.

Speaker 10: Wow.

Mark Cook: Okay. But he went through a lot of things like that. His mother thought she could get a job in Alaska, moved all the kids up there. They were homesteading. They carried their furniture into the woods on their backs, you know. They tried to make log cabins. And it's a real hassle. It's an interesting book. It's a true story. There's a lot of humor in it, along with, you know, their desperate situation. And one of my favorites is— he kind of changed his story for the book, but it's a long time ago. He told me— he's got one eye. He told me he had a girlfriend, and he wanted to show how tough he was, so he took a gun, and he just whirled that cylinder and put it— says, bam! And blew his eye out.

Speaker 8: But—

Mark Cook: Well, you know, it probably hurt. I mean, but looking back on it, it's kind of funny. He tells another— he tells another story to kind of clean it up. It's still funny when you read it in there. I stayed pretty close to Ed. Ed hassled me. Ed came to one of my first conventions, and he called me a bourgeois Negro. You know, you ain't got this thing going. And at these conventions, we had the Weather Underground showing up, AIM showing up. Brown Berets, all the real militants were showing up at these conventions along with these judges and prison officials.

Speaker 10: Right.

Mark Cook: And— but he is a strong Marxist-Leninist. And I didn't speak that language. I was speaking from the Panthers. I was trying to do something for the community, trying to pull people together so we could get things done the government wouldn't do, the state wouldn't do. But that's where I first met him. All the people that ended up in the brigade Yeah. They heard I was in there. They came and joined. Some that joined, some were just supporting on the perimeter, the periphery, what you call it. But they were very strong. And when I got out, they raised $8,000, put it in my hand when I stepped out that door. They gave me a car, got me a job. The day I got out, got a job and a place to stay. And I was no longer the affluent poor. I was middle class. Except I didn't have American flags. I'm sorry about that. I was still a Panther. If anybody's got any questions, I'd like to— go ahead, and start with you.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you were about to touch on it at one point, but can you talk about the diversity of the Georgia SGP?

Mark Cook: Without disclosing— well, let's put it this way. The ones that are documented by the FBI are a lesbian, a white gay, a white straight, a female straight, me— I'm black straight. And, you know, I kind of had to abandon one of my kids in order to do this stuff. And that's the only regret I have about it. He turned into a pretty good kid. I got 2, 3 stepkids and him. See him to this day. Can you say anything about what's going on in China?

Speaker 9: Did you pick up any idea of what's going on there?

Mark Cook: Before it hit the news lately, they were building up a union movement inside of China. They're forming unions. The Chinese had a state union. You know, if you had grievances, Just go to your union and they'd set up, you know, disciplinary, but you know, meetings later on. But it's taken so long, takes sometimes years to set those meetings up. So they started doing these wildcat unions all over China. You probably see them in the news now. They're starting to lock people up behind these unions. This is on the mainland China. I was in Hong Kong when I got my passport to go to China. China refused to let me go in. And of course, I wrote a letter and said, hey, I'm a Panther. You know, you invited us over there in '71 when we sat and talked with you. And they invited us in Vietnam as Panthers to talk with them. But now they said no. But they have this thing with the— Hong Kong has this thing with the U.S. where you don't even need a passport, just a visa. You go to Hong Kong. When I was in— at the university in Hong Kong, a professor told me, if you want to get into China, you get your visa here, and we'll take you over there in a couple hours. But the people in Hong Kong kept me so busy, I never got a chance to go to China. Just before I left, I got to talk to a political prisoner who came out of one of the prisons in China at the airport. And he wrote a book. I never got that book, but he, he said he's going to send it to me. Question? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7: So of all your organizing, what would you say what you felt was the most effective and why?

Mark Cook: Well, mostly is, personally, it was a convention. The thing that I invented, decided there's something I got to do. And the main issue was I wanted prisoners to have the right to vote. Yeah. And if I ask for hands here, how many of you think if we give prisoners the right to vote, it'll hurt you in any way? Is there anybody here? There's got to be. I'm— we're not going to jump on you. I just want to figure out at least one.

Speaker 2: No way.

Mark Cook: No, no way. Okay. Okay. So you see, now, so they got— They got 2.5 million prisoners inside. If they had the right to vote, don't you think there'd be a third party? Because they're not going to vote for the Democrats or the Republicans.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Mark Cook: Well, maybe they will. I mean, knowing prisoners inside, you know, it goes any way inside. Yeah. But that was my main issue with convention. I wanted to get everybody together. And I had my workshop. People had other workshops. But my workshop, Was on the right to vote. And this is a question I always raised. And to me, that was the most positive thing I did myself as a Panther when I got out of prison, was putting that convention together, knowing that people were going to support it. They were supporting it. They built us a bankroll. You know, they gave— we had places to meet. We— the police were hassling us. They'd go around and take the license plates of everybody who was at these meetings. And finally, the mayor told them to get off our backs, stop that.

Speaker 4: Thank you.

Mark Cook: Yeah. His name was Spellman. Spellman in Seattle backed the Panthers a lot. There were the Red Squads who were going to do a drive-by on the Panther headquarters, and the mayor said, not in my city, you're not going to do that. He was a strange, strange mayor. Of course, he didn't last that long. Okay. The question again, you said, what was the makeup of a brigade? I gave you the makeup, but There were people who were not— we won't say were in the brigade, but they gave us very strong support. I did the jailbreak with 4 women. One was a black pregnant woman who did the casing inside the prison. She was not a member. There was a First Nation woman, Yakama Indian. She was one of the drivers in such a situation. In order to get cars and steal license plates for these cars, We had other people, a lot of them out of the gay community, who came in to give us help. Nobody got busted. Nobody even opened their mouth about that stuff. And this is not the first time I talked about it, but I rarely talk about people that helped us. And I always give them their code names. I go along with the code names they had. And some of the code names we had, some of them were pretty colorful. Calico. She had a cat. It was a calico cat. So we called her Calico. That was her code name. And you were in the Bronx? Bo, a lot of people know Bo out of Oakland, California. She's a very active person to this day. Her name was Belle. She liked Belle Starr, so we gave her Belle as a code name. And there's others. Like I say, they're very colorful. If I write a book, I'd like to let people know who they were and the real work they did. Yeah. What did the judges do at the convention? What did the judges do there? Charles Smith was the— like I said, he was the head of the— dean of law school at the University of Washington. He was our keynote speaker. That was one. The others sat in workshops. 2 of them sat in the victims' workshop, you know. But we had public defenders there, too, as well as people who were supporting the victims. Ah, there's a curiosity. When I got out of prison, I got my job. I was working with the public defenders. They started me off doing mail runs, you know, saving postage to all the courts. I'd deliver stuff and pick stuff up and bring it back. Well, one of the prosecutors who sentenced me, he got me the 2 and a half— I mean, 2 life sentences and 10 years. He saw me doing these mail runs. And he called the public defenders. He says, does Mark Cook work there? And he said, yeah. He said, could we talk? Could I talk to him? And he said, yeah. So they called me up to the phone. I said, yeah, this is Marc. He said, well, hey, I'm Dugan, Mike Dugan. You know who I am? Yeah. I said, you're the guy who sent me. I used a little flowery language there. Sent me to Life Sentence. He said, yeah, will you go to lunch with me? I said, yeah. So I did go to lunch with him. That was one of the strange things that happened.

Speaker 8: Yeah.

Mark Cook: The state's witness who falsified information— of course, they got $20,000 for this false information. But that was the chief state's witness in the federal and state court. Her name was Suzanne Wiseville. You've probably heard about Kmart and Wiseville. Well, she's heir to that. She owns that right now. OK. But at that time, she was a— Working as a radical on the streets. She helped found one of the radical bookstores in Seattle. Well, I was at the last Democratic caucus. And after the— during the caucus, this woman kept looking at me. And I didn't know who she was. I didn't recognize nobody. And when it was over, she came over to me and she said, you know who I am? And I said, no. She says, I'm Suzanne. All these people around, I couldn't I wanted to strangle that woman right there on the spot, but there's so many witnesses, I never would have got away with it. But she was in— she was in a witness protection program. And— but she came straight up to me and just said who she was. She said, I'm so sorry. And that was about it.

Speaker 9: This is Defiance Radio, and you're hearing Marc Cook speaking at Burning Books Bookstore in Buffalo, New York, February 18th, 2016.

Speaker 4: I saw that show on public television. In fact, I watched it 3 times.

Speaker 10: I was a preteen, so I was totally oblivious to what was going on.

Speaker 4: But it was awe-inspiring. And they— but in the show they had a map and they had a list of all the cities where Black Panthers were, had chapters. Do you know, and how many were there? Do you know how many members there were across the whole country altogether collectively? Because they never mentioned it in the show. They mostly focused on Oakland.

Mark Cook: Yes. We had a lot of people who wrote along, said they were Panthers. There were about 900 Panthers. Across the country, there were 900? About 900. And there was—

Speaker 4: Hardcore.

Mark Cook: Huh? Well, this is what I'm saying.

Speaker 1: Yeah, hardcore.

Mark Cook: Yeah. The largest— we politicized gangs. Bunchy Carter in Los Angeles politicized the Slauson Gang, later became the Crips or whatever. In Detroit, Fred Hampton, he politicized the The Blackstone Ranges. That was a fantastic and a beautiful experience there when he did that. But you heard what happened to him.

Speaker 10: Mm-hmm.

Mark Cook: Yeah. Of course, Bunchy Carter got killed too. He got killed on Berkeley campus, shot in the back. But a lot of people were in there just for the image, you know. They did their afros and wore their leather jackets. And when things got hot, they split. 2/3 of the Panthers were women, which is strange to me, because when you see all these movies and things, you don't see that percentage representing the Panthers. They're the ones that did the free school, the free food, the clinics. They did the work in all of these places. They also carried guns. They were on the streets. They did the— what you call it— the cop watch, if you want to call it that, followed them with the shotguns and stuff. But the only people you hear are the bosses. People who are like me, I was a lieutenant, so I got a little publicity. All of the people in the Central Committee, they got publicity. You see the people up there that they displayed in this movie. Of course, there's one, David Hilliard, which, like I say, I'd punch him in the mouth if I had the chance, you know. He did a dirty thing. He copyrighted the Black Panther logo, etc. So Nobody is supposed to be able to use it anymore. Yeah, and we talked about that at our last convention. What is this, uh, 40th convention of the Black Panther Party? This year will be the 50th convention of the Black Panther Party. We're gonna— don't know exactly where we're gonna have it. It's gonna be hopefully someplace down in Oakland. Oakland is cleaned up now. It's not like it used to be. Last time I was down there, it was a little shaky going in there to hold that party. And we was kind of surrounded by the police when we did it.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 7: Mm-hmm.

Mark Cook: But they acted wisely, because even though, you know, people weren't supposed to carry guns openly, you know, you got— to be a revolutionary, you got to break the law, simple as that. And they knew we were revolutionary. Yeah, it applies to today. One of the things, if I— when I get the chance, I want to talk about hands up, don't shoot and Black Lives Matter.

Speaker 9: This is The Final Straw Radio, and you're hearing Mark Cook speaking at Burning Books Bookstore in Buffalo, New York, February 18th, 2016.

Mark Cook: Point program, he talked about the Black and oppressed communities. If you read those points, he said the Black and oppressed communities. He wasn't talking about all white. In Seattle, the drillmaster for the Black Panther Party was Japanese. His name is Mike Tagawa. Me and him traveled a lot together when we do these convention things. Marilyn Buck, she helped break us out of prison. She was white, okay? You know, because she died shortly after she got out. We raised over $15,000 for her, and she died within 2 weeks after she got out.

Speaker 2: Wow.

Mark Cook: We— if you listen to the leadership, in fact, writing the leadership in prison right now, they're happy to answer your letters. These are the ones who were in the struggle in the '60s and '70s, you know. And now they're coming— new people coming in out of the '80s and '90s. There's the— what do you call it? The animal rights people and the elf people. I mean, you know, these are people you can listen to. These people are trying to do things that the government won't do for them, do— you know, won't step in. And it may be sloppy work. It looks like us. It's sloppy work.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Mark Cook: But they're doing everything they can to make themselves right. Yeah.

Speaker 8: I have a question, a quick question about like what your feeling is on reparations, because I was talking about the African People's Socialist Party. You said they were a nationalist group, but they're not.

Mark Cook: They used to be, okay. I'm not sure.

Speaker 8: They have a Uhuru Solidarity Movement, which is all white people who focus on reparations. So I was just wondering. What's your take on reparations?

Mark Cook: No, they're doing that work. They're doing right. I ain't got no complaints, and I'm— you know, more power to them, you know.

Speaker 8: What's your view on that, though, like reparations to—

Mark Cook: Well, the— of course, the Native Americans, they got— you know, I never marginalized Native Americans, you know. In fact, they're sovereign. Reservations aren't as sovereign as they'd want them to be. They're still fighting. They're getting ripped off by the government.

Speaker 8: Right.

Mark Cook: Or is not managing. The Japanese were interned for 2 years. My sister-in-law is Japanese. I've seen the money she got just for being locked up for those 2 years. Of course I believe in reparations. The Cubans— not the Cubans, but the Puerto Ricans need reparations for what's happening out there to Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is not the United States.

Speaker 1: Right.

Mark Cook: And a lot of people think it is. They're a dominated territory by the United States, abused, too, in many ways. If they can't tell them to stop bombing our island, use them for bombing ranges, etc., they deserve reparations, you know? I do believe it. And it's a hard struggle. But if they're not going to give us reparations, we'll take what we want. We don't have to ask them for nothing. I don't know if you've seen that. Woman in that Panther flick, and she said she got a shotgun in one hand and a baby in the other, and she's gonna take what she wants. Well, that's what you got to think. There's a militant way of thinking, but we got to think that way.

Speaker 3: Okay, so there is this— all right, so I'm from New York City, and there is a park in like one of the— like an area that I used to go to school in called Crispus Attucks Park. And the park, what it like, it was It was under construction, but it was for a certain color of people, because it's in Bed-Stuy and it's a really— it's a heavily gentrified area.

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3: So it's like the part, I guess, that's on the black side is like the— it's just like disgusting. Nobody wants to go there. And then there's the parts that's like— that has like the monkey bars or whatever, like the things that people actually want to go to. And they started construction. There was a couple of billion dollars That was allocated to the reconstruction of the park, and it just stopped. So, how do you go about like getting people to realize that this is an issue? Because my mentor, he's trying to do that, and he's writing to different like officials, and they're like, oh, we're going to do it, and you don't see any.

Mark Cook: Well, I appreciate his good efforts at heart. If I was there, I'd do a little arm propaganda. Mess that up until they start straightening up the other side, starting living up to what they have to say. And it was effective in the old days. But as you know, if you're not at that level right now, I'm not going to put you at that level. And never tell anybody things they don't need to know. That's important. That's what Che taught us, even though he didn't pay too much attention. He got himself killed telling somebody something they didn't need to know. Thank you. Yeah, okay, go ahead. You, yeah, I want to get—

Speaker 10: okay, I was just really quick. I was wondering, you mentioned working with the Weather Underground and you mentioned working with some white comrades. The one thing that I haven't really been comfortable and not sure that I really understand about the APSP so far, the group that I mentioned earlier, was their stance on like the role of white people. It seems like, you know, they're okay with working Working with white people, but they feel like we should stay, you know, in our white communities, which I understand, and focus on only getting reparations, which again I understand. But what about, you know, people who are willing to take it to that next level? We don't need to be specific about what that is, but, you know, how— like, if people are willing to be working on a higher level or underground doing some more intense work—

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 10: Like, how would you feel about that?

Mark Cook: Well, when I'm working underground, who I work with, the people underground, it's their business. I'm not asking anybody to do more than that. Ed Mead worked with the Weather Underground to start off with. Then it became the John Brown Book Club. They weren't doing anything. So he went underground and said, you know, he had set up some kind of organization. Where they would do something and not ask anybody else to join in. We put out a newsletter called The Wild Turkey, and to the public for opinions, and we could get responses back there, you know, not directly to us, but we'd pick up responses. When I did the bomb inside the prison, there were 6 of us in the total prison. Only 6 of us knew what we were doing, but everybody agreed with what we were doing.

Speaker 2: Right.

Mark Cook: You know, agreed with what we were saying. What we were saying is something they— that appealed to them. When we threw out little hints about, you know, if you care, grow hair, everybody did it because they agreed with this. Small group of people, they didn't know who it was. And we're not asking anybody— we definitely didn't want anybody else to come in on it, because, like you say, you don't want everybody to know what you're doing, because somebody's going to slip off and the man's going to undermine the whole project.

Speaker 4: Right.

Mark Cook: That happened with all of the major radical, militant radical groups in the '70s and '60s, that there were a lot of infiltration by the cops.

Speaker 8: Mm-hmm.

Mark Cook: If you're really going to be militant, keep it quiet. Trust no one and tell no one what they need to know— don't need to know. And like I say, that was something we learned from Che. And they were pretty successful. They outlived all of those presidents. over in Cuba, you know. The Cubans lived out— outlived all of our prisons to get what they wanted. They're at a situation right now where maybe they're going to have to yield a little. But they still have a lot of support from Europe. If not from us, they got a lot of support from Europe to continue on. Yeah. Oh, wait a minute. She wanted to—

Speaker 2: I have a couple questions. So I really enjoyed hearing you talk about the At the beginning about all these different ideas that you came up with, all these programs that were like, I'd be happy if I had one of those ideas to come up with.

Speaker 10: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And you do like an endless string of them, which is really amazing. And I'm wondering, well, first I'm wondering, um, if— so about an autobiography, if you have like anything in the works for telling Your story or the story of all these programs specifically?

Mark Cook: You've been talking to Leslie there. Jalil been telling me to do that. A lot of people. Yeah. And well, Jalil's idea, if you're not going to write a book, people have written so much about me in all these books, just clip them out, put them together, and say it's your book.

Speaker 2: But the other thing, like, I'm also wondering about the— well, the convention. It seems so good, and I just wonder about if that's happening in any incarnation at this point, or if there's like— if you'd be interested or have ever thought about like creating a blueprint for that that could be spread around the country and, you know, done independently or whatever.

Mark Cook: I'll think about it, actually. Uh-oh. Somebody— oh yeah, go ahead. Get the other hands up because I want to try and get them in order. You, you, and then you. Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 9: You were talking about—

Speaker 6: I always thought the Socialist Party— The African People's Socialist Party. Yeah. There's this guy on Tumblr that— I'm sorry. There's this guy that I know. I pay a lot of attention to Tumblr, it's a great source of information. But I sat there and I was watching and he put up a video. His name is Ghazi something.

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6: And he put up this video and I was with what was being said to a certain extent, but then it was like, like it was a colleague, the person was one of those, a comrade basically, but he was letting Ghazi completely walk Oh, Jesse. Yeah, Jesse. When he told Jesse, like, when Jesse was trying to talk, he was just like, ah! And then Jesse would be saying something very important and just shut up because Ghazi told him to. And it's just like, when does it become like, all right, that's a bit much. Like, you matter. Like, I understand you matter in that sense, because I just didn't under— like, I wasn't with that. I wasn't with— the whole point The whole point is to uplift African Americans or uplift people of color. It said nothing about bringing down others.

Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 6: So when I saw that, like, display, I was just like, at first I understood, like, oh, it's a joke. But then this person was, like, really, really doing whatever he said. And he has some pretty crazy and, like, radical ideas, too.

Speaker 9: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 6: So I'm just like, when is it you're a comrade, and then when is it, oh, you No, this is problematic.

Mark Cook: I never criticized anybody in public. I'd wait till that closed meeting and talk to them. I was a lieutenant of information. And the things that I said and things I taught, nobody ever questioned that until we had, you know, meetings separate from that about the leadership, what the leadership is supposed to do, divisions of labor, you know. And I just hung on to— of course, Because I was one of the founders of the party, and nobody could kick me out. Between me and my partner, we flipped a coin saying who was going to be captain, who was going to be lieutenant information. That's where I got my assignment. The captain later— well, that's another sad story— found hanging in his cell. So we don't know if he committed suicide or what. OK, the second person was?

Speaker 1: Regarding the subways, did you write that letter?

Mark Cook: The subway incident. Yeah, the incident on the subway.

Speaker 1: Did you write that letter?

Mark Cook: I don't know what letter. I'm missing it.

Speaker 1: When the 2 people got hurt, you said that there was a letter written apologizing.

Mark Cook: Oh, no, when I shot a cop.

Speaker 4: The Safeway.

Mark Cook: Oh, the Safeway? No, I didn't write the letter. Whoever did, that must have been nerve-wracking. Oh, it's published. It's published in— oh, gosh. Yeah, Movement with Teeth up there. Yeah, all of the communiqués are published. Yeah, and now. Definitely. All the money they're spending on that could be spent on domestic issues. Go ahead. Do you think if they were to not allocate so much money to defenses or going over and trying to, like, take over other countries, that they would actually institute, like, things here? Well, the whole key is what you said, they, not us. There's a closed group. The they is a closed group.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Mark Cook: The people who fund Congress are the military industrialists. They make the weapons and all these— the airplanes that don't fly, and get Congress to allocate money to buy those things that don't work, you know. So, we don't have too much to say. Until we build up enough strength on a domestic level, I don't think we should move. I may be wrong, but I'm not the guru for you guys here. I'm just here to get a free meal, you know. Okay. Somebody else? I'll come after you, but you got a lot of questions. But who else? Maybe you're going to be one of them, huh? Okay, go ahead. No, go ahead. You're up.

Speaker 6: Oh, oh, hey, okay. So this might be a little superficial, but Okay, celebrities like, for example, I'm not sure if you heard about Stacey Dash, who was like, oh, she doesn't see why there should be like a Black History Month, and BET is part of the problem. People that you can tell are obviously paid off by Fox. Like, how do you— those people, do you feel a sense of disrespect, or do you feel— when you hear these ludicrous words coming out of people of color's mouths, do you ever feel Do you feel any sort of way about it, being that you— like, you're not like an average person? You know, like, you've done stuff to, like, move people of color forward. Like, do you ever get upset when you hear this stuff?

Mark Cook: Well, yeah, I get upset. But let's get even. I mean, with the liberation schools, that's what we did. We didn't care what they thought, even if they might be black, you know. Somebody gave them a professorship, so all of a sudden, you know, they can speak perfect English and stuff.

Speaker 10: Yeah.

Mark Cook: And don't say ain't or whatever. Don't pay too much attention to those people.

Speaker 4: Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 6: You know, it's interesting.

Speaker 7: I was thinking, you know, I'm the director of the Western New York Peace Center. One of the things that I was thinking of offering to people here is about this anti-boycott, divestment, and sanction that in the state legislature here, they just passed something in the Senate that just says that people can't do boycotts or trying to take money out or sanction.

Speaker 4: Boycotts.

Speaker 7: To any allied country. Well, it's all about Israel.

Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 7: It's one thing. And it's also like the thin end of the wedge. But this is about like working with, you know, on political stuff and organizing and votes and lobbying people and things like that. So when you were talking, I'm thinking, well, you know, it's all very much activism in the community. But yet the thing that you were just saying you're most interested, that you feel was a great accomplishment, was about people should be able to vote. So in this broken system where, you know, money is ruling things and like that, if you would talk a little bit about what you think about like the, the political structure and the relationship to organizing.

Mark Cook: Well, to start off, our political structure is It's fucked up. I mean, it's as simple as that. Yes, exactly. And the point to point out, we never elected a president.

Speaker 2: Right.

Mark Cook: It's a— what do you call it? It's an Electoral College does that. So that makes it totally fucked up. When they talk about other countries, you're not being a fair election, nobody talks about ours never being a fair election.

Speaker 6: Yeah.

Mark Cook: And it doesn't represent all the citizens. We talk about not only the 2.5 million people in prison, But there's— somebody said 5 times that many who were in prison out, and they still can't vote. That brings it up to almost 10 million people who can't vote. Our system is messed up. In order to change a lot of this stuff, we are going to have to break laws.

Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.

Mark Cook: And by talking about breaking laws, I mean, you've got to go far, farther than just marching in circles Mm-hmm. And going up to the town hall and—

Speaker 10: That's right.

Mark Cook: —listen to one of our spokesmen, our so-called spokesmen, you know, a congressman or somebody, a city councilor. He'll get up and does his speech, and everybody goes home. That's— doing those marches is just one point. You've got to do something beyond that. When it breaks up, break up with groups and say, hey, that's not enough. Super glue is good enough. If you really don't like the police department, superglue every lock they got on that building, you know, and just don't tell anybody who did it, you know. That's about it. Yeah.

Speaker 8: What's your take on—

Mark Cook: I'm not going to get out of this state now. You see that?

Speaker 9: This is The Final Straw Radio, and you're hearing Marc Cook speaking at Burning Books Bookstore in Buffalo, New York, February 18th, 2016.

Speaker 8: What's your take on Bernie Sanders and all? Like, because he says clearly in one of his statements that he's against reparations. So I'm just wondering what your take is on him.

Mark Cook: He's not educated. You know, education doesn't come all in a flash. I'm an anthropologist, a cultural anthropologist, and I didn't learn it in school. Sure, I had one course in college in anthropology, but I went out on my own and discovered something that nobody teaches at any college. And if I publish anything, I'll publish that. I have it copyrighted, so— but it's not published. There's things that aren't taught to us. Some of us have ideas that are beyond, you know, what is taught in school. I love math. But they locked me up for 40 years trying to keep me away from it. And I got every book I could get inside on math. I got— I learned about things I don't even need to know about, you know? Fantastic. I'm really interested in this. There's 2 theories on gravity right now I'm really interested in. But that ain't got nothing to do with what we're talking about here. But I'm just talking a bit about being educated. Educate yourself first. Bernie Sanders— no, we're not on the same page. I liked when he talked about being a socialist, a social democrat. I liked that. But I don't think he is. I really don't think he is a social democrat.

Speaker 4: Right.

Mark Cook: It's a good thing to get him in politics and to fight the Democrats, because he's doing better now. If I had to flip it, I wouldn't flip a coin. I'd pick him before I'd pick Hillary, I'm sorry to say. Yeah. And I may be wrong, but that's my opinion, and everybody's got it behind, you know.

Speaker 4: From that show that I saw, I watched it 3 times. And I'd watch it every day if I could. Yeah, because like I said, I was a kid and I was oblivious to what was going on in the world. And when they were talking anti-capitalist, I mean, they were talking for real. Mm-hmm. And that got the dander up of the capitalists because now you're threatening their Their prophet. Around '67, '68, I had heard one of the kids I used to hang with had made this statement that the Black Panthers and the Hells Angels were going to battle it out. And later, my thumb's not on the pulse, but I had heard that that kid It came from a Vietnam vet who was released from Vietnam, and he thumbed across the country and caught a ride on the back of a motorcyclist. Maybe it was a Hells Angel, and they were headed this way. And that may be somebody that I think I may know. That's my—

Speaker 7: but I don't know if I'm coming up false.

Speaker 4: And then I read that in one of my books just recently, within the last couple months. Was there any validity to that claim that there was going to be a battle between the Hells Angels and the Black Panthers?

Mark Cook: No. In fact, some of our weapons were bought from the Hells Angels.

Speaker 4: Ah.

Mark Cook: Yeah. And here in— I'm thinking I mean state of Washington. State of Washington, there was the Bandits and the Coyotes. You could buy weapons from them. When the brigade needed weapons, I gave them money. They went down, all the way down to Arizona, to get those weapons and bring them back. Hey, those times, those years are gone. I mean—

Speaker 1: They're gone.

Mark Cook: When I was in prison, the closest thing to a gang in prison when I was doing time were the bikers. That's the closest thing to a gang. There was no black or Hispanic or white gangs in prison. Just— they were the closest. They just ate at the same table. And one of their main rules was, don't wash more than once a month, you know? So, I'm serious. Those were some funky people. That's the closest thing to a gang. Things have changed. That's the time I lived in. Things have changed. My city has changed. People around, and the movement has changed. We worked well with AIM and the Weather Underground and a lot of other liberal groups, not just radical groups, but liberal groups, like the American Friends Service Committee, you know, that gave us a lot of funding, you know. But they were watched by COINTELPRO, just like all of the radical groups were. The black churches were all watched. And that's all come out, you know, how they— the dirty tricks they did with Martin Luther King and such.

Speaker 8: Do you think that was a tool, like segregating the prisons, also to like divide the different groups as a way for them not to band together and just like, you know, take over?

Mark Cook: Oh, institutional racism is not a joke. I happened to break it up in the prison I was in, but when I left, it came right back together. It was a Selling only of whites with whites, blacks with blacks, Indians with Indians in state prison. We broke that up so that people could live where they wanted to live.

Speaker 6: Right.

Mark Cook: Of course, when I left, it slowly came back together, backed by the institution. In the federal institution, they have a ruling where there can be no groups living in one cell.

Speaker 4: No.

Mark Cook: No all blacks, no all whites, no all Indians, nothing. They make sure it's all split up. And I've sat with, you know, Aryan Brotherhood in the same cell. They got no problem. And that's— if we're in the cell, there's no problem at all. And a lot of the biggest problems were between, like, say, California blacks and D.C. blacks. Those are the problems they had to worry about. I came from Seattle, and they figured because Seattle's in Washington, I belong to the D.C. side. You know, D.C. No matter how many times I tried to explain to them, it's 2 different cities. Yeah. And by some kind of genetic thing, a lot of those guys were short. People called them Shorty. And I figured something was short up here, too. But anyway, yeah. OK, you are first, and then you over here. OK, please.

Speaker 1: Just to say real quick, if anyone came in late, there's a basket up front. You can chip in, help make these things happen.

Mark Cook: OK, thanks for coming, you guys.

Speaker 1: I have a question, and then Marc can take it, talk on a one-to-one basis.

Mark Cook: Okay, first, you know, I, my oldest brother was a Panther back in the '60s, so I was always fascinated by that. But, you know, I heard you say something about things change. I also was like this guy was talking about, I watched the documentary last night a couple times about the Panther movement.

Speaker 9: J.

Mark Cook: Edgar Hoover went to any length he can to disband the Black Panthers. But he did nothing for the Ku Klux Klan. Are they still going around? I mean, you said the change. They still do, they, they, they're America's oldest terrorist group.

Speaker 7: Mm-hmm.

Mark Cook: Yeah. But Hoover did nothing to disband them. You're right. That's one of our biggest problems, is they're used as soldiers for that controlling group. A lot of them is in Congress now. Yeah. Oh, yeah, one was the chief judge. Judge Black was— belonged to the Klan at one time. Yeah, we understand that. Everybody say who they are. You said to go back to— oh, OK. Oh, back on this one. Oh, 101, you said. That's what we're doing right now. You know, I had a— I got a picture. I took a picture when I was a kid, before I first got locked up. And it's a strange picture. I had 2 babies in my hand. And both of them became Panthers. I was a Panther, and both my— they were both my nephews. And they both became Panthers.

Speaker 9: Wow.

Mark Cook: Yeah. I look at it now. I never— in all the time I had those pictures, I never realized— I'm trying to figure, did it They catch something from me? Yeah. But that was kind of funny. But anyways—

Speaker 1: Nature nurtures us, can't you see?