Interview with Bobby Rush

But you had a particular difference with some faction of SDS and the Days of Rage. Tell me how that came about and where your differences lay.


Well, we, first of all, we never were advacant--advocates of spontaneity. Ah, we thought that uh, i--the need in the Black community was not so much to confront arbitrarily and, and spontaneously the, the police agencies. But that we wanted to develop a programmatic, a programmatic thrust. Um, as you know, the Panthers even split over a similar issue. Ah, that's when Eldridge Cleaver broke with the Panther Party, primarily over the issue of whether or not the party was going to take a, on a ultra-militaristic point of view or whether it was going to actually go in and do some real organizing in the community. And we saw the, the Days of Rage and the Weathermen as not being relevant in that they were only talking about the confronting on them in a, in a, in a quasi military manner, to agencies, the police agencies, whereas we wanted to really organize people and to force--