"e experiment buying Rainer's Ale and even Thunderbird, combining ice-cold bottles of the wine with lime Kool-Aid. Hilliard remembers other variations he and Huey P. Then you fill the bottle with a can or a half a can of filtered lemon juice concentrate, put the lid back on and shake vigorously, and then refrigerate the mixture until it is chilled. To make the drink you "open the bottle and drink the top part of the almost sickeningly sweet, cheap stuff-'the poison,'" recalled Black Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard in his autobiography and party history This Side of Glory. The Four Deuce's song "W-P-L-J (White Port and Lemon Juice)" offers the basic recipe for this "good, good wine that really make you feel so fine." Members often used Italian Swiss Colony and Gallo as the wine component, though particular brands were sometimes advised or banned for the purpose of expressing either solidarity or contempt for the forces behind them-and these directives were often shifting.
The basic ingredients were filtered lemon juice concentrate and port wine. It went by many different names, all of them fierce: Panther Piss, Bitter Dog, and Bitter Motherfucker*. As Hutton surrendered to police, they gunned down the seventeen year old and he was shot more than ten times.Īcross the nation Panthers raised a glass of Hutton's favorite drink, the official cocktail of the Black Panther Party, in his memory. amid national unrest, Panthers had a shoot-out with Oakland police.
Hutton occupies a special place in the party history because he was also the first party member to lose his life for the cause. After talking to him for a few minutes, I knew that he was serious about the struggle and that there was little if any, egoism in his motives." He had a beautiful smile and an uncorrupted, youthful enthusiasm. Li'l Bobby initiated a friendly conversation with me by asking some everyday, down-home questions: where I was from, what I did. He was human, natural, and so clearly unconcerned about fitting the image of a cold, calculating revolutionary. Hutton was the youngest of seven children and his family lived close by the first Panther office.Īctivist and educator Angela Davis recalled meeting Li'l Bobby in her eponymous 1974 autobiography. Li'l Bobby Hutton had moved with his family from Arkansas to California during the second wave of the Great Migration, when African Americans fled the terror of rampant Klan violence and the oppression of Jim Crow in the South. | CREDIT: TED STRESHINSKY / CORBIS / GETTY IMAGES Huey Newton (right), founder of the Black Panther Party, sits with Bobby Seale at party headquarters in San Francisco. Newton and Bobby Seale worked as community organizers at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center program where they met the party's first recruit, Robert "Li'l Bobby" James Hutton, a teen who had left school but found his calling alongside Newton and Seale's new organization, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
"In a sense, these sessions at Bobby house were our political education classes, and the Party sort of grew out of them."īy day, Huey P. Newton in his memoir Revolutionary Suicide. We also discussed the Black achievements of the past, particularly as they helped us to understand current events," wrote Huey P. "We drank beer and wine and chewed over our political situation, our social problems, and the merits and shortcomings of other groups. Newton would hold court with the community for hours, often with his shotgun on display as the symbol of the party's work for the survival of Black life through armed self-defense from police violence. Newton's unofficial office was a soul food restaurant-bar in North Oakland called Bosn's Locker. The party also created its own signature cocktail, one that harbors some of the key ingredients for social change. The Black Panther Party began over drinks, a gathering of a small group of people whose conversations grew into an entire field of committed actions around the world. Bobby Seale (left) and David Hilliard sit at a table in front of Black Panther Party headquarters during a press conference in Oakland, California, August 1969.
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