Yipanther Pact
1968—the year of the pig

The death of the ballot, the birth of the bullet—here is the choice—contemptuously thrust in our face by this decadent racist power structure: racist pig Humphrey, racist pig Nixon, racist pig Wallace for President! So where do we go from here?

Into the streets! Into the alleys! Back of town! Onto the rooftops! Behind whatever shelter remains for a black person here in Babylon!

This is the nightmare election year of the American dream. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party have told black people to kiss the ass of the elephant and the donkey. They have done this in no uncertain terms.

It is time for black people to tell the elephant and the jackass to go fuck each other—political and moral cretins that they are. Yet we cannot sit idly by and allow these vipers to run their game on us without even raising a dead finger in opposition.

It is very clear that there is no way left for us to offer any opposition through the traditional political machinery. These merciless demagogues have so firmly grasped this machinery in their clutches that even the white supporters of McCarthy and Kennedy got all the fat whipped off their heads in Chicago when they tried to oppose the mad dog power play of meathead Humphrey.

Our only recourse is to join in a second Boston Tea Party in order to blow their game. In order to blow their minds, we must chart our own course, a new course designed to Manifest how we feel about the insufferable political manipulation and chicanery that has made the national election into a circus devoid even of the saving grace of humor.

This shit is not funny. These pigs are plotting our death. These vicious reprobates, conniving scoundrels are plotting genocide against us. What do you think this featherweight, featherbrain Alabama racist, George Wallace, has up his sleeve for niggers? Extermination. The final solution to the Negro problem.

We don’t have to go for that. That’s not our issue. That is not the goal towards which black people have been struggling, dying, for these painful four hundred years. Our fight is for freedom, for liberation, by any means necessary, as Brother Malcolm put it.

Brother Malcolm also said that it’s gotta be the ballot or the bullet. The pigs of the power structure have taken off their masks and revealed themselves to be precisely what we have always known them to be. Murderers, liars, miserable genocidal wretches.

These pigs themselves have already closed down the polling places, the ballot boxes, in so far as any meaningful solution to the black man’s problems is concerned. Right on!

Are we to lie down and grovel on our bellies, on our knees, like a begging Lazarus, hoping that these fiends will toss us a few crumbs when they introduce another bullshit four year program into the pigpen of the United States Congress? Fuck these motherfuckers! Let’s go for ourselves. Let’s go for what we know.

And what do we know? We know, in the words of Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of’ the Black Panther Party, that the spirit of the people is greater than the pigs’ technology.

They seek to deprive us of life, of our human rights, of a future, through their rigged technological political crap game. Only snake eyes are on the loaded dice for us within the confines of the American political system.

So there’s nothing left for us to do but to break up this crap game, to pick our money up off the wood and demand a brand new pair of dice from the house.

Let the pigs dance a jig to the star spangled banner. Let us do the dog in the streets. Let the pigs of the power structure put each other through these asinine charges and let us put all the pigs through a final change.

Let us join together with all those souls in Babylon who are straining for the birth of a new day. A revolutionary generation is on the scene.

There are men and women, human beings, in Babylon today. Disenchanted, alienated white youth, the hippies, the yippies, and all the unnamed dropouts from the white man’s burden are our allies in this human cause. The entire anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist world of mankind is with us.

Let us manifest our solidarity with them. Let us say loud and clear that we are not going to accept four more years of Slavery, Suffering and Death under the hooves of racist pigs.

Until this house is set in order, let us plant our tent on the fighting words of Brother Robert Williams: “America is a house on fire. Freedom now or let it burn, let it burn.”

Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information, Black Panther Party; Presidential Candidate, Peace and Freedom Party

Come into the streets on Nov. 5, election day. Vote with your feet. Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball! Demand the bars he open. Make music and dance at every red light. A festival of life in the streets and parks throughout the world. The American election represents death, and we are alive.

Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, bomb throwers, bank robbers, peacock freaks, toe worshippers, poets, street folk, liberated women, professors and body snatchers: it is election day and we are everywhere.

Don’t vote in a jackass-elephant-cracker circus. Let’s vote for ourselves. Me for President. We are the revolution. We will strike and boycott the election and create our own reality.

Can you dig it in every metropolis and hamlet of America boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, pickets, lie-ins, pray-ins, feel-ins, piss-ins at the polling places.

Nobody goes to work. Nobody goes to school. Nobody votes. Everyone becomes a life actor of the street doing his thing, making the revolution by freeing himself and fucking up the system.

Ministers dragged away from polling places. Free chicken and ice cream in the streets. Thousands of kazoos, drums, tambourines, triangles, pots and pans, trumpets, street fairs. firecrackers—a symphony of life on a day of death. LSD in the drinking water.

Let’s parade in the thousands to the places where the votes are counted and let murderous racists feel our power.

Force the National Guard to protect every polling place in the country. Brush your teeth in the streets. Organize a sack race. Join the rifle club of your choice. Freak out the pigs with exhibitions of snake dancing and karate at the nearest pig pen.

Release a Black Panther in the Justice Department. Hold motorcycle races a hundred yards from the polling places. Fly an American flag out of every house so confused voters can’t find the polling places. Wear costumes. Take a burning draft card to Spiro Agnew.

Stall for hours in the polling places trying to decide between Nixon and Humphrey and Wallace. Take your clothes off. Put wall posters up all over the city. Hold block parties. Release hundreds of greased pigs in pig uniforms downtown.

Check it out, in Europe and throughout the world thousands of students will march on the USA embassies demanding to vote in the election cause Uncle Pig controls the world. No domination without representation.

Let’s make 2–300 Chicago’s on election day.

On election day let’s pay tribute to rioters, anarchists, Commies, runaways, draft dodgers. acid freaks, snipers, beatniks, deserters, Chinese spies. Let’s exorcise all politicians, generals, publishers, businessmen, Popes, American Legion, AMA, FBI, narcos, informers.

And then on Inauguration Day Jan. 20 we will bring our revolutionary theater to Washington to inaugurate Pigasus, our pig, the only honest candidate, and turn the White House into a crash pad. They will have to put Nixon’s hand on the bible in a glass cage.

Begin now: resist oppression as you feel it. Organize and begin the word of mouth communication that is the basis of all conspiracies. Coordinate information and ideas by writing to Youth International Party, c/o Eldridge Cleaver, Ramparts Magazine, 495 Beach St., San Francisco, California, 94133.

Every man a revolution! Every small group a revolutionary center! We will be together on election day. Yippie!!!

Stewart E. Albert

Abby Hoffman

Jerry Rubin