Higher Education, Seminary Training, & the Start of a Political Career One of his closest advisors at the time was the veteran Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member David Canter, who also mentored a young David Axelrod. We needed to arm ourselves.”ĭuring the late ’60s and early ’70s, Rush was a sponsor of the GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee, a front group for the Socialist Workers Party.
Reflecting, years later, on his tenure with BPP, he explained: “We were reacting to police brutality, to the historical relationship between African-Americans and recalcitrant racist whites. Rush eventually served six months in prison for illegal possession of firearms. In December 1969, law-enforcement authorities raided Rush’s apartment and found marijuana, booby traps, unregistered weapons, ammunition, training manuals on explosives, and an assortment of communist writings by Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and others. We advocate offensive violence against the power structure.” The trend now is not to wait to be attacked. Rush, who named his own son “Huey” after Panther leader Huey Newton, became the “defense minister” of BPP-Illinois and said in 1969: “Black people have been on the defensive for all these years.
In 1968 Rush went AWOL from the military and became coordinator of the gangster-ridden Illinois branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP), renowned for intimidating local business people into making “donations” to Panther “charities.” One BPP member recruited by Rush was Fred Hampton, who was killed in a Decempolice raid on Panther headquarters. We plan to arm the total black community so when the pigs come down on us, we will be equal.” So we intend to teach everyone in the black community that same language. He developed a profound hatred of white police officers from an early age, as evidenced by his 1966 declaration: ”The only language the pigs understand is the language of the gun. Army from 1963-68, Rush became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1966-68). Bobby Rush was born on Novemin Albany, Georgia, but grew up on Chicago’s North Side, where his mother was a Republican precinct captain.
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