So Can You Pass a Brother some Hot Sauce…and perhaps a Revolution?

So…members of the legendary Black Panther Party are preparing to sell a new line of products called Burn Baby Burn: A Taste of the Sixties Revolutionary Hot Sauce—yes I said hot sauce. Proceeds from the sale of the hot sauce (still ruminating on this?) will go towards the Huey Newton Foundation and Oakland based community organization. Now I know that so many of us have become jaded and look at the hot sauce venture with a healthy sense cynicism, but this is not new territory for members of the Black Panther Party. During the late 1980s BPP founder Bobby Seale began to hawk his skills as a master Bar BQer. His cook book (“it’s a cook book, it’s a cook book!”) Barbeque'N With Bobby was published in 1988. I remember catching Seale give a talk up at New York University shortly after the book’s publication, where he defended his right to write such a book on the basis that (and I’m of cousre paraphrasing), even a revolutionary has a right to eat good Bar BQ (keep in mind as I write this, I am across the street from a place called the Q-Shack which specializes to East Carolina-styled Bar BQ). It seems to me that if Elijah Muhammad could sell the masses of the diverse uses of navy beans, then Bobby Seale and the Black Panther Party can celebrate the virtues of some good Bar-BQ and hot sauce.

Of the cousre the timing of “Burn Baby Burn” hot sauce is not accidental. Next year marks the “formal’ birth of the Black Power Movement and the reality is that unless you are a hard-core fan/scholar/veteran of the era, names like David Hilliard, Mark Clark, Elaine Brown, Fred Hampton, Kathleen Clever and Bobby Hutton are not familiar names. At the very least, “Burn Baby Burn” gives us an opportunity to revisit that amazing moment in American history and at best, let’s hope the Huey Newton Foundation raises enough money to do the kind of work that lives up to the radical democratic ideals that the Black Panther Party tried to uphold.

***

Just to Get a Rep?

I repped today on behalf of Hip-Hop parents on NPR’s News and Notes with Ed Gordon. Danyel Smith also got down on a little Bliss