In Picking up the Gun, Anthony details the particulars and explains the significance of working with white radicals and its impact on the Black struggle. According to Anthony, “The Party had the manpower but the white radicals had the administrative machinery. Without the machinery provided by the committee, we would not have been able to begin to build and sustain the thousands of supporters of Huey with information and political propaganda.”
Here, the Black Panthers would increase their visibility and membership due to the “Free Huey” campaign. This momentum, built upon white Leftists’ support, would contribute to the Panthers’ further expansion. Kizenski and O’Connor told Anthony to have Cleaver dispatch him to Los Angeles, start a Los Angeles chapter of the Party where he could be an independent leader, and encourage an ideological war with Maulana Karenga’s cultural nationalist Organization US, founded on September 7, 1965. Karenga asserts, “US has said and continues to say that the battle we must fight now and always is the battle for the minds of black people, and if we lose that battle, we cannot hope to win any other battle.” Arguing that Black people in the United States have been conditioned with the same racist ideas and anti-Black ideas as white people, Karenga insists that Black people reconnect culturally with their African heritage, reorient themselves in their own sense of self and purpose, and engage in political struggle.
Anthony knew Karenga from L.A. City College when they were both students and did not want conflict with him or US, but Kizenski and O’Connor applied pressure to Anthony to get Los Angeles Black Panther leader Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter—former leader of the Los Angeles street organization the Slauson’s—to recruit members into the Party and start a war in the streets with US. Unable to run Organization US out of Los Angeles, tension grew, and violence followed.
The presence and influence of white radicals, according to Anthony, directly related to the growing tensions with other Black organizations. He explains,
Adding fuel to these political fires was the white radical press, which seemed to use every opportunity to make distinctions between the ideology, strategy, and tactics of the Panthers as opposed to those of other black organizations- most of who were dubbed cultural nationalists, which has become a synonym for reactionary. It seemed that the white radicals were consciously building the image of the Party, and the price the Party was paying for these newly won allies was that it was becoming the enemy of other black organizations and political personalities.