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Mak1
Member
08-12-2002
| Friday, November 10, 2006 - 2:02 am
I read here, too, and appreciate this thread. I usually get caught up on the board on the weekends, so I don't post much cuz everyone has already said everything.
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Friday, November 10, 2006 - 3:05 pm
WHAT WAS THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY? The Black Panther Party was a progressive political organization that stood in the vanguard of the most powerful movement for social change in America since the Revolution of 1776 and the Civil War: that dynamic episode generally referred to as The Sixties. It is the sole black organization in the entire history of black struggle against slavery and oppression in the United States that was armed and promoted a revolutionary agenda, and it represents the last great thrust by the mass of black people for equality, justice and freedom. The Party's ideals and activities were so radical, it was at one time assailed by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States." And, despite the demise of the Party, its history and lessons remain so challenging and controversial that established texts and media would erase all reference to the Party from American history. The Black Panther Party was the manifestation of the vision of Huey P. Newton, the seventh son of a Louisiana family transplanted to Oakland, California. In October of 1966, in the wake of the assassination of black leader Malcolm X and on the heels of the massive black, urban uprising in Watts, California and at the height of the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Newton gathered a few of his longtime friends, including Bobby Seale and David Hilliard, and developed a skeletal outline for this organization. It was named, originally, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The black panther was used as the symbol because it was a powerful image, one that had been used effectively by the shortlived voting rights group the Lowndes County (Alabama) Freedom Organization. The term "self defense" was employed to distinguish the Party's philosophy from the dominant nonviolent theme of the civil rights movement, and in homage to the civil rights group the Louisiana based Deacons for Defense. These two, symbolic references were, however, where all similarity between the Black Panther Party and other black organizations of the time, the civil rights groups and black power groups, ended. Immediately, the leadership of the embryonic Party outlined a Ten Point Platform and Program (see the end of this article for full text). This Platform & Program articulated the fundamental wants and needs, and called for a redress of the longstanding grievances, of the black masses in America, still alienated from society and oppressed despite the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War. Moreover, this Platform & Program was a manifesto that demanded the express needs be met and oppression of blacks be ended immediately, a demand for the right to self defense, by a revolutionary ideology and by the commitment of the membership of the Black Panther Party to promote its agenda for fundamental change in America. HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE FOUNDING OF THE PARTY There was no question that the end of the several centuries of the institution of slavery of blacks had not resulted in the assimilation of blacks into American society. Indeed, there was a violent, postemancipation white backlash, manifested in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, endorsed by the benign neglect of the President and the Congress, codified in the so called Black Codes. The rampant Iynching of blacks became a way of life in America, along with the de facto denial to blacks of every civil right, including the rights to vote, to worship, to use public facilities. From that time forward, then, blacks were obliged to wage fierce survival struggles in America, creating at once the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to promote integration of blacks into society as full, firstclass citizens and the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) of Marcus Garvey to promote independence of blacks and eventually a return to Africa. At the same time, there were the effective efforts of former slave Booker T. Washington to establish a separate socioeconomic scheme for blacks. America's response to all such efforts was violent and repressive and unyielding. Thus, despite the mass uprisings by blacks in resistance to the unrelenting violence and the law's delay, despite tacit urgings by blacks to be afforded some means to survive, despite the bold endeavors by blacks to live separate lives in America or leave America, for the next half century, blacks, in the main, found themselves denied of every possible avenue to either establish their own socioeconomic independence or participate fully in the larger society. Not until nearly 60 years after Plessy was there even the most minimal relief, in the Supreme Court's holding in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. In Brown, the Supreme Court stated that "separate" was "not equal" for blacks in America (at least with respect to public education). It is noteworthy that Dr. Kenneth Clark (the black psychologist on whose study the Brown court based its findings as to the negative impact on black children of the separate but equal doctrine) noted in 1994 that American schools were more segregated at that time than in 1954, when Brown was decided. Even after Brown, blacks struggled to integrate and become full partisans in American society, to no avail. From the famous 1955, Montgomery (Alabama) bus boycott to the subsequent voter rights efforts to the dangerous sit ins in all white public facilities led by SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) workers, the civil rights movement challenged America. Under the spiritual guidance and the nonviolent philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. millions, blacks and whites, protested and marched for freedom and justice for America's black minority, as so many were murdered or maimed for life along the way. Finally, in 1964, the U.S. Congress passed a civil rights act that outlawed racial segregation in public facilities. It was too little too late. As the images of nonviolent blacks and other civil rights workers and demonstrators being beaten and water hosed by police, spat on and jailed, merely for protesting social injustices shot across America's television screens (a new and compelling phenomenon in American life and popular culture), young urban blacks rejected nonviolence. The full expression of this was the violent protest to the brutal police beating of a black man in Watts (Los Angeles), California in the 1965 rebellion that shocked America and set off other such responses to oppression. By 1967, there had been more than 100 major black, urban rebellions in cities across the country. In the same time frame of the same year, 1965, the Vietnam war erupted. As television reports revealed the horrible realities of the war, good American soldiers killing Vietnamese children, America's white youth called the question, and rallied against the war. America's youth, black and white, had become openly hostile to the established order.
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Friday, November 10, 2006 - 3:06 pm
RISE OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY It was against this backdrop that Huey P. Newton was organizing the Black Panther Party for self-defense, boldly calling for a complete end to all forms of oppression of blacks and offering revolution as an option. At the same time, the Black Panther Party took the position that black people in America and the Vietnamese people were waging a common struggle, as comrades-in-arms, against a common enemy: the U.S. government. What was most "dangerous" about this was that young blacks, the same urban youth throwing molotov cocktails on America, were listening. This message was amplified when a small group of Black Panther Party members, led by Bobby Seale, designated chairman of the Party, marched into the California legislature, in May 1967, fully armed. Defined as protest against a pending guncontrol bill (which became the Mulford Act) aimed at the Party with the position that blacks had a Constitutional right to bear arms, the Party's message that day became a clarion call to young blacks. When, therefore, in October of 1967, Huey Newton was shot, arrested and charged with the murder of a white Oakland cop, after a gun battle of sorts on the streets of West Oakland that resulted in the death of police officer John Frey, it was indeed the spark that lit a prairie fire. Young whites, angry and disillusioned with America over the Vietnam war, raised their voices with young, urban blacks, to cry in unison: "Free Huey!" It became a movement of itself, the very embodiment of all the social contradictions, between the haves and have nots, the included and excluded, the alienated and the privileged. The freeing of the black man charged with killing a white cop, the oppressed who resisted oppression, was tantamount to the freedom of everyone. One result was not only the flowering of the Party itself but a rapid proliferation of other, like minded organizations. Chicanos, or Mexican Americans, in Southern California formed the Brown Berets. Whites in Chicago and environs formed the White Patriot Party. Chinese in the San Francisco Bay Area formed the Red Guard. Puerto Ricans in New York created the Young Lords. Eventually, a group of so called senior citizens organized the Gray Panthers to address the human and civil rights abuses of the elderly in society. The Party expanded from a small Oakland based organization to a national organization, as black youth in 48 states formed chapters of the Party. In addition, Black Panther coalition and support groups began to spring up internationally, in Japan, China, France, England, Germany, Sweden, in Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uruguay and elsewhere, including, even, in Israel. At the street level, the Party began to develop a series of social programs to provide needed services to black and poor people, promoting thereby, at the same time, a model for an alternative, more humane social scheme. These programs, of which there came to be more than 35, were eventually referred to as Survival Programs, and were operated by Party members under the slogan "survival pending revolution." The first such program was the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which spread from being operated at one small Catholic church, in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, to every major city in America where there was a Party chapter. Thousands upon thousands of poor and hungry children were fed free breakfasts every day by the Party under this program. The magnitude and powerful impact of this program was such that the federal government was pressed and shamed into adopting a similar program for public schools across the country, while the FBI assailed the free breakfast program as nothing more than a propaganda tool used by the Party to carry out its "communist" agenda. More insidiously, the FBI denounced the Party itself as a group of communist outlaws bent on overthrowing the U.S. government. Armed with that definition and all the machinery of the federal government, J. Edgar Hoover directed the FBI to wage a campaign to eliminate the Black Panther Party altogether, commanding the assistance of local police departments to do so. Indeed, as Hoover stated in 1968 that the Party represented "the greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.," he pledged that 1969 would be the last year of the Party's existence. Indeed, in January of 1969, two Party leaders of the Southern California Chapter, John Huggins and Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, were murdered at UCLA by FBI paid assassins, with the cooperation of black nationalist Ron Karenga and his US Organization. By the end of that year, nearly every office and other facility of the Black Panther Party had been violently assaulted by police and/or the FBI, culminating, in December, in an FBI orchestrated five hour police assault on the office in Los Angeles and FBI directed Illinois state police assassination of Chicago Party leader Fred Hampton and member Mark Clark. In the interim, there had been the Oakland police murder of 17 year old Party member Bobby Hutton, in April of 1968; the August 1968 Los Angeles police murder of another 17 year old Panther, Tommy Lewis, along with Robert Lawrence and Steve Bartholomew; numerous arrests, from that of Party chairman Bobby Seale on conspiracy charges in connection with anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago to that of chief of staff David Hilliard on charges of assaulting police officers (in the April 1968 police gun battle in which Bobby Hutton was killed) to a conspiracy to kill the President (Nixon) charge arising from an anti-war speech, to the famous New Haven murder conspiracy case of Bobby Seale and veteran Panther Ericka Huggins. There had been every kind of assault imaginable on the Party's social programs and destruction of Party property. From police raiders who smashed breakfast programs eggs on the floors of churches they invaded to those who crushed Party free clinic supplies underfoot to those who caused the destruction of batches of the Party's newspapers. In addition, intimidation and other such tactics were being employed to undermine the Party's support, to break the spirit and commitment of Party supporters and family members. More sinisterly, perhaps, and subtlety were the activities carried out under the FBI's so called counter-intelligence program known as COINTELPRO, whereby the FBI directed its field offices and local police to destroy the Party through the use of informants, agents provocateur and covert activities involving mayhem and murder. Nevertheless, the Party survived and continued to build its Survival Programs, which came to include not only the free breakfast programs and free clinics, but also grocery giveaways, the manufacture and distribution of free shoes, school and education programs, senior transport and service programs, free bussing to prisons and prisoner support and legal aid programs, among others.
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Friday, November 10, 2006 - 3:08 pm
THE FREE HUEY MOVEMENT AND THE GROWTH OF THE PARTY Hundreds of thousands of black as well as white youth had marched throughout the streets of Oakland and all over America in support of the Free Huey Movement as it had come to be called. While Huey was eventually convicted, it was not on the original charge of first degree murder but for simple manslaughter. Soon, however, even that conviction was set aside and a new trial was ordered. In July of 1970, then, Huey was indeed set free from jail. Thousands greeted him. The celebrations seemed meaningless in light of the July 7, 1970 murder of 17 year old Jonathan Jackson (George Jacksons brother) in the incident that gave rise to the famous arrest and trial of Angela Davis. The question of Huey's freedom was nearly forgotten when well known Party leader Eldridge Cleaver, living in exile in Algeria, challenged the Party's agenda of social programs and proposed a terrorist one. By the end of 1970, Cleaver was expelled from the Party in a nasty riff that culminated in the murder of Party loyalist Sam Napier in New York. Still, the Party continued to build its programs and move its agenda, as it began to consolidate its efforts in its home base of Oakland, California. Over the next few years, until 1973, the Party maintained and built its agenda, despite the brutal assassination at San Quentin prison in August of 1971 of Party field marshal and author George Jackson. Nevertheless, in 19723, the Party entered into electoral politics in Oakland by running Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown for public office, for mayor and city councilwoman respectively. Though that election was lost, per se, it allowed the Black Panther Party to solidify a broad base of support for its future efforts. In 1974, there was great upheaval in the internal affairs of the Party, so much so that by the time Huey Newton went into selfimposed exile, rather than stand trial for the murder of a young prostitute (for which he would be acquitted), most of the original leadership was gone. David Hilliard was expelled while in prison; Bobby Seale was expelled. Elaine Brown took over the chairmanship of the Party during those three years that Newton was in exile, in Cuba. THE LAST CHAPTER During that time, Brown ran for Oakland public office again, this time garnering more than 44% of the vote along with the support of every labor union in the area. At the next city election, the Party supported and virtually installed Lionel Wilson as mayor of Oakland, the first black to hold that post in the 100 year history of the city. In the meantime, it further solidified its base by fighting for and obtaining funds to build 300 new, replacement housing units for poor people displaced by a local freeway; by entering into a working partnership with certain developers to build up the dilapidated downtown city center in order to provide 10,000 new jobs for Oakland's poor and unemployed. At the same time, a permanent primary school was instituted, which was highly lauded by the California legislature, among others. On Huey's return from exile, then, in 1977, the Black Panther Party was alive and well in Oakland, California, maintaining a strong constituency base in the black and working communities, and prepared to move forward to carry out its primary goal to make Oakland a base for revolution in America. Soon after Newton's return to Oakland, in July of 1977, however, a combination of the continued, albeit more subtle and sophisticated, activities of the FBI (despite J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972) and internal stress and conflict came to erode the Black Panther Party. By the end of the decade, it had come to a slow and unheralded demise. link
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Retired
Member
07-11-2001
| Saturday, November 11, 2006 - 10:23 am
Thanks for posting that, Mocha. Great read.
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Saturday, November 11, 2006 - 1:13 pm

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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 11:55 am
Black People Resisted They resisted the practice of slavery and the trade in slaves from its inception in the United States in the early 1600s to its end in the middle 1800s. They resisted it on the ships from Africa. They resisted it in the fields and in the big house; they resisted by organized rebellion; and they resisted by direct, spontaneous acts of courage. For their freedom, they killed and were killed. They poisoned and committed infanticide and suicide. They always ran away. And some master was always hunting for them. Their will set against the master’s will, they fought, fought back, and died. They also survived. They took the lash and the burn. They lost but they won. By the strength of their determination, led by the North Star and set aboard the box cars of the Underground Railroad - by their resistance - slaves won in the cause of Human freedom.
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Mamapors
Member
07-29-2004
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 11:59 am
I just got caught up here. Thanks Mocha!!!!
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 12:26 pm
Spangs was taking too long to post this so I will. Very powerful images. The lynchings did me in. link
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Justavice
Member
11-22-2005
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 1:03 pm
Count me in as another reader of this thread and this was the first place I came after catching up from last week in the N & V thread.
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Jimmer
Moderator
08-30-2000
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 1:18 pm
Thanks for sharing that link Mocha. That is awesome stunning photography about a very important subject. I only took a short look but I will definitely go back again.
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Grannyg
Member
05-28-2002
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 1:57 pm
if you put your mouse on the pic it tells who they are pictures of and where they were taken. not all of them have it but some of them do. thanks for sharing and i agree the lynchings were the most horrible site.
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Jan
Moderator
08-01-2000
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 2:44 pm
My newest macLean magazine ( Canada) has an article about a University in the USA ( would it be Brown??) that was begun by a family of the same name in New England. This family made the bulk of their money in Rhode Island running slave ships - long after it was illegal - and it was slave money that funded the university. One of the brothers was horrified by it all and became an abolitionist, I think. I am checking to see if the story gets put online at their site and if it does, I will link it. ( I forgot and gave the magazine away today before posting it here)
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 2:55 pm
Brown University Admits Slavery Link, Creates Research Center By Patrick Cole Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) --Brown University acknowledged today its co-founders were linked to the slave trade, and said it would establish memorials, forums and a research center to educate its students and the public about the practice. A 106-page report, ``Slavery and Justice,'' released on the institution's Web site, said the Brown family, after whom the school is named, were slave owners. Family records show that the four Brown brothers -- Nicholas, Joseph, John and Moses -- owned at least 14 slaves in the early 1770s, the report said. The report recommended that the seventh-oldest U.S. university sponsor on- and off-campus forums on slavery, rewrite its history to include the role the Brown family had in the slave trade and create a research center on slavery and justice. The report was ordered in 2003 by Ruth Simmons, president of the Providence, Rhode Island, institution. ``We believe it is incumbent on the university, at a minimum, to acknowledge formally and publicly the participation of many of Brown's founders and benefactors in the institution of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade,'' the report said. Brown said it will ``pay particular attention to the recruitment of students from Africa and the West Indies, the historic points of origin'' for most slaves brought to Rhode Island. It rejected the idea of scholarships specifically for African-Americans because it does not offer any aid except on the basis of need, and said it would not pay reparations. Brown is one of the first Ivy League institutions to investigate its links to enslaving peoples of African descent in U.S., a practice which began in the 17th century. The first enslaved Africans came to Rhode Island sometime after 1638, according to the Brown report. Founded in 1764 as the College of Rhode Island, Brown University was incorporated by a group of people who included Nicholas Brown, the son of Captain James Brown, who was a merchant. Nicholas' brother John laid the cornerstone for the College Edifice and brother Joseph designed the building.
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 2:56 pm
My brother got his BS from Brown.
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Jan
Moderator
08-01-2000
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 3:00 pm
Hmm what a connection and irony, no? I notice that their article says "slave owners" but doesn't exactly own up to actually being slave runners and slave traders. The MacLeans article talks about the slave ships, mentions one where many many slaves died - and that is what turned the one brother around and made him an abolitionist.
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Retired
Member
07-11-2001
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 3:25 pm
Very moving. Thanks for posting the link.
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 4:47 pm
There was some sort of list somewhere that had all the big companies that profited off of the slave trade. Can't remember where I saw it though but let me do some googling...
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 4:52 pm
Ok here's a lil something... Blacks sue companies that profited from slavery By Christian Wiessner in New York March 28 2002 In the first class action seeking reparations from firms for profiting from slavery, three large American companies have been named in a lawsuit filed on behalf of blacks descended from slaves. The companies include the US's largest insurer, Aetna, which insured slaves as property in the 1850s; CSX, which used forced labour to build railways; and FleetBoston bank, formed from institutions including one owned by the slave trader John Brown. Ed Fagan, a lawyer who also led the successful campaign for Swiss banks to pay billions of dollars in compensation to Holocaust survivors, said this was the first of a series of lawsuits that could affect up to 100 businesses. These companies "benefited from stealing people, from stealing labour, from forced breeding, from torture, from committing numerous horrendous acts", Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, 36, one of the plaintiffs, said. Slavery "constituted an immoral and inhumane deprivation of Africans' life, liberty, African citizenship rights [and] cultural heritage and ... of the fruits of their own labour", the 21-page suit said Aetna and CSX said slavery was a regrettable chapter in US history but the events in question occurred so long ago that a courtroom was not the proper venue to decide on reparations. <snip> link
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 4:54 pm
Independently, USA TODAY has found documentation tying several others to slavery: Investment banks Brown Bros. Harriman and Lehman Bros. Railroads Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union Pacific and Canadian National. Textile maker WestPoint Stevens. Newspaper publishers Knight Ridder, Tribune, Media General, Advance Publications, E.W. Scripps and Gannett, parent and publisher of USA TODAY. link
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Pamy
Member
01-02-2002
| Monday, November 13, 2006 - 7:10 pm
the link was very moving. Seeing the pics and listening to the song had me teary eyed
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Jan
Moderator
08-01-2000
| Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 10:11 am
the human race never seems to get any better (PS when he says worse - he means "in greater numbers" ie more numerous- not that it is morally worse): Trafficking now 'worse than African slavery' VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Human trafficking, including women forced to become prostitutes or minors forced to do child labor, is worse now than the trade in African slaves of past centuries, a top Vatican official said on Tuesday. "This trafficking in human beings has intensified, persons put into slavery because they depend on certain criminals who take possession of these human beings," said Cardinal Renato Martino, former longtime Vatican envoy to the United Nations and current head of the Holy See's office concerned with migrant and itinerant peoples. "It's worse than the slavery of those whose slaves who were taken from Africa and brought to other countries," Martino told a news conference to present Pope Benedict XVI's annual message dealing with the problems of migrants. The cardinal singled out modern-day forms of slavery -- minors who are sold to do child labor or who are forced to be soldiers, as well as women forced to prostitute themselves -- and challenged countries to combat these problems. "In a world which proclaims human rights left and right, let's see what it does about the rights of so many human beings which are not respected, but trampled," the cardinal said. <snipped for length> CNN
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Dogdoc
Member
09-29-2001
| Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 5:08 pm
I don't know how to activate this link and I posted it elsewhere but "Thoughts Upon Slavery" by John Wesley 1774 gives eye witness accounts of the slave trade in the 1700s. It is painful to read because it is a straight forward account of Africa before and after the slave trade started. I would like to know how others here feel after reading it.
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Mocha
Member
08-12-2001
| Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 5:34 pm
Is this it DD? link
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Dogdoc
Member
09-29-2001
| Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - 5:54 pm
That is it Mocha. Thank you. I think it is safe to say that John Wesley was ahead of his time. I wonder how much of an impact his writings and sermons had at the time. There is a story about John Wesley that you can find by searching "John Wesley and oysters." I really enjoyed it. He is my kind of preacher even though I am not a Methodist.
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