Seize the Time Inc
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Managed by Elaine's daughter Ericka Seize the Time, Inc., is dedicated to promoting the vision of Elaine Brown, once chairman of the Black Panther Party and now author and activist. The phrase Seize the Time comes from the title song of Elaine's first album of music, recorded in 1969, a declaration of the oppressed that the time for freedom is now and a plea to seize the time.
The majority of people in the world remain poor and oppressed. It is time for an immediate end to this suffering, an end to poverty, war, oppression, racism, sexism and class disparity. It is time to create a world in which all people will have everything they need to live a decent life, in peace and in harmony with nature. We are committed to spreading this ideal through sales and distribution of our materials to those willing to become "underground messengers," believing this is the most effective way for the powerless to deliver a powerful message.
Message Merchandise
Seize the Time, CD released by Water Records
Seize the Time Shirts
Comrade Sister Shirts
Elaine Brown's first album Seize the Time reissued and now available on CD,
includes the Black Panther Party National Anthem*
After the assassinations of my beloved comrades John Huggins and Alprentice
"Bunchy" Carter in January of 1969 at UCLA, I met the Black Panther
Party Chief of Staff, David Hilliard. He had come to Los Angeles for Bunchy's
funeral, where I sang Precious Lord, at the request of Bunchy's mother.
It had rained that entire week after the assassinations, a downpour as overwhelming
as our grief. After the funeral, we gathered together, speechless. Then
David spoke to me. He asked about the songs he had heard I wrote. In my
jail cell that last week, I had written a song for Bunchy and John.-Nearly
all the members of our Southern California Chapter of the Party had been,
criminally, arrested hours after the assassinations on the bizarre charge
of conspiracy to commit murder, or, to retaliate against the assassins of
John and Bunchy, members of the counterrevolutionary US Organization of
Ron Karenga, who we believed an operative of the FBI.-My song for Bunchy
and John was called, simply, Assassination. I played it for David in the
silence of that terrible moment. I played others, at his request that was
a command.
At some point then, or maybe later, I played him a song called The Meeting.
While it was a recollection of the night I encountered Eldridge Cleaver,
then the Party's Minister of Information, it seemed more to David, as, to
me, particularly in the aftermath of that night weeks later when Eldridge
was wounded and 17-year-old Bobby Hutton was killed in a police assault
on Panthers in Oakland, California, on April 6, 1968-two days after the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The heaviness of it all seemed
to resound in the song, which David ultimately ordained, and which remains,
"The Black Panther Party National Anthem."
These and the other songs here were written for and, in many ways, by the
heroes I came to know, the freedom fighters, the soldiers of the Black Panther
Party. This album is an homage to them, to the blood they shed in our struggle
to find freedom for our people, for all oppressed people.
The distance between the time when this album was recorded, under the baton
of the great jazz pianist Horace Tapscott, in 1969, is barely perceptible
to me. It's not so much that aging allows me to recognize, reckon with,
the brevity of life and time but that the oppressive conditions that gave
rise to the Black Panther Party remain. The relevance of our work is contemporary.
The heroes and ideas celebrated and expressed in song here are presently
significant. The United States is still engaged in wars of aggression, for
profit. Poverty overwhelms the country, millions, especially the blacks,
living at the edge of life, without food or decent housing or medical care
or education. Over two million people, 50% of whom are black, are imprisoned
in the U.S., in both public and private, for-profit prisons, rendering the
U.S. distinct as having the highest incarceration rate in the world. The
black infant mortality rate is twice that of whites, the same tragic disparity
as when Dr. King reflected on it in 1968; and the black cancer death rates
are double and triple that for whites. And now there are the scourges of
AIDS and "crack" cocaine.
A new generation of freedom fighters must rise up from this pyre. May these
songs serve as inspiration.
