FOR A POLITICAL movement that serves as a 50,000-watt boogeyman for conservative talk radio in America, finding your local representative of the New Black Panther Party is not easy.
There’s no party headquarters and no membership roll — just a doorbell at a modest brick home in the lawn-checkered, rebuilt stretch of North Philadelphia between the Temple campus and Center City.
When King Samir Shabazz, the Philadelphia chairman of the New Black Panther Party, emerges, he agrees to an interview only if it can be conducted while he paces up and down the sidewalk out front.
The mid-40s Shabazz is a beret-wearing, dreadlock-flowing bundle of contradictions — with a nervous laugh and a “Kill Whitey” tattoo etched into his cheekbone.
He is short in stature but long on the kind of political hate speech that has gotten his NBPP dinged by the extremist-tracking Southern Poverty Law Center.
“I hate every last white person,” says Shabazz, who adds during a rambling 30-minute dialogue that Christianity has “a Satanic mind-set,” that he believes the U.S. government carried out the 9/11 attacks and that he’d just been doing some research on a video website that he insisted on calling “Jewtube.”
And Shabazz makes a mockery of the talk-radio notion that the New Black Panthers are somehow an adjunct to President Obama’s political campaigns. The first African-American president, Shabazz says, “has not made the conditions for black people any better — in fact it has made things five times worse because we’ve gone back to sleep. We put our hopes and dreams into a man who is an outright murderer of his own people”—a reference to the bombing of Libya.
The New Black Panthers are a political party with no elected officers, and even trackers have no idea how many members it has nationwide — probably somewhere in the hundreds. A website maintained by Shabazz called RebelSlaves.com promotes a weekly meeting at a former post office on Girard Avenue, but this week no one showed up.
