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A Preface to our interview with Lauren Watson. by David Bean
I came by my early militancy naturally. Long ago, I found a very neat and professional business card. Printed at the top was “Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” I still remember the feeling of the card in my hand and on my heart, curiously it smelled like church. The card was lying on a window sill outside of a drug store near my junior high school. This drug store was on a busy street near the center of town in a white neighborhood. I had been bused from my neighborhood to predominantly white schools since I was nine years old. It was four years latter that I found the KKK card. I looked around expecting to see some large sweaty southern brute to whom the card might have belonged. There were only regular looking Denver white people. For me that made it worse. Invisible Empire could mean just that. I felt heavy, burdened by the cards weight and scared. I noticed a few more cards on the same windowsill sort of spaced evenly. I decided it was a recruiting attempt and wondered how many of the white people walking by were Knights.
I never showed the card to my parents. I kept it and looked at it occasionally. Whenever I met somebody who I thought might know something about the KKK or more specifically, knew something we might do about them, I would ask questions. I got some answers perhaps three months later. It is hard to gauge time when your that young but it must have been summer because we were hanging out with Dick. Dick had a electrical engineering degree and would play chess with us during the summer. Everybody knew he was intelligent. Dick told me that if the Black Panthers were around the Klan's knights would run like rabbits. At last I knew what to do, or rather where to start. I went to public library and looked up the Black Panthers. I ended up stashing a copy of Huey P. Newton’s book “Revolutionary Suicide” in the shelves near books on German W.W.II armor. I'd come back almost every day and read a chapter or two. When I finished that book I read Newton's other book “To Die for the People.” After that, I read “Black Power” by Stokely Carmicheal and then Hitler's “Mein Kampf” just for perspective. I was now ready for action. The last month or so of that summer I started to train a small force to attack the KKK headquarters. I found some guys that were a couple of years older than me who had either drivers licenses or learners permits and indoctrinated them. I recruited the rest of the team based on loyalty and political fervor. I told them about the Ten Point Program. The Black Panther Party's ten point platform of demands. I educated everyone I met on the forty acres and a mule promise that had never been honored. I told them about the inequities of our situation as Black Men. Most importantly I showed them the catalyst of my new orientation, the KKK business card. I had found out where they were meeting. I had mapped out our approach and ex-filtration routes. The KKK HQ was about 30 minutes outside of the city. We would have to park a half a mile away and run back to the car after we threw the Molotov cocktails inside. We trained for the half mile run. We practiced sneaking around our neighborhood in blacked out costumes looking like ninjas. We made and tested the Molotovs. We were ready to strike. On the first scheduled night for the strike, the drivers mom wouldn't let him have the car. We scheduled a alternate night. When the night arrived three of our five man, I mean boy, team didn't show up. The Driver and I took the ride anyway. It was dark out and we could see their shadows inside. We imagined hooded clansmen taking blood oaths to kill us. We realized that we had made some time miscalculations. We shored up the plan and rescheduled. Again we had difficulties getting the team in motion. The importance of organization was becoming obvious. I was by then reading “Guerrilla Warfare: Theory and Practice.” The importance of building a true cadre was on the mind of both myself and my number two guy, the Driver. At some point we must have started to get cold feet. We didn't trust the other three team members enough to use them anymore. We got bogged down in the organizational phase and never moved on to the mobilization phase. We built what could better be described as a gang. We called it “The Organization.” We all had similar jackets with inside pockets and we shoplifted and sold joints to make money. Before long school started, I had my first childhood romance and our nerve weakened. We never launched “Operation Dragon.”
Looking back I am glad we didn't go through with the operation. We would probably still be in jail. Some of us are in jail anyway. But I laugh now when I think about how easy we would have been to catch. Five Black youths driving down a mountain highway back to the only city within 500 miles. Surely they would have caught us within minutes. I now know that the KKK was only one of the several organizations that used that building for meetings. How would we have felt if we had bombed the quilting bee by mistake. In any case I carried the KKK card in my possessions for years. I think I got rid of it when I was around twenty five. By then it was faded and crinkled but it still smelled like church to me. I had used the information I gathered from Huey Newton often. One time I stopped a cop from searching our car. The cop had us out on the street. He used his flashlight to look in the window of our parked car and then opened the car door. “You may not search that car without probable cause.” I told him. The cop laughed at me. “Where did you get your law degree?” he joked. “At the public library.” I answered proudly. He and the other cops laughed even louder but the cop closed the car door. Another time while in the custody of security guards I placed one of them under citizens arrest for threatening me and commanded his partner to assist me, as per the constitution. Again I was laughed at, but the threats stopped. When the real cops arrived I informed them that I had arrested that guard, and that the other one had aided and abetted his resistance by refusing to assist me. The real cops were pissed off. They took my charges seriously. Even I was surprised. They gave that guard a talking to in front of me about how he was not a cop. I am sure I was just glowing. The real cops let me go because the guards had violated the law by pursuing me and by threatening me.
When I was a little older, 16 I think. I was part of a Sunday morning news program recorded at my high school and broadcast on a local radio station. Everybody involved was thinking about a career in radio, I was thinking about revolution. My radio reports were always about injustice. Injustice in Chicago, injustice in Rhodesia or South Africa. I even did sympathetic reports about the “Red Chinese” during the Cold War. The revolutionary spirit was alive in me.
Looking back like this I realize how much all this affected my life. I have lived as an outsider most of my days. Seeking to avoid entanglement in “The System.” At an even younger age I had been indoctrinated into American patriotism. I took it all very seriously. I still love this country in a way I considered for a long time as pure. A great love I would say. I used the constitution as guide in all my efforts. I just want it to be free for all of us not just the bourgeois or the elite or the white. I want it free for everybody. I still don't think we are there yet.
After many years of college I think differently about revolution now. I realize the possible horrors and the rudderless course a revolution can take. I still want freedom. Sometimes I think I am the only one. My college papers, presentations, and projects always retained the information I wanted disseminated about injustice. Chairman Mao is a special hero of mine. I even understand what he meant to accomplish when he began the “Cultural Revolution.” I wonder if anybody else knows. Another hero of mine has been Lauren Watson. Lauren Watson is the founder of the Denver chapter of the Black Panther Party or BPP. He did battle with the Denver Police Department on the streets of “Five Points.” A Denver neighborhood where I ran around as a youth. I read everything I could about him. Most of that was from the newspapers. I also had the fortune of latching onto a barber who did my hair the way I like it, and had been a Panther in those days. The BPP had been all but eradicated in Denver, with the help of the federal government, after the Vietnam War. Watson had seemingly disappeared into obscurity after prison.
I had always planned to visit Lauren Watson in prison where I thought he still resided. While I was working on a documentary about citizen activism a few months ago his name pepped into my head. I googled him and presto like magic his name and phone number appeared at the top of the page. I wasn't sure it was him but part of what I had been learning during the making of the documentary was that, sometimes you have to just step out on faith. So I did. I called told him what I was doing and asked for an interview. Mr. Watson was suspicious at first but asked me to call back at a latter date. Which I did, and he agreed to the interview. To me this was and is one of the most exiting things I have ever done. To talk to Lauren Watson could only be overshadowed by an interview with Mao, Dr. King or Malcolm X, who were no longer available. I had an idea in my mind of who he was. Mostly shaped by the newspaper articles I had read. I was expecting to see a tough no nonsense man who hated the system. What I found was a brilliant man and an excellent tactician who was not full of hate but full of love. Love for freedom and for people.
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