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Chapter Five

Think Small

We had just pushed back from the dinner table when we heard a horn honking out front. Maybe I read something in Pete O’Neal’s body language that wasn’t really there. But when you’re a fugitive do you ever stop being jumpy?

In my neighborhood, a honking horn is no cause for concern. It usually means someone hasn’t figured out how to use the car alarm. When you’re in the African bush, though, miles from any paved road, surrounded by mud and grass huts, living as Africans have lived for centuries, and you’re the only one who owns a vehicle, a honking horn gets your attention.

Someone wanted to get to Pete’s house badly enough to endure miles of bone-jarring cattle paths full of rain-carved ruts in the dark. Pete, his face lined with concern, looked at his wife Charlotte. She shrugged. So much was said in that wordless exchange. Who would drive out here? Why? Who knows we’re here? How did they find us? What do they want?

With his graying dreadlocks pulled behind his head, his stiff back causing him to get up straight and slow, Pete looked like the aging leader in The Lion King. He picked up his walking stick and headed toward the sound.

The rest of us remained at the table, silent, listening to the faint hum of a Volkswagen engine accentuated by barks from countless aroused dogs. We had been talking about Pete’s days as the founder of the Black Panther Party in Kansas City. We discussed his frequent run-ins with the local police and his attempt to disrupt hearings in Washington, D.C.

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Pete told us about the trial where he was convicted of transporting a weapon across state lines. He told us about the death threats he received in the United States and how he escaped with the help of the American Communist Party before being sent to jail. Now, if he tried to return to the United States, he would immediately be arrested.

This was my second visit with Pete and Charlotte in Africa. At first it seemed strange to seek the help of a fugitive—a convicted felon—for a medical airlift. After all, the Black Panthers were generally feared in America when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. They were trying to use violence to overthrow the U.S. government. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director at the time, called the Black Panthers our single most serious threat to U.S. security.

Remember the Tolstoy question in an earlier chapter: “What do men live by?” Pete and Charlotte O’Neal are perfect examples of the transformation that occurs in people’s lives when they live out the answer to the Tolstoy question. The answer is by serving others.

The dining area at Pete and Charlotte’s compound is extraordinarily modern, given the surroundings. It is like a patio outside a nice restaurant. There are floodlights, a satellite dish, a television/VCR, couches and easy chairs, a dart board, and a chess table. On the wall are pictures of the hosts as they live in Tanzania: Pete climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, Charlotte at an opening of a local arts center, the two of them receiving an award from the national government’s arts council. There are also photos of their more distant past in the United States: Pete and Charlotte in black berets and sunglasses, holding weapons, severity etched in their faces. A boxing trophy rests on a shelf.

While Pete was checking out the horn, Charlotte maintained her conversation, but she never took her eyes off the door through which he left the room.

Soon we heard the car drive away and Pete emerged from the darkness, beaming. It had been a courier from the Kilimanjaro airport, more than an hour away. Pete held a large yellow envelope that contained a videotape labeled American in Exile. It was a documentary on his life, made by filmmakers at the University of California at Berkeley. This was the first copy. It had never been seen outside of the editing room in Berkeley. He gestured to all of us at the dinner table.

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“Would you like to be the first to see it?”

“Maybe you and Charlotte should see it first, so you can have some privacy,” I said.

“You’re family,” he said. “Let’s watch it together.” From the day I met Pete and Charlotte, I have felt like a member of their family.

I have never been to a Hollywood movie premiere. But that night, in the African bush, I saw a Tanzanian movie premiere, and I will never forget it.

It opened with scenes from Pete’s neighborhood in Kansas City, where he spent his growing-up years in and out of jail. It showed the local headquarters of the Black Panther Party. It showed Panthers confronting police. It showed them feeding poor children at their schools, early in the morning. There were interviews with Pete’s mother and brothers, who still live in Kansas City, and with newspaper reporters who covered the Panthers.

While we watched it together, Pete and Charlotte were in another world, transported thirty years into the past. “How did they get those pictures?” they exclaimed to one another. “How did they find that out?”

They were stunned when they saw the footage of Pete disrupting the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings of FBI director-to-be Clarence Kelly. O’Neal and Kelly were old adversaries. Kelly was Kansas City’s police chief and Pete had a long history of run-ins with him.

When Kelly was about to be selected for one of the most prestigious law-enforcement positions in the country, Pete was there to shout it down, calling Kelly a menace to society. The film showed Pete, in his black beret and sunglasses, being hauled out of the confirmation room by security guards. Pete and Charlotte, seated on the couch together, shook their heads and smiled.

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They believed in the struggle then and they believe in it now. But now the struggle has taken on different dimensions. Back then it included violence. No longer. Now it is service.

Pete founded the Black Panthers’ Kansas City chapter in 1969. He had spent the previous several years as a petty criminal and admits now that he was probably headed for a lengthy prison term. When he heard the rhetoric of Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, and other founders of the Black Panthers, something resonated with him. There was talk of an armed revolution in America—a violent overthrow of the U.S. government. There was a call for black communities to control their own destinies. There was an appetite for blacks in America to throw off their oppressors and develop a new power structure. The movement mobilized law enforcement throughout the country. Most of white America feared the Panthers, but they were fascinated by them as well.

Being a member of the Black Panther party put O’Neal in a position to help his own Kansas City community create a different approach to black life in America, he said. The local chapter put pressure on the police department by following squad cars to document any abuses. Chapter members attended public and private political meetings, demanding that the needs of their community be met. They confronted public officials, the police, businesses, and churches, sometimes violently. They made a lot of enemies with their tactics and threats. The dispute between the police and Panthers got personal, to the point where Pete even challenged Chief Clarence Kelly to a duel.

“All of the revolutionary groups of that period—the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Students for a Democratic Society, and others—believed that the American system of government was so corrupt that it had to be destroyed and built from the bottom up,” Pete said. “We viewed the police department as an occupying army, threatening our existence, so it had to be destroyed too.”

But, throughout the angry confrontations, the Panthers continued to do something else: they fed children breakfast and distributed clothing to the needy.

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“Everybody likes to talk about the guns and the violence,” Pete said. “But what attracted me to the Panthers is what motivates me here in Tanzania—community service. One of the great joys of my life as a Panther was to provide food for hungry kids every morning. We didn’t care where we got it. For a while, the Mafia provided the food for our program. I’m sure those kids were the only ones eating sirloin steak for breakfast! The mafia liked us because we kept the police occupied and out of their hair.”

In addition to feeding hungry kids, the Panthers also established a free health clinic, where a doctor, a nurse, and a pharmacist donated their time.

While the Black Panther rhetoric continued to inflame an already tense situation between blacks and the police, community service continued. Then Pete learned a lesson in Panther philosophy.

“The Panther leadership pulled me aside one day and told me to cool my personal argument with the police because it was getting in the way of lifting up the community,” he said. “That was a new thought to me—that the community’s needs were more important than the individual’s—and I found it attractive. I became more involved in service, which had a direct effect on my materialism and my personal feuds. I started looking at the big picture.”

O’Neal’s run-ins with the police came to a head when he was arrested for transporting a gun across state lines. He was convicted in 1970 and sentenced to four years in prison.

“After my conviction, a police officer made it clear to me that my life in prison would be short. The officer said ‘You’ll come out of there in a box.’ He said it with a smile on his face. I knew then that the judge had sentenced me to death.”

Pete and Charlotte fled the country and lived with other members of the Panther party in exile, first in Sweden, then in Algiers. At the time they expected to return to the United States within a year. While waiting for word that he would get a new trial, the O’Neals resettled in Tanzania, then a socialist country, where they have lived since 1974.

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From their very early days in Tanzania, they began putting into practice the philosophy of improving their community wherever they were. Their talk about overthrowing the United States government was replaced by a desire to improve the lives of those with whom they were living. They began farming, with no knowledge of how to farm, and connected with their neighbors. Pete started a sausage-making business. And just as they did in Kansas City, they started a community center.

“The community service bug bit us in Kansas City,” Charlotte said. “Once you see how rewarding it is to live in service to others, you really can’t stop.”

The O’Neals conducted book drives for the local schools. Charlotte, a gifted artist, taught art classes to the women in the nearby villages.

“The art classes opened up a whole new world to these ladies,” she said. “They came to our home very meek and distrusting of their abilities. Now they have confidence. Their work is on display in the cities around here. They’re artists.”

Seeing the devastation AIDS was having on the continent, the O’Neals showed videotapes about HIV to whoever would watch them. It wasn’t culturally acceptable to talk publicly about AIDS back then, but someone needed to get the message out that the disease was preventable.

They distributed fliers the first time they showed the AIDS videotapes. More people responded than could fit in the O’Neal’s home, so they hooked up a small television to a VCR and put it on top of their car, wiring it to the car’s battery. Dozens of people surrounded the car to watch the video. Pete took the tapes to industrial sections of the closest city, Arusha, put his TV and VCR on top of his car, and showed the tapes to workers on their lunch breaks.

Pete and Charlotte also organized celebrations to highlight traditional dance and music of local tribal heritage. The elders of the community saw the value in these efforts and selected the O’Neals to receive a four-acre plot of land to continue developing their activities.

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“That was a very significant decision,” Charlotte said. “We’re not Tanzanians, and we’re not even part of the Wamiri tribe that dominates this area. But they saw how these things benefited the community, and they wanted us to continue.”

Now the compound has several buildings to house guests, artists in residence, and exchange students. There are classes in computers, fashion design, painting, music, and dance. The Tanzanian commissioner of culture is one of the center’s greatest advocates of what is now called the United African American Community Center.

One of the programs offered by the center is called Heal the Community, which gives opportunities for teenagers from Kansas City who are headed for trouble to spend time with the O’Neals and others in Tanzania.

“It is a chance for them to see their heritage and connect them to a world bigger than their neighborhoods,” Pete said. “Many of these kids don’t know their own history. They leave here with a lot more respect for themselves.”

Many of them end their time in Tanzania with a trek up to Mount Kilimanjaro. “When they descend,” he said, “they are ready to take on the world.”

When I see how Pete and Charlotte live their lives for others, and think about their unlikely path from violence to service, I am reminded of the story of the Good Samaritan. Jesus tells the story in response to the question “Who is my neighbor?”

The story tells of a man walking along a road who is attacked by robbers, who beat him and leave him to die. A political leader crosses to the other side of the road to avoid the dying man. A religious leader walks by and does the same thing. But a Samaritan stops when he sees the victim. Samaritans were a hated group, viewed by the dominant culture as virtually subhuman. The Samaritan puts the dying man on his horse, takes him for medical attention, and pays the bill in advance. Jesus then asks the question “Who acted like a neighbor?”²

What I like about the story is that it is the most unlikely person of all who helps the beaten man. The Samaritans had rejected that day’s society and revolted against it. Samaritans were considered the ultimate in corruption. They were the enemy— maybe even the Black Panthers of their day. The story is so powerful because it is an “enemy” responding to a person in need. It teaches that our “neighbor” is whoever is in need and, further, that service to others can happen in most unlikely situations.

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Thomas Keating says that service, which comes from a heart of love, “knows no political or religious boundaries. . . . In the person of the Good Samaritan, the [boundaries] are swept away.” According to Keating, the parable means that “Everyone must be concerned about everyone else.”³

I first heard about Pete when I was trying to drum up support for a medical airlift to Arusha, a sister city to my home town of Kansas City. Tanzania is one of the poorest countries on the poorest continent in the world. Heart to Heart wanted to take much-needed medical supplies to hospitals and clinics there. After a meeting in downtown Kansas City with some business and political leaders, the mayor pulled me aside.

“When you go to Arusha, I want you to contact a distant cousin of mine,” said Mayor Emmanuel Cleaver. I knew he was a relative of Eldridge Cleaver’s, one of the founders of the Black Panther party in Oakland, California. But the mayor told me about another cousin named Pete O’Neal.

I contacted Pete, and he invited me to stay in his guest house while I was looking for appropriate sites for our airlift. I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived. Mayor Cleaver had told me some things about Pete, and I did a little reading about him. I was a teenager during the race riots of the 1960s and I remembered how I had feared the Black Panthers. Every white person I knew was terrified of them. The closer I got to my first encounter with Pete the more apprehensive I became.

When I got to his house, my first thought was, “So this is the life of a celebrity fugitive.”

One building has a mural with the faces of those who gained freedom and rights for blacks in America. Malcolm X, whose book The Autobiography of Malcolm X energized and fueled Pete’s beliefs, appears front and center. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nat Turner, John Brown, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tub-man are also there. The building where Pete and Charlotte sleep has a painting of a ferocious-looking black panther.

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I have to confess that I was skeptical about associating Heart to Heart with a felon on the run who had been so radically and militantly committed to the overthrow of the U.S. government. Were the O’Neals going to use this project for some personal political gain? I didn’t know if I could trust them.

When I talked with Pete, however, I felt instant rapport. Pete’s personal warmth is matched only by the intensity of his views. That first night we talked well into the next morning about the beliefs each of us hold dear. We are both idealists and activists. Both of us are well aware of the problems and injustices in the world around us. Pete had chosen to address these problems through violence. He had advocated the revolutionary overthrow of a political system he felt was unjust. I had chosen to work within the system, and addressed the role of the individual in changing the world.

As different as we were, and as different as were the paths we had chosen, one thing was the same. We thought the world needed improving. We talked about politics, race relations, global affairs, and how both as young men dreamed big dreams, thinking we could change the world.

I told him about Heart to Heart, about the impromptu speech I gave at a Rotary Club meeting, and how we now go to disaster areas around the world to provide medical supplies. I told him that it gives both corporate leaders and private individuals an opportunity to find meaning. I told him about providing immediate aid to victims of tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, and riots in the United States as well as to those suffering from natural or economic disasters throughout the world.

I told him about my philosophy that serving others is how we find meaning and significance in our lives, and about the three points I repeat to everyone:

• Everyone has something to give.
• Everyone can start where they are.
• Most people are willing to serve others when they see the need and opportunity.

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Pete told me about his and Charlotte’s efforts in Tanzania. He told me that they had abandoned violence as a means for change and decided to make an impact where they lived. There were similarities in the struggles we face to accomplish our goals. Many have to do with what happens when it appears we are at an impasse, where our resources simply can’t stretch far enough to meet the desperate needs of those around us.

“There is a law of the universe that comes into play at that point,” Pete said. “I learned it from Charlotte, who may have gotten it from her religious upbringing in Kansas City. It is simply: “Give, and you will be cared for. Don’t give, and it will all be taken away.” I understood the sentiment.

Pete cited several examples of how this law worked in their community center. They started their computer class with about a dozen people crowded around one computer. Within a few weeks local businesses and governments were providing them with more computers. Now they have an entire classroom with a computer on every desk. To fully appreciate this, you have to realize how far they are from city life. The region around them still has an uneven electrical supply. Water for the local villages is still collected and carried from a village well. The only employment is in hard labor, raising corn, bananas, coffee, or flowers.

The popularity and success of the computer training classes has been duplicated with instruction in music, languages, dance, and art. As word gets out about the efforts at the Community Center, people from the area look for ways they can contribute.

“Seeing it all come back gives you the strength to keep going for another day,” Pete said.

I knew exactly what he meant. People at Heart to Heart had similar feelings when responding to an overwhelming hurricane in New Orleans, a devastating tornado in Oklahoma, and a record-setting earthquake in Pakistan. We start as if we have what we need, even though we don’t, and there is always enough to proceed. It almost never happens, though, if we wait until we have enough supplies or resources or volunteers to respond to a need. If we wait, there’s never enough to act. If we act, there’s always enough. As Pete said, it seems to be a law of the universe.

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Rabbi Harold Kushner writes from a similar perspective in his book How Good Do We Have to Be? Helping others, Kushner says, “is not like a bank account that is depleted as it is given away, where every dollar of love can only be spent once. Love is not like a buffet line where the person in front of you threatens to take too much and leave too little for you. . . . Whenever we ‘give away’ our love, God replenishes it so that we become the channel of His love flowing to all of His children, a channel that never runs dry.”⁴

That first night Pete and I initiated a friendship and a partnership. He helped us identify places in Tanzania that need medical supplies most. He also helped me see the value of a person living out his passion to serve others right where he was, despite the fact that he is unable to return home.

“Where would I be able to do what I do if I were in the United States?” he asked. “I often wonder how my life would be different if we hadn’t gotten in that car, sneaked out of Kansas City, and escaped through New York. Actually, I think I know the answer. I’d be dead.”

Rabbi Kushner says that, at a rational level, giving ourselves to others doesn’t change our past, “but at the irrational level, where our souls live, it does introduce us to our better, nobler self.”⁵ Pete was clearly living out his better self in Tanzania.

At the end of my initial visit, Pete said he had a question for me.

“Gary, we have talked all night about what motivates us, gets us inspired, keeps us going,” he said. “For me it started as a political movement. But that movement is over. Most of the beliefs that got me started in this have proven to be ineffective. So I have a question for you: What ‘ism’ we should give our lives to?”

There was great intensity in his voice.

Pete told me of the transformation in his life when he gave himself over to an “ism.” In his case it was socialism. In the early days of his transformation, the socialist life seemed ideal. People did what they could for the good of the larger society, and everyone’s needs were met, according to the philosophy. He pointed back to that incident where the leaders of the party told him he needed to set aside his personal issues with the Kansas City police in order to serve the larger black community in Kansas City.

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“It was a philosophy completely opposite to the way I was living,” Pete said. “I was the most materialistic, self-indulgent person on the earth, and I didn’t care how I got my clothes or jewelry or cars.”

Marxist thought opened his eyes to a world bigger than himself. It motivated and energized him. Then he saw its collapse through greed and hypocrisy.

“It was the ‘ism’ that pulled me from the brink,” he said, “and then I saw that it didn’t work. So what do you replace it with when that’s gone?”

We talked at length about the philosophies and flaws of communism, socialism, capitalism, anarchism, and all of the other social systems the human race has tried. Neither one of us could identify a system worth giving our lives to.

Here I was, with a guy who believed he could change the world by overthrowing the dominant political force. When he realized he wasn’t going to change the world or even the United States, he focused his energy on changing the community in which he settled in faraway Tanzania. Tied to his big question —What “ism” should we give our lives to?—was why I did what I did with Heart to Heart. What were my motives, what made me want to change the world, and what was my “ism?”

It’s a fair question, one we all need to ask ourselves from time to time. Why do we do what we do? What makes us think we are making a difference? What makes us think we can make a difference? What do we live by?

The philosopher Huston Smith addressed the “isms” issue that Pete and I were discussing. He said that communism and progressivism, the most dominant “isms” of the twentieth century, left out a crucial component.

“Neither filled the spiritual hollow in the human makeup,” he said. “Progress has turned into something of a nightmare. The campaign against ignorance has expanded our knowledge of nature, but science cannot tell us what we should give our lives to.”

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As for communism, “Marx saddled his movement with a bloody-mindedness the likes of which history has rarely seen. . . . The Marxist record on compassion is no better than its record on truth.”⁶

I told Pete I have concluded that every ideology will ultimately fail. Some may seem to hold more promise for justice and fairness than others, but in the end they will all fail.

“Everyone needs a sense of purpose in their lives that transcends their daily routines,” I said. “I believe our purpose is to give of ourselves according to our ability to give, and according to our neighbor’s need. That’s the only way we can find meaning in our lives on this earth. It’s not about making money or acquiring power. It’s about serving others. That’s what we’re here to do. That’s my ‘ism.’”

It’s not bumper-sticker material, but it adequately describes looking past my own personal circumstances to see how we all fit into the bigger picture.

Pete thought about that for a long time, and then nodded. It seemed as if we agreed at a deep level. Unlike him, I didn’t get my start in an effort to overthrow the power structure of the country, but I did experience a different kind of overthrow.

The culture that surrounded me as a young person was dominated by self-interest and self-indulgence. While our wealthy culture got wealthier, I saw people suffering, both in the United States and elsewhere. I simply was not satisfied with making more money, achieving more goals, and accumulating more things. I saw that there was a better, more fulfilling way to live, and that living for yourself is its own type of slavery. Living to serve others is a kind of liberation that I would call revolutionary.

I believe it is possible, and even desirable, to live to serve others.

That night at Pete’s compound we talked the language of the heart. We probed and prodded each other’s assumptions and beliefs. He was as committed to doing the right thing as any person I’ve ever met.

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I knew I had made a true friend when we said goodbye at the airport a few days later. As we got out of the van and started to walk into the terminal, he asked me to stay behind for a moment. There was something he wanted me to do. Here it comes, I thought The Big Ask. He needs money or something.

After a lengthy silence, Pete put his hands on my shoulders.

“Could you do me a favor?”

I am used to people asking me for favors. Sometimes they want free medical advice. Sometimes they want samples of medicines. Sometimes they want sophisticated equipment, like CT scanners for their local hospitals or clinics, which are a little tougher to procure. I assumed Pete wanted me to get some vaccinations for the local school children or supplies for the local clinic. Maybe he wanted me to build a hospital on the compound.

“I will do whatever I can,” I assured Pete.

“My father is dying of cancer in Kansas City, and I can’t visit him because of my legal status,” Pete said. “I want you to visit him for me and tell him how I’m doing. You don’t have to take him anything or give him anything. Just go to him and do what you’ve done with me. Just be you. Talk to him. Laugh with him. There’s a family joke I want you to talk about. For years I have joked about being a Golden Gloves boxing champion. Can you make something up and keep the story going?”

That was it? Visit his sick dad? Talk about boxing? That’s all he wanted me to do? Tears filled my eyes. Pete would never see his dad again. But I could go to his father and share something of his son, who I had come to know and love.

“Of course I’ll do it,” I said. “I’d be honored.”

I stuck out my hand to shake his.

“No,” Pete insisted. “We’re friends. We’re brothers.” And with that he gave me a big hug.

I left Tanzania thinking about the juxtaposition of Pete’s two questions.

Here was a man who had committed his life to revolutionizing the world, and he ended up in deepest Africa. We had talked all night about the “isms” of humanity’s best intelligence. Macro systems. Big Picture ideas.

But we don’t live each day in macro systems. We live in micro systems. Frame by frame. Moment by moment.

How can we bridge the two? How do we find meaning in our lives, commit to something bigger than ourselves, in a frame-by-frame life? By doing small things, like visiting the dying father of a fugitive revolutionary. By doing something for someone that he can’t do for himself. We can start where we are.

Sometimes we get paralyzed by the world’s problems and needs and how inadequate we are to solve them. But we can all do something, no matter how small. Heart To Heart started with a small project. Pete’s transformation started with something just as small.

I couldn’t solve the unemployment problem in Tanzania, or the AIDS epidemic, or any of the other major challenges the people there are facing. I couldn’t help Pete change his world. But I could visit his father. True service begins by thinking small.

I called Pete’s dad when I got back to the United States. I told him his son was doing great things for others. I told him he was the heavyweight boxing champion of Tanzania. I told him that his son loved him very much. He seemed happy to hear about Pete. I asked if I could come by to visit, but he wasn’t doing well enough to have visitors. He died a short time later.

Sometimes people don’t consider serving another person because the problems of the world seem too big. What’s one act of service going to change?

Everything.