I was in college when I discovered Richard Aoki, thirty years after he joined the Panthers. An Asian American magazine featured a story on him. On the cover of that issue, one of the headlines read: “Black Panthers and Yellow Power.” I tracked him down for an interview. I told Richard I was writing a research paper about him, and I was, but the paper was just an excuse to meet a Yellow Panther. He chose a donut shop for the interview. He wore cowboy boots and pronounced police “PO-lice.” He said he was down with the Panthers from the jump. He’d grown up in West Oakland with Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, and they grew closer at Merritt College. They’d chop it up about politics over drinks. The year after Malcolm was assassinated, the three of them “sat down one night with a fifth of Scotch and hammered out the Ten-Point Program,” the Panther manifesto.
In an interview on public radio, Richard recalls it was at the Panthers’ first formal meeting that Huey asked him to join, to which Richard replied, “I know you two guys are crazy’cause you got this program together, but are you blind as well? I’m not Black.”
“That’s not the issue, Richard,” Huey says. “The struggle for freedom, justice, and equality transcends racial and ethnic barriers. As far as I’m concerned, you Black.”
“Grab your .357,” Bobby says, “we got work to do.”
“To the park,” TYMER announced. He lighted up a beedi and crossed in the middle of the block with SIKE.
“Come on, RANK.” Hollywood nudged me.
SHIM flicked CLUE’s ear and ran across the street, unconcerned that we hadn’t received an answer.
Flattened cigarette butts were strewn about the sidewalk. A girl and two boys, all of them wearing spiked collars and leather jackets with an inordinate number of zippers, were smoking on the stoop of a house. We passed a bar, a tattoo parlor, and a small boutique. I called these Places for White People. That’s probably why Lower Haight became our stomping grounds—neutral territory bordering Fillmore. Though Fillmore was one neighborhood, it was more accurate to call it a coalition. Members of 3F repped different turfs, usually tied to a housing complex: Banneker Homes, Thomas Paine, Freedom West. Claiming one Fillmore turf didn’t gr ant you a pass to hang on the block of another Fillmore turf; the bond was tenuous.
We rounded the corner toward a cul-de-sac of Victorian homes. The entrance to Duboce Park sat at the end, wide steps breaking up a stone retaining wall. Past the steps an open patch of grass met us under a blue-black sky. The park was empty, as though it had been reserved for us.
“Time to slap box,” SIKE said, ambling around the grass.
“If y’all want to get in the Tray,” TYMER said, “you gotta know how to chucks ’em.”
For 3F, writing took a backseat to throwing down. In an article about graffiti in San Francisco, dated the year of that summer, the author, a freelance journalist, who would later become an editor with Wired magazine, concludes, “3F is one of the most notorious tagging crews in the city, known by almost every graffiti writer as disrespectful of the art and violent.” The article begins with an anecdote about four graffiti artists painting a mural inside a tunnel. They’re confronted by three teenagers, who they believe might be from 3F. “How about you give us your paint,” one of the teenagers demands. No fight ensues, but the graffiti artists leave, their mural incomplete. The anecdote sets up the main subject of the article—the tension between taggers and graffiti artists. The graff artists interviewed don’t deride us for our lack of artistic talent. They don’t call our tags scribbles. They saw us as part of their graffiti family, one with an established hierarchy based on artistic skill. Their beef: we didn’t respect them. They’d spend hours, sometimes days, painting on a wall intricately designed figures, words with three dimensions, only to discover when they’d return that their work had been defaced by tags. “These kids have lost their roots,” an OG graff artist says. Maybe we had. Not because we sullied their fresh murals. That was a minority of taggers. The rest of us were in awe of them. Graff artists were the better-looking sibling, the one with more talent. They made their way into galleries, books, forever photographed. The darlings of the family. We were the runaways. Several hundred strong. Duking it out for supremacy on the city bus, our home—a mobile battlefield. Most of us had never heard of the older graffiti artists mentioned in the article. We didn’t write to connect to a past. We wrote to break from it.
“Let’s get this shit over with,” SIKE said, as though slap boxing would be a formality.
SHIM was up first. He and his opponent feinted and dodged each other’s swipes, their match resembling the first round of a boxing fight. Though SHIM was silly, he played on the school basketball team, was athletic—rare for a tagger—but he wasn’t landing any of his strikes. We booed, and I knew the same boos awaited me. The last time I slap boxed, I’d gotten smacked left and right. Wood had to call time-out to remind me to guard my face. In the distance, overlooking us on a hill was a three-prong antenna tower, layered red and white, its aircraft warning lights blinking, as if communicating with some celestial entity.
“Next!” TYMER said.
“Me and you, RANK,” Hollywood said. He took off his rhinestone-encrusted hat,
