KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- He took a bullet, spewed Marxist rage, declared war on police and tried to start a revolution.
It's funny what now makes a guy like that happy.
"They are building me a goat house," Pete O'Neal says in a telephone interview from a village between two east African mountains.
He's at home in his old chair, surrounded by 21 children who call him "Babu," meaning grandfather, although he is that to none of them. In photos and videos, he doesn't look like much of a fugitive; no "go bag" in sight. He's 76 with a degenerative spine, cataracts and prostate problems. A body worn out except for his smile.
But if he were to leave Tanzania, where he has lived nearly 50 years, and travel to the United States, he would likely be arrested on a gun conviction dating from when he led the Black Panthers during the 1960s in Kansas City. He may be the last black militant of that era still at odds with the U.S. government.
He was a street kid and ex-convict. Smart and charismatic. His call for armed revolution served as a clarion to those like him, and they followed him into the fray.
Most everybody else feared him, or hated him -- in his beret and sunglasses, disrupting polite company, barging into hallowed chambers, denouncing the way things had always been. He disrupted a church service, brawled at police headquarters and stormed a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington.
A year ago, a new push began for a presidential pardon for O'Neal, who fled the U.S. in 1970. At the time, he was facing four years in federal prison and feared the same bloody end as other Panthers got.
Fleeing, he first went to Sweden, then to Algeria and finally to Tanzania, where O'Neal and his wife, Charlotte, run the United African Alliance Community Center and school, which they founded in 1991 to serve the poor families and children around Imbaseni village.
"That's what the Black Panther Party originally set out to do, and we are continuing that work here," he said. "People remember the guns and rage. We were so much more than that."
People from all over the world, including study-abroad groups from American schools, visit the community center.
Leading the effort for his pardon was U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., who is O'Neal's third cousin. Others joined in with letters and emails to the office of the pardon attorney at the Justice Department. But President Barack Obama, thought to be O'Neal's best hope for a pardon, left office without fulfilling their pleas.
Cleaver, who first sought a pardon 25 years ago when he was Kansas City's mayor, said O'Neal was not even in the car where authorities found a shotgun leading to his conviction, but that he, like other black militants of the time, had been targeted by police and FBI agents.
"Mr. O'Neal was wrong to flee the country, but he felt that he would be railroaded to federal prison or even killed while in police custody," Cleaver said. "This is a nonviolent 75-year-old man who has done remarkable things in Africa."
O'Neal never asked for a pardon. A greater concern for him, he said, is recent police shootings and what he sees as America's continued social injustice and inequality.
"That's where you will hear my voice, and that's where I hope to hear yours," he said in a recent Facebook post.
Certainly not everybody supported a pardon. Cleaver acknowledged that O'Neal made a lot of mistakes back in the day -- some that people will never forgive. One that stands out is a Black Panther article that spoke of jubilation when an off-duty Kansas City police officer, John Dacy, was killed trying to stop a robbery.
Dacy's son has made clear over the years that he opposed a pardon, saying he has no sympathy for O'Neal, and if O'Neal wants to return to Kansas City, he should come back and face his punishment like a man.
In recent months, Obama issued hundreds of pardons and commutations, mostly for people who received lengthy sentences because of mandatory minimum terms. And there were some big names out there: Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, American Indian activist Leonard Peltier and government secrets-leaker Edward Snowden. They weren't pardoned either.
O'Neal's younger brother was present at 3 a.m. when Pete and Charlotte O'Neal fled by crawling on their bellies along an alley and into the trunk of a waiting car. He thinks a pardon wouldn't have meant much to O'Neal.
"Pete has done so much good in Africa -- he is content and his life is fulfilled," said Brian O'Neal, who lives in Kansas City. "But he could have done it here. Whether he talked to one person or 10,000, people reacted to him. What happened to Pete is Kansas City's loss."
He paused for the brother he hasn't seen in 30 years.
"And certainly my family's loss."
Pete O'Neal says he would have accepted a pardon. He would very much like to see his 96-year-old mother, who lives in a nursing home in Kansas City.
Other than that, he says, "I've lived in a remote African village for the majority of my life. Quite frankly, the thought of returning would terrify me. This land is my home now.
"I stopped dreaming about Kansas City a long time ago."
As a boy he ran the streets of the segregated city. There were riots, protest marches, police dogs and shootings. Civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s call for nonviolence was answered with an assassin's bullet on a Memphis balcony. King's killing angered blacks across the land.
Two days after King's April 4, 1968, assassination, Black Panthers and police shot it out in Oakland, Calif. Then the same thing happened in Los Angeles. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the Panther Party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."
On Jan. 30, 1969, in the fifth-floor hallway of Kansas City police headquarters, O'Neal, then 29, announced the formation of a Black Panther chapter for Kansas City.
He wore a black leather jacket, white turtleneck, beret and a "Free Huey [Newton]" button. As 30 or so supporters and numerous police officers looked on, O'Neal read a list of demands, including "an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people."
A news reporter asked: "You do advocate violence?"
O'Neal answered: "We advocate self-defense."
He told a Kansas City Star reporter that he was basically a petty criminal and street hustler until the riots in 1968 after King's assassination. That sent him on a mission to lead the fight against "the racist power structure and their arm, the police department."
That first year brought numerous confrontations with police and arrests of Panther members. O'Neal later admitted that his intent was to start a war.
In May 1969, he and other Panthers disrupted a Sunday service at the Linwood United Methodist Church, where then-Kansas City Police Chief Clarence Kelley attended. A melee ensued as O'Neal commandeered the microphone and another Panther took down the American flag.
That fall, O'Neal and other Panthers disrupted a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington with shouts that Kelley had provided guns to a white supremacist group. Nothing came of the claim, and Kelley later became FBI director.
In December 1969, Panthers tried to enter a news conference in Kelley's office at police headquarters and fought with officers. The Panthers argued that they represented the chapter's newspaper.
O'Neal ended up with his face on the floor, handcuffed. Reports differed as to who was to blame for the fight.
The next year, O'Neal was found guilty of transporting a shotgun across the state line. He'd also used a false name to buy the weapon. Already a felon from a decade-old charge of receiving stolen property, he was sentenced to four years in federal prison.
Like other militants and radicals of the time, he insists that the prosecution was politically motivated.
"Anybody who goes quail hunting in Kansas takes a shotgun across the state line," he said in a recent interview. "But they were determined to get me because of my old nemesis Clarence Kelley."
O'Neal was allowed to go free until he was to report to prison. That worried him. Panthers and police by then had engaged in at least nine gunbattles nationally, resulting in multiple deaths on both sides, including Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was killed in his apartment.
"I knew it was time to get out of Dodge," O'Neal said.
Arrangements were made for cash and phony passports for O'Neal and his young wife. Before they left, he told Charlotte that she didn't have to go with him. They might never return.
She smiled. She was just 17 the first time she heard him stir a crowd, and he stirred her heart.
"Of course I do. I'm down for double," she said, in reference to a Mel Torme song.
With police watching the house, they sneaked out to a car that took them to St. Louis. From there they flew to a New York safe house that sat across from a Jewish deli.
"I watched from the window and saw a young black boy go in," he said. "The man who ran the place patted the boy on the head when he left with a sack.
"That's my last memory of the country where I was born."
These days, O'Neal is happy. At his center and school, he has children who call him Babu.
"Every year they go to their homes for two weeks to maintain a sense of who they are -- we call it village home stay," he said by telephone. "This is the day they come back. I like it when they come back."
There will be a feast with chicken, rabbit sausage and cake. There will be music, and the children will dance.
The 21 children are part of the center's Leaders of Tomorrow program, which takes in youths from poor tribal areas. They attend school so they can go on to a university. They learn hygiene, physical fitness, and traditional arts and music.
"He takes care of us," said Alima, a young girl. "He's a good man. He gave us this school."
Other children in the area also attend the center's school.
"They want to improve their lives -- they study science, computers and tailoring," Pete O'Neal said. "One wants to be a member of Parliament."
Students from Stony Brook University in New York visit the center often. One said a stay there changed her life.
"Pete and Charlotte bring amazing lessons to the students and the watoto [orphaned children]," she wrote. "There is an immediate sense of ease and belonging when you pass through those gates."
American actors Sean Penn and Jude Law have been there. A school group from Winston-Salem, N.C., spent time there for a summer session.
"You are all going to be leaders," Charlotte, known as Mama C, tells the students. "Someday I will read about you in the newspaper. You will be doctors and lawyers and artists. We will miss you all."
Brian O'Neal thinks sometimes that it all turned out for the best. Look at the good things his brother has done in Africa. And there's his own story. In 1982, Brian O'Neal traveled to Africa to see his brother. While there, he met a woman, married her and took her back to Kansas City. Now they have four sons.
"None of that would have happened if Pete hadn't run," Brian O'Neal said.
Charlotte would have liked a pardon for her husband, but she sees the gift of exile.
"People come from all over the world to see Brother Pete, and I see these children sit at his feet and they learn from him," she said. "Carrying on the work of the Black Panthers is a great and powerful revenge."
Pete O'Neal knows he did things in his youth that were hurtful. They haunt him, and he apologizes for them. He chalks it up to volatile times and an anger he never seemed to run out of.
Now he says he has nothing but love for Kansas City. If he could, he would like to sit on a bench along the Paseo thoroughfare in downtown Kansas City and watch the people pass.
But he knows he left the city of his birth behind forever when he crawled along that alley on his belly.
It is now the African sun that warms his face, and he says he's just an old man, trying to get a bunch of kids through school.
"Then I will walk into oblivion, and Pete O'Neal the Black Panther will cease to exist."
SundayMonday on 01/22/2017