KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ He took a bullet, spewed Marxist rage, declared war on police and tried to start a revolution.
Funny what would now make 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, though 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 issues. A body worn out except for the smile.
But if he were to leave Tanzania, where he's lived nearly 50 years, and travel to the U.S., he would likely be arrested for a gun conviction dating to when he led the Black Panthers during the 1960s in Kansas City. He might be the last black militant of the era still at war with the U.S government.
He was a street kid and ex-con. Smart, gifted with charisma. 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 _ him in his beret and sunglasses, disrupting polite company, barging into hallowed chambers, denouncing the way things had always been. He crashed a church service, brawled at police headquarters and stormed a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington.
Kansas City had never seen anybody like him. And it hasn't seen him for a long time.
But a year ago, a new push began for a presidential pardon for O'Neal, who in 1970, facing four years in federal prison _ and fearing the same bloody end for himself as for other dead Panthers _ fled the country.
First 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."
Visitors from all over the world, including study-abroad groups from American schools, visit the community center.
Leading the pardon effort is U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, 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 now less than a week remains before President Barack Obama, thought to be O'Neal's best hope, leaves office.
Cleaver, who first sought a pardon 25 years ago when he was Kansas City's mayor, said Thursday that he had not heard any news of a pardon, so one seems unlikely. He says O'Neal was not even in the car where authorities found a shotgun, 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."
Quiet during all this? O'Neal.
He's not asked for a pardon. A greater cause than himself, 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 supports a pardon. Cleaver acknowledges that O'Neal made lots 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 opposes a pardon, saying he has no sympathy for O'Neal, and if he wants to return to Kansas City, he should come back and face his punishment like a man.
In recent months, Obama has issued more than a hundred pardons and commutations, mostly for people sentenced to lengthy sentences because of mandatory minimum terms. But some big names are out there for other offenses: Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, Native American activist Leonard Peltier and government surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.
O'Neal's younger brother, who was there at 3 a.m. when Pete and Charlotte made their escape by crawling on their bellies down an alley and into the trunk of a waiting car, thinks a pardon now wouldn't mean much.
"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."
Don't get Pete O'Neal wrong _ he would accept a pardon. He would very much like to see his 96-year-old mother, who lives in a nursing home here.
Other than that, he says he's been gone too long.
"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."
The last time he did dream of his hometown, police with lions on leashes were chasing him through derelict buildings.
