Just before he launched his longshot Senate bid, Kansas Democrat Erik Murray boasted on a podcast about his life-changing experience learning from former Black Panther leader Elaine Brown, an avowed socialist who recently reaffirmed her commitment to topple the "Empire of the United States."
Murray, a real estate investor who recently moved back to Kansas after a decade in California, entered the race for the Democratic nomination to unseat incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) on Dec. 3. Just days earlier, in late November, Murray reminisced about his transformative experience living in Oakland, California, for the past 10 years during an appearance on The Disruption Lab podcast. During those years, Murray said he expanded his vocabulary to include words such as "hella," and booked lunch meetings with Brown, whom he credits with changing the "wiring" in his brain.
"Go spend a decade, or even a year or even a week or two in Oakland, California, and I think it’ll change your mind on some things," Murray said. "Go spend a decade, you know, having lunch with Elaine Brown, who’s one of the original founders of the Black Panther[s]. It’ll change some wiring in your brain."
"It was a great experience, the decade I spent in Oakland," Murray added. "The eye-opening social justice conversations that it triggered … I say things like ‘hella,’ and ‘hella’ is actually a word that came out of Oakland."
Murray’s ties to Brown may be a tough sell in deep-red Kansas, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1932. During her time as leader of the Black Panther Party from 1974 through 1977, Brown said she viewed herself as a soldier in the fight to bring about a "socialist revolution" in the United States, a fight she says she remains committed to winning.
"That's how we saw ourselves, as a soldier in the army, in an army that was about bringing about revolution," Brown said in 1988. "A vanguard army as we considered ourselves to introduce socialist revolution into the United States of America. It meant surrendering our lives to something greater, which was the notion of, of, of getting rid of oppression and, and all the things that oppression meant and mean in this country for black people and other people in the country."
Brown told the Socialist Worker in 2022 that bringing about the socialist revolution in America remains her goal: "All I know is that it is my goal. We will never be a free people without it."
"The bottom line is that the Empire of the United States, which has caused our enslavement, cannot continue like this," the former Black Panther leader said. "We cannot continue with this world system."
Brown became the leader of the Black Panthers as the movement fell on hard times in the mid-1970s after its cofounder, Huey P. Newton, fled to Havana to escape prosecution for allegedly murdering a 17-year-old Oakland prostitute. Newton’s retreat to communist Cuba came after he escaped prison time for shooting and killing an Oakland police officer in October 1967.
Standing now at the site of Newton’s cop-killing is a low-income apartment building that Brown opened in 2024 with the help of a $1 million investment from Black Lives Matter, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Brown said she hopes the building will inspire her followers to bring about the communist revolution as predicted by former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.
Murray is the fifth Democrat to seek the party’s nomination to challenge Marshall in 2026. Only one of those challengers—Wellington, Kan., councilmember Michael Soetaert—has ever held political office, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported.
The Murray campaign did not return a request for comment.
