Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  More than five years older than Newton, Bobby Seale was born in Dallas, Texas, on October 22, 1936, the oldest of three siblings, and raised in Oakland.9 His father worked as a carpenter, and his mother also worked, sometimes as a caterer. Besides teaching Bobby how to build things and how to hunt and fish, Bobby’s father also taught him about injustice, often beating him badly for no apparent reason.

  The arbitrary beatings filled Bobby with a rage for which he had few outlets. They also meant he had little to fear from fights; he had already tasted the worst. Rather than become a bully himself, from an early age, Bobby started to stand up for the little guy. When his family first moved to Oakland, a local bully pushed his little sister Betty off the swing. Despite being outnumbered in new territory, Bobby knocked the bully out of the swing and then told all the kids they could share the swing.10 Bobby had a penchant for taking on bullies, even when he had little hope of winning, once challenging a neighborhood kid twice his size who was cheating the smaller kids in marbles, and was often beaten to the ground.11

  When he was fifteen, Bobby became close to a loner named Steve Brumfield. Steve told Bobby that the white man had stolen the land from the American Indians. The two of them escaped the pettiness and injustices at school and home by emulating Lakota warriors, running through the Berkeley hills for hours every day, dressed in moccasins and beads, and fighting each other for sport. Bobby used metal working skills he learned in a vocational program at Berkeley High School to make large knives and tomahawks that the two carried wherever they went. When they were not practicing fighting, they climbed trees and dreamed of moving to South Dakota, marrying American Indian women, and living off the land. Bobby had never felt happier. He quickly became fast and strong, and soon the bullies tried to stay out of his way.12

  But after high school, Steve joined the military and Bobby, lonely once again, drifted from city to city, job to job, and woman to woman. When things got hard, he ended up back at home with his parents. No longer willing to be pushed around by his father—and now perfectly able to defend himself—he joined the U.S. Air Force. While further developing his metalworking skills and mastering the use of firearms, he learned to contain and channel his rage, turning his explosive temper into cold calculation. When three soldiers refused to pay back a debt and threatened to beat Bobby if he mentioned the matter again, he suppressed his instinct to fight and bade his time. Later that week, Bobby attacked the main perpetrator when his defenses were down, nearly killing him with a pipe.13

  Huey and Bobby both had their first serious political experiences with Donald Warden in the Afro-American Association. Warden had founded the all-black study group while he was a student at Boalt Law School at the University of California, Berkeley, creating a space for in-depth discussion of books by black authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Booker T. Washington, and James Baldwin. Warden asserted a black nationalist perspective inspired by Malcolm X, emphasizing racial pride and embracing a transcontinental black identity rooted in Africa. Warden believed in the virtues of black capitalism, arguing that black people “must develop our own planned businesses where efficiency, thrift and sacrifice are stressed.” Feisty and charismatic, Warden challenged students and professors alike, debated groups such as the Young Socialist Alliance, and gave public lectures on black history and culture. Willing to debate anyone, Warden made a strong impression on fellow students, and became an important intellectual influence on many of the future leaders of the Black Liberation Movement.14

  In addition to Newton and Seale, association members included Leslie and Jim Lacy, Cedric Robinson, Richard Thorne, Ernest Allen, and Ron Everett, who later changed his name to Ron Karenga, founded the black cultural nationalist organization US, and created the holiday Kwanza. Warden also became a mentor to James Brown in 1964, and through him, helped influence the politicization of soul music.15

  The Afro-American Association produced local radio shows debating the concerns of Black America, regularly mobilized street-corner rallies preaching racial consciousness to unemployed blacks, and sponsored conferences entitled Mind of the Ghetto. At a September 1963 conference at McClymonds High School in Oakland, Cassius Clay, the future heavyweight boxing champion who would change his name to Muhammad Ali and have his title stripped for resisting the draft, was the featured speaker.16

  But Newton was a man of action, and he grew dissatisfied with Warden’s teaching. Newton felt that Warden was heavy on the talk but ultimately could not be counted on. In Newton’s view, Warden “offered the community solutions that solved nothing,” and he also doubted that much could be accomplished through black capitalism. Soon he split from Warden in search of a new path.17

  RAGE

  When Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, Bobby’s rage overflowed. He gathered six bricks from his mother’s garden, broke them in half, and stood in wait at the corner, hurling bricks at the cars of any whites he saw passing by. “I’ll make my own self into a motherfucking Malcolm X,” he swore, “and if they want to kill me, they’ll have to kill me.”18

  By then the civil rights juggernaut had run its course. Throughout the early 1960s, in campaign after campaign, the Civil Rights Movement successfully tore down the Jim Crow system of legal segregation. Activists crossed the color line with their bodies, drawing brutal repression from local white authorities and forcing the federal government to intervene—politically, legally, and militarily. But by the summer of 1964, the limits of civil rights political practice were becoming clear, particularly at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City.

  As late as 1964, the Democratic Party in Mississippi excluded blacks, all too often doling out violence or death to blacks who attempted to register to vote. In the Freedom Summer campaign that year, leading civil rights organizations developed a parallel political party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), that included blacks as well as nonblacks and began registering blacks to vote. Three of the Freedom Summer activists—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped, mutilated, and killed. Undaunted, the campaign continued. The MFDP held a state convention in Jackson in early August and selected sixty-eight delegates to attend the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.19

  President Johnson was determined to maintain white southern support and worked to undermine the MFDP. On August 12, Mississippi’s Democratic governor, Paul B. Johnson, told the all-white Dixiecrat delegation that President Johnson had personally promised him not to seat the MFDP. The president refused to discuss the MFDP with civil rights leaders and instructed FBI director Hoover to monitor the renegade party closely and provide regular updates on its activities to the White House.

  It became clear by the start of the convention that the MFDP would not win outright support in the Credentials Committee to seat its delegation in Atlantic City. But MFDP leaders hoped that a strong minority report from the committee would bring the issue to an open vote on the floor and that, under the pressure of public scrutiny, convention delegates would at least vote to seat both delegations.

  On August 22, after intensive one-on-one lobbying of the state delegations, the MFDP presented its case to the Credentials Committee. Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony about the consequences of her efforts with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to register Mississippi blacks vote—in which she described how she was fired from her job and beaten in jail by black prisoners under orders of the police—caught the nation’s attention:

  The first Negro began to beat, and I was beat until I was exhausted. . . . After the first Negro . . . was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack. The second Negro began to beat . . . I began to scream, and one white man got up and began to beat me on my head and tell me to “hush.” One white man—my dress had worked up high—he walked over and pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back, back up. . . . All of this is on account we want to register, to become first-cl
ass citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America.20

  The television audience responded almost instantly. Phones started to ring, and the delegates began receiving telegrams urging them to support the MFDP. Quickly, President Johnson called a press conference, and Hamer’s testimony was cut off so that the president’s statement could be broadcast.

  Behind the scenes, the president’s staff twisted the arms of Credentials Committee members while soon-to-be vice president Hubert Humphrey called a meeting at the Pageant Motel across the street from the convention with Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, and the other MFDP leaders to discuss a compromise. Humphrey told them that the MFDP delegation would not be seated but that educated professionals from the delegation—Aaron Henry of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and white minister Ed King—would be given seats alongside the official all-white Mississippi delegation. Ms. Hamer would not be part of any official delegation. “The President will not allow that illiterate woman to speak from the floor of the convention,” said Humphrey.21

  The MFDP had not been consulted in the compromise offer, and the delegates rejected the proposal on the spot. Then someone knocked on the meeting room door and announced, “It’s over!” The MFDP leaders turned on the TV to see Minnesota attorney general Walter Mondale, head of the Democratic Party committee appointed to resolve the MFDP challenge, announcing that the MFDP had accepted the “compromise.” Apparently, the Democratic Party leadership had timed the introduction of the issue on the convention floor to coincide with the MFDP leaders’ meeting with Humphrey across the street so that the leaders could not voice any opposition. Feeling deeply betrayed, SNCC and MFDP leader Bob Moses stormed out of the room, slamming the door in Hubert Humphrey’s face.22

  Civil rights mobilization played a central role in defeating legal segregation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 enfranchised southern blacks. But for blacks outside the South, neither generated political gains or significant economic concessions. Even in its heyday in the early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement never significantly challenged de facto, or customary, economic and political exclusion in the black ghettos of the North and West. As de jure, or legal, segregation was defeated in the South, economic and political empowerment lagged, civil rights strategies lost their punch, and black activists across the country looked for other solutions. Many, including Newton and Seale, turned to Malcolm X.

  In December 1964, after the Atlantic City convention, Malcolm X spoke at the Williams Institutional CME Church in Harlem on the same stage with Fannie Lou Hamer. In sharp contrast to the nonviolent tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X suggested that black activists take up the revolutionary activities of the anticolonial Mau Mau rebels in Kenya:

  In my opinion, not only in Mississippi and Alabama, but right here in New York City, you and I can best learn how to get real freedom by studying how Kenyatta brought it to his people in Kenya, and how Odinga helped him, and the excellent job that was done by the Mau Mau freedom fighters. In fact, that’s what we need in Mississippi. In Mississippi we need a Mau Mau. In Alabama we need a Mau Mau. In Georgia we need a Mau Mau. Right here in Harlem, in New York City, we need a Mau Mau. . . . We need a Mau Mau. If they don’t want to deal with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, then we’ll give them something else to deal with. If they don’t want to deal with the Student Nonviolent [Coordinating] Committee, then we have to give them an alternative.23

  Malcolm X developed a form of revolutionary black nationalism as a minister in the Nation of Islam (NOI). Maintaining a central focus on a black nationalist identity as advocated by the NOI, he came to see black liberation as part of the global struggle against Western imperialism—a stance that posed a challenge not only to the integrationist politics of the Civil Rights Movement but also to the NOI’s tradition of abstaining from political controversy.

  Uncle Sam’s hands are dripping with blood, dripping with the blood of the black man in this country. He’s the earth’s number-one hypocrite. He has the audacity—yes, he has—imagine him posing as the leader of the free world. The free world!—and you over here singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, take it into the United Nations, where our African brothers can throw their weight on our side, where our Latin-American brothers can throw their weight on our side, and where 800 million Chinamen are sitting there waiting to throw their weight on our side.24

  When he continued to strike this tone in public statements, becoming increasingly politically outspoken and controversial, his mentor Elijah Muhammad expelled Malcolm X from the NOI.

  Malcolm X’s words resonated with many young blacks, especially those in the ghettos who had not seen the Civil Rights Movement bring any noticeable change in their condition. He also spoke to the activists who felt betrayed by President Johnson and the federal government and were sick of turning the other cheek: “And now you’re facing a situation where the young Negro’s coming up,” Malcolm X declared. “They don’t want to hear that ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ stuff, no. . . . There’s a new deal coming. There’s new thinking coming in. There’s new strategy coming in. It’ll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month, and something else next month. It’ll be ballots, or it’ll be bullets. It’ll be liberty, or it will be death. The only difference about this kind of death—it’ll be reciprocal.”25

  In the 1960s, most black families—like the Newtons and the Seales—faced the peril of poverty. After migrating to the cities of the North and West to meet the demand for wartime jobs, thousands of black workers were left empty-handed when the war ended and the jobs evaporated. Many of the jobs that did remain followed whites fleeing to the suburbs—leaving sprawling black ghettos in their wake. Living in substandard housing and subjected to inferior and overcrowded schools, blacks were largely denied their rightful share of political power and economic opportunity. As unemployment increased, so did crime, and white urban politicians responded with strategies of containment, beefing up police patrols and attacking crime through force. While President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act and the supposed redress of black grievances were widely touted as success stories, the poverty, political exclusion, police brutality, and desperation of ghetto life had only intensified. As a result, many young urban blacks rejected civil rights politics as ineffectual and were drawn to the revolutionary nationalism of Malcolm X.

  When Malcolm X was gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem in February 1965, he came to symbolize the struggle for black liberation—everything the Civil Rights Movement promised but could not deliver. In the words of historian William L. Van Deburg, Malcolm’s “impassioned rhetoric was ‘street smart’—it had almost visceral appeal to a young, black, economically distressed constituency. Before his assassination, Malcolm constantly urged this constituency to question the validity of their schoolbook- and media-inspired faith in an integrated American Dream. Many responded.” After his death, Malcolm’s influence expanded dramatically. “He came to be far more than a martyr for the militant, separatist faith. He became a Black Power paradigm—the archetype, reference point, and spiritual adviser in absentia for a generation of Afro-American activists.”26

  In August 1965, six months after Malcolm X died, the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles exploded in one of the largest urban rebellions in U.S. history. Black migrants had begun moving into Watts in the 1920s, creating a black island in a sea of white towns such as South Gate, Lynwood, Compton, and Bell (Compton did have one black resident in 1930). Home-lending regulations excluded blacks from obtaining mortgages to buy houses in white neighborhoods. By 1945, Watts was 80 percent black.27 Through the 1950s, the black migration continued, and more blacks migrated to California than to any other state. During this decade, the black population of New York City increased almost two and a half times, and Detroit’s black population tripled—while Black L.A. grew eightfold. Meanwhile, white residents fled in drove
s for the suburbs, taking capital and employment opportunities with them.28

  Tensions between Watts residents and the police ran high. While the vast majority of Watts residents in 1965 were black, only 4 percent of the sworn personnel of the Los Angeles Police Department and 6 percent of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department were black.29 Police Chief William Parker used analyses of crime data to develop and justify a policy that explicitly targeted Watts and other black neighborhoods for heavy police coverage, including intrusive techniques such as routine frisking of people on the street. “I don’t think you can throw the genes out of the question when you discuss the behavior patterns of people,” Parker wrote in 1957.30 Officers on the force called their nightsticks “nigger-knockers.” Residents of one of the most highly patrolled precincts called their area “little Mississippi.” The local NAACP reported, “Negroes in Los Angeles never know where or at what hour may come blows from the guardians of the law who are supposed to protect them.” One activist recalled, “You just had to be black and moving to be shot by the police.”31

  Between January 1962 and July 1965, Los Angeles law enforcement officers (mostly police but also sheriff’s deputies, highway patrol personnel, and others) killed at least sixty-five people. Of the sixty-five homicides by police that the Los Angeles coroner’s office investigated during this period, sixty-four were ruled justifiable homicides. These included twenty-seven cases in which the victim was shot in the back by law officers, twenty-five in which the victim was unarmed, twenty-three in which the victim was suspected of a nonviolent crime, and four in which the victim was not suspected of any crime at the time of the shooting. The only case that the coroner’s inquest ruled to be unjustified homicide was one in which “two officers, ‘playing cops and robbers’ in a Long Beach Police Station shot a newspaperman.”32