Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  The incident that sparked the Watts rebellion was a traffic stop. Twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye was driving his 1955 Buick along 116th Street near his family’s house at 6 P.M. on August 11, 1965, when he was pulled over by a California Highway Patrol officer. His younger brother Ronald Frye, the only passenger, had just been discharged from the U.S. Air Force. A crowd gathered, including Marquette’s mother, Rena. More police arrived. Soon a crowd of more than two hundred had gathered, and the onlookers became agitated as the police reportedly slapped Rena Frye, beat her with a blackjack, and twisted her arm behind her back.33

  Watts exploded. On August 12, at 9:30 P.M., a group identifying itself as “followers of Malcolm X” arrived on Avalon Boulevard shouting “Let’s burn . . . baby, burn!” The next day, at 3:30 P.M., the Emergency Control Center journal recorded “6 male Negroes firing rifles at helicopter from vehicle, 109th & Avalon.” Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown cut short an aerial tour of South Los Angeles because of “sniper fire.” Delta Airlines rerouted flights over the city because rebels were “shooting at planes.”34

  By the second day of the rebellion, according to the Los Angeles Times, more than seven thousand people were looting stores, in particular stealing guns, machetes, and other weapons. Rebels were filling glass bottles with gasoline and hurling Molotov cocktails at cars and stores, setting them on fire. Many were also firing shots at police. Fire trucks and ambulances that attempted to enter the area were also attacked.35

  During the heat of battle, Police Chief Parker declared, “This situation is very much like fighting the Viet Cong. . . . We haven’t the slightest idea when this can be brought under control.” One rebel standing on the corner of Avalon and Imperial made a different reference to Vietnam, telling an interviewer, “I’ve got my ‘stuff’ [gun] ready, I’m not going to die in Vietnam, whitey has been kicking ass too long.”36

  As the fires still burned, the local CBS radio station reported, “This was not a riot. It was an insurrection against all authority. . . . If it had gone much further it would have become civil war.” The CBS Reports TV broadcast in December 1965 called it a “virtual civil insurrection probably unmatched since” the Civil War. Scholars David O. Sears and John B. McConahay noted that the “legally constituted authority . . . was overthrown.” Sociologist Robert Blauner saw the rebellions as “a preliminary if primitive form of mass rebellion against a colonial status.”37

  The rebellion spread out over 46.5 square miles. All told, 34 people—almost all black—were killed, many by police, and more than 1,032 were wounded; 3,952 people were arrested. The rebellion caused more than $40 million in property damage to over six hundred buildings, completely destroying two hundred of them.38

  Full of rage at ghetto conditions, chafing against police repression, and frustrated with a civil rights politics unable to redress their situation, the Watts rebels sought to take matters into their own hands, forcefully rejecting the old-guard civil rights leadership. Following the rebellion, Martin Luther King Jr. went to Watts to bring his vision of an integrated society and the tactics of nonviolence. On August 18, he spoke to a meeting of five hundred people at the Westminster Neighborhood Association. He began his appeal in rolling cadence: “All over America . . . the Negroes must join hands . . .” “And burn!” shouted a member of the audience. Throughout the evening, the audience repeatedly challenged and ridiculed King’s appeal. Nonviolent activist and comedian Dick Gregory fared even worse in Watts. While the rebellion still flared, he borrowed a bullhorn from the police so that he could speak to the rebels. He attempted to calm them and pleaded “Go home!” The crowd did not respond kindly. A gunman in the crowd shot Gregory in the leg. The politics of nonviolence were failing.39

  Commenting on the wave of urban rebellions and the rejection of civil rights strategies by disenchanted and dispossessed blacks, Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau observed, “The masses of poor Negroes remain an unorganized minority in swelling urban ghettos, and neither SNCC nor any other group has found a form of political organization that can convert the energy of the slums into political power.”40

  ARMCHAIR REVOLUTIONARIES

  In Oakland in 1964, far away from Fannie Lou Hamer and the convention battles in Atlantic City, Huey Newton stabbed a man named Odell Lee with a steak knife at a party. At his trial, he claimed he had done so in self-defense, but the all-white jury was not convinced, and he spent six months in jail, mostly in solitary confinement because he would not obey orders from the guards. Newton later recalled finding a new sense of freedom in prison. The guards could lock up his body, but they could not cage his mind. Newton emerged from jail eager to embrace the new political ideas and organizations developing in Oakland.41

  Newton soon reconnected with Seale, and the two joined the Soul Students Advisory Council (SSAC), founded by Ernie Allen. The council was a front group for the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), an anti-imperialist and Marxist black nationalist organization based in Philadelphia. Allen had collaborated with Newton and Seale in Warden’s Afro-American Association when he was a student at Merritt College. After transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, Allen had traveled to Cuba in 1964 on a trip sponsored by the Progressive Labor Party. The contingent also included other radical black students from Detroit and around the country. In Cuba, Allen and the others met Max Stanford, the leader of RAM, who was there visiting his mentor Robert F. Williams, a pioneering advocate of armed black self-defense. Williams had moved to Cuba after local authorities—in collusion with the Ku Klux Klan and backed by the FBI—forced him to flee North Carolina.42 Allen got to know Stanford and Williams in Cuba, and through his intense conversations and debates with them, he found a way to move beyond the limits of Warden’s Afro-American Association, embracing the idea that U.S. blacks could win their freedom by participating in a global revolution against imperialism. By the time he returned to the United States, Allen was committed to organizing a chapter of RAM in California.43

  Ernie Allen, his brother Doug, Kenny Freeman (Mamadou Lumumba), and others began to build several front groups for RAM in the Bay Area. One project was Soulbook: The Revolutionary Journal of the Black World, a beautifully presented quarterly magazine of cultural criticism and political theory whose content ranged from essays on the significance of John Coltrane to analyses of the writings of Frantz Fanon. Both poetry and black revolutionary nationalist artwork graced the magazine.44

  Virtual Murrell, Alex Papillon, Isaac Moore, and other friends of Newton and Seale at Merritt also joined the SSAC and helped launch a campaign to create courses in Afro-American studies at the college. The Merritt student body was predominantly black, and there was a large demand for such courses. The demand for Afro-American studies cut across intrablack differences and garnered support from many black individuals and organizations. The administration put up resistance, but hundreds of students turned out for meetings and protests, and the administration slowly began making concessions, including development of a black studies curriculum.45

  Working with RAM exposed Newton and Seale to a new world of writings and ideas. Both had been strongly influenced by the thinking of Malcolm X and the readings in the Afro-American Association. But unlike the association, RAM was a revolutionary nationalist organization with a strong socialist and anti-imperialist bent. Guided by the political ideas of Robert F. Williams, RAM exposed Newton and Seale to the key writings of revolutionary nationalism, and they were particularly attracted to the writings of Frantz Fanon, Mao Zedong, and Che Guevara, as well as RAM’s own publications on revolutionary black nationalism, including articles by Max Stanford and Robert Williams.46

  The Revolutionary Action Movement advanced a pivotal idea that would become central to the politics of the Black Panther Party. Drawing on a line of thought reaching back at least to the mid-1940s and the black anticolonialism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Alpheaus Hunton, RAM argued that Black America was essentially a colony and framed the struggle against racism
by blacks in the United States as part of the global anti-imperialist struggle against colonialism.47 Max Stanford defined the politics of revolutionary black nationalism this way in 1965: “We are revolutionary black nationalist, not based on ideas of national superiority, but striving for justice and liberation of all the oppressed peoples of the world. . . . There can be no liberty as long as black people are oppressed and the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America are oppressed by Yankee imperialism and neo-colonialism. After four hundred years of oppression, we realize that slavery, racism and imperialism are all interrelated and that liberty and justice for all cannot exist peacefully with imperialism.”48

  The politics of RAM connected the struggles of black Americans with liberation struggles abroad. Whereas black soldiers returning from World War II helped catalyze the Civil Rights Movement by arguing that if they could die fighting for their country, then they should be considered full citizens upon their return, RAM insisted that blacks were not full citizens in the United States. RAM viewed Black America as an independent nation that had been colonized at home. Because black Americans were colonial subjects rather than citizens, RAM argued, they owed no allegiance to the U.S. government and thus should not fight in the Vietnam War.

  On July 4, 1965, RAM wrote an open statement to the Vietnamese National Liberation Front declaring the independence of Black America from the United States and asserting its solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle against American imperialism.49 In a separate statement that day, RAM addressed blacks in the military, arguing that if they should be fighting against anyone, it should be the U.S. government for the liberation of Black America: “Why should we go ‘anywhere’ to fight for the racist U.S. government, only to return home and be faced with murder, rape, castration, and extermination? How can the racist U.S. government talk about ‘freeing’ anyone, when the U.S. government practices racism against Black Americans every day? If the U.S. government says it cannot protect us from local and national racists, then let your battle assignment be against those who are abusing your children, wives, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and loved ones.”50

  RAM and its front group the SSAC identified a common cause between blacks and the Vietnamese, and they were on the cutting edge of early opposition to the Vietnam War. Before there was any significant draft resistance, they criticized the draft and organized a campaign “to oppose the drafting of black men” into the military, holding rallies for the cause, including one at Merritt College on April 26, 1966, featuring local organizers Alex Papillon and Mark Comfort.51

  Through its honorary chair-in-exile, Robert F. Williams, RAM began building relationships with anti-imperialist leaders around the world. Williams had served as president of the local NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina. As Jim Crow came under growing attack by the Civil Rights Movement, the Ku Klux Klan, with the support of the local white government, increasingly relied on violence to protect racial segregation. With no support from the federal government, Williams turned to the skills he had learned as a private first class in the Marine Corps to turn the tide, arming himself and other members of his NAACP chapter. Williams and the Monroe NAACP fought several armed battles in self-defense against whites. In 1961, facing dubious criminal charges and threatened by a lynch mob that promised to kill him for his activities, Williams fled North Carolina.52

  Williams found asylum in Cuba and soon met Mao Zedong in China. Mao was deeply impressed with Williams and saw common cause in the struggle for black liberation in the United States and the global struggle against imperialism. In 1963, Mao articulated this position in an essay he wrote at Williams’s behest, asking the people of the world to recognize the Black Liberation Struggle in the United States as part of the global struggle against imperialism.53

  Robert Williams’s life exemplified a different approach to politics than that of RAM, and Williams’s memoir, Negroes with Guns, greatly influenced Newton.54 Newton was deeply impressed by Williams’s courage in standing up to the lynch mobs, but he was not sure how to apply this political approach to the ghettos of the North and West. He wanted to organize poor blacks. He wanted to mobilize the “brothers on the block,” the unemployed black men seen on every street of the ghetto, the black underclass. These were the people who faced the brutality of the expanding urban police departments. And many were the same folks who had rioted in Watts. RAM claimed to be talking for them, but it was not reaching them or moving them to action. Newton did not yet know how to mobilize these “brothers on the block,” but given what he knew of his brother Sonny Man, he believed that they would understand armed self-defense—that they would understand the language of the gun.55

  The Revolutionary Action Movement led the way in developing revolutionary black nationalist thought in the United States in the 1960s, but the group’s practical application of these ideas was limited. RAM leaders fashioned themselves as revolutionaries: They read socialist and anti-imperialist texts and raised the possibility of urban guerilla warfare. Some evidence indicates that RAM members attempted to implement these ideas, but most of them were intellectuals like Huey’s brother Melvin.56 They rarely emphasized practical action, and when they did, they oriented their efforts toward students. Huey soon became dissatisfied with the group’s inability to appeal to the “brothers on the block” and sought new ways to meld theory with on-the-ground action.

  Huey and Bobby wanted to challenge police brutality directly, and they found some inspiration in the activities of Mark Comfort and Curtis Lee Baker, talented young organizers who had emerged from traditional civil rights organizations in Oakland.57 Comfort and Baker had begun appealing to young African Americans with militant style—adopting black outfits and berets in early 1966—and with challenges to police brutality.58 In February 1965, Comfort organized a protest “to put a stop to police beating innocent people.” A crowd of more than two hundred—mostly high school students—encircled the Oakland Hall of Justice, urging Governor Pat Brown to “make a full scale investigation” of police brutality.59 That August, Baker and others demanded that the Oakland City Council keep white policemen out of black neighborhoods.60 During that summer, Comfort organized citizen patrols to monitor the actions of the police and document incidents of brutality. When people were arrested, he followed them to the jail and bailed them out. He soon abandoned the tactic, though, because it was too costly.61

  On Thursday night, March 17, 1966, at approximately 9 P.M., Newton and Seale and a friend they called “Weasel” were walking on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, just north of Oakland, headed toward the University of California campus. The street was a small bohemian mecca, with students, hippies, and young people congregating and milling about in the restaurants, cafes, bars, and shops. With encouragement from Huey and Weasel, Bobby stood on a chair outside the Forum restaurant near the corner of Telegraph and Haste and began to recite Ronald Stone’s black antiwar poem “Uncle Sammy Call Me Fulla Lucifer”:

  You school my naïve heart to sing

  red-white-and-blue-stars-and-stripes songs and to pledge eternal allegiance to all things blue, true,

  blue-eyed blond, blond-haired, white chalk white skin with U.S.A. tattooed all over. . . .

  I will not serve.62

  The poem struck a chord. The war was escalating, and many students felt conflicted, scared, and angry about the draft. A crowd began to gather. Soon more than twenty-five people were cheering Bobby on and asking him to recite the poem again. George Williamson, an off-duty police officer, pushed into the crowd and grabbed Seale. A scuffle broke out. More police arrived. Newton and Seale were both arrested for disturbing the peace.63 Virtual Murrell withdrew $50 from the SSAC treasury and bailed them out.64

  A few weeks later, Newton and Seale saw a policeman pushing around a black man for no apparent reason. The officer arrested the man and took him to the station. Following Mark Comfort’s example, Newton and Seale went to the station and bailed the man out using money from the SSAC treasury.65 The brother st
arted to cry, and it touched Bobby deeply. Bobby was fed up with “armchair intellectualizing” and wanted to stand up against the police, recalling, “I was filled with a staunch belief of the need for brotherhood and revolution and rebellion against the racist system.”66

  Huey and Bobby were ready to take meaningful, on-the-ground action. Seeking to emulate Robert Williams’s defiant stance, Newton proposed that the SSAC organize a rally for Malcolm X’s birthday in May 1966 and wear loaded guns in the spirit of his call for armed self-defense. Newton believed that this would attract the “brothers on the block” to participate. Seale supported Newton’s proposal, but Kenny Freeman and the other RAM leaders flatly rejected it.67

  Perhaps feeling threatened, Freeman and other RAM leaders suggested that Newton and Seale had misused money from the SSAC treasury. That was the last straw. Already frustrated with the failure of the local RAM leadership to stand up to police brutality, the organization’s lack of support during the fray on Telegraph Avenue, and its inability to organize brothers on the block, Bobby and Huey confronted Freeman and the others and then left the SSAC.68

  EPIPHANY

  In the summer of 1966, Seale was hired to run a youth work program at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center funded by the federal War on Poverty. Through his role as a social service provider, he came to understand even more clearly the economic and social needs of black youth. Beyond delivering services, Bobby brought his revolutionary nationalist theory to the job and used the opportunity to push up against the ideological bias in the government program. Rather than merely guiding young blacks into a government-prescribed path, he used his authority to help them stand up against oppressive authority, particularly against police brutality. One day Seale’s boss instructed him to take a group of young black men and women on a tour of the local police station. When the group arrived, the police officers pulled out notepads and pencils and started to interview the teenagers about the character of gangs in the neighborhood. Seale protested, instructing his group to remain silent and announcing that his program would not be used as a spy network to inform on people in the community. The officers claimed that they simply wanted to foster better relations with the community. In response, Seale turned the conversation around, creating an opportunity for the teenagers to describe their experiences with police brutality in the neighborhood.