by Joshua Bloom
Like the West Coast members of RAM with whom they had worked in the Soul Students Advisory Council, Newton and Seale decided to form a chapter of the Black Panther Party. But guided by Newton’s epiphany, they took their party in a different direction that would have long-term political consequences.95
2
Policing the Police
One night in early 1967, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Little (Lil’) Bobby Hutton, the first recruit to their Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, were cruising around north Oakland in Seale’s 1954 Chevy. Newton was at the wheel. They saw a police car patrolling the area and decided to monitor it. As Bobby Seale later recounted the incident, Newton sped up to within a short residential block behind the car and kept that distance.1 When the officer turned right, Newton turned right. When the officer turned left, Newton turned left. Newton was armed with a shotgun, Seale with a .45 caliber handgun, and Hutton with an M-1 rifle. A law book sat on the back seat.
After they had followed the police car for a while, the officer pulled the patrol car to the curb and stopped at the corner. There was a stop sign at the corner, so Newton pulled up to the intersection and stopped next to the police car. The three men looked over at the officer. Seale held Newton’s shotgun while he drove, and both the shotgun and Hutton’s M-1 were plainly visible through the window. The officer looked back. After a pause, Newton stepped gently on the gas and rounded the corner to the right in front of the officer. As Newton completed the turn, the officer flashed his high beams. Newton kept driving without changing speed. The officer stepped on the gas and pulled out after him. Seale could see the flashing red lights, but Newton kept moving. He told Seale, “I’m not going to stop ‘till he puts his damn siren on because a flashing red light really don’t mean nothin’, anything could be a flashing red light.” At this point, the car headed north on Dover Street behind Merritt College. Newton took a left on 58th Street and headed down the block, passing Merritt’s track field. The officer turned on his siren, and Newton pulled over, coming to a stop across the street from the back door of the college.
As soon as Newton pulled over, the officer stopped and burst out of his car, hollering, “What the goddam hell you niggers doing with them goddam guns? Who in the goddam hell you niggers think you are? Get out of that goddam car. Get out of that goddam car with them goddam guns.” At this point, students who had just finished their evening classes at the predominantly black school began filing out the back door, and they stopped to watch. Many residents of the homes along the street looked out their windows.
The officer approached the car, screaming, “Get out of that car!” Newton said, “You ain’t putting anybody under arrest. Who the hell you think you are?” At this point, the officer pulled open the car door and shouted, “I said get out of the goddam car and bring them goddam guns out of there.” The officer stuck his head in the car, reached across Newton, and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun Seale was holding. Seale pulled back on the shotgun. Newton grabbed the officer by the collar and slammed his head up into the roof of the car. He then swiveled in his seat, kicked the officer in the stomach, and pushed him out of the car.
Newton took the shotgun from Seale, leapt out of the car, and jacked a round of ammunition into the chamber. He shouted, “Now, who in the hell do you think you are, you big rednecked bastard, you rotten fascist swine, you bigoted racist? You come into my car, trying to brutalize me and take my property away from me. Go for your gun and you’re a dead pig.” The officer lifted his hands away from his gun while Seale and Hutton jumped out of the passenger side of the car. Seale pulled back the hammer on his .45. The officer backed away from Newton toward his car, where he radioed for backup.
People streamed out of their houses; more students streamed out of Merritt. Seale and Newton beckoned people to come out and observe the police. A sizable crowd soon coalesced. Seale called the police “racist dogs, pigs.” He explained to the crowd that police were “occupying our community like a foreign troop that occupies territory” and that “Black people are tired of it.”2
Several more police cars arrived, and an officer walked up to Newton and demanded, “Let me see that weapon!”
Newton said, “Let you see my weapon? You haven’t placed me under arrest.”
The officer insisted: “Well, you just let me see the weapon, I have a right to see the weapon.”
Newton refused. “Ain’t you ever heard of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States? Don’t you know you don’t remove nobody’s property without due process of law? What’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be people enforcing the law, and here you are, ready to violate my constitutional rights. You can’t see my gun. You can’t have my gun. The only way you’re gonna get it from me is to try to take it.”
Another officer walked up to Seale and shouted, “Come over here by the car.”
Seale said: “I ain’t going no goddam place. Who the hell you think you are? You ain’t placed me under arrest.”
“But I have a right to take you over to the car,” the officer replied loudly.
Seale responded, “You don’t have no right to move me from one spot to another. You just got through telling me I wasn’t under arrest, so I’m not moving nowhere, I’m staying right here.”
The officer then demanded that Seale hand over his gun, and Seale refused. Newton, Seale, and Hutton would not submit to the police. Citing local ordinances as well as the Second Amendment to the Constitution, they asserted their right to bear arms as long as the guns were not concealed. The standoff threatened to escalate. But after tense deliberations, the police lieutenant told the other officers he did not see sufficient grounds for arrest. After looking around, one of the officers noticed that the license plate on Seale’s Chevy was attached with a coat hanger. He then wrote Seale a ticket for not having the license plate securely fastened to his vehicle.
The police soon left, and the excited crowd gathered around Newton and Seale to hear what had happened. The men described their organization, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The next day, several community members who had witnessed the event joined the Party.
Bobby Seale provided the first guns for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense from his personal collection: a .30–30 Winchester rifle and a shotgun. Even before his time in the military, Seale had been around guns, mostly when hunting with his father. Once new recruits began joining the Party, obtaining more firearms became a priority. Newton and Seale approached Richard Aoki, a Japanese American radical who they knew had an impressive collection of guns. A small and energetic man with a big smile, a dirty mouth, and a generous sense of humor, Aoki was a dedicated revolutionary committed to Third World liberation. He was pleased to help the Black Panthers get started and donated two guns to the Party in support of their revolutionary cause, an M-1 Garand rifle and a 9mm pistol, both weapons designed for the military.3
Newton and Seale needed to raise money to purchase more guns for their Party. Newton got the idea to sell Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book on the Berkeley campus to raise money—a small but influential book of quotations by the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party that was receiving a lot of news coverage. They went to Chinatown in San Francisco and bought the books at thirty cents apiece and then sold them on the Berkeley campus for a dollar. Soon they raised enough money to buy a .357 Magnum (a pistol designed for law enforcement officers) from Aoki and a High Standard shotgun at the local department store.4
Over the course of several months patrolling the police, Newton and Seale gained a small following. Bobby got Huey a job at the War on Poverty youth program where he worked, and the two used a portion of their paychecks to rent an office on Grove Street and 56th in north Oakland near Merritt College.5 In early 1967, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense had only a handful of members. The organization had received no coverage in the press and was known only by those with whom the Party had direct contact, or through word of mouth. By February, this
began to change.
That January, Eldridge Cleaver, a writer for Ramparts magazine—an independent Catholic magazine that had become an influential voice of opposition to the Vietnam War—had recently moved to San Francisco and joined forces with playwright Marvin Jackman, poet Ed Bullins, and singer Willie Dale to found Black House, a cultural center for the burgeoning Black Power movement in the Bay Area. Along with the RAM-affiliated Black Panther Party of Northern California run by Kenny Freeman, Doug Allen, Ernie Allen, and Roy Ballard, they decided to organize a memorial for Malcolm X on the two-year anniversary of his death, February 21, 1967. The idea came out of Cleaver’s plan to create a new organization that represented the true legacy of Malcolm X and to name it after the group he had started before his death, the Organization for Afro-American Unity. Cleaver’s idea was to bring Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, to the Bay Area as the keynote speaker at the memorial conference to legitimize the new organization. Cleaver was new to the area, and the group appointed Roy Ballard as coordinator of the event.6
A number of the organizers feared that Betty Shabazz could become a target like her husband, so Roy Ballard asked Bobby Seale if the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would speak at the conference and provide an armed escort for Shabazz. After consulting with Newton, Seale agreed, and arranged to meet Shabazz at the San Francisco Airport. In the early afternoon of February 21, eight members of Newton and Seale’s Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, dressed in uniform—waist-length leather jackets, powder blue shirts, and black berets cocked to the right—met up with Roy Ballard, Kenny Freeman, and several other members of the RAM-affiliated group.
At 3:05 P.M., the Black Panther contingent, led by Newton, entered the lobby of the San Francisco Airport displaying shotguns and pistols. The airport security chief, George Nessel, and his armed deputies confronted them and ordered them to wait outside the building. Newton refused. Nessel acquiesced, telling the press later that the Panthers were “quite hip on the law.”7 The Panthers made their way in military fashion to American Airlines gate 47, where Shabazz was scheduled to arrive. According to one eyewitness, “Each one, like clockwork, set themselves up at various stations at the arrival gate and waited, rifles in hand.”8
From the airport, the Panthers escorted Shabazz to the office of Ramparts magazine for an interview with Eldridge Cleaver. There, the group had another, more intense confrontation with law enforcement. Chuck Banks, an aggressive reporter from KGO-TV, tried to push his way through the Panther bodyguard. When he tried to push aside Huey Newton, Newton grabbed his collar and pushed him back against the wall. Police officers reacted, several flipping loose the little straps that held their pistols in their holsters. One started shouting at Newton, who stopped and stared at the cop. Seale tried to get Newton to leave. Newton ignored him and walked right up to the cop. “What’s the matter,” Newton said, “you got an itchy finger?”
The cop made no reply and simply stared Newton in the eye, keeping his hand on his gun and taking his measure. The other officers called out for the cop to cool it, but he kept staring at Newton. “O.K. you big fat racist pig, draw your gun,” Newton challenged. The cop made no move. Newton shouted “Draw it, you cowardly dog!” He pumped a round into the shotgun chamber.
The other officers spread out, stepping away from the line of fire. Finally, the cop gave up, sighing heavily and hanging his head. Newton laughed in his face as the remaining Panthers dispersed. Shabazz had already been whisked away by other Panthers while Newton occupied the attention of the police.
Witnessing Newton stand his ground with the police, back them down, and call them cowards, Eldridge Cleaver was filled with jubilation. “Work out soul brother!” his mind screamed, “You’re the baddest motherfucker I’ve ever seen.”9
Cleaver was as unimpressed by Ballard and the RAM group as he was impressed by Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. He decided then that he would give his full support to Huey Newton as the legitimate heir to the legacy of Malcolm X. Word quickly spread about Huey Newton’s stand against the police, and about the bold new Black Power organization, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
The Panthers’ patrols of police sparked interest in the community, but still Huey and Bobby’s following remained small. Newton was very conscious that black people were excluded from power and that the government did not represent their interests. He knew that many blacks in Oakland saw the police as oppressive. Newton hoped that by standing up to the police, he would be able to organize blacks to build political power. But even though his actions won respect, not many people were ready to join the Black Panther Party.
DENZIL DOWELL
Six weeks later, at 3:50 A.M. on Monday April 1, 1967, all this changed. George Dowell and several neighbors from North Richmond, an unincorporated all-black community near Oakland, heard ten gunshots. Sometime after 5:00 A.M., George came upon his older brother Denzil Dowell lying in the street, shot in the back and head.10 Police from the county sheriff’s department were there, but no ambulance had been called. Something did not seem right. Why had no one called an ambulance? George rushed home to tell his mother and father that their son, Denzil Dowell, a twenty-two-year-old construction laborer, was dead.
When the newspaper came out that day, the Contra Costa sheriff’s office reported that deputy sheriffs Mel Brunkhorst and Kenneth Gibson had arrived at the scene at 4:50 A.M. on a tip from an unidentified caller about a burglary in progress. They claimed that when they arrived, Denzil Dowell and another man ran from the back of a liquor store and refused to stop when ordered to halt. Brunkhorst fired one blast from a shotgun, striking Dowell and killing him. The other man escaped.11
For the Dowells, the official explanation did not add up, and community members helped the family investigate. The Dowells knew Mel Brunkhorst. He had issued citations to Denzil in the past, and on occasion, Brunkhorst had threatened to kill Dowell. The more they probed, the more contradictory the facts appeared. There was no sign of entry, forced or otherwise, at Bill’s Liquors, the store Dowell had allegedly been robbing. Further, the police had reported that Dowell had not only run but also jumped two fences to get away before being shot down. But Dowell had a bad hip, a limp, and the family claimed that he could not run, let alone jump fences. When the coroner released his report, community skepticism only grew. The report stated that Dowell had bled to death, yet there had been no pool of blood where Dowell was found. There was a pool of blood, however, twenty yards away from the site where police claimed Dowell died. The report also listed six bullet holes, apparently confirming neighbors’ reports of hearing multiple shots. A doctor who worked on the case told the family that judging from the way the bullets had entered Dowell’s body, Dowell had been shot with his hands raised. Bullet holes in nearby walls also suggested alternate trajectories and a different story. The family demanded to have the clothes Dowell wore when he was shot and to be allowed to take pictures of the corpse to verify how many times he had been shot. The county refused. Mrs. Dowell publicly announced, “I believe the police murdered my son.”12
The city of Richmond, a few miles north of Oakland, had been the site of several major shipyards during World War II. Many blacks migrated to the area for wartime jobs but found themselves unemployed and underemployed during the postwar demobilization and deindustrialization. Much of the postwar black community lived in ghettos consisting of public housing units built by the federal government during the war. North Richmond, a town of six thousand people stuck between a garbage dump and the toxic-fume-producing Chevron Oil refinery, was almost entirely black. As an unincorporated area, the community received no public services from the city. Instead, North Richmond came under the jurisdiction of Contra Costa County, including the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department. Extremely isolated, the area had only three streets on which to enter or exit. On occasion, county police blocked those streets, sealing off the entire area.13
Two weeks before Christmas 1966
, just a few months before Denzil Dowell died, two unarmed black men had been shot and killed in North Richmond. Bullet holes in their armpits showed that they had been shot with their hands raised. It was rumored that police were responsible. A black woman from the neighborhood had also been brutally beaten by police.14 Denzil Dowell’s killing added insult to injury. A white jury took little time deciding that the killing of unarmed Dowell was “justifiable homicide” because the police officers on the scene had suspected that he was in the act of committing a felony. Outraged, the black community demanded justice.
The Dowell family supported a petition drive demanding the suspension of officer Brunkhorst and a full investigation of Denzil’s death. Almost one-fourth of the North Richmond community signed on—twelve hundred people in all. Yet county officials refused to investigate. For many, this was the last straw.15
Paralleling black anger about police brutality nationally, the rage in North Richmond over Dowell’s killing was palpable. With no sympathetic response from local government, the situation appeared headed in a clear direction: toward riot. Mark Comfort knew the Dowell family and understood how high the stakes were. As North Richmond threatened to boil over, instead of organizing a sit-in or prevailing upon the traditional civil rights organizations to act, he drove down to 56th Street and Grove in Oakland to see Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.
Ruby Dowell, Denzil’s sister, called a meeting at Neighborhood House, a community center in North Richmond, to discuss the situation. Newton and Seale attended.16 The meeting was emotional. Mrs. Dowell was still very angry, but she was also despondent and scared. Alongside her husband, who remained in the background during much of the crisis, she had worked so hard to survive in North Richmond, to support her family, and to raise her children. Now, her son Denzil had been taken from her by the very police sworn to protect him. Her appeals to the authorities had been treated with indifference at best.17 Who was she to look to? How could she find justice?
