Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  In the next issue of the Black Panther, the Party dropped “for Self-Defense” from its name and became simply the Black Panther Party.49 While the rhetoric of the SNCC leaders roused as much enthusiasm from the crowd at Huey’s birthday celebration rally as did the speeches by Panther leaders, the Panthers were the ones with a practical program. Several thousand people left the Oakland Auditorium that night with a shared commitment to help “Free Huey!”50

  The Black Panther Party was now a key model for the new Black Power politics. According to the Panthers, black communities were colonies within the mother country. The oppressive imperial American state denied black people political and economic power, so blacks had no moral obligation to obey its laws. They had a moral obligation to resist. In particular, the Party politicized black people’s conflicts with the police. The police were not officers of justice—they were pigs, foul traducers, and foreign troops oppressing black people. Those who challenged the police were not criminals—they were anti-imperialists. The “Free Huey!” campaign rejected the legitimacy of the police and demanded Huey’s freedom irrespective of the details of the case. The Panthers turned the charges around and put America on trial.

  Building upon foundations laid after Sacramento, the “Free Huey!” campaign drew strong support from SNCC and leading Black Power activists, on the one hand, and the Peace and Freedom Party and the broader Left, on the other. Then, in April, the living symbol of the insurgent Civil Rights Movement, who for many embodied that movement’s continuing promise, was extinguished.

  5

  Martyrs

  On Thursday, April 4, 1968, at 6:01 P.M., Martin Luther King Jr. stepped onto the balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. King and his aides were in Memphis organizing support for a strike by thirteen hundred black sanitation workers. The effort was part of King’s new emphasis on the alleviation of poverty and opposition to the Vietnam War. King’s fame brought widespread attention to the sanitation workers’ strike, and over the previous week, conflicts between police and black strike supporters had become violent.

  King had returned to the hotel after a long day of organizing and was headed to dinner. He wore a black silk suit and white shirt. Jesse Jackson, one of King’s associates standing in the courtyard below, introduced Ben Branch, a musician from Chicago who was scheduled to play at the rally that evening. King took hold of the green iron balcony railing and leaned over it to chat. “Do you know Ben?” Jackson asked. “Yes, that’s my man!” King beamed. King asked Branch to play the gospel favorite “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” at the rally. A shot rang out, and the bullet tore through the base of the right side of King’s neck. An hour later, at 7:05, doctors at St. Joseph’s Hospital pronounced King dead.1

  That evening, Black Memphis erupted with fires, broken windows, and sporadic attacks on police with bricks, bottles, and some gunfire. Over the next three weeks, violent rebellions swept the nation, igniting communities in more than 120 cities. Black neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chicago were devastated. President Johnson deployed forty-four thousand soldiers and National Guardsmen to restore order. Police arrested twenty-one thousand, and forty-six people were killed.2

  By the time of King’s assassination, a wide rift had opened in the Black Liberation Struggle. On one side were moderate organizations such as the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As the movement successfully challenged legal segregation, these venerable groups offered vital legal and institutional support.3 But in the civil rights insurgency that peaked in the early 1960s, these organizations played a supportive role, rather than leading the sit-ins, marches, and frontline civil disobedience. With formal segregation defeated by the late 1960s, leaders like Urban League director Whitney Young and NAACP director Roy Wilkins joined the establishment, seeking to consolidate the gains of formal racial equality. On the other side, young activists—frustrated by the lack of material progress, particularly in the urban areas outside the South—sought new, often more confrontational ways of advancing Black Power.

  In the months before his death, King endeavored to bridge these divergent paths. More than any other individual, King was widely revered for his role in helping to destroy Jim Crow. With this stature, he could not easily be ignored nor repressed. Further, King and his organization—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—had a strong base rooted in the black churches of the South and had worked closely with other organizations both in supporting and leading front-line civil disobedience. As the movement defeated Jim Crow and the challenge to legal segregation became moot, King increasingly championed the struggle against poverty and publicly opposed the war in Vietnam—gaining the cautious respect of the radical young activists. His leftward turn toward anti-imperialism increasingly incurred the wrath of the establishment.

  Shortly before his death, King told reporters, “Our program calls for a redistribution of economic power.” Blacks, he explained, must help lead the struggle “to reform the structure of racist imperialism from within.”4 An article in the New York Times Magazine right before his death explained that King had “come to believe that war and poverty are inseparable issues.” King’s “plans are calculated to disturb whatever peace of mind the President enjoys these days.”5 King was leading plans for an interracial march in the nation’s capital that would mobilize thousands of poor people and their supporters to “re-establish that the real issue is not violence or nonviolence, but poverty and neglect.”6 King’s persistent insurgency angered the Johnson administration, which trumpeted recent civil rights victories. Despite their history of working together, Dr. King and President Johnson had been “virtually out of touch since Dr. King began to condemn the Administration’s policy in Vietnam two years ago,” the New York Times explained in a front-page article published just days before King’s assassination.7

  An establishment chorus denounced King’s Poor People’s March as well as his increasingly vigorous opposition to the Vietnam War. Robert Byrd, the Democratic senator of West Virginia, called King a “self-seeking rabble rouser” and called for a restraining order to block the planned April demonstrations against poverty.8 The day before King was killed, a federal court had issued a restraining order prohibiting him from holding a demonstration in Memphis. Angry and defiant, King called the order “illegal and unconstitutional,” and refused to obey it.9

  But when King died, the establishment quickly put aside its wrath and sought to claim him as a martyr for America. On the evening after King’s assassination, President Johnson addressed the nation, asking “every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King, who lived by non-violence.” The president emphasized King’s nonviolent tactics and ignored the insurgent character of his leadership, appropriating the symbolism of King’s death for America: “Martin Luther King stands with our other American martyrs in the cause of freedom and justice.”10

  The following day, on April 5, President Johnson attended a memorial for King at the Washington Cathedral. He entered the cathedral with an entourage that included Roy Wilkins; Whitney M. Young Jr.; Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights lawyer appointed by Johnson as the first black Supreme Court justice; Chief Justice Earl Warren, who crafted the landmark Brown v. Board civil rights decision; Robert Weaver, Johnson’s secretary of housing and urban development and the first black member of a presidential cabinet; Vice President Hubert Humphrey; and Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford.11 The message was clear: Johnson was signaling his administration’s commitment to racial equality and its support of the civil rights establishment.

  Johnson presented King as an “American martyr” sacrificed to the cause of formal racial equality embraced by the establishment and embodied in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Every avowed presidential candidate at the time, including former Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, Senators Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, and Vice Presid
ent Humphrey, flew to Atlanta to attend Dr. King’s funeral on April 9, as did fifty congressmen, thirty senators, and several state governors.12 Young black activists at the funeral complained that the politicians were “vote-seeking” and crying “crocodile tears.”13

  With King gone, the SCLC no longer offered an effective conduit for the realization of black political aspirations. Without King’s celebrity and credibility, SCLC had difficulty attracting participation in the Poor People’s Campaign, and its protests drew less public attention and support from allies. SCLC initiated fewer and fewer insurgent protests and saw its membership and funding wither.14 “People had confidence in him,” explained SCLC leader Andrew Young in July 1968, but they “have not demonstrated a willingness to take us [the post-King leadership] seriously.”15

  The rift between the civil rights establishment and young urban blacks became harder to bridge. Stokely Carmichael, the preeminent voice of the young guard, held a press conference the day after King’s assassination and declared, “I think white America made its biggest mistake when she killed Dr. King last night because when she killed Dr. King last night, she killed all reasonable hope. When she killed Dr. King last night she killed the one man of our race that this country’s older generations, the militants and the revolutionaries, and the masses of black people would still listen to. Even though sometimes he did not agree with them, they would still listen to him.”16

  LIL’ BOBBY HUTTON

  On the evening of April 6, two days after King’s death, at a little after 9:00 P.M., three carloads of armed Black Panthers pulled over to the curb on Union and 28th Streets in largely black west Oakland. Eldridge Cleaver was driving the lead car, an old white Ford with a Florida license plate that a member of the Peace and Freedom Party had donated to the Panthers. The entourage included David Hilliard, seventeen-year-old Lil’ Bobby Hutton, and six other rank-and-file Panthers.17 Cleaver opened the door and walked around to the passenger side of the Ford, reportedly to urinate. A moment later, several police cars pulled up and shined a spotlight on Cleaver. Words were exchanged, then gunfire. The Panthers ran for cover, the police quickly cordoned off a two-block area, and neighbors gathered in the streets. An hour and a half later, Cleaver, having been shot in the foot and rear, his lungs burning from tear gas and firebomb smoke, emerged stark naked from a burning basement, surrendered, and was taken into custody. Lil’ Bobby Hutton emerged from the basement unarmed. Police shot him dead.18

  The following day, Bobby Seale held a press conference. Speaking quietly and carefully, he charged the police with racism, repression, and murder: “Bobby Hutton had his hands in the air, and was shot and murdered” by the Oakland police. Seale and Charles R. Garry, the Panthers’ lawyer, called for the indictment of the policemen who had killed Bobby Hutton. Seale described the shoot-out as an ambush by police, and explained that the Panthers bore arms in self-defense. He noted, “A panther never attacks anyone, but when he is pushed into a corner . . . like the brothers were last night, he has one thing to do: to defend himself.” The Black Panthers wanted peace, he explained, but peace could be obtained only through armed self-defense. “Our brother Martin Luther King exhausted all means of nonviolence.”19

  At the April 12 funeral for Hutton, two thousand people packed into the Ephesian Church of God in Christ in Berkeley, with a hundred uniformed Black Panthers forming the honor guard. The Reverend E. E. Cleveland called down “shame” on the powerful for failing to improve the lot of blacks. After the service, the Panthers held an outdoor rally and proclaimed that Bobby Hutton had been assassinated because of his Panther politics. Now Seale was angry. “There are pigs on tops of the library behind you. They are up there on other buildings. . . . They must know that every time these racist pigs attack us we are going to defend ourselves.” Seale cried out, “Free Huey!” and the crowd answered: “Free Huey!”20

  The Black Panther leadership charged that Hutton had posed a challenge to racism and that the police had killed him to repress this challenge. From prison, Cleaver wrote his account of the shoot-out, published in Ramparts:

  The Oakland Police Department MURDERED Little Bobby, and they cannot have that as a victory. . . . We must all swear by Little Bobby’s blood that we will not rest until Chief Gains is brought to justice, either in the courts or in the streets; and until the bloodthirsty troops of the Oakland Police Department no longer exist in the role of an occupying army with its boots on the neck of the black community, with its guns aimed at the black community’s head, an evil force with its sword of terror thrust into the heart of the black community. That’s what Little Bobby would ask you to do, Brothers and Sisters, put an end to the terror—by any means necessary.21

  Many notables joined the Panthers in praising Hutton’s courage and contribution to the Black Liberation Struggle. Stokely Carmichael said, “Hutton understood that power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, sent a telegram: “Shot down like a common animal, he died a warrior for black liberation.” A group of professors from the University of California, the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State College, and San Jose State College called for an investigation of the Oakland Police Department by the U.S. Civil Service Commission.22 Harry Edwards, professor of sociology at San Jose State and a prime mover behind the successful movement for black athletes to boycott the 1968 Olympics, said, “You can no longer ignore the Black Panthers” and announced his intention to join.23 Marlon Brando attended Hutton’s funeral and said, “That could have been my son lying there.”24 A letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, signed by a list of notables that included James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, Elizabeth Hardwick, LeRoi Jones, Oscar Lewis, Norman Mailer, Floyd McKissick, and Susan Sontag, compared the murder of Hutton to the murder of King: “Both were acts of racism against persons who had taken a militant stand on the right of black people to determine the conditions of their own lives. Both were attacks aimed at destroying this nation’s black leadership.”25

  NEW DAY IN BABYLON

  By 1968, the Civil Rights Movement had unraveled as the defeat of formal racial subordination eliminated targets for effective civil rights mobilization. But more than any other figure, King had embodied the promise of liberation through nonviolence and appeals to American morality. His persistence as he sought to broaden the civil rights struggle to address war and poverty kept hope alive. For many young activists, when King died, the promise of the civil rights struggle died with him.

  De facto racial subordination of black people persisted. Many schools, neighborhoods, and professions remained segregated in practice. Many police departments, fire departments, and local governments in areas with large black populations remained exclusively or predominantly white. Many black people remained locked in poverty and in squalor. And in some holdout areas, such as “Bloody Lowndes” County, Alabama, protection of black residents’ civil rights was seriously lacking well past the passage of the federal 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

  But by 1968, even in “Bloody Lowndes,” the political dynamic had changed.26 As the Civil Rights Movement dismantled Jim Crow through the mid-1960s, it ironically undercut its own viability as an insurgent movement. Whereas activists could sit in at lunch counters or sit black and white together on a bus or insist on registering to vote where they had traditionally been excluded, they were often uncertain how to nonviolently disrupt black unemployment, substandard housing, poor medical care, or police brutality. And when activists did succeed in disrupting these social processes nonviolently, they often found themselves facing very different enemies and lacking the broad allied support that civil rights activists had attained when challenging formal segregation. By 1968, the civil rights practice of nonviolent civil disobedience against racial exclusion had few obvious targets and could no longer generate massive and widespread participation.27

  Civil rights as an ideal remained more important than ever. Black activists continued to emulate the
nonviolent direct action of the Civil Rights Movement’s heyday in their struggles for school busing, economic opportunity, and affirmative action. For decades to come, countless black activists would work tirelessly in the legal and political arenas to bring to fruition the seeds of racial equality planted by the Civil Rights Movement. And many others would emulate the Civil Rights Movement in pursuing their own environmental, identity, and social causes.

  But black liberation activists who were committed to continued nonviolent insurgency had no coherent alternative politics for which to claim King. Because of his fame and stature, King had remained a threat to the establishment. Actions he participated in garnered wide attention and support that they could not have attracted without him. But King had yet to convert that fame and stature into a viable practical basis of a new insurgency. Thus, there was no viable new insurgent movement that could claim King as its martyr.

  President Johnson and the American establishment sought to appropriate King as an American martyr: a powerful symbol for American democracy. Members of the establishment quickly forgot King’s continued insurgency and his efforts to broaden the struggle. Instead, they sought to make King their own, trumpeting racial progress to burnish American democratic credentials. Lacking the practical means to sustain civil rights insurgency and eager to join the establishment, the moderate civil rights leadership quickly embraced this symbolism.

  In this environment, Lil’ Bobby Hutton became a very different kind of martyr from King. He was virtually unknown and ignored by the establishment. Hutton had died standing up to the brutal Oak land police; he died for black self-determination; he died defying American empire like Lumumba and Che and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had before him. Unlike King in 1968, Lil’ Bobby Hutton represented a coherent insurgent alternative to political participation in the United States—armed self-defense against the police and commitment to the revolutionary politics of the Black Panther Party.