Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  While Cleaver could not be easily ignored, neither could he be easily repressed. Only a small percentage of Californians actively ascribed to the Black Panthers’ revolutionary anti-imperialist politics, but elements of the Party’s position had broad appeal. Most blacks wanted a serious treatment of black history and greater black student enrollment. The university seemed unlikely to provide either without a struggle. For those opposed to the war, in late 1968, neither the Democratic nor Republican Party appeared to be listening to them. For faculty across the state and the country, the issue of intellectual freedom loomed large: would politicians be allowed to silence controversial and provocative viewpoints and interfere in university curricula? For these reasons, suppressing Cleaver proved to be widely unacceptable, even to many who believed the Panthers’ revolutionary program was extreme. The op-ed pages in California newspapers were filled with conflicting opinions on the “necessary” or “disturbing” character of Cleaver’s planned lectures.94

  As Cleaver traveled from campus to campus in late September and early October, he stirred up the controversy, assailing “Mickey Mouse Ronald Reagan” and the others in front of packed meetings overflowing with cheering student activists. Burnishing his hypermasculine image, a jocular Cleaver contended, “It is my belief that Ronald Reagan is a punk, a sissy, and a coward, and I challenge him to a duel. I challenge the punk to a duel to the death and he can choose his own weapon: it could be a baseball bat, a gun, a knife, or a marshmallow. I’ll beat him to death with a marshmallow.”95

  When the UC Board of Regents passed a resolution in late September to restrict Cleaver to one lecture, opposition exploded. Important segments of the black political establishment, believing that the edict undermined black educational interests, challenged the regents. The California Negro Leadership Conference described the censorship of Cleaver as racist and warned that if Cleaver was not allowed to lecture, it would ask black legislators to deny support to the university and seek to have federal funding withheld under the Civil Rights Act. Dr. Carleton Goodlett, publisher of the San Francisco based black newspaper the Sun Reporter, said he would launch a campaign “in which the black middle class will disassociate themselves from all UC programs.”96

  More than two thousand students turned out for an organizing meeting at UC Berkeley and voted unanimously to demand that Cleaver be allowed to give all ten lectures. The Student Senate voted overwhelmingly to demand that the regents rescind their decision and to ask the faculty Academic Senate to reject it. The student senates at three other University of California campuses, the National Student Association, and seven university student body presidents all announced their support for the lecture series. Student demonstrators at UC Santa Cruz heckled Reagan and disrupted a Board of Regents meeting there, protesting the Cleaver policy and demanding creation of “a college dedicated to the black experience.” Students at Berkeley occupied the College of Letters and Science headquarters and the chancellor’s office and lit a protest bonfire on the campus’s Sproul Plaza.97

  Faculty members were also agitated. Responding to faculty outcry about political interference in the curriculum, the president of the University of California announced, “The faculty still has authority over courses. It has not been affected in any way.” The UC Berkeley faculty Academic Senate in turn voted to repudiate the Board of Regents’ censure by 668 to 114. Faculty senates at both the Los Angeles and San Diego campuses of the University of California voted similarly in support of UC Berkeley’s faculty. Cleaver would be allowed to hold all ten lectures, although students would not receive credit for attending. One thousand students signed up for the hundred-seat class. When the victorious Cleaver finally lectured, he adopted a serious tone, avoiding obscenities, not once alluding to the controversy, and confining his comments to an analysis of his topic, “The Roots of Racism.”98

  Even as the political establishment appropriated Martin Luther King Jr. as a martyr for America, Black Panther Lil’ Bobby Hutton confronted the police and became a martyr for revolution. Tens of thousands of allies mobilized in support of Newton, Hutton, Cleaver, and their Party. But the true litmus of the Panthers’ politics would be the response of young blacks throughout the country.

  6

  National Uprising

  The turning point in Ericka Huggins’s life came a week after King’s death, at the funeral of Lil’ Bobby Hutton in Oakland on April 12, 1968. This was the moment when she committed her life to the revolution and the Black Panther Party. Huggins later recalled,

  What awakened me, what changed my life and my mind . . . was Bobby Hutton’s face at his funeral. . . . My entire life and mind was changed from that point on. . . . I had read about the Party and I had read about all the things in history that had been done to black people—lynching, murder, tortures, etc.—but I was convinced when I had direct confrontation with the brutality, the cruelty, and the doggishness of the police. His face had been entirely shot out. The entire portion of his face was gone and had been puttied into place and made up. He was no longer the seventeen year old person he had been, not physically or anything else. He wasn’t. And the police were in the balconies of that church. They were everywhere. I had never seen anything like that in my life. I mean I had never been directly involved.1

  Born in 1948 to a working-class family in Washington, D.C., Huggins had one younger sister and a younger brother. Among the children, she was the pensive, reclusive, existential one. After high school, she went to historically black Cheyney State College in Pennsylvania with dreams of becoming a teacher and working with disabled children. But Cheyney offered no challenges, educational, political, or otherwise. Huggins found both the curriculum and the student life lacking, and in 1966, she transferred to Lincoln University, another historically black institution in Pennsylvania. At Lincoln, her world began to open up. Here she was turned on to the ideas of Malcolm X and joined the black student organization, where she met John Huggins in early 1967. John had been raised in a well-heeled black family in New Haven, Connecticut. He had served in the navy and was a Vietnam veteran. John was sensitive and had shaggy hair. The two quickly fell in love and soon married.

  Ericka and John immersed themselves in black student activities, but something was missing. More and more, they felt removed from the real problems faced by most black people. As the black urban rebellions spread, they felt like “armchair revolutionaries”—committed to the idea of Black Liberation Struggle yet distant from it. Consequently, they dropped out of school and in November 1967 moved to Los Angeles, a hotbed of black politics, looking to get involved. In April 1968, at the funeral of Lil’ Bobby Hutton, Ericka and John committed their lives to the revolution.

  LOS ANGELES

  One of the first people Ericka Huggins recruited to join the Black Panther Party was an articulate and striking young woman named Elaine Brown.2 Raised poor in a Philadelphia row house in a Jewish neighborhood, Brown was the only child in a household of adults—her single mother, her aunt, and her grandmother and grandfather. After high school, she enrolled in Temple University but soon dropped out, joined the working world, and moved to Los Angeles. Through intelligence, hard work, wit, and a series of affluent white lovers, Brown made her way into a world of glamour and wealth, but she could never escape racism. She reached a personal turning point in 1967, when, as the guest of the owner of a luxurious hotel in Las Vegas, she was denied service at a nearby beauty shop because of her race. The hotel owner disciplined the beauty shop manager, but the incident showed that she could not escape her blackness. She soon started making friends with Los Angeles black nationalists.3

  At the time, the Black Power ferment in Los Angeles centered on the Black Congress. After the Watts rebellion in 1965, Black Power organizations had proliferated and developed the Black Congress as a united front. One member organization was the Community Alert Patrol led by Ron “Brother Crook” Wilkins. After Watts, Brother Crook became widely known for pioneering patrols of police, a tactic tak
en up and modified by Huey Newton. Members of CAP would follow the police with cameras and tape recorders to ensure that they did not commit acts of brutality against members of the black community.4

  Harry Truly’s Black Student Alliance was another member of the Black Congress. Truly taught sociology at California State University, Los Angeles, during the day and led the alliance by night. He had a vision of bringing all black student organizations across the country into the alliance and creating a revolutionary force. Truly was well read and deeply committed. His compelling vision for Black Power was just one of many in the Black Congress of Los Angeles at the time. The congress also included representatives from the Congress of Racial Equality, the Freedom Draft Movement, SLANT (Self Leadership for All Nationalities Today), the Afro-American Association, the Afro American Cultural Association, Black Resistance against Wars for Oppression, Black Unitarians for Radical Reform, Black Youth Conference, Citizens for Creative Welfare, Immanuel Church, L.A. County Welfare Rights, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Operation Bootstrap, Parent Action Council, Underground Musicians Association, and the Watts Happening Coffee House.5

  The most influential organization in the Black Congress in late 1967 and early 1968 was Ron Karenga’s US, pronounced “us,” as in “not them.” Karenga’s group sought to transform society through a cultural, rather than a political, revolution. According to historian Scot Brown, “As a cultural nationalist vanguard, the US Organization saw itself as a mirror of African Americans’ progressive future.” Through the creation of an alternative and progressive culture, US held that black people would transform their own world and the larger society. Karenga and US were not adverse to political action, but they saw culture as the principal vehicle for change. For them, heightened cultural awareness was the key to social transformation. Members dressed in dashikis and ceremonial African garb. Male members shaved their heads. Karenga spoke several languages, including Swahili, which he taught widely. Within US, Karenga was the central authority and was called Maulana, or “master teacher,” by his followers. US is best known today for starting the holiday Kwanza.6

  Another Black Congress member was the Black Panther Political Party, led by John Floyd, a schoolteacher. The L.A. Black Panther Political Party, which grew out of Stokely Carmichael’s efforts to proliferate the Black Panther Party originated in Lowndes County, Alabama, started independently of the Oakland Black Panther Party. The fifth issue of Harambee (Swahili for “Let’s pull together”), the Los Angeles Black Congress newsletter edited by Ron Karenga, popularized the Black Panther idea and symbol in Los Angeles. The issue, published on November 3, 1966, reproduced a Lowndes County flier, a speech by chair John Hulett, and a front-page spread dedicated to the Lowndes County Black Panther Party. Soon thereafter, John Floyd started the L.A. Black Panther Political Party. When the Oakland Black Panther Party for Self-Defense forged an alliance with the Peace and Freedom Party in June 1967, John Floyd supported the effort, filing documents to verify the Black Panther Party’s existence as a statewide organization and explaining to the press, “For all intents and purposes, we are a statewide party.” But in practice, the two organizations hardly communicated. In late 1967 or early 1968, Angela Davis—at that time working on her PhD in philosophy with Herbert Marcuse at the University of California, San Diego, joined Floyd’s organization.7 Around this time, Elaine Brown was becoming active in the Black Congress. She began working with John Floyd to put out Harambee and became particularly close to Sandra Scott and Harry Truly of the Black Student Alliance.8

  Beneath the surface of Black Power unity at the Los Angeles Black Congress lay deep conflict. Black Power had posed a question, but there was no single answer. The term meant different things to different people and organizations in the Black Congress. Everyone in the Black Congress sought dignity and empowerment. Most rejected the integrationism and nonviolence of the Civil Rights Movement. Many organizations in the congress viewed the black community as a colony and agreed on the need for self-determination. Black people, they agreed, needed to develop their own sources of political, economic, and cultural strength. But how to achieve this and how best to appeal to the people proved to be points of contention.

  In every insurgent movement, conflicting visions compete. As movement groups challenge the legitimacy of the state and the established social order, each asserts its own vision as an alternative. The stakes appear high, especially the ability to claim leadership of the revolution and the potential to set the direction for the future. Certainly, the conflict in Los Angeles was intense. Organizations constantly jockeyed for control within the Black Congress, and at times, these conflicts became violent.9 Recalling a gun battle that broke out between the United Front and members of Ron Karenga’s US at the November 1967 Black Youth Conference, Angela Davis explained, “Beneath the façade of unity, under the wonderful colors of the bubas, lay strong ideological differences and explosive political conflicts, and perhaps even agents provocateurs.”10 The incident at the conference was not unique. In another incident, fifteen members of US were arrested, for allegedly beating three men who interrupted a “soul session.”11

  In early 1968, the Oakland-based Black Panther Party began organizing a chapter in Los Angeles—the first outside the Oakland Bay Area—and the dynamics in the Black Congress quickly changed. The politics developed by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver resonated with young blacks in Los Angeles, providing new conduits for action. Like Ron Karenga and US, the Black Panthers had a compelling theory about the source of black people’s suffering, a vision for advancing black dignity and power, and they had created a disciplined organization to advance that vision in tangible ways. US, however, never sought to become a mass organization, emphasizing educational and cultural activities accessible to only a few. As Scot Brown has observed, “US leaders saw no need for a large membership. Their goal was to ideologically influence other organizations with its unitedfront approach, and thus direct the course of the coming ‘cultural revolution.’”12

  Unlike US, the Black Panther Party recognized the explosive potential of the Watts rebellion as a political force and developed a program and activities to organize black folks on the street. Like Brother Crook’s community alert patrols, the Black Panther Party asserted black dignity and self-determination by holding the police accountable. But unlike Brother Crook, the Black Panthers created a track record of winning such confrontations, legally backing off police with loaded weapons and storming the state capitol in Sacramento. When the law was changed to prevent the Panthers from engaging in these confrontations, Huey Newton had allegedly killed a policeman in self-defense. Many in the Black Congress considered Newton’s resistance heroic and embraced the “Free Huey!” campaign.

  In January 1968, Eldridge Cleaver recruited Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter to organize a chapter of the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles. Elaine Brown recalled the first time she met Carter:

  “My name is Bunchy,” he said coolly. “Bunchy,” he reiterated “like a bunch of greens,” answering a question someone a long time ago had found the courage to ask. His face was black alabaster; his eyes, black diamonds, set off by carved eyebrows and distinct black eyelashes. His skin was as smooth as melted chocolate, unflawed, with a reddish gloss. He was the vision of Revelations, a head of soft black wool refined to an African crown. He stroked his rich mustache as he spoke, head back, feet apart, an olive-green leather coat tossed over his strong shoulders. Everybody had heard of Bunchy.13

  Cleaver and Bunchy had become friends at Soledad State Prison, where they had joined the Nation of Islam and become politicized by Malcolm X. Before Soledad, Bunchy had a brief career as a middle-weight boxer and then joined the five thousand–member Slauson gang and founded its most feared branch, the Slauson Renegades. Widely known as the “Mayor of the Ghetto,” he was considered by many to be the most dangerous man in Los Angeles. Bunchy was not only tough, he was charismatic. His authority came from
his intelligence and creativity as well as his street credentials. He wrote poetry and having studied revolutionary theory during his years in prison, could fiercely debate the theories of Fanon, Che, Lenin, and Mao.14

  The strong respect Bunchy garnered on the streets separated him from the regular participants in the Black Congress. Because of Huey Newton and the Panthers’ courageous stance against the police, Bunchy could relate to the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, as could his street protégés.15 When Bunchy formed a branch of the Oakland-based Black Panther Party in Los Angeles, he brought many former members of the Slauson gang into the Party with him.16

  In January 1968, Bunchy attended a poetry reading organized by the Black Congress to announce the launch of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party, the first outside the Oakland Bay Area. He brought twenty street-hardened soldiers dressed in black leather jackets and gloves and carrying armed pistols and sawed-off shotguns. Uninvited, Bunchy and his “wolves” stormed the hall midreading and surrounded the Black Congress members who were there. Conversation stopped, and someone called for Bunchy to “blow,” to recite a poem. After reciting the fierce “Niggertown” and tender “Black Mother,” both of which he had written, Bunchy thanked the audience for letting him “blow.” Next he gestured to one of the wolves, who unfurled a poster of Huey Newton on his wicker throne. Bunchy declared that Huey Newton was the leader of the Black Liberation Struggle and announced that he was forming the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party: