Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  [Huey] set the example and showed us that we, too, must deal with the pig if we are to call ourselves men. We can no longer allow the pig’s armed forces to come into our communities and kill our young men and disrespect our Sisters and rob us of our lives. The pig can no longer attack and suppress our people, or send his occupying army to maraud and maim our communities, without suffering grave consequences. . . . From this point forward, Brothers and Sisters, if the pig moves on this community, the Black Panther Party will deal with him.17

  Bunchy then commanded that no one else, including John Floyd, was to use the Black Panther name or logo without authorization from the Central Committee of the Party in Oakland. At the suggestion of James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Floyd changed the name of his group to the West Coast chapter of SNCC and helped to mobilize the “Free Huey!” rally in February.18

  A wide array of organizations in the Black Congress, including Karenga’s US, supported the Black Panther argument that Huey was a political prisoner. They demanded he be set free, and many pitched in to organize the “Free Huey!” rally planned in Los Angeles on February 18, 1968 (the day after the “Free Huey!” rally at the Oakland Coliseum).19 Amid the show of unity, though, tensions and disputes emerged as representatives of the participating organizations jockeyed for authority and sought to assert competing visions. In a meeting just before the rally on February 18, an angry dispute erupted among US, the Black Panther Party, and two factions of SNCC over whether police should be allowed to provide security at the rally. The Panthers and Carmichael asserted that the police should be removed, but Karenga—still the most influential voice in the Black Congress—prevailed, asserting that confrontation with the police should be avoided at that point.20 The February 18 rally drew at least five thousand people. Speakers included Bobby Seale, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, James Forman, Ron Karenga, and radical Chicano activist Reis Tijerina.21 In late February, the Party moved its office in the Black Congress building to a new space at 4115 South Central in Los Angeles.22

  When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in April, the Black Panther Party quickly became the dominant presence in the Los Angeles Black Power scene. Hundreds of young black Angelenos flocked to join the Panthers. People such as Elaine Brown and Ericka and John Huggins, who had been seeking a way to advance Black Power, found what they were looking for in the Party of Bunchy Carter and Huey Newton. Many of the smaller organizations, such as Harry Truly’s Black Student Alliance, dissipated. By early 1969, the Black Congress would be defunct.23

  The Black Panther Party offered black people more than an alternative; it promised dignity. By standing up to the police, Huey Newton showed that black people could break patterns of racial submissiveness and deference. Eldridge Cleaver claimed that Newton was the true heir to Malcolm X: “Malcolm prophesied the coming of the gun to the black liberation struggle. Huey P. Newton picked up the gun and pulled the trigger.”24 Newton had created a black anti-imperialist politics of armed self-defense that, unlike other versions of Black Power, held strong appeal for alienated and marginalized blacks. The Panthers recognized that many black people already lived in a state of war. The violence of the ghetto rebellions reflected the raw desperation of everyday life. The Panthers believed these forces could be organized and strove to channel the desperation and violence of everyday black life into powerful political resistance.

  Newton’s example of armed self-defense against the police inspired many young activists in L.A., and they sought to emulate it. In the second week of August 1968, more than seventy thousand people and seventy organizations participated in the Watts Festival in South Central Los Angeles commemorating the third anniversary of the Watts rebellion.25 Tensions between police and the community were running high, and on Monday August 5, a gunfight broke out during the festival at Will Rogers Park in Watts, and six people were wounded.26 Later that day, police pulled over four Black Panthers driving a black 1955 Ford sedan at a service station at the corner of Adams and Crenshaw. Anthony Bartholomew later reported, “The police knew we were Panthers and were following us.”27 The Panthers were armed and refused to submit to police. A gun battle erupted. Police killed Stephen Kenna Bartholomew, twenty-one years old, with multiple gunshots to the head and lower body; Robert Lawrence, twenty-two years old, with multiple gunshots to the head and left shoulder; and Thomas Melvin Lewis, just eighteen years old, with shots to the abdomen and left leg. In the battle, the Panthers wounded two police officers; one Panther, Anthony Bartholomew, escaped.28

  SEATTLE

  The funeral of Bobby Hutton transformed the life of Aaron Dixon, a student from Seattle, much as it did Ericka Huggins’s life. A member of SNCC, Dixon and his brother Elmer were in San Francisco for the West Coast Black Student Union conference, and they crossed the Bay Bridge to attend Bobby Hutton’s funeral on April 12, 1968. Aaron later recalled the overwhelming cries of Hutton’s mother. Looking into the casket “was almost like looking into a vision of the movement, and it was not what we had expected. It was not the glory and the victory we had romanticized about.” After the funeral, Dixon met Warren Wells, Kathleen Cleaver, and Bobby Seale. Seale’s speech was mesmerizing. Decades later, Dixon remembered sharing a drink with Seale and could still visualize Seale’s dramatic portrayal of a black man chained up and struggling to be free.29

  When the Dixon brothers returned to Seattle, they rented an office and opened the first chapter of the Black Panther Party outside of California. Within two months, more than three hundred people joined the chapter, women as well as men. Some, such as Kathy Jones, were high school students; others were in their twenties. A few, such as Ron Carson, who ran a local poverty program and carried a pistol, were over thirty. Most were black but some were Asian, such as Guy Kurose, and had grown up in the neighborhood. A few came from college, including Kathy Halley, who later changed her name to Nafasi and became one of Aaron’s closest confidants. Others, such as Bobby White, Bobby Harding, and Mike Tagowa, were Vietnam veterans. White was a dynamic poet and writer who became the chapter’s lieutenant of information. Some Seattle Panthers, such as Chester Northington, John Eichelburger, and Bruce Hayes, came with experience from other black nationalist organizations. Others, such as Warren Myers and Steve Phillips, had been involved in street life and saw the Party as a way of getting back at the police while redeeming themselves in the community. Lewis Jackson was a hardened fighter from New Orleans with a thick Creole accent, who sported a tattoo of a football between his eyebrows. He carried a .45 when he joined the Party and soon became Aaron’s bodyguard. Joyce Redman had a reputation as the fiercest sister in the neighborhood. Maud Allen was a stickler for rules.

  “Since the death of Martin Luther King,” Aaron Dixon later recalled, “my life and the life of many other black youth throughout America had taken on an overwhelming sense of urgency. Suddenly it seemed that the movement had accelerated. We were now almost totally consumed with the fight for justice and the right to determine our own destiny. For me school had now taken a back seat to the emerging struggle.”30

  The Seattle Black Panther office became a community headquarters, and the phone was constantly ringing with people asking for help. The Panthers frequently helped people with problems with landlords, spousal abuse, or the police. In one incident, a landlord had removed the front door when a family was late in paying the rent. The Panthers went to the landlord’s house, took back the tenants’ door, and hung it back on the hinges. In another case, parents reported frequent beatings of black children at the predominantly white Rainier Beach High School. Three cars of armed Panthers drove to the school, patrolled the hallways, and told the principal that if he did not provide security for the black students, they would. The principal quickly complied.31

  Like their comrades in California, the Seattle Panthers increasingly came into conflict with police. In May 1968, Buddy Yates was arrested for interference with an arrest. In June, Aaron Dixon was arrested for the same, and Ga
ry Owens was charged with addressing a cop as “pig.” In July, Seattle police accosted and beat Panthers Bobby Harding, Bobby White, and Joe Atkins.32

  At seventeen years old, Seattle Black Panther Welton Armstead was tall yet slight of frame. A new father, he walked in exuberant strides, his energy infectious. He was highly intelligent, perceptive, and reasonable, and many older men looked to him for answers. He quickly climbed the Party ranks and earned authority in the Seattle chapter. On a dreary Tuesday afternoon in Seattle, October 15, 1968, Armstead decided to tint the windows on his car. The car was parked in front of his house, and Armstead worked in the street. At about 4:20 P.M., a police car pulled up. Officer Erling J. Buttedahl got out, asked Armstead what he was doing, and accused him of stealing the car. Armstead denied the charges. Armstead’s mother came out of the house and later would claim that the police were harassing her son. Armstead decided that he would defend himself and his family from harassment. He got his rifle and asked the police to leave him alone. Officer Buttedahl shot Armstead dead and arrested his mother and sister for interfering with an arrest.33

  NEW YORK

  In the weeks following King’s assassination, the Black Panther Party also opened a chapter in New York City’s Harlem. The black nationalist ferment of late 1960s New York had deep roots in Harlem that went back at least as far as Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in the late 1910s and 1920s. Malcolm X achieved his greatest impact and notoriety in Harlem in the 1950s and 1960s. SNCC had a New York City office and had even flirted with the idea of creating a New York–based Black Panther Party in early 1966.34 The effort collapsed long before SNCC’s partial merger with the Panthers in February 1968. When King was killed in April, SNCC helped jumpstart the New York Panther chapter, this time under Oakland’s leadership. With the “Free Huey!” campaign picking up momentum as the case headed to trial, tales of the Panthers storming the legislature in Sacramento, news of Cleaver’s presidential bid, and the martyrdom of Lil’ Bobby Hutton, the Oakland-based Black Panther Party exemplified the direct enactment of Black Power that so many black New Yorkers craved.

  In April, just weeks after King’s death, Joudon Ford took the reins as the new captain for the New York Black Panther Party, setting up a temporary office in the SNCC headquarters in downtown Manhattan.35 In addition to his civil rights experience with SNCC, eighteen-year-old Ford had served in the Civil Air Patrol before joining the Panthers. He was looking for a practical way to build Black Power and was drawn to the Panthers because of their track record of militancy. “The Panther Party,” Joudon later recalled, “seemed to be the most serious black organization, but there was also the military aspect.”36

  Joudon Ford was an organization man and diligently set about building the first East Coast chapter of the Party. Assisted by David Brothers—the newly assigned forty-year-old chairman of the New York chapter—Ford organized and taught political education classes and self-defense training.37 He led his members into open verbal confrontations with the police. He convinced the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University to let the Panthers use an auditorium for monthly citywide meetings and diligently hashed out internal conflicts to create order in the New York chapter.38 His job was not easy, especially with the challenges posed by the chapter’s rapid growth. At one point, Joudon called David Hilliard, Panther chief of staff in Oakland, to ask how to keep shady people out of the party. “When I find out,” Hilliard told Ford, “I’ll let you know.”39

  On May 20, the Black Panther Party held a benefit performance at the Fillmore East in the East Village to help raise $200,000 bail for Eldridge Cleaver and six other Panthers arrested in the April 6 shootout in Oakland. The benefit, which featured several plays and performances by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Ed Bullins, drew twenty-six hundred people. James Forman of SNCC was the event’s emcee, and Kathleen Cleaver spoke about Lil’ Bobby Hutton’s martyrdom and her husband’s case. The Party tapped into the emerging consensus that the Panthers epitomized Black Power, drawing upon its national networks and its new relationship with SNCC to raise funds and build a strong presence in New York.40

  Two of the first New Yorkers to join the Black Panther Party were Lumumba Shakur, appointed section leader for Harlem, and Sekou Odinga, named section leader for the Bronx. After attending Andrew Jackson High School in Queens together, the two men had been politicized in prison, joined Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) in 1964, and—dissatisfied with other black nationalist organizations—turned to the Black Panther Party after Martin Luther King’s death.41

  Lumumba’s racial politics had deep roots. His father was a Black Muslim, and his grandfather “was arch anti-white repression,” Lumumba recalled. “He would sit down and talk about white repression for days. My grandfather was a cop for three days until a white man told him no nigger was going to arrest him, and Grandpa whipped that cracker half to death.”42

  Perhaps the turning point in Lumumba’s life was an event that took place in December 1959. Lumumba—sixteen years old at the time—boarded a bus in Jamaica, New York, with about fifteen friends after a party. He sat next to a large white man in a U.S. Navy uniform. The man said that where he came from “niggers” did not sit next to white people. Lumumba told the man that this was not the South, and the man punched Lumumba in the face. “All pandemonium broke out in the bus, and that cracker was whipped mercilessly. Later I found out that cracker was cut every place except the soles of his feet.”43 Lumumba got off the bus but was soon picked up by the police. The police took him to the hospital, and the white man identified Lumumba as the one who had beaten him. The police beat Lumumba badly in front of the doctors and nurses, right in the middle of Jamaica Hospital. Later in court, the white man admitted that he had punched and attacked Lumumba first, “because niggers aren’t supposed to sit next to white people on buses.” The judge ordered the statement stricken from the record, saying it was not relevant to the issue being decided. The judge set bail at $10,000 for Lumumba and dispatched him to jail for seven months pending trial. Lumumba’s state-appointed lawyer told him to plead guilty to “attempted assault two” and said that he would receive a sentence of time served. Lumumba pled guilty as instructed, but his lawyer never made a deal, and he was sent to jail for five years.44

  In jail, prisoners had to fight continually to protect themselves or suffer the consequences—often rape. Guards cultivated racial and gang conflicts among the prisoners and often sat as spectators at their fights, “like they were in Madison Square Garden.”45 Lumumba resented being used in this way and became increasingly politicized in prison, organizing black inmates into a united block.46

  In New York state’s Comstock Prison, Lumumba again met up with Sekou Odinga. There in 1963, Lumumba tried to get assigned to work in the bakery. Of 1,800 prisoners in Comstock, 1,300 were black. But black prisoners were confined to working as dishwashers, in labor gangs, in the laundry, or in other low-skill jobs; no black prisoners were allowed to work in any of the shops or prison jobs where they could learn a trade, such as the bakery or the auto shop. Lumumba asked the deputy warden for reassignment to the bakery, but the official told him that the bakery jobs were only for white prisoners. Sekou and every other black prisoner who requested assignment to a skilled shop or job received the same response. Consequently, Lumumba, Sekou, and a number of the black prisoners decided that the only way to change the situation was through violent confrontation. They secretly organized and in late September 1963, they rioted. Some 450 prisoners fought guards with fists, stones, and wooden planks; 23 of them were injured. New York Prison Commissioner McGinnis visited Comstock to investigate. Lumumba met with him and told him why they had rioted. Lumumba and 13 other prisoners who had organized the riot were transferred to Attica. Yet the policies in Comstock were changed, with black inmates “assigned to every professional school, shop, trade, and job in Comstock” from then on.47

  When Lumumba got out of prison in December 1964, he j
oined Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity. A couple months later, Malcolm X was dead. In April, he got in touch with Sekou, his childhood friend, who also joined OAAU. Lumumba, however, was put off by the male chauvinism in OAAU and its lack of impact, so the two quit and looked for another organization that exemplified the vision and direction of Malcolm X. They could not find anything satisfactory in New York. In 1967, they joined with other black nationalists in Jamaica Queens and organized the Grass Root Front. “Our aim was to take the anti-poverty programs from the hands of the religious pimps and preachers and guarantee the grass-root people control of the anti-poverty programs,” Lumumba explained years later. “When the community people began to get more control of the anti-poverty programs, the religious pimp-preachers called OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity] and the pigs. It was a split within the Grass Root Front because Sekou, Larry Mack, and I wanted to inflict a political consequence. The other brothers did not agree with us. So we quit and told them that they were jiving.”48 Sekou recalled, “We were all very young and inexperienced and got caught up in a local anti-poverty program. By 1967 I was thoroughly disillusioned with that, when I heard about the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. . . . By the spring of 1968, we heard that representatives from the [Black Panther Party] were coming to New York and there was a possibility of organizing a chapter. I attended the meeting and decided to join and help build the [Party] in New York.”49

  In the spring of 1968, the Black Panther Party attracted many of New York’s most politically active young blacks. An experienced tenants’ rights activist, Kuwasi Balagoon had traveled to D.C. to protest opposition to rat-control legislation in Congress, a key issue for renters in New York City. He and his fellow protesters brought live rats to the demonstration in the House of Representatives and were beaten by police. Next he joined the central Harlem Committee for Self-Defense.50 Yet none of these efforts satisfied Balagoon’s feeling that he had to do something more serious for black people’s liberation—a feeling that only intensified with King’s assassination. Then he heard about the Black Panther Party: