Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  Young blacks were drawn by the Panthers’ strategy of armed self-defense against the police because it simultaneously gave them a powerful means to resist and was difficult to repress. Facing the resistance of organized and armed young blacks, police departments could no longer maintain brutal containment policing practices with impunity. By arming and organizing, and advocating revolution, Black Panthers challenged the legitimacy of the state. Yet the Party remained above-ground, refraining from overt direction of armed struggle. For example, Newton’s Executive Mandate No. 3, issued from prison in March 1968, ordered all Panther members to obtain firearms, and to fire on anyone—including police—who attempted to enter their homes without peaceably producing a legal warrant. Without any offensive direction, the Party thus created the conditions under which an increasing number of armed confrontations between Panthers and the police occurred. The Party effectively argued to potential allies that these confrontations reflected the widespread pattern of oppression of blacks and that the only change was the Black Panthers’ decision to claim their right to defend themselves.

  By framing this practice of armed self-defense as part of a global anti-imperialist struggle, the Panthers were able to draw broad support both from other black political organizations and from many nonblacks. These allies provided crucial financial, political, and legal support that enabled the Panthers to mount top-notch, unprecedented legal defenses against the many charges they faced, and they often won their cases in court. The allied support the Panthers received not only enabled the Party to grow but also demonstrated the efficacy of its politics. If the Panthers had simply been jailed and killed, with little allied support, the Party would have quickly dissolved. Instead, the Black Panther Party rapidly expanded to become the most influential black movement organization in the United States by December 1968. The insurgency was escalating.

  FIGURE 1. The original Black Panther logo is displayed by Jesse W. Favor, a candidate for sheriff of Lowndes County, Alabama, in preparation for the nominating convention on May 3, 1966. (AP Photo)

  FIGURE 2. Disseminated nationally by Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panther Party name and logo first appeared in the Oakland Bay Area on this flier for a Black Power conference on October 29, 1966, featuring Carmichael and organized by the Students for a Democratic Society. (H. K. Yuen Collection)

  FIGURE 3. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale soon adopted the Black Panther logo, displayed here in the first issue of their newspaper, published April 25, 1967. (© Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation)

  FIGURE 4. Black Panther founders Bobby Seale (left) and Huey Newton (right) pose with their weapons outside their first office on 56th and Grove Streets in Oakland, February 1967. (AP Photo / San Francisco Examiner)

  FIGURE 5. An armed Black Panther contingent at the California Assembly building in Sacramento protests the proposed Mulford Act, which would prohibit their armed patrols of police, May 2, 1967. (Walt Zeboski / AP Photo)

  FIGURE 6. Huey P. Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party, seated in a wicker throne. The Party began distributing this now-iconic image as part of its reconception as a revolutionary vanguard following cessation of armed patrols of the police during the summer of 1967. (© Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation)

  FIGURE 7. Newton lies manacled to a hospital gurney after an early-morning confrontation on October 28, 1967, in which he was shot in the abdomen and Oakland police officer John Frey was killed. (AP Photo)

  FIGURE 8. Speakers at the Huey Newton birthday celebration at the Oakland Auditorium, February 17, 1968, include, from right to left, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, leader of the newly founded Los Angeles Black Panther Party chapter, who was later killed in a conflict fostered by the FBI COINTELPRO; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leaders James Forman, H. Rap Brown, and Stokely Carmichael; Bobby Seale; Carver Chico Nesbitt; unknown boy; and Ron Dellums. The renowned SNCC leaders were exploring a merger with the Black Panther Party at the time. The empty wicker throne highlights Newton’s absence, as he sat in prison awaiting his trial on capital charges. (© Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation)

  FIGURE 9. The Black Panther Party’s first member, Lil’ Bobby Hutton, poses armed in front of the Oakland jail, 1967. On April 8, 1968, four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Oakland police killed Hutton. (© Ron Riesterer)

  FIGURE 10. Actor Marlon Brando and Black Panther members in uniform were among those attending Lil’ Bobby Hutton’s funeral on May 12, 1968. (Dan Cronin / New York Daily News Archive / Getty Images)

  FIGURE 11. Black Panthers hold a rally in New York City. Following the killings of Lil’ Bobby Hutton and Martin Luther King, the Black Panther Party quickly expanded, opening chapters in cities throughout the country, including an important branch in New York City. (© Roz Payne)

  FIGURE 12. Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, leader of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party, was killed on the University of California campus in Los Angeles on January 17, 1969, by members of the US organization, in a confrontation actively instigated, if not directly planned, by the federal government’s COINTELPRO. (© Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation)

  FIGURE 13. John Huggins, born to a well-heeled family in New Haven, dropped out of college to join the Black Panther Party and played a key role in organizing the Los Angeles chapter, the first chapter to open outside the Oakland Bay Area. Three weeks after his wife, Ericka Huggins, gave birth to their daughter, Mai, on January 17, 1969, Huggins was killed alongside Carter in the UCLA campus confrontation instigated by COINTELPRO. (© Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation)

  FIGURE 14. Ericka Huggins left college in Pennsylvania and traveled to California to join the Black Power movement. At the funeral for Lil’ Bobby Hutton, she and her husband, John, committed their lives to revolutionary struggle and to the Black Panther Party. When John was killed less than nine months later, Ericka moved to New Haven and became an important Party leader there. Her trial on conspiracy charges, eventually dismissed, was one of the most celebrated political trials of the decade. She went on to direct the award-winning Oakland Community School and now lectures and consults widely. (Dave Pickoff / AP Photo)

  FIGURE 15. Bobby Seale speaks at a “Free Huey!” rally in “Lil’ Bobby Hutton Park” on July 14, 1968. The bus and sound system were on loan from the Peace and Freedom Party. James Forman (seated middle) and Chief of Staff David Hilliard (seated right) share the stage with Seale. (© 2011 Pirkle Jones Foundation / Ruth-Marion Baruch)

  FIGURE 16. Left to right, Black Panthers Mary Ann Carlton, Delores Henderson, Joyce Lee, Joyce Means, and Paula Hill rally in “Lil’ Bobby Hutton Park,” August 25, 1968. (© 2010 Pirkle Jones Foundation / Pirkle Jones)

  FIGURE 17. Allies attend a “Free Huey!” rally in “Lil’ Bobby Hutton Park,” the summer of 1968. As in most large Black Panther rallies, the audience was mixed racially, featuring many nonblack as well as black supporters. (Stephen Shames / Polaris Images)

  FIGURE 18. Kathleen Cleaver, Black Panther communications secretary, poses armed to illustrate the Party’s Executive Mandate No. 3, which ordered all members to keep guns in their homes and to defend themselves against any police officers or others who attempted to invade without a warrant. (© Alan Copeland)

  FIGURE 19. “It’s All the Same,” a graphic by Emory Douglas published in the Black Panther and subsequently disseminated by New Left activists, makes the point that all state violence is similar, whether meted out by local police (against blacks), the National Guard (against protestors), or the U.S. Marines (against the Vietnamese). (© 2012 Emory Douglas / Artists Rights Society, New York)

  FIGURE 20. Students and Black Panther supporters listen to Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther minister of information, speaking on Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley, on October 3, 1968. (© 2010 Pirkle Jones Foundation / Pirkle Jones)

  FIGURE 21. Black Panther Charles Bursey serves breakfast to children, June 20, 1969. In 1969, the Black Panther Party made community programs its core activity.
(© 2011 Pirkle Jones Foundation / Ruth-Marion Baruch)

  FIGURE 22. Black Panther Bill Whitfield serves breakfast to children in Kansas City, Missouri, April 16, 1969. (William Straeter / AP Photo)

  FIGURE 23. The Panthers launched the first Free Breakfast for Children Program at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland. (Stephen Shames / Polaris Images)

  FIGURE 24. Students attend class at the Black Panther Party Children’s Institute, a precursor to the Oakland Community School. (Stephen Shames / Polaris Images)

  FIGURE 25. Members of the Black Panther Party distribute free clothing to the public in New Haven, September 28, 1969. (David Fenton / Getty Images)

  FIGURE 26. Panther Cubs and members of the San Francisco chapter of the Party give the Panther salute. (© Bettmann / Corbis / AP Images)

  PART THREE

  Resilience

  First you have free breakfasts, then you have free medical care, then you have free bus rides, and soon you have FREEDOM!

  —Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman, Black Panther Party, Illinois

  One of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the [Black Panther Party] is to keep this group isolated from the moderate black and white community which may support it. This is most emphatically pointed out in their Breakfast for Children Program, where they are actively soliciting and receiving support from uninformed whites and moderate blacks. . . . You state that the Bureau under the [Counterintelligence Program] should not attack programs of community interest such as the [Black Panther Party] “Breakfast for Children.” You state that this is because many prominent “humanitarians,” both white and black, are interested in the program as well as churches which are actively supporting it. You have obviously missed the point.

  —J. Edgar Hoover to FBI Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco, May 27, 1969

  You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution!

  —Fred Hampton

  7

  Breakfast

  Polly Graham knew about hardship and struggle. In the 1940s, she had been part of a failed attempt to organize low-wage black workers in the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Factory in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. But virulent anti-unionism, magnified by racism and anti-Communist hysteria, had beaten that noble and long-forgotten effort. Almost thirty years later, on March 4, 1970, she opened the door of her rented home to find police handing her an eviction notice. Because the property had already been condemned in a legal hearing, she understood that she owed no rent until the landlord made the necessary repairs. The landlord believed and acted differently. Confronted with the seemingly impregnable power of the police, Polly Graham went to the local office of the Black Panther Party for help.

  The local Panthers immediately sprang into action, sending a contingent to Ms. Graham’s home, where, with two armed Panthers standing guard, they replaced belongings that had been removed from the home by eviction police. In addition to resecuring Ms. Graham in her home, armed Panthers stood guard over the nearby homes of Pauline Greer and Minnie Bellamy to prevent similar evictions of these two elderly women.

  The neighborhood temperature reached a boil. A standoff ensued between the police, trying to carry out evictions, and the Panthers, trying to keep these elderly black women from being tossed from their homes. Other community activists joined the fray. Lee Faye Mack, emboldened by the Panther presence, encouraged the crowd to “Go get your pieces.” A cofounder of Mothers for Black Liberation and a Party adviser, Ms. Mack personified the increasingly tight bond between the poor and working-class black community of East Winston-Salem and the Panther Party. As Larry Little, the irrepressible leader of the local Panthers, recalled, after Ms. Mack spoke, even little “old ladies” went home and returned with “their double-barrel shotguns” to face down the eviction cops. Only after a third party paid Ms. Graham’s rent did the standoff cool down.1

  Still, Winston-Salem’s black community remained on edge. Three months later, in June 1970, Sara Alford seriously cut herself on a glass jar in the A&P Supermarket in the black Carver neighborhood. When Ms. Alford asked store management to pay for her anticipated medical bills they refused. As word of the store’s refusal spread, black outrage about the store’s position sparked a community-wide boycott and picket of the local A&P. Larry Little told store officials, “Either you make the A&P relevant to the needs of the black community or get out.” A protest against the store’s disregard for Ms. Alford’s injury escalated into a broader protest against discriminatory and disrespectful treatment endured by many black patrons of A&P. Protestors demanded that the store end its discriminatory hiring practices and employ blacks in substantial positions. The Party and its supporters demanded that the store contribute to its free breakfast program (formally known as the Free Breakfast for Children Program). Eventually, the store relented and agreed to the demands, including payment of Ms. Alford’s medical bills.2

  Reenacted countless times in black communities across the country, similar confrontations between the Panthers and authorities helped build strong local Party chapters. Local Party chapters frequently served as community sounding boards and social service agencies—as black people’s stewards—deeply committed to social justice and community betterment. The Party essentially said to the community, Bring your concerns to us. And they did. Jamal, a Philadelphia Panther recalled,

  The offices were like buzzing beehives of Black resistance. It was always busy, as people piled in starting at its 7:30 A.M. opening time and continuing ’till after nightfall. People came with every problem imaginable, and because our sworn duty was to serve the people, we took our commitment seriously. . . . When people had been badly treated by the cops or if parents were demanding a traffic light in North Philly streets where their children played, they came to our offices. In short, whatever our people’s problems were, they became our problems. We didn’t preach to the people; we worked with them.3

  Community members brought all kinds of disputes to the local Party: job-related conflicts, evictions, rent struggles, gang violence, safety concerns, legal and criminal justice problems, consumer complaints, and issues with government social services, public and private utilities, and the underworld economy (numbers runners, pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers). If the local Party judged that redress was necessary, it took action. In doing so, it provided community members with a vital source of remediation that was often unavailable from the state. Its actions, in turn, attracted more members and supporters.

  The Party saw itself as inextricably tied to the local black community. The most critical aspect of the Black Panther message proved deceptively simple: We are you; your problems are our problems. As one Party comrade explained, “The exploited . . . people’s needs are land, bread, housing, education, . . . , clothing, justice, and peace, and the Black Panther Party shall not, for a day, alienate ourselves from the masses and forget their needs for survival.”4

  FROM GUNS TO BUTTER

  By the fall of 1968, membership in the Black Panther Party was mushrooming. Local activists in cities throughout the country had heard of the Black Panther Party and contacted national headquarters wanting to join and start their own local chapters. Chief of Staff David Hilliard later recalled the deluge of calls from people “asking to start a chapter. We get calls all day long. Des Moines, Virginia Beach, Atlanta. Since we’re three hours behind the East Coast, the requests often start as early as eight A.M.”5 As Party membership and influence grew, so did repressive action by the state. The Party sought meaningful activities for members that would serve the community, strengthen the Party, and improve its image in the public relations battle with the state. In this context, community programs quickly became a cornerstone of Party activity nationwide.

  The Black Panther community programs began in early 1969 under Bobby Seale’s leadership, marking an important transformation in the Party’s political practice. In the fall of 1968, Eldridge Cleaver went into exile to avoid returning to prison when his parole was rev
oked.6 With Huey Newton in prison, Seale, a staunch advocate of community programs since his days working in the government poverty program in Oakland, became primarily responsible for setting Party policy.7

  The Black Panther Party announced its intention to launch the Free Breakfast for Children Program in Oakland in September 1968. The call for volunteers and donations went out before Christmas.8 The Party launched its first free breakfast program at Father Earl A. Neil’s St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in west Oakland in late January 1969. Parishioner Ruth Beckford-Smith coordinated the program. Beckford-Smith first became interested in the Black Panthers while teaching Afro-Haitian dance to young women at the church, including LaVerne Williams, Huey Newton’s girlfriend. When the Party decided to organize a breakfast for children at St. Augustine’s, Beckford-Smith volunteered to coordinate the program and helped organize it. The first day the program opened it served 11 children. By the end of the week, the program was serving 135 children daily at St. Augustine’s. The San Francisco Chronicle covered the program and reported the “unspoken lesson” children would learn: “power in a community begins with people who care.”9