Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  Complementing the Party’s health care activism were several programs that addressed the most basic material needs of poor black communities. The Free Food Distribution Program, the Free Clothing Program, and the Free Shoe Program were extremely well received. Also popular were targeted give-away initiatives featuring free food, clothing, and shoes, sometimes in conjunction with a Party rally. Free-food rallies organized by the Winston-Salem Black Panther Party chapter inaugurated the Joseph Waddell Free Food Program to honor a beloved comrade who had died in state prison under suspicious circumstances. One rally drew over two thousand people to the Kimberly Park Housing Project, where Party members gave out free food and shoes for children.37

  A lack of adequate ambulance services was an especially galling problem in Black Winston-Salem. On October 17, 1970, fifteen-year-old Alan “Snake” Dendy was shot and then died when the drivers of the county ambulance that arrived on the scene refused to move his body, claiming they lacked authorization to do so. Responding to community outrage at the injustice, the local Panther chapter swung into action. By June 1971, the group had acquired an old hearse that it retrofitted as an ambulance. Party members had already been taking emergency medical technician (EMT) and first-aid classes at Surry Community College, and by summer’s end, they were certified as EMTs. The chapter was thus able to begin operating its own ambulance before the year was out.38

  The free emergency ambulance service was a big success and was named the Joseph Waddell People’s Free Ambulance Service to commemorate the Panthers’ recently deceased comrade. Waddell’s $7,000 life insurance death benefit went to the local chapter, which used the money to subsidize the free ambulance program. Operating for over two years, the service at its height featured twenty-four-hour service and twenty certified EMTs who were Party members. The Forsyth County commissioners granted the chapter a franchise to operate.39

  Another popular Panther effort, the Free Busing to Prison Program, helped incarcerated blacks stay connected to their families and communities. Because so many inner-city blacks could not afford transportation to and from prisons (which were often located in out-of-the-way rural sites) to visit relatives and friends, the busing program proved very popular, though it was expensive to maintain and suffered from chronic underfunding and persistent state efforts to destroy it.40 The busing program had multiple political aims. First, it helped sustain connections between imprisoned blacks and their home communities. “Just because a Brother or Sister commits a crime, is it correct for them to be cut off from their loved ones, friends and community with no communication?” asked Milwaukee’s Ronald Stark.41

  Another aim of the Free Busing to Prison Program was to highlight the unjust incarceration of a disproportionate number of blacks and bring attention to the wrongful imprisonment of Panthers and other black political prisoners through bogus charges. The Panthers also sought to expose the alarming racism underlying these wrongs—an entire criminal injustice system for blacks and poor people. The extreme state repression of the Party, the unjust imprisonment of so many Party members, and the devastating consequences of both only heightened the ideological and practical significance of the Party’s Free Busing to Prison Program.42

  After becoming a member of the Detroit branch, JoNina Abron’s involvement in the busing program introduced her to the Party’s other community service programs:

  I drove one of the vans that transported families to visit their incarcerated relatives at Jackson State Prison. Having grown up as the sheltered daughter of a minister and a music teacher, I was overwhelmed by my experience at Jackson State Prison, which was my first visit to a penitentiary. Another service that the [Black Panther Party] provided for prison inmates was the free commissary program. [Party] members secured donations of personal hygiene items and non-perishable foods and sent care packages to prisoners. The party also offered attorney referral services for prison inmates.43

  Just as the Party’s free medical clinics at times led to cooperation with local allies and outlasted the Party’s active involvement, several of the Free Busing to Prison programs lived beyond the Party. In Cleveland, for instance, Panther JoAnn Bray’s work with the Party’s Free Busing to Prison Program continued after the local Party itself collapsed. With ongoing community support and a $16,000 grant, Bray was able to keep the buses running for several years in the 1970s, changing the program’s name to the People’s Busing Program and charging a small fee.44

  Panthers at all levels and from all class backgrounds had endured the racism of public schools and knew firsthand the crying need to remake fundamentally black public school education. The Black Panther Party thus committed itself to a relevant and empowering education for black children. Point 5 of the Party’s platform demanded an education “that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society” and “teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.” Such an education had to be probing and affirmative. It had to create highly skilled citizens dedicated to advancing the best interests of the black nation within the American nation.

  Building upon the tradition of black self-empowerment, alternative black schools dotted the progressive landscape before the Panthers came on the scene. The citizenship schools of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Septima Clark, helped many blacks master the knowledge and mechanics necessary to register to vote in the South before the Voting Rights Act. Freedom Summer 1964 in Mississippi featured a series of freedom schools that taught the fundamentals alongside black history and culture as well as the Civil Rights Movement’s ideology and goals. These efforts contributed to the larger social changes transforming Mississippi and the rest of the former Confederacy.45

  The Panthers’ liberation schools extended this tradition by insisting on a Black Power revolution: the inclusion of black perspectives, experiences, and knowledge in the formal and informal school curricula. The liberation schools typically served children in kindergarten through the eighth grade and included meals, social welfare help for needy students and families, and extended hours. These schools also featured black history and culture, a diverse and rich academic and political curriculum, and lessons in the Party’s ideology, goals, and activities. Whereas the Party saw these schools as training grounds for well-equipped citizens, sensitive to issues of class, race, and socialism, the Black Panther Party’s enemies—principally state and federal governments—saw them as purveyors of anti-American and antiwhite propaganda.

  The Panthers launched at least nine liberation schools across the nation, from Seattle to the Bronx, with the first established in Berkeley in June 1969. These institutions varied in longevity, structure, substance, and effectiveness. Because of the Party’s emphasis on education and the Panthers’ own often negative experiences with the mainstream education system, Party members labored hard and long to make these schools effective. Still, government misinformation and bad publicity led to the demise of several efforts, such as Black Panther Party–sponsored liberation schools in Des Moines and Omaha.46

  Variations on the Panthers’ central educational model sprouted up throughout the United States. Building upon the Party’s broader community-based educational work, the Philadelphia chapter sponsored a People’s Free Library that featured texts by black authors. In the summer of 1970, the Cleveland chapter ran a summer liberation school with meals and ten hours of instruction for twenty-five children. In Brooklyn, the local Party ran a liberation school that supplemented the basics with an Afrocentric focus. According to Miriam Monges, the schools emphasized “rudimentary aspects of the Afrocentric paradigm. . . . We taught African history lessons and sponsored African dance classes.”47

  The most substantial and successful Party liberation school was the flagship Intercommunal Youth Institute (IYI) in Oakland. Founded in January 1971, the school graduated its first class in 1974 and lasted through 1982, well after the rest of the Black Panther Party organization had disintegrated. The IYI’s first class had twenty-eight students, most of whom were
children of Party members. At its height, the school had a waiting list of four hundred. Working with students from ages two and a half to eleven, the faculty, led from 1973 to 1981 by Ericka Huggins and a strong group of mostly women teachers, taught a demanding program to a student body with wide-ranging abilities and often challenging backgrounds.48

  Adopting a pedagogy that grouped students by ability and achievement rather than by age, the IYI sought to do its best by each student. The Party provided meals to students, and when the school expanded to encompass a middle school, it provided housing for some of the older children. The school also at times hosted other programs, including a GED (high school equivalency) program and instruction in martial arts. At its height, the school was commended by Governor Jerry Brown and the California State Assembly for “having set the standard for the highest level of elementary education.”49

  SHIFTING GENDER DYNAMICS

  Women were a pivotal force in the Panthers, at times constituting a majority of the Party’s membership. Panther women energized the local branches and played a central role in creating the indigenous culture of struggle that gave the local chapters their resonance and distinctiveness. They kept the community programs alive and did most of the painstaking day-to-day social labor necessary to sustain the chapters. Providing informal child-care networks and day-care centers, assisting elderly and infirm community members with their housing, food, medical, and even more personal concerns were generally the province of Panther women. The Party heavily recruited women to staff programs like the Free Breakfast for Children Program, where women, notably mothers, garnered special praise for their work. Reflecting traditional gender norms, the Party newspaper enthusiastically endorsed these kinds of programs as fundamentally maternalist: particularly well suited to mothers’, and by extension to women’s, sensibilities and commitments.50

  In its early years, especially before 1968 and the explosive subsequent growth in Party membership, the organization was largely male. The Black Panther Party got its start as “a male-centered, male-dominated organization.”51 The group’s initial rhetorical and programmatic emphasis on arming members for self-defense, organizing the “brothers on the block,” and revitalizing black manhood highlighted the Party’s masculinism.

  Even after women began to join the Party en masse in 1968 and the struggle to achieve gender equity intensified, the Party never overcame what Tracye Matthews has aptly called its “masculine public identity.” Nevertheless, Frankye Malika Adams, speaking from her experiences at the grassroots level and reflecting a widely held view among Party members, noted, “Women ran the [Black Panther Party] pretty much. I don’t know how it came to be a male’s party or thought of as being a male’s party. Because these things, when you really look at it in terms of society, these things are looked on as being women’s things, . . . feeding children, taking care of the sick. . . . We actually ran the [Party’s] programs.”52

  The gendering of the Party’s community programs as female and the public face of the Party as male became entrenched for two major reasons. First, the Party’s continuing masculinism and the society’s deeply ingrained gender norms undercut the women’s serious battles against sexism within the Party. Second, even as women’s participation became increasingly central to the operation of the Party and questions of gender equity loomed large, the Party had no formal and effective mechanisms to root out sexism and misogyny. Consequently, despite the Panthers’ antisexist rhetoric and efforts and the efforts of many Panther men and women to confront these ongoing problems, the problems persisted. Ericka Huggins recalls visiting a local chapter where women prepared the food and then waited in the kitchen until Panther men had eaten before serving themselves—a dynamic she quickly ended.53

  Just as the lure of guns proved compelling for many recruits, both women and men, community service programs brought innumerable men and women into the Party and actively engaged large numbers of Panthers of both genders. Indeed, while women often ran many of the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, male participation in the programs was widespread, sensitizing innumerable Panther men to the importance of family, children, and gender issues for the Party as well as for black communities and the larger society. The Free Breakfast for Children Program specifically and the community service programs generally provided a powerful counter to the misleading stereotype of the Party as a bunch of gun-toting men.

  Many of the Party members who served black communities in the free breakfast and other community programs lived in low-cost, nofrills communal arrangements within black communities known as Panther pads or Panther cribs. To the extent that these homes operated along egalitarian and democratic lines, they worked for all involved. In part, Panther pads reflected the Party’s critique of conventional familial norms. As Huey Newton once noted, the traditional nuclear family in particular and conventional familial norms in general were “imprisoning, enslaving, and suffocating.”54 The Party’s open and nonmonogamous communal living arrangements aimed to offer freer and more fulfilling lives.

  In fact, these Panther pads often perpetuated the very practices they were supposed to alleviate, reinscribing male privilege and sexist attitudes. Thus, women were primarily responsible for housework and bore the brunt of the responsibility for open relationships with men, taking on family planning and reproductive concerns—notably birth control and abortions. Similarly, pregnancy and child care were primarily women’s responsibility, so single mothers with children were often expected to pull the same load as their single and childless comrades. Rather than ushering in greater gender and sexual equality, these Panther pads all too often replicated gender and sexual inequality.55

  THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY SERVICE

  The Party’s community service programs were fundamentally political programs as well as socioeconomic ones and were thus vital to the Party’s developing political ideology and practices. Writing in 1969, Bobby Seale maintained that the programs were not “reform programs” but “revolutionary, community, socialistic programs.” This distinction—by casting the programs as part of a broader insurgency to change the American capitalist system to a more equitable socialist one—was crucial to the Party’s political and ideological integrity. In the Panthers’ view, the programs were revolutionary, not reformist. As Seale explained, “A revolutionary program is one set forth by revolutionaries, by those who want to change the existing system to a better one,” whereas “a reform program is set up by the existing exploitative system as an appeasing handout, to fool the people and to keep them quiet. Examples of these programs are poverty programs, youth work programs, and things like that.”56

  The Party’s community-based revolutionary ethos epitomized the pervasive desire within Black Power movements to empower black communities. The Party attracted large numbers of members and supporters, from various classes and races, who wanted to be part of a dynamic liberation movement rooted in the day-to-day struggles of ordinary black people, most of whom were poor and working class.

  “Unlike the Niagara Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the Urban League,” Miriam Monges reminds us, “the Party’s origins lie enmeshed among the black down-trodden. [Black Panther Party] offices were always located in the center of low-income areas of African American communities.”57 The short-lived and all-black Niagara Movement (1905–9), the interracial NAACP (1909-present), and the interracial Urban League (1911-present) all began as middle-class-led movements. The Black Panther Party, as a movement primarily identified with the black working class and under-class, linked itself to movements like the Nation of Islam, Garveyism, and varieties of black worker-and union-based activism dating back to the nineteenth century.58

  Through direct service to the community, the Panthers accomplished several pressing functions. First, the services provided concrete aid to an impressive number and cross-section of folk—whites, blacks, and other people of color—materializing the notion of service to the community.
In addition to providing their own labor, the Panthers generated alternative bases of funding and resources to serve impoverished communities, collecting individual and local business donations.

  Second, these programs accomplished crucial educational and political work within communities, conveying the insufficiency of the capitalist welfare state to meet even the most basic needs of its citizens, especially its black citizens. As Ryan Nissim-Sabat has pointed out, the piecemeal yet serious efforts of these community programs represented a broader offensive “to compensate for the inadequate institutions of the state and to raise the consciousness of people in their local communities.”59 As Yvonne King, deputy of labor in the Party’s Chicago chapter, observed in the spring of 1969, “Hunger among schoolchildren illustrates one of the basic contradictions in American society. America is one of the richest nations in the world, able to send countless numbers of rockets into space at the drop of a dollar, yet people are starving.”60 The Free Breakfast for Children Program in particular enabled the Party to crystallize these stark contradictions and heighten black awareness of such structural inequities. This deepening awareness then pushed black communities to create other programs to ameliorate the crushing problems stemming from systemic inequalities.

  Third, the Panthers’ programs expanded communities’ understanding of the process of grassroots institutional development—how to create and sustain their own much-needed institutions from the ground up. Building upon these communities’ tradition of active self-help, the Party revitalized and modeled grassroots black community development and institution building. Its programs offered concrete examples of Black Power’s vision of community empowerment. The ultimate goal of these institutions was clear: self-determination. Empowering black communities to take control of their own affairs and manage them in their best interests was central to the Party’s social service programs.