Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  Hayakawa and his allies spared no expense in making life difficult for the dissenting students. Conservative state assemblyman Donald Mulford held a special meeting with superior court judges to inform them that if they were lenient with student demonstrators, they would face “heavily financed opposition” when they ran for reelection. Instead of holding joint trials for arrested students as is customary in cases of civil disobedience, in the “S.F. State Trials,” each student was tried individually leading to more than nine hundred civil jury cases. The trials lasted nearly a year, backlogging the entire civil court system. This approach cost the government a lot of money, but it also made it very difficult for the activists to mount effective defenses, tying up the movement’s resources and serving as a significant deterrent to further action.

  Prominent and effective student leaders were targeted for the heaviest repression. No one knows exactly what happened to George Murray in jail. But as TWLF leader Roger Alvarado reflected, “Once they got him in jail, I’m sure they really put the screw to him . . . I mean cause what was happening with the Panther Party at that time. . . . They were just out and out getting murdered.”32 As part of Murray’s sentence, he was ordered to resign from the Black Panther Party and to refrain from ever appearing or enrolling in an educational institution again without explicit permission from the court. With his mother, wife, and newborn child with him in court, Murray agreed, and he dropped completely out of politics.

  As more targeted repression of student leaders began to take its toll, Hayakawa offered concessions to the American Federation of Teachers, such as a reduced class load, and threatened to fire any faculty members who failed to return to work. By March 5, the American Federation of Teachers strike was over, and faculty members were back in their classrooms teaching.

  On March 20, Hayakawa announced plans to establish the School of Ethnic Studies, which would contain a Department of Black Studies, a Department of Asian American Studies, and a Department of La Raza Studies. He also committed to taking measures to significantly increase minority student enrollment. Though Hayakawa’s offer did not meet the protestors’ demands for student participation in the hiring and firing of new faculty for the School of Ethnic Studies faculty or in setting the school’s curricula, and it did not provide redress of Hayakawa’s repression of George Murray and firing of Nathan Hare, the TWLF agreed, and the San Francisco State strike was over.

  PROLIFERATION

  As the San Francisco State strike developed, the student struggle spread across California and the country. “The spin-off from San Francisco State,” predicted Ron Dellums, the black city council member from Berkeley, “will have implications for high schools, junior colleges, junior high schools, elementary schools as well as other colleges throughout the state and outside the state.”33 And he was right. From the example set at San Francisco State, black students and their allies learned that they could advance their demands for increased enrollment, ethnic studies curricula, and educational “self-determination” by forming broad anti-imperialist alliances and disrupting university functions.34 They could expect harsh repression but also the widespread support necessary to endure it.

  In early January 1969, SF State’s Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front convened a weeklong meeting attended by student representatives from more than thirty California colleges and high schools. They called this January 6–13 meeting a “National Week of Solidarity,” during which they prepared a statement appealing for national action that read in part,

  The Third World Liberation Front and the Black Student Union demands stress our human rights to self-determination according to the needs of our community and not the military-industrial complex that controls the education of this nation. No longer must we or you put up with the psychological genocide that is called education. We must stop them from making us into “sophisticated slaves” with highly developed skills. We must attack from all levels those institutions and persons that have kept us fighting with each other and forgetting the real enemy. We must come back to our “grass roots” understanding that we are all brothers and sisters and extensions of our communities. We realize that the racist power structure has united to crush the strike at San Francisco State hoping to make it an exemplary defeat for Third World people as it has sought to repel the tide of Vietnamese self-determination. AN ATTACK ON ONE CAMPUS IS AN ATTACK AGAINST ALL CAMPUSES!35

  As the conflict at San Francisco State grew and word spread, students at other schools launched their own struggles. Black students at Balboa High School and Polytechnic High School in San Francisco organized a walkout, demanding the creation of classes in black history and culture. More than one thousand black students marched on the San Francisco Board of Education demanding the “right to determine our educational destiny.” Black and Latino students at Mission High in San Francisco formed an alliance and went on strike with the support of parents and community activists. The city sent in the police tactical squad, and the conflict escalated as students were beaten and nearly three hundred were arrested. In the broader San Francisco Bay Area, black and Third World students launched student strikes and protests at the City College of San Francisco, Laney College in Oakland, Chabot College in Fremont, and California State College at Hayward demanding “educational self-determination.” At the College of San Mateo, when students called a strike with demands similar to those at San Francisco State, the conflict escalated and the president of the college declared martial law, surrounding the school with armed police and limiting campus access to those with valid student IDs whose names did not appear on a “subversives” list. At UC Berkeley, the campus chapter of the Third World Liberation Front called for the creation of a Third World College and released a statement of demands: “The people must be given an effective voice in the educational apparatus which either prepares or fails to prepare their children for life as it actually is. WE MUST HAVE SELF DETERMINATION!! We can no longer afford to have our tax dollars used to finance private, privileged sanctuary for a group of backward, unrealistic colonialists while our needs go unmet. We must have change and change will come by any means the colonialists make necessary.” Like those at San Francisco State, the Berkeley strikers successfully forced their concerns onto the statewide agenda. Governor Reagan declared an “extreme state of emergency,” dropped tear gas on students from helicopters, and sent in the National Guard armed with bayonets.36

  As word spread, so did mobilization by black and other Third World students. Throughout the spring of 1969, demands for increased black and Third World enrollment and curricula ripped through campuses across the country. About a third of all student protests that tumultuous year aimed to increase black studies curricula.37 Many of the protests followed roughly the trajectory of those at San Francisco State: disruptive protests by a relatively radical minority could not be easily repressed because their demands spoke to the interests of a much broader constituency, including other marginalized students, black groups across the political spectrum, and liberals alienated by Law and Order politics. When college administrations attempted to repress the dissidents, public support for the student activists became overwhelming.

  At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which had only five hundred black students in its student body of thirty-two thousand, several hundred black and white radicals rallied on February 8 to call for a boycott of classes until the administration created a black studies department. A small-scale picket persisted until the mayor of Madison called in the National Guard to repress it. By noon, the picket had ballooned to two thousand students; conflicts with the Guard intensified, and the guardsmen used tear gas to disperse the students. By that evening, more than ten thousand students had joined the protest, and the crowd marched on the capitol, carrying lit torches, precipitating a major social crisis.38

  Black students at Cornell University took over a campus building in April to demand the creation of a black college and to decry recent incidents of racism on campus.
The conflict over redress of black concerns almost became an armed battle as students marched in front of news media bearing seventeen rifles and shotguns and bandoliers of bullets, refusing to back down until their demands were met.39

  On May 21, protests by black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, developed into open warfare. The conflict started when a student with a Black Power platform was excluded from a ballot for student body president at the all-black Dudley High School. Police arrested student protestors, and students began throwing rocks and breaking windows. The conflict escalated. The mayor called a curfew. Angry black students took over several buildings and held them for two days at the historically black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. The National Guard was called in with tanks and sharpshooters. The black students resisted and engaged in an extended shoot-out with police and the National Guard. At least five policemen were shot, and many students were injured. More than two hundred students were arrested, and sophomore honors student Willie B. Grimes was killed.40

  All told, in the spring of 1969, major protests disrupted nearly three hundred colleges across the country. One-quarter involved strikes or building takeovers. One-quarter involved disruptions of classes or other school functions. About 20 percent of the protests involved bombs, fires, or destruction of property. At least eighty-four incidents of bombing or arson were reported on campuses that spring; the American Insurance Association estimated that these protests incurred at least $8,946,972 in property damage alone.41

  In instigating the San Francisco State strike, the Black Panther Party forged broad alliances with community leaders, faculty, labor, and a multiracial coalition of radical students that would have been impossible to mobilize within the confines of a narrower black nationalism. While most faculty members did not agree with the political vision of the Panthers, as right-wing California politicians attempted to prevent the Panthers from organizing on campus, many of them believed that academic freedom had been undermined. Latino and Asian American students, opposed to the educational marginalization of their own communities, integrated their political agendas into an anti-imperialist “Third World” alliance. Anti-imperialist white students mobilized in solidarity. And despite their political differences, black political, church, and civic leaders saw harsh repression of promising young black activists on campus as a threat to their own interests. In 1969 and 1970, the Black Panthers’ resilient anti-imperialist politics propelled their Party into the center of an ever-widening resistance.

  13

  Vanguard of the New Left

  Yolanda Lopez and Donna Amador, activists from the San Francisco State strike, were at the Free Huey rally on May 1, 1969, along with Ralph Ruiz when, as Amador recalls, “I was standing in the back of the crowd near a police motorcycle when I heard from a crackling radio that a police officer had just been shot in San Francisco’s Mission District (my home). An all-points bulletin went out for a number of Latin men, and, coincidentally, one of the suspects [Ralph Ruiz] was standing right beside me! My priorities changed instantly. Education was important for the brothers and sisters, but the fight for freedom from the oppression and injustice of the real world suddenly took me away from SFSU [San Francisco State University].”1

  Earlier that day, San Francisco police officers Joe Brodnik and Paul McGoran, both undercover, approached a group of young Latinos moving a television from their car into an apartment. Officer McGoran, who had been drinking that morning, called the youths “wetbacks” and a number of insults were exchanged. A fight broke out, and by the end, Brodnik had been killed with McGoran’s gun. Despite evidence that four of the seven young Latino activists charged with the shooting were elsewhere at the time and with no clear argument about who had actually shot Brodnik, the prosecution charged all seven with first-degree murder and called for their execution. In response, San Francisco police raided more than 150 homes in the Mission District, claiming they were searching for the seven young men they said had shot Brodnik. The Black Panther asked rhetorically, “Was that pig Brodnik shot by the many thousands of Brown people who live in San Francisco’s Mission District?”2

  The seven Latinos charged—Tony and Mario Martinez, Nelson Rodriquez, Jose Rios, George “Gio” Lopez, Gary Lescallet, and Danilo “Bebe” Melendez—were active in student efforts to force the administration to institute Third World curricula and enrollment at the College of San Mateo. They came to be known as Los Siete de la Raza (roughly, the seven Latinos). Many young Latinas and Latinos in San Francisco’s Mission District had initially become politically active through the Mission Rebels, a federally funded program for low-income youth. Both the San Francisco State strike and conflicts with police had radicalized many young activists in the Mission District. When Los Siete were accused of murder, the charge gave young Mission District activists a focal point for their political energies.

  Having gotten to know the Black Panthers during the SF State strike, Los Siete supporters Roger Alvarado and Donna Amador approached Bobby Seale for help, and the Panthers immediately came to their assistance. The Panthers offered Los Siete supporters publication assistance, shared the stage at rallies, introduced them to their lawyer Charles Garry, committed $25,000 to their legal defense, and mentioned Los Siete when they were interviewed on the evening news.

  On June 28, 1969, the Black Panther headline was “Free the Latino Seven,” and the newspaper featured a full-page cover graphic of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and six photos of members of Los Siete de la Raza. The paper featured stories explaining the case and calling on readers to donate to the cause of Los Siete de la Raza, including one article that equated their struggle to the Panthers’ own: “The Black Panther Party sees that these brothers are political prisoners the same as Huey P. Newton.” Newton wrote a personal statement in support of Los Siete from prison, calling on Panthers to support them.3

  Los Siete crafted a seven-point anti-imperialist program, “What We Want and What We Believe,” that they modeled after the Panther’s Ten Point Program:

  We want self determination for all people of La Raza.

  We support all revolutionary movements at home, in Latin America, and throughout the world.

  We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of La Raza people.

  We want an end to exploitation of women, male chauvinism, male supremacy. We want freedom for women.

  We want freedom for all La Raza men and women of all ages held in federal state, county, city prison, and youth detention centers.

  We want all La Raza men to be exempt from military service.

  We demand a free society where the needs of the people come first: free health care, free education, full employment, and decent housing.4

  In August, the Black Panther Party provided pages in its newspaper for Los Siete de la Raza to launch its own news publication. Donna Amador was the editor, and Yolanda Lopez, after lessons from Emory Douglas, was in charge of layout. Three eight-page bilingual issues of Basta Ya! were published within the Black Panther newspaper, until Los Siete developed the capacity to publish independently in late September.5

  RED GUARD

  Another group that sought to emulate the Black Panthers was a Chinese-American group in San Francisco that grew out of Leway, a nonprofit organization serving low-income youths in Chinatown. After participating in the Stop the Draft Week and the San Francisco State strike, many Leway members came to believe that the government was not truly interested in their problems, and they sought more radical redress.

  Alex Hing, Warren Mar, and others participated in Black Panther political education classes and helped recruit Chinese American youth to attend “Free Huey!” rallies. Soon, they left Leway and founded the Red Guard, named for Mao’s army in China. They saw themselves as part of a global revolutionary struggle for self-determination, in solidarity with both the Chinese Revolution and the Black Panthers. The Red Guard emulated many of the Black Panthers’ activities, including estab
lishing community service programs and organizing against police brutality. They adopted a ten-point program very similar to that of the Panthers but with notable exceptions. For example, their tenth point read, “We demand that the United States government recognize the People’s Republic of China. We believe that Mao Tse-Tung is the true leader of the Chinese people; not Chiang Kai Shek.”6

  YOUNG LORDS

  In Chicago, as the Black Panthers developed a powerful presence in the black community, they pioneered strong alliances with nonblack anti-imperialist groups. One important ally of the Chicago Panthers was the Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization. The Young Lords originated in the 1950s as a Puerto Rican street gang in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez joined in 1959 and rose through the ranks to become leader of the gang in 1964. Jimenez used his position to advance a social service mission in the Puerto Rican community. The Young Lords started to give food and clothing to poor families, formed a social club, and began organizing community picnics. Eventually, Jimenez became dissatisfied with the giveaways as a means to effect real change. According to Jimenez, “The Young Lords Organization turned political because they found out that just giving gifts wasn’t going to help their people, they had to deal with the system that was messing over them.” In 1968, Cha Cha Jimenez met Fred Hampton in jail. After a long discussion about the divisions between blacks and Puerto Ricans, Jimenez embraced the Black Panther Party as the revolutionary vanguard and sought to emulate the Black Panther model. “We see and we recognize the Black Panther Party as a vanguard party, a vanguard revolutionary party. And we feel that as revolutionaries, we should follow the vanguard,” Jimenez explained. When he got out of jail, he initiated a campaign to oppose Chicago’s “urban renewal” policies that displaced many Puerto Ricans from their homes and transformed the Young Lords into the Young Lords Organization.7