Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  9. Lauren Araiza and Joshua Bloom, “Eldridge Cleaver,” in Mark Carnes, ed., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  10. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 3–4.

  11. Ibid., 7–11.

  12. Stephen J. Whitfield. A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York: Free Press, 1988)

  13. Frantz Fanon, “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” in Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 63.

  14. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 6–12.

  15. Ibid., 14.

  16. Eldridge Cleaver, interview by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in Paris, winter 1975, transcript in possession of author.

  17. For copies of early love letters between Eldridge Cleaver and Beverly Axelrod, see Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 141–51, and also commentary, 18–25.

  18. Ibid., 143–44.

  19. Beverly Axelrod in Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 145–46.

  20. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 150.

  21. Gene Marine, The Black Panthers: Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale—A Compelling Study of the Angry Young Revolutionaries Who Have Shaken a Black Fist at White America (New York: Signet, 1969), 52–53; Wyatt Buchanan, “Edward Keating, Ramparts Founder,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 10, 2003.

  22. Cleaver, interview in Paris.

  23. Marine, The Black Panthers, 52–53; Wyatt Buchanan, “Edward Keating, Ramparts Founder,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 10, 2003.

  24. Kathleen Rout, Eldridge Cleaver (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 23.

  25. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 21.

  26. Ibid., 14.

  27. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (1971; repr. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990), 172–73.

  28. Maitland Zane, “Ugly Words at S.F. State—A Pro-Panther Rally,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1967, 8.

  29. Seale, Seize the Time, 177.

  30. Ibid., 181–82. Previous accounts have mistakenly identified Stephen Shames as the photographer. The confusion likely stems from the image of Huey in the wicker throne published on the cover of Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (1973; repr. New York: Writers and Readers, 1995), which is correctly attributed to Shames. But that cover image is actually a photo Shames took of the poster hanging in the window of the Black Panther office in 1968, not the original photo of Newton taken during the summer of 1967. Shames did not start working with the Party until 1968. Joshua Bloom telephone conversation with Stephen Shames, March 10, 2012.

  31. After Sacramento, the Party made a deal. Bobby Seale and a few others who didn’t have records would serve time for “disturbing the peace,” and the others would be let off. Seale and Warren Tucker would serve the most time, six months each. Seale, Seize the Time, 187. The rally took place on Wednesday, May 10, after the Young Socialist Alliance had overcome the objections by the university administration.

  32. Seale quoted in Jim Hyde, “Protest Police Brutality: Black Panthers Defend Negro,” Daily Californian, May 11, 1967, 3.

  33. Barbara Arthur in Jim Hyde, “Protest Police Brutality: Black Panthers Defend Negro,” Daily Californian, May 11, 1967, 3; “Panther Rally Postponed,” Daily Californian, May 5, 1967, 1; “Black Panthers at UC—Friendly, Unarmed Visit,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 11, 1967, 2.

  34. Zane, “Ugly Words at S.F. State,” 8

  35. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 150.

  36. For details on the Community for a New Politics, see David Mundstock, “Chapter 1—Before 1971,” in “Berkeley in the 70s: A History of Progressive Electoral Politics,” unpublished manuscript, 1985, in possession of the author.

  37. [Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver], “White ‘Mother Country’ Radicals,” Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 1; [Bob Avakian], “White ‘Mother Country’ Radical Responds to Editorial,” Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 6. In the first article, Cleaver is identified only by his title. In the second, Avakian is not identified in a byline, but he explains his role in such a way that only he could be the author. See also Bob Avakian, “L.A. Gestapo Attacks Anti-War Demonstrators,” Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 16.

  38. Bobby Seale, “The Coming Long Hot Summer,” Black Panther, June 20, 1967, 4, 7. The phrase “long hot summer” is a reference to Malcolm X’s discussion of the Harlem rebellion.

  39. The statistics in this paragraph come from the city’s application for Model City funding.

  40. The account of the Newark rebellion draws from five sources: U.S. Riot Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam, 1968); Robert L. Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969); Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Tom Hayden, Rebellion in Newark (New York: Vintage, 1967); and Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

  41. LeRoi Jones quoted in Allen, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, 135.

  42. Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 1.

  43. Ibid., 12–13.

  44. The formal name of the eleven-member commission was the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, but it became known as the Kerner Commission, after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois.

  45. Andrew Kopkind, “White on Black: The Riot Commission and the Rhetoric of Reform,” in The Politics of Riot Commissions, ed. Anthony M. Platt (New York: Collier, 1971), 380.

  46. Robert Shellow et al., “The Harvest of American Racism,” unpublished report quoted in ibid, 387.

  47. Campbell-Schumann survey in Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 351. There is some evidence that this more political interpretation of the incident was not so widely held initially but that it developed in the weeks following the rebellion as the black community sought to make sense of the conflict.

  48. Fine, Violence in the Model City, 249, 294; U.S. Riot Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 107.

  49. For details of the Detroit rebellion in this section, see Fine, Violence in the Model City, except where otherwise noted.

  50. Ibid., 160.

  51. Ibid., 148.

  52. Ibid., 183.

  53. Sol Stern, “America’s Black Guerillas,” Ramparts, September 2, 1967, 26; Fine, Violence in the Model City, 191–201.

  54. Fine, Violence in the Model City, 177.

  55. Ibid., 170, 180, 181, 194, 206, 207, 224–25; U.S. Riot Commission, Report of the National Advisory Committee on Civil Disorders, 101.

  56. U.S. Riot Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, ch. 2.

  57. Ibid., 16.

  58. Ibid., 10–11.

  59. Ibid., 120, 206.

  60. Black Panther, May 15, 1967, 3.

  61. Ibid., July 3, 1967, various articles, 1, 6, 7; “Carmichael ‘Drafted’ by Panthers,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 30, 1967, 48. Carmichael was later appointed “Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party. See the discussion of the February 1968 Huey birthday rallies and exploration of the merger with SNCC in chapter 4.

  62. Black Panther, July 3, 1967, various articles, 1, 6, 7.

  63. Ibid., 3.

  64. “Core Convention Fallout,” Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 2.

  65. See “Bootlickers Gallery,” 19; “Long Tongue Ussery,” 19; “Bootlicker Tshombe Captured,” 2; “Core Convention Fallout,” 2; “Good Beggin’ Willie Goofs,” 5; “Old Toms Never Die Unless They’re Blown Away,” 7; “Bedfellows: NAACP and Others,” 7; all in Black Panther, July 20, 1967.

  66. On David Hilliard’s coining of the phrase “Paper Panthers,” see Seale, Seize the Time, 113; Paper Panther graphic by Emory Douglas, Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 5.

  67. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 132.

&nbs
p; 68. Newton, “Fear and Doubt,” 3.

  69. Tracye Matthews, while making an important contribution to understanding the Black Panthers based in rich research and sophisticated analysis, like Michelle Wallace, argues that Newton’s concern with society’s social castration of black males parallels the argument in the Moynihan Report (formally titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action), which had been spearheaded by the assistant secretary of labor, Daniel P. Moynihan. See Matthews, “No One Ever Asks What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is,” in Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 267–304. But despite some mild parallels, Newton sharply departs from Moynihan, both in his analysis and proposed redress. For Newton, like Fanon, the social castration of black men is the result of imposed structural oppression rather than an internal cultural pathology. And for Newton, like Fanon, black men can regain their humanity only by destroying the society that oppresses them.

  70. Barbara Arthur, “Sisters Unite,” Black Panther, May 15, 1967, 6.

  71. Sister Williams, “Sister Williams Says,” Black Panther, May 15, 1967, 6.

  72. Black Panther, July 3, 1967, 4.

  73. Judy Hart, “Black Womanhood,” Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 11.

  74. Ibid.

  75. Tracye Ann Matthews, “‘No One Ever Asks What a Man’s Role in the Revolution Is’: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Black Panther Party, 1966–1971” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1998).

  4. FREE HUEY!

  1. The account of the lead-up to the incident on October 28, 1967, draws from five sources except where otherwise noted: the transcript of the trial “The People of the State of California vs. Huey P. Newton, No. 41266,” copy in possession of author; Edward M. Keating, Free Huey! (1970; repr. Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1971); Gene Marine, The Black Panthers: Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale—A Compelling Study of the Angry Young Revolutionaries Who Have Shaken a Black Fist at White America (New York: Signet, 1969), ch. 9; Michael Newton, Bitter Grain (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1980), ch. 4; Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (1973; repr. New York: Writers and Readers, 1995), ch. 23.

  2. Marine, The Black Panthers, 100–101.

  3. Mary Jane Aguilar, M.D., “Doctor Apologizes to Huey,” Black Panther, November 23, 1967, 6.

  4. On Hilliard transporting Newton to the hospital, see David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (New York: Little, Brown, 1993), 131. On the ambiguous account by the jury, see Marine, The Black Panthers, 104.

  5. Keating, Free Huey! 47–48; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 182–91; Charles Garry and Art Goldberg, Streetfighter in the Courtroom (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977).

  6. Eldridge Cleaver, “Huey Must Be Set Free!”Black Panther, November 23, 1967, 1.

  7. Michael Ferber and Staughton Lynd, The Resistance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 103.

  8. Ibid., 145.

  9. Hal Jacobs quoted by H. K. Yuen in his notes on the back of flier 329–671013–000, H. K. Yuen Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Yuen Collection).

  10. Fliers 329–671016–007, 329–671016–008, 329–671013–001 (oversize), and 329–1016–004, Yuen Collection. Many other fliers in box 329 of the collection also provide important insights into Stop the Draft Week in Oakland. For example, in an attempt to stop the induction center actions planned for Tuesday October 17, Judge Lercara issued an injunction requiring UC Berkeley to prohibit the use of campus facilities to organize draft resistance activities. Chancellor Haynes’s overzealous enforcement of the injunction reminded the students of the previous struggle for free speech and reinforced their idea that they were being subjected to the demands of empire and that their struggle was one for self-determination much like that of the Vietnamese or the ghetto residents who had rebelled in America’s cities. See fliers 329–671017–000 and 329–671026–000 in the Yuen Collection; Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 196; Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 191–95; “Cops Beat Pickets,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 17, 1967, 1.

  11. Marine, The Black Panthers, 106.

  12. SNCC, Western Union telegram, October 28, 1967, reproduced in Black Panther, November 23, 1967, 5 (punctuation and capitalization added for readability).

  13. Progressive Labor Party, Western Union telegram, October 28, 1967, reproduced in Black Panther, November 23, 1967, 10; Bob Avakian, “White ‘Mother Country’ Radical Supports Huey,” Black Panther, November 23, 1967, 3.

  14. Marine, The Black Panthers, 93; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 189.

  15. Newton and Garry would use the phrase “exhaust all legal means” after the announcement of the involuntary manslaughter verdict in the trial. See ABC News coverage, “Huey Newton Decision/Black Panthers,” September 8, 1968.

  16. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (New York: Routledge, 2001), 124.

  17. Marine, The Black Panthers , 128–29.

  18. Cleaver and Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, 123.

  19. Marine, The Black Panthers, 128–29.

  20. Kathleen Cleaver, “On Eldridge Cleaver,” Ramparts, June 1969, 4.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Cleaver and Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, 124, 227.

  24. Ibid., 124.

  25. Interview with Kathleen Cleaver in the Washington Post, February 1970, cited in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 145.

  26. Marine, The Black Panthers, 129.

  27. Huey Newton, “Executive Mandate No.3,” Black Panther, March 16, 1968, 1.

  28. For the photo of Kathleen Cleaver, taken to illustrate Executive Mandate No.3 and published later, see Black Panther, September 28, 1968, 20.

  29. Cleaver, “On Eldridge Cleaver,” 6.

  30. Joel R. Wilson, “‘Free Huey’: The Black Panther Party, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Politics of Race in 1968” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, June 2002), 83, 98.

  31. Ibid., 102–3.

  32. Ibid., 105–6.

  33. For James Forman’s thoughts on the Peace and Freedom Party, see his The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972; repr. Washington, DC: Open Hand Publishing, 1985), 525–26.

  34. December 3, 1967, Meeting Notes, box 17, folder 1, P&F Collection; and “Peace and Freedom Party to Press On,” People’s World, December 9, 1967, 2; both in Wilson, “Free Huey,” 122. “Peace/Freedom: Blacks to Aid as Court Rebuffs,” Berkeley Barb, December 29, 1967, quoted in ibid., 135.

  35. Mike Parker, KPFA Radio, February 15, 1968, recording BB1632, 18:30, Pacifica Radio Archives, North Hollywood, California.

  36. “Common Cause,” Berkeley Barb, December 22, 1967, quoted in Wilson, “Free Huey,” 127.

  37. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (1971; repr. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990), 208.

  38. Wilson, “Free Huey,” 138–40.

  39. “B.P.P. and P.F.P.,” editorial, Black Panther, March 16, 1968, 3.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Bobby Seale at a rally in support of the Oakland Seven facing criminal charges for their leadership role in organizing Stop the Draft Week, with Bettina Aptheker, Bob Avakian of the Peace and Freedom Party, and Robert Scheer of Ramparts. KPFA Radio, February 20, 1968, recording BB1783, Pacifica Radio Archives.

  43. Bettina Aptheker, ibid., 13:30.

  44. Bob Avakian, ibid., 36:40.

  45. Black Panther, March 16, 1968, 6; Peace and Freedom Party, “Know Your Enemy!” flier 334–680517–003, Yuen Collection
; Newark photo reproduced in flier 321–670906–000, Yuen Collection. White antiwar activists’ use of Black Power to legitimate their struggle against imperialism was not new. In September 1967, before Newton was arrested, the Progressive Labor Party had issued a flier in support of antiwar protestors arrested in San Francisco. Under the title “How Much Political Freedom Do We Have?” the flier reproduced a photo of blacks confronting soldiers in the Newark rebellion from the July 20, 1967, Black Panther next to a photo of unarmed citizens confronting soldiers in Vietnam. The implication was clear: the antiwar protestors were part of the global struggle against imperialism. Newark photo reproduced in flier 321–670906–000, Yuen Collection.

  46. Bobby Seale, February 17, 1968, recording BB 5471, Pacifica Radio Archives.

  47. H. Rap Brown, ibid., recording BB 1708.

  48. Stokely Carmichael, Ibid.

  49. Black Panther, March 16, 1968, 1.

  50. One of the many actions spurred by the birthday rally was a resolution that Councilman Ron Dellums (later a U.S. congressman and Oakland mayor) introduced to the Berkeley City Council calling for the freeing of Huey Newton and dismissal of the murder charges against him. The resolution argued that the indictment had been passed down by a grand jury not composed of Newton’s peers. KPFA Radio, February 20, 1968, recording BB1633, Pacifica Radio Archives.