by Joshua Bloom
It was the first time the young people had had the opportunity to look white police officers in the eye and express their anger and frustration. One teenager berated the police for an incident in which several officers had thrown a woman down and beaten her in the head with billy clubs. “Say you!” said a sixteen-year-old girl, pointing at a policeman. “You don’t have to treat him like that,” Seale said to the girl. “I’ll treat him like I want to, because they done treated me so bad,” she replied. Bobby sat back as the girl grilled the officer about whether he had received proper psychiatric treatment. The officer turned red and started to shake. “The way you’re shaking now,” she said, “the way you’re shaking now and carrying on, you must be guilty of a whole lot! And I haven’t got no weapon or nothin.’”69
The poverty program provided a paycheck, some skills, and an opportunity to work with young people. But Newton and Seale were still searching for a way to galvanize the rage of the “brothers on the block.” They wanted to mobilize the ghetto the way that the Civil Rights Movement had mobilized blacks in the South. They dreamt of creating an unstoppable force that would transform the urban landscape forever. The problem was now clear to Huey and Bobby, but they did not yet have a solution.
Huey and Bobby were not the only ones looking for answers. Within a year of the Watts rebellion, the younger generation of black liberation activists had widely rejected the goals of integration and the tactics of nonviolence. On June 5, 1966, James Meredith, the first black student to gain admission to the University of Mississippi, was shot on his solo march from Memphis to Jackson. Civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael flew to Memphis to take up his march, and they were soon joined by black liberation activists from around the country as well as many local blacks. As the march proceeded, a split began to emerge between the old-guard civil rights leaders represented by King and the younger wing represented by Carmichael. The younger activists wanted the march to be a blacks-only event, and they also wanted the Deacons of Defense—a militant black organization that promoted armed self-defense—to provide protection for the marchers. These were significant departures from the civil rights integrationist frame and nonviolent tactics.70
As the march made its way to Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael and a group of activists were arrested and held in jail for six hours. Upon their release, Carmichael announced to a rally of supporters, “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more. What we gonna start saying now is ‘Black Power.’” Willie Ricks, a SNCC activist, took up the phrase and called it out: “What do you want?” The crowd replied, “Black Power!”71 The phrase caught on like wildfire. The old-guard civil rights leaders soon acknowledged the shift. King even appealed to the government for help: “The government has got to give me some victories if I’m gonna keep people nonviolent. . . . I know I’m gonna stay nonviolent no matter what happens. But a lot of people are getting hurt and bitter, and they can’t see it that way anymore.”72
Black Power was not so much an answer as a new way of framing the quest for black liberation. No one knew quite what Black Power was or how to achieve it. But the younger generation of black activists put their minds and energies to figuring it out.
By 1966, racial tensions were rising in Oakland. Mayor John Reading called the City Council to his office for a special meeting to warn its members that if communication between the city government and low-income blacks did not improve, Oakland would become “another Watts.”73 Amory Bradford, a Johnson administration official sent to Oak land in 1966 to develop a federal plan for reducing racial tensions, reported, “Experts sent by the President to survey conditions in other ghettos picked Oakland as one of those most likely to be the next Watts.”74 Another visiting white official described Oakland as a “powder keg.”75 One Economic Development Administration outreach flier widely distributed in west Oakland in 1966 read:
LET’S TALK A BOUT PROBLEMS
Eugene R. Foley,
U.S. Department of Commerce,
President Johnson’s Troubleshooter,
wants to talk to you to prevent a Watts
in Oakland.76
That fall, word spread that Oakland police officers had beaten a black girl during the arrest of her brother. A large crowd of disgruntled youths began to gather. They soon “laid siege” to a ten-block area on East 14th Street, smashing windows, attacking cars, and throwing gasoline bombs. Sixty police officers arrived on the scene and arrested twelve people.77
On September 27, 1966, sixteen-year-old Matthew Johnson was pulled over by police in Hunters Point, a black neighborhood across the bay in San Francisco. Johnson and his friends had stolen a car and were cruising around the neighborhood. When police pulled them over, the teens panicked and fled. Matthew Johnson was shot in the back by police and was left bleeding on the ground for more than an hour. By the time ambulances arrived, he was dead. The neighborhood erupted in a rebellion that went on for several days. Using bricks and Molotov cocktails, rebels damaged or destroyed thirty-one police cars and ten fire department vehicles. The police arrested 146 people, injuring 42, 10 of them with gunshots.78
The situation was unbearable. Newton and Seale would tolerate no more police brutality and were fed up with the disorganized and impotent attempts of the black community to resist. They were determined to find a solution.79 Newton soon experienced an epiphany sparked by an article he read in the August 1966 edition of the West Coast SNCC newspaper, the Movement, about the Community Alert Patrol (CAP) in Watts. “Brother Lennie” and “Brother Crook,” two activists from Watts, organized CAP after the rebellion in 1965 to prevent further police brutality. CAP members monitored the police, driving around the black neighborhoods of Watts with notepads and pencils, documenting police activities. In August 1966, CAP began displaying a Black Panther logo on its patrol vehicles—inspired by SNCC’s use of the Panther symbol when helping to organize an independent black political party in Lowndes County, Alabama. CAP was not left alone to carry out its activities, however; it was vulnerable to harassment and abuse by the police. One frustrated CAP member commented on the police harassment to a Movement reporter: “There’s only one way to stop all this,” he said, “and that’s to get out our guns and start shooting.”80
Newton had been studying law at Merritt College and San Francisco State College, and he also read on his own at the North Oakland Service Center law library. He discovered that California law permitted people to carry loaded guns in public as long as the weapons were not concealed. He studied California gun law inside and out, finding that it was illegal to keep rifles loaded in a moving vehicle and that parolees could carry a rifle but not a handgun. In California, he learned, citizens had the right to observe an officer carrying out his or her duty as long as they stood a reasonable distance away.81
Newton had finally hit upon a way to stand up to the police and organize the “brothers on the block.” He would organize patrols like the CAP in Watts. But he and his comrades would carry loaded guns.
THE BLACK PANTHER
Following the September 27 killing of Matthew Johnson, the UC Berkeley chapter of Students for a Democratic Society decided to hold a conference on Black Power and invited Stokely Carmichael, SNCC chairperson and the leading national proponent of Black Power, to be the keynote speaker. Because of the timing of the Conference on Black Power and Its Challenges, scheduled for October 29 in Berkeley, it immediately became an explosive political issue for the campus and in state politics. Republican Ronald Reagan was running a highly polarizing campaign against Democratic incumbent Edmund Brown for governor of California, and the election was coming up in early November. Given the contentious national debate on Black Power and Carmichael’s stature, the conference threatened to become an election issue. The campus administration decided to deny the campus chapter of SDS permission to hold the event.
The move echoed recent battles between students and the administration over students’
rights in the Free Speech Movement. Soon, a raging battle arose on campus over whether SDS would be allowed to hold the conference. Wary of further escalation, the university capitulated.82 In response, Ronald Reagan criticized the conference publicly: “We cannot have the university campus used as a base to foment riots from.” Reagan sent Stokely Carmichael a telegram urging him to stay out of California. He then challenged Governor Brown to cosign his telegram. The governor refused, saying that he did not want to dignify Carmichael’s cause. Nevertheless, Governor Brown made public statements similar to Reagan’s. “I wish Stokely Carmichael would stay out of California. I wish he’d not come in here at all. I think he’s caused nothing but trouble,” the governor told a crowd at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Californians, he pronounced, “don’t want black power.” The day before the conference, Governor Brown made a surprise appearance in Oakland to meet with the Alameda County sheriff to assure that “the peace of this community will be protected.” Reagan quipped sarcastically, “I’m happy to see he has hurried north like a man of action.”83
In addition to Carmichael, speakers scheduled for the conference included Ivanhoe Donaldson, the New York director of SNCC; Brother Lennie, leader of the Watts Community Alert Patrol; Mark Comfort, leader of the Oakland Direct Action Project; Ron Karenga; James Bevel from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Mike Parker and Mike Smith from SDS; Mike Miller and Clay Carson from SNCC; Terry Cannon, editor of the Movement newspaper; Elijah Turner, an Oakland organizer; and Barbara Arthur, a student at UC Berkeley.84
The controversy stoked interest in the conference, not only among students but also among local black activists. Huey and Bobby’s former mentor Donald Warden and members of RAM such as Doug Allen spoke out against the “racist” university administration for attempting to bar the conference. On Saturday October 29, people flooded the Greek Theatre to listen to the speakers. By midafternoon, more than three thousand people had packed into the open-air theater, with students standing in the aisles, sitting on the stage, and spread out on the grass hill above the theater to hear the speeches.85 It is not clear whether Huey and Bobby participated in the conference, but they certainly heard about it.
The podium was black with big red letters identifying SDS. Behind the podium, a large banner, three feet wide and fifty feet long, read “Black Power and Its Challenges.” Ivanhoe Donaldson introduced Carmichael, emphasizing Carmichael’s leadership against the war and drawing an analogy between the struggle of blacks in American cities and the struggle of the Vietnamese against imperialism: “The Vietnamese are fighting the same establishment that the brothers in Oakland, Chicago and Watts are fighting.” Carmichael approached the podium wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. He straightened his shirt, adjusted the microphone, and looked out at the predominantly white student audience.86
“It’s a privilege and an honor to be in the white intellectual ghetto of the West,” Carmichael began, making common cause with the students. But the familiarity was brief. “White America cannot condemn herself,” Carmichael told the students, “so black people have done it—you stand condemned. . . . Move on over, or we’re going to move on over you.” Carmichael talked about the limitations of integrationism and the need for Black Power in international terms. “In order for America to really live on a basic principle of human relationships, a new society must be born. Racism must die. The economic exploitation by this country of nonwhite people around the world must also die.”87
Carmichael focused most of his speech on the question of Vietnam. “The war in Vietnam is an illegal and immoral war,” he argued. He compared the plight of black people in America with the plight of the Vietnamese: “Any time a black man leaves the country where he can’t vote to supposedly deliver the vote to somebody else, he’s a black mercenary. Any time a black man leaves this country, gets shot in Vietnam on foreign ground, and returns home and you won’t give him a burial place in his own homeland, he’s a black mercenary. Even if I were to believe the lies of [President] Johnson,” said Carmichael, “if I were to believe his lies that we are fighting to give democracy to the people in Vietnam, as a black man in this country, I wouldn’t fight to give this to anybody.”88
Carmichael also criticized the student peace movement and argued that if peace activists wanted to be relevant to most people, they needed to start organizing to resist the draft:
The peace movement has been a failure because it hasn’t gotten off the college campuses where everybody has a 2S [draft deferment] and is not afraid of being drafted anyway. The problem is how you can move out of that into the white ghettos of this country and articulate a position for those white youth who do not want to go. . . . [SNCC is] the most militant organization for peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today. There isn’t one organization that has begun to meet our stand on the war in Vietnam. We not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. . . . There is a higher law than the law of a racist named [Secretary of Defense] McNamara; there is a higher law than the law of a fool named [Secretary of State] Rusk; there is a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. We will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we are going to decide who to kill.89
The conference program featured the symbol of a black panther from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) that Carmichael was publicizing. The LCFO was part of a new effort by local blacks and SNCC to build an independent political party outside of the exclusive white Democratic Party, marking a departure from its strategy of mobilizing civil disobedience against Jim Crow segregation in the early 1960s. Lowndes County was 80 percent black, yet in early 1966, despite the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, there was still not a single black person registered to vote in Lowndes County. So on May 3, 1966, with SNCC’s help, the LCFO convened and nominated candidates for sheriff, tax assessor, coroner, and school board and encouraged blacks to register to vote. As blacks registered, white resistance intensified. At one SNCC rally, a deputy sheriff fired into the crowd, shooting two civil rights workers and killing one, Carmichael’s friend Jonathan Daniels, a white ministerial student.
Because so many whites in Lowndes were illiterate, the ballot featured a drawing of a party mascot. The all-white Democratic Party featured a white rooster and the slogan White Supremacy/For the Right. The LCFO selected the black panther as its symbol to signify a fierce black political challenge. In a June 1966 interview, John Hulett, the chairman of the LCFO, explained the symbol of the panther: “The black panther is an animal that when it is pressured it moves back until it is cornered, then it comes out fighting for life or death. We felt we had been pushed back long enough and that it was time for Negroes to come out and take over.”90
In late August 1966, SNCC had organized a rally at the Mt. Morris Presbyterian Church in New York City to promote the newly formed Harlem branch of the Black Panther Party. The speakers included Carmichael; William Epton, the head of the Harlem branch of the Progressive Labor Party; and Max Stanford, the leader of RAM, who identified himself at the time as the head of the Harlem branch of the Black Panther Party. Black Panther members came dressed in uniforms of black pants and shirts displaying the panther emblem. In front of a cheering crowd of 250, Carmichael called on blacks to unite with people of color in Vietnam and throughout the world. He also spoke in favor of armed self-defense for blacks. “If the police and the federal government won’t protect us,” said Carmichael, “we must protect ourselves.” Both he and Stanford spoke in favor of the recent wave of ghetto rebellions. The United States, Stanford suggested, “could be brought down to its knees with a rag and some gasoline and a bottle.”91
In September 1966, Carmichael wrote that organizing had begun under the black panther symbol across the country, in the North as well as the South—including independent efforts in Los Angeles, New York, Phi
ladelphia, and New Jersey. “A man needs a black panther on his side when he and his family must endure—as hundreds of Alabamans have endured—loss of job, eviction, starvation and sometimes death for political activity,” Carmichael explained. “He may also need a gun and SNCC reaffirms the right of black men everywhere to defend themselves when threatened or attacked.”92
The Black Power conference and the symbol of the black panther captured the attention of Kenny Freeman, Doug Allen, Ernie Allen, and the West Coast members of RAM. At this time, RAM’s political analysis was fairly close to that of SNCC and Carmichael. Like the New York branch of RAM, the West Coast members were drawn to Carmichael’s charisma and the defiant symbol of the black panther, and they were impressed by his organizing efforts in Lowndes County. They followed the example of Max Stanford and the New York RAM and formed the Black Panther Party of Northern California.
Not only did the program for the October 1966 Berkeley Black Power conference feature the black panther logo of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in recognition of Carmichael’s work there, but two days before the conference, activists distributed a pamphlet and fliers about the Lowndes County Black Panther Party on the Berkeley campus.93
Huey Newton was among those to take notice of the bold logo and courageous organizing. Writing several years later, Newton recalled, “I had read a pamphlet about voter registration in [Alabama], how the people in Lowndes County had armed themselves against Establishment violence. Their political group, called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, had a black panther for its symbol. A few days later, while Bobby and I were rapping, I suggested that we use the panther as our symbol.”94