We Want Freedom. Mumia Abu-Jamal
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speech they couldn’t make, and then told them to get out of town by sundown.…20
Martin’s “dream” is better known to most Americans, but to Black people, especially those teeming millions barred within US ghettos, Malcolm’s words were closer to the mark, closer to the heart.
When Watts erupted, it did not erupt in a vacuum. In 1964 and 1965, violent outbreaks were occurring in every part of the country. In Florida, the killing of a Black woman and the threat to bomb a Black high school caused an uproar; when a white minister who sat in front of a bulldozer to protest housing discrimination was killed, Cleveland erupted; the fatal shooting of a fifteen-year-old Black boy by an off-duty cop set it off in New York City. Similarly, mass violence (called “riots”) rocked Rochester, Jersey City, Chicago, and Philadelphia.21
And then there was Watts. What became the most violent urban outbreak since World War II began with something that had been commonplace in African American communities—violent police behavior.
A Black motorist was forcibly arrested, a bystander was clubbed, and a young Black woman was seized and falsely accused of spitting on a cop. Watts exploded. The uprising raged from August 11 to 16, 1965; fires swept through the neighborhoods. Some 4,000 people were arrested during the rebellion.
The summer of 1966 showed that Watts was not the end of conflict and suggested it may have been a kind of beginning. Cities burned and armed conflicts raged, some between members of Black self-defense groups and the National Guard. Firebombs were hurled in Chicago; Cleveland saw several Blacks shot by white cops and white civilians.
By 1967, rebellions were raging all across America—123 major and minor uprisings or “outbreaks,” according to the National Advisory Committee on Urban Disorders. Some eighty-three people died of gunfire, mostly in the mass violence that occurred in Newark and Detroit. As the committee noted, “The overwhelming majority of the persons killed or injured in all the disorders were Negro civilians.”22
It was into this social context of mass disorder and urban chaos that the Black Panther Party emerged—as a response to the massive violence perpetrated against Blacks and as a way to focus and organize the resultant mass anger into a cohesive political movement.
Riots, by their very nature, are disorganized and incoherent. The Black Panther Party wanted to signal an end to this disorganization and introduce the revolutionary alternative: organization, discipline, purpose, self-defense.
Beginnings
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense began with books. Huey Newton had done extensive reading about revolutionary organizing and revolutionaries. He scored several hundred copies of the Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung) from several radical Asian friends and began hawking them on the campus of the nearby University of California, Berkeley. Bobby Seale would later write that Huey came up with that idea because he suspected the very idea of “Negroes with Red Books” would spark the curiosity of Berkeley’s white radicals and thereby move them to support the fledgling effort.23
That, however, was a tactic, not an objective. Selling the Red Book made money; and money would be used to buy what revolutionaries the world over found indispensable: guns. While the predominant civil rights groups of the era pitched their raps to the press, or the white liberal community, or the Negro bourgeoisie, Huey knew that mere words would not break through the thick shell that ghetto Blacks had to have to survive in racist America. Huey knew that guns, openly and freely displayed, would reach them.
To reach them, he had to attract their attention.
Attention would not be long in coming. The Black Panther Party started as an Oakland phenomenon, with perhaps a dozen members who could be relied upon to make meetings. Nearby Richmond was also showing a small degree of interest.
Newton had studied the California penal codes (he suggests, in Revolutionary Suicide, that such knowledge made him a better thief) and learned that weapons possession was protected by state statute, and guns could be carried in public as long as they were not concealed. The Party therefore developed the nation’s first armed police monitoring patrols. Party members would be armed, with loaded weapons, cameras, tape recorders, and law books. When approaching a traffic stop, they would loudly announce state law allowed citizens to observe police stops and arrests. Huey’s legal research would ensure that the proper legal distance would be kept. People would see members of the Party standing in their defense against the hated representatives of the white power structure. The Panthers would advise suspects of their legal rights. Such actions proved a powerful organizing tool in the first year of activity.
In April 1967, a twenty-two-year-old Black man named Denzil Dowell was shot and killed by a white deputy sheriff in Richmond. Some of Dowell’s family members contacted the Party when local authorities ruled the killing was justifiable homicide, and the Party launched its own investigation. More importantly, for organizing purposes, the Party sent “twenty Panthers out there armed with guns, disciplined, standing thirty or forty feet apart on every corner of the intersection” where the Black man was murdered.24
The Panthers announced the results of their preliminary investigation, which cast considerable doubt on the police version of the killing, and rallied in the streets against the slaying. They denounced the brutality of the cops, “in full view of the local police.”25 As Seale would later write, “[W]e were educating the people that we would die for them. This was the position we always took with brother Huey P. Newton.”26 The rally was a brilliant organizing success because “just about everybody out there joined the Party that day.”27
The Dowell case provided a further opportunity for the growing group. On April 25, 1967, the first issue of The Black Panther Community News Service came off the press, in the form of a mimeographed, four-page newsletter, edited by Eldridge Cleaver. The Black Panther’s maiden edition was full of fire:
[T]he white cop is the instrument sent into our community by the Power structure to keep Black people quiet and under control … it is time that Black People start moving in a direction that will free our communities from this form of outright brutal oppression. The BLACK PANTHER PARTY FOR SELF-DEFENSE has worked out a program that is carefully designed to cope with this situation.
Eldridge, paroled after an extended stint in California prisons, brought a bite and a wit to The Black Panther that ensured that Black folks who dared read it would be moved as by nothing they had read before. Cleaver’s articulate phrasing, married with the clever artistic depictions of Emory Douglas, would make The Black Panther a reading experience that few would forget.
The Richmond demonstration, the newsletter (soon to be reborn as a full-fledged newspaper), and the armed community police patrols would prove irresistible to ghetto youth who had simmered under the glare of overtly racist cops. They longed to join the swelling Civil Rights movement, but had not because they could not bear to join any group which would meekly submit to racist violence, as demanded by some civil rights organizations. The 1967 revolts marked a rise in Black militancy, a psychic change of pace that the middle-class leaders of the southern-based Civil Rights movement could not address, and word spread about the actions of the Black Panther Party. The Black journalist William Gardner-Smith remarked, “The ’67 revolts marked the entry of the tough ghetto youths into the race battle, and the existing organizations, led by intellectuals or the middle-class, could not cope with them—the Panthers had to be born.”28
Just over six months into the Party’s existence another event would push the organization into the minds and consciousness of millions around the nation. On May 2, 1967, armed members and supporters of the Party “invaded” the California State Assembly in Sacramento. The state assembly had probably never seen armed (not to mention, Black) “lobbyists” on its debate floor before, and the incident resulted in tremendous visibility for the Party.
Huey Newton, on parole for a past offense, wisely opted to sit out the event. Despite being arrested along with twenty-five other Panthers, Bobby Seale, following Newton’s instructions to the letter, read the entirety of Newton’s boldly penned Executive Mandate denouncing the pending Mulford Bill. The bill was a direct legislative attempt to change California gun laws in response to BPP armed police patrols. Newton wrote: