Jessica Lindsey

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"All Power to All People" : Visions of the Black Panther Party

It was an organization called the "vanguard" for the human rights movement, "the single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States" and a "social evolutionary accident." Demonized for their belief in self-defense, the Black Panther Party suffered distortions from the media and government repression. Even today, few are aware of the full scope of the Party and their philosophy. For what is, the soul of the Black Panther?
A revolutionary movement against the oppression and inequalities in Black communities began in 1966 in Oakland, California when Bobby Seale and Huey Newton formed the Black Panther Party. In less than a year they were propelled into national media coverage. One of the Panther's main philosophies was the right to self-defense. If the "police were determined to rule by force" Panthers were willing to fight back against this brutality. They carried law books, tape recorders, and shotguns as they followed police around the community. Although it was legal to carry a shotgun in plain sight, the actions of the Black Panthers caused a stir in Sacramento.
A state assemblyman Donald Mulford introduced a bill into Congress that to his own admission was designed to make it illegal for the Black Panthers to patrol with their guns. On May 2, 1967 a group of Panthers including Bobby Seale marched on the Capital. National papers and magazines, such as the New York Times and the U.S. News and World Report covered the incident. Dr. Jane Rhodes, a professor at UC San Diego in Ethnic Studies, analyzed articles from these and other newspapers about the Black Panther Party. She found reoccurring themes of fear, denunciation and suspicion. U.S. News and World Report described the Panthers as they "swarmed, marched and pushed," conjuring images of a foreign army. Although articles in both the U.S. News and the Times admitted that no violence occurred, they focused on the group's militancy instead of their purpose.
Expecting media coverage Bobby Seale read a pre-written statement detailing the Party's grievances and philosophy. Yet articles tended to repeat certain phrases like the "'racist California legislature'" and leave the deeper issues alone. Huey Newton reported: "few appeared to hear the important thing. They were concentrating on the weapons. We had hoped that after the weapons gained attention they would listen to the message." The party which was founded to challenge the inequalities resulting from the "residue of slavery," would be sidelined into stereotypes of irrational radicals. Parts of the statement, such as this deeply moving passage, would be lost:
Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned and demonstrated, among other things, to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetrated against Black people. All of these efforts have been answered by more repression, deceit and hypocrisy.
Instead of focusing on the education of the public, the press used familiar and sometimes scary images of angry, black men with weapons, emphasizing a potentially violent situation.
Although the Panther's message was not delivered in a comprehensive manner, it did inspire many young African-Americans across the country to learn more about the organization; some decided to join. After the demonstration, Newton recalled, "soon we had more members than we could handle. From all across the country calls came to us about establishing chapters and branches; we could hardly keep track of the requests."
Relations between the mainstream media and the Black Panther Party would not improve. A little less than a year after their march on Sacramento, in April 1968, 17-year-old member Bobby Hutton would be killed by the Oakland police. Unsurprisingly police and Black Panther members would clash in their versions of events. These differences were seen in mainstream sources, which tended to support the police account, and a more open alternative media.
Time magazine recorded the story in an article entitled "Shoot-Out on 28th Street." The article took police accounts and reported them as fact, stating the confrontation started when "two patrolmen investigating a parked car in a West Oakland slum were sent reeling by shotgun pellets." The article continued to explain how gunfire was exchanged for a period of time, until "there was a cry of surrender" from the building where the Black Panther members were positioned. When Bobby Hutton stepped out "police believed he might be armed and said he disregarded a command to halt. The circle of law officers shot him dead." The article could have been right out of police reports. There is no evidence the author attempted to contact Black Panther members to see a different viewpoint. The only mention of a response is a single comment that "Black Power spokesmen shrilled murder, claiming Hutton's hands were raised." Yet this statement appears dubious; the reader does not know who the mysterious spokesman is, or if they even witnessed the incident.
There are other references in the article, which show the reporter's negative and aggressive attitude towards Panthers and their neighborhood. According to the author Oakland was "hate-filled" and the Panther's were "a strutting band of hyper militants [. . .] armed and angry [. . .] defiantly demanding a facedown." This follows a pattern one former Black Panther member Ericka Huggins saw time and time again: the media portraying Blacks in a shoot-out, yet never showing or explaining the underlying police brutality.
In an alternative news source one colleague of the Black Panthers, Gene Marnie, spoke in opposition to this authority-centric viewpoint. In Marnie's eyes there was an "automatic bounty on Panthers in Oakland," because they challenged police action. Succinctly and understandably, Marnie explained how police accounts of "arbitrary violent action" went against Panther philosophy of self-defense. The article recounted the Panther's story in depth, where young Hutton came out with his hands held high, heard a cop yell, "Run boy!," "took a few frightened, hesitant steps" and was shot dead. The author juxtaposed these events with police accounts that suggested Hutton was trying to run or possibly possessed a gun.
The reactions to this and other shoot-outs exposed the polarized views people in different groups had of the Black Panther Party. For the black communities and progressive groups, shoot-outs were proof of police brutality and repression. Yet for mainstream, white America it was confirmation that the organization was dangerous. Media coverage sometimes acknowledged these differences. In Time magazine, Daniel Walker who studied police brutality stated it was "one of these unfortunate situations in which one story is almost totally believed by the white community and another story is almost totally believed by the black community." At one point Bobby Seale expressed his aggravation for a press that labeled the group anti-white. The Black Panther Party was not anti-white, but anti-oppression, he explained. They were fighting against murder and high unemployment rates in Black communities.
Although the media participated in heightening the fear of whites against Black Panthers, group experience already separated Black and white perception. My mother grew up in suburban Livermore, California during the 1960s and 1970s. She was fourteen when the Party was founded. As a young white woman she felt, "if you obeyed the law you didn't have to worry about the police bothering you." Although she admits this might not have been true for everyone, she lived in a reality in which the Panthers were vigilantes instead of protectors against police brutality. One author suggested, "Maybe you have to be black and live in the ghetto, patrolled by white racist policemen, to understand how the Black Panthers came to be and why they talk the way the do." Ericka Huggins explained the disparity when comparing a white and a Black man who received a parking ticket. From her experiences a Black man might have been beaten for the ticket, while a white man would just have been given the ticket and told to have a nice day. These differences in reality further widened the perceptions of middle-class whites and urban Blacks.
The media was not alone in creating and encouraging negative images of the Black Panthers. The government, especially the FBI Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), according to former Panther Huggins, used the media to lie to Americans about the organization. Flint Taylor, an attorney, who as a law student helped the Black Panther's in legal matters in Chicago, agrees: "The FBI fed information to the media, which in turn stereotyped the Panthers as Black racists." When analyzing events, and the media and government response, Huggins' and Taylor's feelings are very understandable.
Through the investigation of various studies, Dr. Rhodes believes that media is influenced and pressured by the government, especially in "times of controversy and stress." The sixties and seventies were definitely tumultuous times for America - Civil Rights struggles, Vietnam protests, and Black Nationalist groups, to name a few. The limited access of Blacks to an almost all white male newsroom restricted the ability to have multiple perspectives on issues such as the Black Panther Party. Therefore a unilateral perspective in favor of police and other government branches dominated the media.
Black Panther members actively attended to basic human needs in their communities. When possible they held sickle cell anemia testing, free food programs, free clothing and shoes programs and free busing to prisons, etc. One of the most prominent activities was the free breakfast for children program. Both government and media response degraded and questioned the motivation of this community gathering. A Newsweek article in 1969 declared that the Panthers were only implementing the program to "broaden their revolutionary base." The paper continued to chide the Party's "decidedly unrevolutionary tactics: organizing free ghetto clinics [ . . ] or serving breakfast to kiddies." In the author's opinion this is an absolute alteration from the party's original intent. Yet the author wasn't aware, or ignored, certain parts of the Party's founding 10 Point Platform, written in 1966. The last point begins "We want land, bread, housing, clothing, justice and peace." In this context the free breakfast program was in direct correlation with the Party's goals.
The government's response to the program was even more subversive. Domestic Intelligence Chief William C. Sullivan stated that the Black Panthers were attempting to "fill adolescent children with their insidious poison," indoctrinating them ideas that they should hate whites and the police. The FBI extensively campaigned to discredit the Free Breakfast Program. Ericka Huggins remembers one tactic, in which police repeatedly stormed into breakfast programs while children were being fed, guns ready. Another report states these police were "riot-equipped tactical units" who destroyed the food and the room while "claiming to look for non-existent 'contraband' or 'fugitives.'" This tactic scared many, while it attempted to stop community support for the program.
Another incident in which Ericka Huggins remembers government and media collaboration is in the death of her husband, John Huggins. The media portrayed the event as a black on black crime, involving a shootout between the Black Panthers and a rival Black Nationalist group, Us (United Slaves). Yet there is a significant amount of documentation showing the FBI aggravated the hostilities and set-up the murders of John Huggins and another party member, Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter. Before the shootings, peace negotiations between the groups were in process. Yet when other Panthers were killed and wounded the Senate Select Committee of the FBI took credit for the events, stating "a substantial amount of unrest" - the "shootings [and] beatings" - "is directly attributable to this [COINTELPRO] program." Retired FBI agent M. Wesley Swearingen and a former FBI informant Darthard Perry both confirm that three men were FBI informants and Us members at the time of the Huggins, Carter murders, including the man who killed both Panthers.
The government played an extensive role in thwarting Black Panther efforts toward equality. Their actions caused hurt, confusion and disheartenment for many involved with the Party. The organization's stance on self-defense and redistribution of the wealth, caused serious backlash, especially from the FBI and their counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO). Designed to destroy the Party, police raids, infiltration, the promotion of dissent within the organization, systematic arrests and fake mail, among many other tactics forever changed the way people will view and remember the Black Panthers. Several former Black Panthers remember raids where supplies, such as cereal, for the breakfast program, were burned. According the Bobby Seale, this was in an effort to "psyche the community out" "terrorize [the Black Panthers] out of existence." COINTELPRO used another serious and life-changing measure to meet their goals -- assassination.
One of the most blatant acts of assassination lead by COINTELPRO was the murders of Mark Clark and leader of the Illinois Panthers, Fred Hampton. On December 4, 1969 around 4:30 in the morning Chicago police invaded the apartment where several Black Panthers lived. Their shots killed Mark Clark and wounded several others. Black Panther members yelled at the police to stop shooting, and came out with their hands up. Everyone was taken to the kitchen, except Fred Hampton, who had not awoken during the incident. Deborah Johnson, who was Hampton's fiancée and eight-and-a-half months pregnant with their child, remembered hearing an unfamiliar voice say "He's barely alive. He'll barley make it." Shots were fired, and then another voice said "He's good and dead now." Although initially police authorities deemed the raid a shoot-out, a wealth of evidence would eventually come out proving otherwise.
Ballistics reports eventually concluded that all but one of the shots fired were conclusively from police weapons. Later, evidence came out that William O'Neal, a high ranking Panther in the Chicago organization was an FBI informant. He had detailed the apartment floor plan used in the police raid to his control agent. There are also suspicions that someone, possibly O'Neal, drugged Hampton before the incident. After all Hampton did not wake up during the raid and an independent study found high amounts of a depressant drug in his blood. No one ever accused or reported Hampton as a drug user. Because the police did not seal the building, Black Panther's held tours for the community to see the suppression the organization faced from the US government. One elderly black woman was so moved she proclaimed, "It ain't nothing but a northern lynching."
Although the events set-off an outpouring of community support, the Chicago branch was left without a leader and the group floundered for direction. Johnson was so hurt by O'Neal's betrayal she "vowed never to get in another organization, not from the fear of getting killed or arrested [. . .] but because I just didn't trust people." The survivors and families of the deceased eventually received nearly 2 million dollars in a civil rights settlement, yet no one was ever indicted with the murders of Fred Hampton or Mark Clark.
Time moves on, and the legacy of the Black Panthers continues. The government was so "embarrassed" by the Free Breakfast Program, that it created a federally run program to feed breakfast to disadvantaged youth. The Panthers supported a voter registration diver in 1972 which in the first six months registered approximately 60,000 in Alameda and Contra Costa counties. These votes were crucial in the election of the first Black supervisor for Alameda County, John George, in 1976, and the election of Oakland's first Black mayor, Lionel Wilson, in 1977.
Yet very little information is readily available for the public to remember or learn about the Party and their legacy. History, as Huggins explains, has been "decontaminated," leaving out much of the accomplishments of the Panthers. While some are intrigued by the Panthers, the image of "angry Black people" prevails, especially to white middle-class Americans. One classmate at CSUEB commented that he doesn't know very much about the organization, but still appears to hold a negative viewpoint. He remembers a clip in the 1996 motion picture Forrest Gump which depicted the organization in a stark militant light. The movie followed the trends of media sources of the past, focusing on forceful and angry individuals, while ignoring or making light of the police brutality and oppression that caused such a stance.
While the Black Panthers are rarely featured in mainstream newspapers, in the past twenty years documentaries have shown the Black Panthers in a more multi-dimensional perspective. Eyes on the Prize, a PBS series on the Civil Rights movement, interviewed various members of the Party and opposing government officials, illuminating suppressions faced by the organization. Another documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties, featured a short segment dealing with the founding of the Black Panthers and early confrontations between the police and the media over the groups use of guns for self-defense. Yet these films still focus on violence as opposed to the social programs the Party implemented. Documentaries also tend to be viewed by fewer people than major motion pictures, therefore they have less potential to cause a change in perception.
This appears to be true with other educational opportunities surrounding the Black Panther Party today. Radio shows, such a Dr. Marshall's Street Soldiers have aired a two-hour segment to discuss the Party, and the Berkeley Public Library has a photography exhibit. Several prominent figures in the Party have written memoirs and autobiographies including Elaine Brown's Taste of Power and David Hilliard's This Side of Glory. Yet all these sources will only help people learn about the Panthers if they are proactive and interested in this part of our nation's history.
The world continues to change and evolve; history is made, and the spirit of the Black Panther's lives on. What we remember it for, is up to us. Will we dig deep into the core, or skim a surface full of distortions and deceit? Ericka Huggins hopes people will remember the group she gave thirteen years of her life to, as one that was dedicated to the end of human suffering and "guided by human love for people." A group that "love[d the] people in our community." And the voice of Fred Hampton echoes in my head, "I'm gon' die for the People! [. . .] 'Cause I live for the People! [. . .] 'Cause I love the People!"

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