and the History It Sprang From
Chapter One
The Beginnings of the Black Panther Party and the History It Sprang From
I started with this idea in my head, “There’s two things I’ve got a right to, death or liberty.”
—Harriet Tubman, Black Freedom Fighter
The origins of the Black Panther Party seem surprisingly mundane, as we look from the other side of time’s hourglass.
Two relatively poor college students, fresh from meager and uninspiring public schools, seek to join a junior college’s Black student group to give voice to their emergent sense of activism.
They were, on the surface, unremarkable. Two Black men in their twenties, searching for meaning in a world that seemed content to ignore their existence. They were among doubtless thousands, if not tens of thousands, of young men and women who were among the first in their families—members of that first generation—to seek higher education. Their trek into such institutions was, in many ways, a voyage into a new and unfamiliar world. A trek that their earlier, unchallenging education left many youth woefully unprepared for.
What made these two emerge as remarkable men was not so much that they possessed remarkable qualities, as that this was a truly remarkable time.
It was the mid 1960s, movements were circling the globe like fresh winds blowing through stale, unopened, darkened rooms. Wafting on those winds were the seductive scents of rebellion, resistance, and world revolution!
In West Oakland, California, where Merritt College was then located, the biggest issue sparking discussion was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Although it seemed that the immediate problem of a nuclear war between the US and the USSR over Cuba had been averted, the terror of possible atomic war was as real as moonlight. The international tensions of the times caused the era’s students to question the world they were growing into. And, if that were not enough, the rising Civil Rights movement in the US South brought domestic questions to the debate amongst the young.
A student named Bobby Seale walked the campus, observing and listening to those who possessed the power to engage in verbal combat and hold court. Speakers didn’t just spout their opinions to silent observers, but engaged in debate, parrying a variety of rapid-fire questions from the massed throng. One speaker—a young guy named Huey—spoke with such militant conviction and knowledge that Bobby stood transfixed:
I guess I had the idea that I was supposed to ask questions in college, so I walked over to Huey and asked the brother, weren’t all these civil rights laws the NAACP was trying to get for us doing some good? And he shot me down too, just like he shot a whole lot of other people down. He said, it’s all a waste of money, black people don’t have anything in this country that is for them. He went on to say that the laws already on the books weren’t even serving them in the first place, and what’s the use of making more laws when what we needed was to enforce the present laws?1
This thriving, questioning atmosphere gave way to broader challenges. Huey had joined the school’s Afro-American Association to try to formulate answers to the questions that hung in the air. Bobby was soon to follow:
That’s the kind of atmosphere I met Huey in. And all the conflicts of this meeting, all the blowing that was going on in the streets that day during the Cuban crisis, all of that was involved with his association with the Afro-American Association. A lot of arguments came down. A lot of people were discussing with three or four cats in the Afro-American Association, which was developing the first black nationalist philosophy on the West Coast. They got me caught up. They made me feel that I had to help out, be a part and do something. One or two days later I went around looking for Huey at this school, and I went to the library. I found Huey in the library, and I asked him where the meetings were. He gave me an address card and told me there were book discussions.2
How does such a benign meeting presage the emergence of the Black Panther Party? What these recollections reveal are the various strands of thought that were circulating through the Black student and radical community at the time, and would later coalesce and congeal as the beginnings of ideology. The two men seemed to be searching for something—perhaps answers to why the world was as jumbled up as it seemed, perhaps for a way out of their daily grind, perhaps for that which Black Americans had searched for centuries—for freedom.
They were looking for an organization that would represent their collective voice. Even at this early stage, there existed positions that would later re-emerge espoused and reflected by the Black Panther Party: a questioning of the status quo; a sense of alienation not only from the US government, but, reflecting a class divide, also from the elite of the Civil Rights movement; and the germ of recognizing the importance of the international arena to the lives and destinies of Blacks in America.
Their first interaction also suggests the beginnings of the power relations that would last for the duration of the existence of the Black Panther Party. It is clear that, although younger, Huey P. Newton possessed a mind far more active, far more flexible, and far more wide-ranging than did Bobby Seale. Newton emerged as the teacher, though Seale too was pivotal.
Seale would introduce Newton to the Caribbean-born Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon through his masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth. A notoriously slow reader, Newton would read the extraordinary book six times.3 For Newton, and for many other Black Americans, Fanon’s words were a revelation, not merely of African colonial conditions, but of the world’s problems and why Black America was in such a wretched state:
The mass of the people struggle against the same poverty, flounder about making the same gestures and with their shrunken bellies outline what has been called the geography of hunger. It is an under-developed world, a world inhuman in its poverty; but also it is a world without engineers and without administrators. Confronting this world, the European nations sprawl, ostentatiously opulent. This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and the subsoil of that under-developed world. The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races.4
For one seeking to make sense of the vast, bleak panorama of poverty in the American ghetto, as contrasted with the projected stately order and opulence of white wealth, Fanon’s brave and passionate prose held powerful illumination. Black folks in America saw themselves in the villages of resistance and saw their ghettos as little more than internal colonies similar to those discussed in Fanon’s analysis.
Fanon’s anticolonial and anti-imperialist perspective was not the only influence on the young Newton. The Black nationalist Malcolm X had a powerful impact upon him, one he termed “intangible” and “deeply spiritual.”5 Newton regularly visited Muslim mosques in the Bay Area and discussed the problems facing Black Americans with members of the Nation of Islam (NOI). He heard Malcolm X, accompanied by a young convert then named Cassius Clay, speak at Oakland’s McClymond High School and found the intense young minister an impressive man “with his logic” and his “disciplined” mind.6 He seriously considered joining the NOI, but growing up as a preacher’s kid
I could not deal with their religion. By this time, I had had enough of religion and could not bring myself to adopt another one. I needed a more concrete understanding of social conditions. References to God or Allah did not satisfy my stubborn questioning.7
Fanon’s analysis mixed well with Malcolm’s militant anti-establishment oratory. Malcolm spoke often about the anticolonial liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He spoke also of the Bandung Conference (1955) in Indonesia where African and Asian nations pledged support to the anticolonial movement. Malcolm X and Fanon were deep influences on Newton and played a role in moving him to develop an anti-imperialist and radical perspective:
From all of these things—the books, Malcolm’s writings and spirit, our analysis of the local situation—the idea of an organization was forming. One day, quite suddenly, almost by chance, we found a name. I had read a pamphlet about voter registration in Mississippi, how the people in the Lowndes County