by
Joshua Bloom
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The city of Richmond, a few miles north of Oakland, had been the site of several major shipyards during World War II. Many blacks migrated to the area for wartime jobs but found themselves unemployed and underemployed during the postwar demobilization and deindustrialization. Much of the postwar black community lived in ghettos consisting of public housing units built by the federal government during the war. North Richmond, a town of six thousand people stuck between a garbage dump and the toxic-fume-producing Chevron Oil refinery, was almost entirely black. As an unincorporated area, the community received no public services from the city. Instead, North Richmond came under the jurisdiction of Contra Costa County, including the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department. Extremely isolated, the area had only three streets on which to enter or exit. On occasion, county police blocked those streets, sealing off the entire area.
background on the police killing of Denzil Dowell, a 22-year-old Black construction worker whose death was covered up (the police claimed he was robbing a liquor store)
The Panthers’ first confrontation with police in North Richmond was unplanned. Newton observed, “Policemen were constantly coming to Mrs. Dowell’s house and treating her like dirt. They would knock on the door, walk in, and search the premises any time they wanted.” One Sunday in April 1967, Newton was at the house when they came. “When Mrs. Dowell answered the knock, a policeman pushed his way in, asking questions. I grabbed my shotgun and stepped in front of her, telling him either to produce a search warrant or leave. He stood for a minute, shocked, then ran out to his car and drove off.” Given recent events, many locals felt vulnerable to police attack, and word about the Panthers spread rapidly throughout North Richmond.
When the lunch bell rang, the mothers entered the school and proceeded to patrol the hallways. The Panthers remained outside in case any problems arose. The mothers informed the principal that they were there to ensure their children’s safety and protect them from brutal treatment by school officials. “We’re concerned citizens,” they told him, “and we’ll whip your ass and anyone else’s that we hear of slapping our children around.”
School officials called the police, and an officer soon arrived. Upon hearing about the angry parents inside, he demanded to know what was going on. Five of the Panthers sitting in their car outside the school were openly armed, four with shotguns and one with an M-1. According to Seale, when the officer saw the guns, he began to stutter. He asked what all the guns were for, and Newton told him that he and his companions were members of the Black Panther Party and that the guns belonged to them. The officer asked for his driver’s license, and Newton obliged. When he saw Newton’s name, he went to his car and radioed for reinforcements. Another police car soon arrived, but there was nothing the police could do. The Panthers were acting within the law, and apparently the police did not want to inflame the situation further. The mothers patrolled the hallways until the end of the lunch period.
responding to a "recent rash of student beatings by teachers at the local Walter Helms Junior High School"
Newton, Seale, and Cleaver all spoke, proclaiming that the community would not get justice from the government, nor from its arm, the police. In outlining the Party’s program, they emphasized that black people would never be safe and secure if they depended on the police to protect them. The police were part of the problem, extensions of the oppressive power structure. Black people would be safe only if they took the situation into their own hands and defended themselves. At one point, Newton explained what kinds of guns people should buy. He pointed to Panther John Sloan stationed on a rooftop. Sloan did a weapons demonstration, and people cheered wildly.
That day, something startling occurred that had never happened at any other Panther event. Neighbors showed up with their own guns. Some of these people had seen the armed Panthers at the previous rally and decided to bring their guns this time as a gesture of support and solidarity. Others, seeing the Panthers for the first time, went home to get their guns and returned. One young woman who had been sitting in her car got out and held up her M-1 for everyone to see. The Panthers passed out applications to join their party, and over three hundred people filled them out. According to FBI informant Earl Anthony, he “had never seen Black men command the respect of the people the way that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale did that day.”
damn
The Panthers graphically introduced the public to a new vision of black politics. Like the leaders of the earlier Civil Rights Movement, the Panthers continued to focus on black liberation. Yet, rather than appeal for a fair share of the American pie, the Panthers portrayed the black community as a colony within America and the police as an “army of occupation” from which blacks sought liberation. In their view, the racist power structure was the common enemy of all those engaged in freedom struggles.
When black people send a representative, he is somewhat absurd because he represents no political power. He does not represent land power because we do not own any land. He does not represent economic or industrial power because black people do not own the means of production. The only way he can become political is to represent what is commonly called a military power—which the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls Self-Defense Power. Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community, throughout the nation. Then we will choose a political representative and he will state to the power structure the desires of the black masses. If the desires are not met, the power structure will receive a political consequence. We will make it economically nonprofitable for the power structure to go on with its oppressive ways. We will then negotiate as equals. There will be a balance between the people who are economically powerful and the people who are potentially economically destructive.
quoting a 1967 essay in the party newspaper - "politics is war without bloodshed"
(i'll admit this makes me think of the expanse)
Newton’s conception of the vanguard party was important because of the way he envisioned the party’s relationship to the people. He did not simply want to educate the people but also saw the importance of winning their respect.6 While approvingly citing Mao Zedong’s dictum that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” Newton understood that the respect and loyalty of the community were about much more than that. He knew that the black community would look to and respect the Black Panther Party only if the people believed that the Party’s main concern was their needs and interests.
The Panthers also reached out to students on college campuses. As soon as Bobby Seale was released on bail from the arrest in Sacramento, Peter Camejo of the Young Socialist Alliance at the University of California, Berkeley, scheduled an event on campus to set the record straight about the Black Panther Party’s political positions. Twelve Panthers came to campus on May 10, 1967, and Bobby Seale was the featured speaker. Seale asked, “Why don’t cops who patrol our community live in our community? I don’t think there would be so much police brutality if they had to go and sleep there.” The audience of several thousand, composed mostly of white students, clapped loudly. Seale emphasized that the Black Panther Party was not racist. “You’ve been told that the Black Panthers . . . make no bones about hating whites,” said Seale. “That’s a bare-faced lie. We don’t hate nobody because of color. We hate oppression.”
In 1967, the black community in Newark, New Jersey, was emblematic of the ghetto isolation and containment from which rebellions grew. At that time, Newark was the thirtieth largest city in the United States, with a population of four hundred thousand. As blacks migrated to Newark in the late 1950s and early 1960s, whites deserted the city; in 1960, Newark was still 65 percent white, but by 1967, it was more than 52 percent black and 10 percent Cuban and Puerto Rican. Yet whites maintained near-total political control. From Mayor Hugh Addonizio to seven of nine city council representatives and seven of nine board of education members, the city leadership was almost entirely white. Whites also dominated the city commissions. The police were almost all Italian American. Almost all of those the police arrested, though, were black. [...]
Very few black families, fewer than 13 percent, owned their own homes. Black residents had minimal access to education. Newark’s per capita expenditures on education were significantly lower than those in the surrounding areas, and 70 percent of the children in the Newark public school system were black. Almost half of Newark’s black children did not finish high school. In 1960, more than half of the city’s adult blacks had less than an eighth-grade education, and 12 percent were unemployed. Newark had the highest rates of crime, venereal disease, substandard housing, maternal mortality, and tuberculosis in the country. Organized crime was rampant. Most people convicted of crimes were black, and the majority of the victims were also black. Like the city government, organized crime—the operation, the money and power—was run by Italian Americans.
background to riots in Newark in summer 1967
In the Detroit uprising, rebels not only looted but also turned to more serious insurrectionary tactics, such as arson and sniping. Unlike looting—which offers rebels instant material benefit—these activities subjected rebels to significant risk while offering no instant material benefit, thus suggesting a challenge to the social order. According to police, 552 buildings were destroyed or damaged by fires started by the rebels. Some 7,231 rebels were arrested, more than twice as many as in the Watts uprising and four times more than in Newark. By the end of the Detroit rebellion, 43 people had been killed, 33 of them black. Ten whites were also killed, a number of them government officials.