i~ r - ~ ON C1TY POLITKS 1950-1975 Harriet Kathan and Stanley Scott, Editors Evelio Grillo Thomas L. McLaren re : D. G. Gibson Margaret S. Gordon George A. Pettitt Joel Rubenzahl T. J. Kent, Jr. ~lona Hancock Donald R. Hopkins Ed Kallgren Pat and Fred Cody Joseph P Lyford Wallace J . S. Johnson INSTITUTE OF GOVERNMENTAL STUDIES University of California, Berkeley ima Development of Black Political Organization in Berkeley Since 1960 DONALD R. HOPKINS Donald R. Hopkins has lived in Berkeley since 1960. A native of Kansas, he received a B.A. from the University of Kansas, an M.A, in poli- tical science from Yale, a 7.D. from Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley, and an L.L.M. from Harvard Law School. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Sigma Alpha honorary societies. He has served as Assistant Dean of Students and Assistant to the Executive Vice-Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1969-197Q he was a staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, New York City. Since 1971 he has been District Ad- ministrator for the Han. Ronald V. Dellums, 8th Congressional District, California. INTRODUCTION I approached this assignment with some trepidation, because i am aware that a discussion of Black political activity, even in an arena as small as Berkeley, gets one involved in a discussion of historical perspectives, attitudes, sociological currents, educational and economic developments and philosophies that far transcend the immediate subject matter . The constant challenge is to narrow one's focus, despite the realization that whatever developments there were in Black political organization during the 60's in the City of Berkeley did not occur in a vacuum, but rather were profoundly influenced by political currents within the Black community, nationally and internationally . it is interesting in this regard that my own involvement in Berkeley politics began as a studious noninvolvement in politics. 1 came to Berkeley to enter the University of California in the fall of 19b0. On February 1, 1960, four Black students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College had entered an F. W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina and demanded to be served, thus ushering in the era of $lack militancy that was to reach a watershed with Stokeley Carmichael's demand for Black Power. These led to the most pro- found changes in the relationships between Blacks and whites in this country to occur in the centuries of their existence here. It is within this context that I be- came "political." THE AFRO-AMERICAN ASSOCIATION AND BLACK STUDENT NATIONALISM: A TIME FOR IDEOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT AND A PRELUDE TO POLITICAL ACTION In September of 1960, a group of about 14 Blacks, all students at the University of California, met on the patio of the new student union at Berkeley to discuss our role in the historic events that began in Greensboro. This meeting was attended by a number of Blacks who are still prominent in different areas of public life in Berkeley and the Bay Area: Donald Warden, Henry Ramsey, Otho Green, Peter, Aubrey, and Gerald Labrie, Maurice Dawson and Kenneth Simmons, to name a few. Henry Ramsey took the initiative of chartering an official organization on the Berkeley campus under the rubric of the Afro- 107 American Historical Association . (The group rarely flew under this banner, so its name is mostly commemorative .) For some two years thereafter, we met, mostly in my Shattuck Avenue apartment, spending long hours in discussing the polit- ical, social and economic ramifications of being Black in America. By 1963, this organization and its branches at San Francisco Skate University and Merritt College had touched the lives of hundreds of Black students in the Bay Area, and I think it fair to say that few lives that were touched by it were unchanged as a result. Our discussion group was to become known simply as the Afro-American Association . If there was one idea that wed us all together, it was that we were not Negroes, but rather were American Blacks of African descent . Through our explorations we sought to come to an intellectual understanding of what this meant within the context of American life, and to come to a further under- standing of what this meant in terms of our own political direction as future leaders of our people. Just as the sit-ins and related civil rights demonstrations were to confront the institutionalized aspects of American racism, our discussion groups and attendant political activity were to address the ideological aspects of racism-a role we felt more suited to northern Blacks who, after all, faced racism in a much more disguised and subtle form. In June 1966, at the time members of the Afro-American Association in the Bay Area were emerging from colleges and professional schools, Stokeley Carmichael popularized the slogan "Black Power." Attendant to this call was the plea that whites should leave the civil rights movement, and begin organizing in their own community. In the fall of 1966, in Dwinelle Hall on the University of California campus, Larry Gurley, a graduate student at Berkeley, convened a most remark- able group of Black and white community leaders for the purpose of institution alizing Carmichael's call for separate white and Black caucuses to address the problems of racism. It resulted in a large one-day convocation at the Hall of Flowers in San Francisco, wherein white participants developed an elaborate strategy for dealing with white racism in the white community. A parallel strategy was to develop the same kind of caucus within the Black community. The Black Conference, as it was called, was held on January 28 and 29, 1967, in San Francisco, and was sponsored by, among others, Otho Green, Ron Dellums, Ernest Howard, Will Ussery {then the National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Fquality), and myself. According to contemporaneous news reports: the purpose, according to Otho Green, was "to discuss and evaluate the present situation of blacks in America. ."Topics to be examined, according to Dellums, chairman of the program committee, included Negro political participation; the "new left" and its "possible detriment" to Negroes; ghetto housing and education ; and Negro em- ployment problems. ."The time had come for a group of black people to think unthinkable thoughts about the recognized drift toward the right in California and the nation," Ussery said, "and the relationship of this drift to the survival of the black community in America." These meetings--the several years of meetings of the Afro-American Asso- ciation, and the historic Hall of Flowers and California Black Caucus meetings, were harbingers of the most significant developments in Black politics to occur for a decade. THE GREEN-MILLER RACE: AN ATTEMPTTO FILLTHE ORGANIZATION VACUUM IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY In 1966, Otho Green ran for the 17th Assembly District seat vacated by Byron Rumford, Sr., who had chosen to run for the state Senate. Otho had nurtured his political ideas in the Afro-American Association . In the campaign, which was to be joined and won by then Berkeley School Board President John J. Miller, Green was to introduce for the first time the element of what might be called "Black populism" into local political debate. I only knew John Miller casually. I respected the fact that when 1 was a law student at Boalt Hall he was kind enough to stop long enough to discuss the law with me--something I found very rare among Black practitioners of that time. While I was in law school, John had taken me on a tour of Tom Berkley's law firm, with which he was associated and had introduced me to Tom Berkley thus beginning an association that I was to greatly cherish later on . It was not difficult for me to choose sides in the Green-Miller race, for Otho had been a very close personal friend, and as a result of our five years of camaraderie in the Afro-American Association and the streets of San Francisco, I knew intimately his views and political ideology. On the other hand, it was clear to me that John Miller was heir apparent to the establishment's mantle in the 17th Assembly District race, and thus I viewed his politics as an extension of "Negro" politics, a politics of which the Afro-American Association had prop- erly taught me to be contemptuous. As a result of my having met and become a friend of Tom Berkley, I was given the opportunity to write a weekly column in the Berkeley Post, the news- paper he owned and published. The column was entitled, appropriately, the "Hopkins Report, " and I used it as a forum to think out loud, in a style that often mimicked James Reston, on political and social currants in the Bay Area and the nation. Of course in the context of the i9b6 elections, I was to use the column as much as possible within the boundaries of reasonable subtlety, to pro- mote the Otho Green candidacy . There was a particular column that for a time I honestly regretted writing. I will quote from it here in order to put the ideological developments within the Black community at the time, as I saw them, in perspective: In the 17th Assembly race, Otho Green repre- sents an effective people's candidate . Though he has the virtue of color, he has a good deal more in terms of training and experience in politics and poverty. Ha is comfortable among his people. He attends their churches, walks along their streets, and knows scores by their first namos due to a life- time of association in the community.