Living for the City Donna Jean Murch

Living for the City Donna Jean Murch Published by The University of North Carolina Press Murch, Donna Jean. Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/43989. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/43989 [ Access provided at 22 Mar 2021 17:39 GMT from University of Washington @ Seattle ] 5. MEN WITH GUNS In the aftermath of the Watts rebellions, the failure of community pro- grams to remedy chronic unemployment and police brutality prompted a core group of black activists to leave campuses and engage in direct action in the streets.1 The spontaneous uprisings in Watts called attention to the problems faced by California’s migrant communities and created a sense of urgency about police violence and the suffocating conditions of West Coast cities. Increasingly, the tactics of nonviolent passive resistance seemed ir- relevant, and the radicalization of the southern civil rights movement provided a new language and conception for black struggle across the country.2 Stokely Carmichael’s ascendance to the chairmanship of the Student Non- violent Coordinating Committee SNCC( ) in June 1966, combined with the events of the Meredith March, demonstrated the growing appeal of “Black Power.” His speech on the U.C. Berkeley campus in late October encapsu- lated these developments and brought them directly to the East Bay.3 Local activists soon met his call for independent black organizing and institution building in ways that he could not have predicted. In October 1966 several weeks before the Black Power Conference, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton began meeting to formalize the political platform for a new organization they called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Their earlier participation in Merritt College’s Black Studies movement forged networks of allies, as well as opponents, that shaped the local Black Power movement for years to come. After founding the BPPSD, New- ton and Seale downplayed their student origins and ongoing campus sup- port in favor of “brothers off the block,” who they celebrated as their base. This choice reflected their desire to not only include but also foreground the young people most excluded from traditional uplift and civil rights politics. At first glimpse, these two seemed unlikely candidates for leading a na- tionwide social movement. In 1966, Huey Newton was twenty-five, margin- ally employed, and a parolee.4 Bobby Seale was several years older, cycling 119 between day jobs, and working intermittently as a stand-up comic at a local nightspot.5 While their backgrounds precluded involvement in more traditional avenues of black politics, they became an essential asset in organizing the most disfranchised sectors of Oakland’s migrant community. Draw- ing on his own experience, Huey Newton developed an expansive critique of the state that spoke to the disappointment and grievances of Bay Area youth. A whole generation found itself displaced and burdened by the false hopes of southern exodus. They traveled to California with their parents to escape the poverty and brutality of the Jim Crow South only to find that the bountiful supply of industrial jobs that drew their families had disappeared. A segregated and hostile school system combined with law enforcement’s systematic campaign of harassment and containment relegated many to life at the social and economic margins.6 The Black Panther Party channeled migrant youths’ alienation into an organized program of self-defense and community service. The emergence of the Oakland-based BPPSD reflected both the particular conjuncture of Bay Area migrant communities and the changing nature of the southern civil rights movement in mid-decade. In the face of the federal government’s failure to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964, southern activists developed new strategies for asserting black political rights.7 In Jonesboro, Louisiana, the Deacons for Defense tapped into a long-standing tradition of armed self-defense to prevent the Ku Klux Klan and other white paramilitary groups from intimidating black citizens. Similarly, in Lowndes County, Alabama, SNCC workers organized a new political party to run black candidates for public office. Although Lowndes was simply an extension of SNCC’s voting rights campaign, the choice of a crouching black panther as their party symbol betrayed a new spirit of militancy. Lowndes workers broke with the earlier wisdom of nonviolent passive resistance by working with the Deacons for Defense, the Nation of Islam, and other volunteers to protect black activists and voters.8 In a fundraising tour in Los Angeles, or- ganizer John Hulett explained that African Americans “never had any pro- tection and today we aren’t looking for anyone to protect us. We are going to protect ourselves.”9 Significantly, both the Deacons and the Lowndes County Freedom Or- ganization (LCFO) had deep roots in black rural communities, not unlike those that many Bay Area migrants had so recently left. Their vision for black liberation resonated strongly with Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and other California activists. The midsixties witnessed a proliferation of Pan- ther parties throughout the West Coast, including the Black Panther Party 120 BLACK POWER AND URBAN MOVEMENT of Northern California, the Black Panther Political Party of Watts, and the Oakland-based Black Panther Party for Self Defense. These organizations emerged independently, linked only through the shared inspiration of the LCFO. The appeal of panther iconography was inseparable from the exis- tential struggle of migrant youth against police brutality and the new tech- nologies of incarceration that the Golden State pioneered.10 California led the nation in the scale and infrastructure of youth detention as well as the militarization of domestic policing. This tendency reached a crisis point in the aftermath of the Watts rebellions when the Los Angeles Police Depart- ment (LAPD) arrested over 5,000 people, many of whom were juveniles. The state response to Watts as much as the popular uprising itself did much to radicalize California’s urban communities in its wake.11 In this moment of crisis, black migrants looked to the South. In the East Bay, black political culture, like churches, music, and almost every dimension of postwar Af- rican American life, retained binding ties to a recent southern past.12 The East Bay’s Black Panther Party adapted the Deacons and Lowndes County’s model of armed self-defense to address the peculiar forms of racial violence and segregation of West Coast cities. Given the parallel migration of white southerners and their heavy representation in the ranks of the LAPD and the OPD, this leap was not a difficult one.13 Oakland—the Next Watts? Washington policymakers closely watched Oakland in the months after Watts. Following their lead, the Wall Street Journal published a series of ar- ticles on the city’s social and political life. To readers, it must have seemed surprising to see such a comparatively small city—only the fifth largest in California—receive such extensive coverage. However, it quickly became clear why this industrial suburb of San Francisco had attracted so much national attention. After Watts, federal policymakers drafted a confidential report examining conditions in cities across the country to see if the urban uprisings would spread. Oakland appeared at the top of the list, and the Wall Street Journal proclaimed the city a “racial tinderbox” on the verge of a social explosion. The question was whether the federal government could provide much needed relief while also financing the growing expenditures on defense. “It reaches to the heart of the ‘guns or butter’ problem that finds Presi- dent Johnson striving to scale down his costly Great Society plans, many of them designed to aid poor Negroes.”14 Perhaps more than any other metropolitan region, the San Francisco MEN WITH GUNS 121 Bay Area experienced the deep contradiction that underlay Johnson’s waning War on Poverty and the military escalation in Vietnam. Northern California’s postwar “Arsenal of Democracy” with its extensive military and defense infrastructure had been reinvigorated in the 1960s as a major point of disembarkation for the Vietnam War.15 The Oakland Naval Sup- ply Center, Alameda Air Station, and nearby Concord Naval Weapons Sta- tion processed seemingly endless supplies of military hardware, weapons, and men. As hundreds of thousands of soldiers passed through the Oakland Army Base and Airport, the vast expenditures on defense became a visible part of daily life.16 Awash in federal research and development dollars, U.C. Berkeley and Stanford provided the intellectual superstructure. In the San Francisco Bay Area, raw martial power and university expertise converged.17 Through regular demonstrations, Berkeley antiwar activists called attention to the military-industrial complex in their midst. Starting in October 1965, the Vietnam Day Committee sponsored marches from the Berkeley campus to the Oakland Induction Center to publicize its essential role in the Viet- nam War effort.18 Within less than a few miles of this military edifice lay ravaged West Oak- land, where nearly half of all families lived below the poverty line and a third relied on welfare for their survival.19 The Wall Street Journal claimed that the unemployment rate among black residents was five times that of the national average.20 In response, local activists demanded federal work relief to meet these “Depression-like” conditions. “What we need here is jobs, jobs, jobs, not training for no jobs,” explained one resident. Instead, they were told the money simply was not there.21 In conjunction with the vigorous black and white student movements sweeping Bay Area campuses, this situation represented potential social dy- namite, and Oakland city leaders were acutely aware of their vulnerability.

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