Bandung by the Bay: Revolutionary Nationalism Comes to Oakland

The San Francisco Bay Area was fertile ground for a movement that fused black nationalism with Third World anticolonialism and a radical critique of capitalism and the Cold War. Well before the advent of the BPP, a number of local groups were at work on the theory and practice of these various elements, though often in relative isolation. From C. L. Dellums and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (founded in 1926), through the battle to organize the waterfront in the 1930s and the diverse coalition behind the 1946 Oakland general strike, the Bay Area had a long tradition of cosmopolitan activism.4 The history of East Bay unionism included links with the CPUSA and other groups expressing larger critiques of capitalism and imperialism. BPP chief of staff David Hilliard recalls in his autobiography, “When I’m growing up, Communist Party members openly recruit at the docks and in union halls, and there’s no stigma attached to their ideas or practice. The political environment encourages the idea of internationalism; solidarity is the watchword, and we are surrounded by examples of people collectively asserting their power.”5 During the 1950s, Oakland was home to one of the most vibrant chapters of the CPUSA-affiliated Civil Rights Congress (CRC), which petitioned the United Nations to charge the U.S. government with genocide for its treatment of African Americans. In the early 1960s, local PL representatives joined the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and the UC Berkeley chapter of the CPUSA’s W. E. B. Du Bois Club in staging Bay Area rallies and offering a critique of capitalism and its role in the systematic exploitation of domestic communities of color and Third World people. As historian James Smethurst observed, one result of the Bay Area’s long and relatively continuous history of radical activism was that “the public campaigns and organization of the Left were a part of the cultural memory of young Black militants in ways that were unusual elsewhere.”6

The Bay Area also had close connections to the development of both the military industrial complex and oppositional movements that questioned U.S. Cold War policies. The industrial base and strategic location for staging men and material across the Pacific that had made the region so important during World War II (and drawn so many African Americans from the South in search of jobs) contributed to making the Bay Area a crucial cog in the Cold War military buildup that began with the Korean War and continued through the Vietnam War era. The region was home to numerous military installations and defense contractors as well as two universities, the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and Stanford, that helped create the scientific, technological, and intellectual architecture of U.S. Cold War strategy.7 Not coincidentally, the Bay Area also gave birth to a series of vibrant movements that questioned the logic of both the Cold War and U.S. actions in the Third World. As early as May 1960, students at UCB staged a dramatic public challenge to the domestic effects of the Cold War by interrupting hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in San Francisco.8 The escalating war in Vietnam, the continuing tensions between the United States and Cuba, and the fallout from the Congo crisis all played out in the streets of the Bay Area during the 1960s. The 1962 PL-sponsored rally in support of Cuba outside the gates of Merritt College is one example of the way in which developments in the Third World and U.S. foreign policy intersected with the development of the black freedom struggle in the East Bay. The Berkeley-based Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) led several high-profile marches attempting to close the Oakland induction center, and its November 1965 demonstration ended in DeFremery Park in West Oakland, which would soon become a hub for Panther organizing and rallies.9 Although anti–Vietnam War and Cold War–related activism in the Bay Area were often dominated by a combination of middle-class students and “socialist … white boys,” by virtue of sheer geographic proximity these demonstrations made an impact on the development of black activism in the East Bay during the 1960s.

Developing in parallel with primarily white antiwar activism on campuses and in the streets of the Bay Area was an emerging black nationalist scene. During the 1920s, Oakland had hosted a chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In the 1950s and 1960s, the Nation of Islam (NOI) had temples in San Francisco and West Oakland, and Malcolm X’s May 1961 visit to UCB (where he had to speak off campus due to opposition from the university administration) stimulated broad local interest in black nationalism.10 Among the local organizations that sprang up in the wake of Malcolm’s visit was the Afro-American Association. Founded by UCB law student Khalid al-Mansour (then known as Donald Warden) and a handful of others in 1962, the AAA encouraged the cultivation of black pride and self-reliance while rejecting the liberal civil rights movement’s emphasis on integration. Al-Mansour’s charisma and his emphasis on rediscovering the black past attracted young activists ranging from Newton and Seale to Ronald Everett, who would later found the US Organization in Southern California under the name Maulana Karenga, and future Oakland mayor Elihu Harris. Though primarily focused on promoting cultural pride and black capitalism in the tradition of Marcus Garvey, the AAA also drew links to contemporary anticolonial struggles in Africa. At rallies, reading groups, and on his weekly Bay Area radio show, al-Mansour frequently invoked figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, and Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta.11 Black nationalist organizations such as the AAA, meanwhile, coexisted with other formal and informal activism by people of color in the Bay Area. As scholar Jason M. Ferreira observed, “The notion of revolutionary Third Worldism was profoundly facilitated … [not only] by the sheer fact that many individuals within these Bay Area organizations had known each other for years,” but also because “Black and Brown and Yellow and Red San Franciscans were connected, by buses, by schools, by neighborhoods, by cultures, and ultimately by histories.”12

Public colleges and universities on both sides of the San Francisco Bay played a crucial role in nurturing a cosmopolitan strain of black activism in the early to mid-1960s. UC Berkeley was home to an NAACP chapter led by J. Herman Blake, who would later collaborate on many of Newton’s writings, including his autobiography. The UCB chapter distinguished itself by inviting Robert F. Williams to speak on campus in March 1961 at a time when he was out of favor with the NAACP’s national leadership. As with Malcolm’s visit later that year, Williams’s Bay Area appearance under the auspices of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) helped stimulate discussion about armed self-defense and the international dimensions of the black freedom struggle. The international orientation of black activism on the UCB campus was also fueled by the presence of a growing number of students from Ghana and Kenya during the early 1960s, an inadvertent side effect of U.S. Cold War policies aimed at using access to American higher education as a tool for winning support from these newly independent nations.13 Even predominantly white organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) played a role in spreading black nationalism at UCB. In October 1966 the Berkeley SDS chapter sponsored a major Black Power conference on campus that included an appearance by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) as well as local activists such as Mark Comfort.14 Across the bay at San Francisco State University (SFSU), the Black Student Union (BSU) fused the emerging West Coast Black Power scene with the more established East Coast Black Arts Movement. As part of a larger effort to expand the black studies curriculum and faculty at SFSU in 1966–67, the BSU invited Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Askia Touré to campus as visiting faculty. They would interact with local students, artists, and activists including Bobby Seale, George Murray, and Eldridge Cleaver (who would go on to become, respectively, chairman, minister of education, and minister of information in the BPP).15

Merritt College in North Oakland played the most important role in bringing from the classroom to the community the emerging fusion between urban black nationalism, anticapitalism, and Third World anticolonialism. Newton and Seale both attended Merritt in the early 1960s, and Newton later cited influences ranging from Marxism to the logical positivism of A. J. Ayers and the writings of Mao Zedong as examples of the ways in which the education he received there shaped his approach to black liberation.16 But it was Merritt’s location as a hub linking higher education, activism, and the surrounding black community in Oakland that accounted for its disproportionally influential role in the Bay Area Black Power movement. Though it had had few African Americans students when it opened in 1946 as a business and trade school, Oakland’s shifting demographics, combined with the effects of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, led to a rapid rise in black enrollment at Merritt during the 1960s. While nearby UC Berkeley remained out of reach for most black Oakland residents, community colleges like Merritt offered a more accessible alternative. With a 40 percent black student body by the late 1960s, it featured, in the words of historian Martha Biondi, “the largest concentration of Black students at a predominantly white institution in the United States.”17

The shift in the composition of Merritt’s student body led to corresponding pressure to revamp the college’s academic programs. The college offered its first black history course in 1964, and in the years to come student activism impelled the creation of one of the nation’s pioneering black studies programs.18 Unlike nearby UCB, where black students tended to be more isolated from both their peers and the surrounding community, Merritt was tightly integrated into the North Oakland neighborhood where it was located. Historian Donna Murch described the boundary between Merritt and the surrounding community as “completely porous,” with students and local residents mingling on campus and eating together at the school cafeteria. Joining this mixture of students and local residents was a diverse group of local and national organizations, including the NOI, the AAA, and PL, that took advantage of Merritt’s central location and ties to the community to stage rallies and recruit members.19

As a result of Merritt’s spatial and demographic situation, when students such as Newton and Seale read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth or The Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung they experienced them not as exotic foreign imports but as organically related to the activism and debate that took place on campus and as part of the Bay Area’s cosmopolitan Black Power and leftist scene. Newton recalled a seamless blending of classroom and street, with “rap sessions [taking] place all over, in cars parked in front of the liquor store on Sacramento Street near Ashby in Berkeley, outside places where parties were being held, and sometimes inside.”20 Figures such as Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Harold Cruse, and Robert F. Williams had wrestled with the challenge of reconciling their struggle at home and developments in the Third World with little in the way of examples to guide them. In contrast, young activists in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s not only had the precedents set by these pioneers to draw upon, but also a vibrant local environment in which to attempt to translate black nationalism and Third World anticolonialism into practice both at Merritt and beyond. As Murch observed, Merritt acted as a kind of proving ground where young activists not only developed skills and connections that they could then apply in the nearby community but also had a chance to exercise power in a way that would have been impossible in larger and more established institutions such as the NAACP, NOI, or Left/labor organizations such as PL.21

Starting in 1964, a small group of individuals affiliated with Merritt began to weave together the tangled threads of black nationalism, Third World anticolonialism, and anticapitalism, giving birth to a series of new organizations in the East Bay. Huey Newton is generally credited with being the driving force behind the creation of the BPP, but Bobby Seale also played a pivotal role in bringing revolutionary nationalism to Oakland. Born in 1936 in Dallas, Seale came to Northern California with his family during the 1940s. Dishonorably discharged from the air force in February 1959 following a confrontation with his commanding officer, Seale returned to Oakland and enrolled at Merritt while holding down a variety of jobs that ranged from metallurgical work on the Gemini rocket project to work as a standup comedian at local nightclubs.22 Although he identified as a supporter of the NAACP when he first met Newton in 1962, Seale subsequently rejected the liberal civil rights movement and joined al-Mansour and the AAA. Like Newton, however, Seale eventually found the AAA to be too conservative, and in 1964 he left to join a small, informal study group centered around black nationalism and Third World anticolonialism, a group whose members included Ernest Mkalimoto Allen, Mamadou Lumumba (Kenn M. Freeman), and Isaac Moore. Allen, who had also been a student at Merritt before transferring to UCB, took part in a PL-sponsored trip to Cuba. During his visit to the island in 1964, Allen had a chance encounter with Muhammad Ahmad and other RAM-affiliated activists who were there to visit with Robert F. Williams in exile. Inspired by this meeting, Allen returned to the East Bay and helped to transform what had been an informal study group into the Oakland chapter of RAM.23

RAM in Oakland had a small, mostly underground membership (Newton later characterized it as “more intellectual than active”), and its major contribution was in the realm of theory and ideology.24 Starting in late 1964, Allen, Lumumba, Seale and a handful of others began publishing Soulbook, a quarterly journal dedicated to “jazz, economics, poetry, [and] anti-imperialism.” Though nominally independent and attracting a wide range of contributors, Soulbook was tightly linked to Oakland RAM and followed the national organization in promoting revolutionary nationalism and Third World anticolonialism. In an editorial accompanying the first issue, Soulbook’s founders insisted that while “this Journal and all ensuing issues of it must be produced, controlled, published and edited by people who are sons and daughters of Africa,” their goals were not confined to promoting a parochial form of black nationalism. Rather, they insisted that it would ultimately require “a radical socio-economic transformation within the United States before the freedom of the Black man in the U.S., the Congo, and anywhere else … can be won and guaranteed for all time.”25 This linkage between black nationalism, socialist revolution, and the Third World was characteristic of the approach pioneered by Harold Cruse in the early 1960s and subsequently adapted by Muhammad Ahmad and other RAM leaders. Like them, the editors of Soulbook also offered an interpretation of the Cold War that cast the Soviet Union as “America’s clandestine ally” and “ ‘white’ as any Mississippi peckerwood,” while hailing Mao’s China for both the development of a nonwhite form of Marxism and for directly challenging the United States.26

Of particular significance to the development of black internationalism in the Bay Area and beyond was the way in which Soulbook integrated the Third World into a domestic context. Though by no means the first black publication to highlight the Third World, Soulbook was distinguished by the depth of its coverage—which went beyond current events to feature long, citation-packed pieces on subjects ranging from the history of Tanzania to the relationship between the United Nations and the former Belgian Congo and reports from the Tricontinental Conference in Havana.27 Soulbook also went to great lengths to let voices from the Third World speak for themselves, translating and publishing pieces by Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Senegalese intellectual and activist Cheikh Anta Diop and reprinting pro-independence statements from Puerto Rican nationalist leaders in both English and Spanish.28 In its very layout, Soulbook elided the differences between the black experience in the United States and the anticolonial struggles of the Third World. Rather than confining these voices to a separate “international” section of the journal, Soulbook’s editors intertwined news and opinions from the Third World with articles exploring the domestic issues facing African Americans. In similar fashion, the journal bridged the gap between cultural nationalists and socialist revolutionaries with poetry and plays by Black Arts Movement luminaries such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Carol Freeman, and Sonia Sanchez, dense doctrinal exegeses by former CPUSA member Harry Haywood, reviews of Mao Zedong’s writings, and works by such lesser known figures as future BPP minister of education George Murray.

Soulbook and the Oakland chapter of RAM played a crucial role in building the intellectual foundations of a Third World–oriented Black Power movement on the West Coast. Ultimately, however, both ventures suffered from many of the same tensions that characterized RAM’s operations elsewhere. For all of its internationalism, Soulbook offered little in the way of practical guidance on how black Americans might forge meaningful relationships with their brothers and sisters in the Third World. Like those of the national organization, Oakland RAM’s leaders often operated under the assumption that as the revolutionary vanguard inside the United States they would naturally win recognition and support from fellow world revolutionaries without the hard work of building relationships across languages, cultures, and societies. The most glaring unresolved issue that beset Soulbook and Oakland RAM, however, was how to translate ideology into action at home in the United States. While embracing what Kenn Freeman dubbed “Fanonismo” and declaring that “in the best tradition of the Bandung Conference … Afroamerica is more and more struggling to become DECOLONIZED,” Soulbook was generally silent on the question of how this might work at either a local or national level.29 Indeed, for all its eclectic content, Soulbook seldom touched on the issues that most directly affected the daily lives of the East Bay’s African American population. The inaugural issue, for example, featured a literary critique of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and an annotated bibliography on apartheid in South Africa but nothing about the chronic unemployment, poverty, and police brutality that plagued the neighborhoods surrounding the journal’s place of publication. And unlike the NOI’s Muhammad Speaks or the Black Panther newspaper, both of which succeeded in reaching a mass audience in urban African American communities, Soulbook’s dense and often citation-heavy prose limited its potential appeal to a select and highly educated few. Its most important contribution to the practical development of the black freedom struggle was indirect: Soulbook and Oakland RAM served as incubators for individuals who would attempt to apply revolutionary nationalism and Third World anticolonialism directly to the communities where they lived.

“Uncle Sammy Call Me Full of Lucifer”: Newton, Seale, and the Formation of the BPP

Born in 1942 in Monroe, Louisiana, Huey Pierce Newton was three years old when his family (which included his parents Walter and Armelia and his six older siblings) joined the thousands of African Americans who were drawn to the Bay Area by the World War II defense boom. The West Oakland neighborhood where Newton grew up was emblematic of the plight of African Americans in the urban West and North, as well as the failure of both government and the liberal civil rights movement to address the enduring structural issues of poverty, inequality, and institutionalized white supremacy. As deindustrialization erased wartime economic gains, most black Oaklanders found themselves with neither the means to follow the jobs into the white suburbs nor the political and economic clout to control the institutions in their own community. By the mid-1960s, the city’s African American unemployment rate hovered around 20 percent, and nearly half of the families in West Oakland lived below the poverty line.30 In addition to these economic woes, police brutality, political underrepresentation, decaying housing and infrastructure, and a lack of adequate schools, medical care, and other public services were among the daily problems confronting Oakland’s black population. It was, Newton later described, “almost like being on an urban plantation, a kind of modern-day sharecropping.”31

There was little in Newton’s early years to suggest that he would go on to become an international icon or, in the words of Bobby Seale, “the baddest motherfucker ever to set foot in history.”32 A rebellious student who had barely learned to read by the time he graduated from Oakland Technical High School in the late 1950s, Newton drifted into hustling and petty crime, including pimping, armed robbery, burglary, and credit card fraud. As a teenager, he was a member of a local gang known as “the Brotherhood” and won notoriety in the streets of West Oakland as a “bad dude” and fearless street brawler.33 He enrolled at Merritt (then called Oakland City College) in the fall of 1959, but the experience was not an immediately transformative one. “As soon as I finished my classes,” he later recalled, “I would go down to the block … and drink wine, gamble, and fight.” Newton studied law in large part to defend himself against the criminal charges that he confronted with some regularity in the early 1960s, including allegations of theft leveled by the dean of the college. He kept up this dual life as hustler and student until 1964, when he was sentenced to six months in prison for felony assault after stabbing a man with a steak knife at a party. Newton spent much of his sentence in solitary confinement, including the infamous “soul breaker” cell in the Alameda County Jail. He emerged on parole more disciplined and focused, returning to Merritt in 1965 just as it was becoming the epicenter of the Bay Area’s cosmopolitan Black Power scene.34

Prior to his time behind bars, Newton had drifted in and out of several of the groups that often uneasily coexisted as part of the Bay Area’s eclectic mix of black nationalism and leftist activism. In addition to occasionally attending local NOI mosques, he was briefly involved with the AAA but broke with the organization over al-Mansour’s conservative black capitalism and what Newton felt to be an unwillingness to engage with the practical issues facing the “brothers on the block.” Though Newton later praised al-Mansour for his emphasis on black pride and history, he was disillusioned with his “refusal to deal with the Black present.” Newton also attended PL meetings and signed up to take the same Cuban trip that inspired Ernest Allen to found the Oakland chapter of RAM, but he withdrew at the last moment. Though he embraced socialism while at Merritt after reading Marx and Mao, he found that PL was “just a lot of talk and dogmatism, unrelated to the world I knew.”35 Upon his release from prison, Newton reconnected with Seale and through him was introduced to RAM. Although this too proved to be a short-lived association, RAM’s fusion of black nationalism, socialism, and Third World anticolonialism was crucial in informing the later development of the BPP. The doctrine of revolutionary nationalism, as initially propounded by Harold Cruse and adapted by RAM in the mid-1960s, would become central to the identity of the Panthers. But it was what RAM was not willing to do in terms of putting decolonization into practice at the community level that inspired Newton to join with Seale in forming a new organization in October 1966.

The dispute that culminated in the formation of the BPP centered on the Soul Students Advisory Council (SSAC), a Merritt campus group formed in the mid-1960s. The SSAC organized students and local activists around the issues of building a black studies curriculum at Merritt and hiring more African American instructors and administrators. But while the demand for black studies was able to unite cultural nationalists, revolutionary nationalists, and even otherwise apolitical students, the issue of moving the group’s activities beyond the campus proved to be more divisive. Newton and Seale had sought a wider agenda for the SSAC from the beginning—at their suggestion the group’s first rally centered on the issue of black men being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.36 The turning point came in March 1966 when the two men were arrested following a public reading of Ronald Stone’s antiwar poem “Uncle Sammy Call Me Full of Lucifer” (which had recently been published in Soulbook) on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. Seale was standing on the table of a sidewalk cafe and loudly reciting the poem, which concluded with the ringing declaration “fuck your motherfucking self … I will not serve,” when police arrived and a scuffle ensued. Though the charges were later dropped, Newton and Seale used funds from the SSAC treasury to retain a lawyer. From this incident they took the notion that the group should put its resources to work on combating police brutality off campus. Several weeks after the Berkeley incident, Newton and Seale observed an African American being stopped on the street by police without apparent cause. They followed the officers back to the station and used SSAC funds to bail out the arrested man in the hope that doing so would create awareness of the student organization in the local black community.37

Building on their initial efforts to join antiwar activism, campus organizing, and community-centered protests against police brutality, Newton proposed that the SSAC stage a public demonstration outside the gates of Merritt College on Malcolm X’s birthday (May 19) while openly carrying firearms. The demonstration would not only serve notice to the Merritt administration but also impress the local community with the determination of the SSAC to stand up for all African Americans in Oakland. At the time of Newton’s proposal, however, the SSAC was increasingly dominated by RAM members who hoped to use it as a front group on campus. Following the line set by the national organization, Oakland RAM rejected actions such as that proposed by Newton as likely to bring unwanted attention, choosing instead to confine their operations to the realm of rhetoric and propaganda. After a contentious meeting, the RAM-dominated leaders of the SSAC rejected Newton’s proposal as “suicidal” and chastised both Newton and Seale for their use of funds from the group’s treasury. “The Soul Students Advisory Council, RAM, the Muslims, and the Afro-American Association were not offering these brothers and sisters anything concrete,” Newton later declared, “much less a program to help them move against the system.”38

“We Want Freedom”: The Ten-Point Program and Picking up the Gun

Having declared “Later for these dudes” to RAM, Soulbook, and the SSAC, Newton and Seale set about creating their own organization.39 On October 15, 1966, they sat in the library of the North Oakland Service Center and crafted a ten-point program for a new organization, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The party’s name and logowere borrowed from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), an Alabama group organized to run African American candidates for political office on an independent, all-black ticket. But while the LCFO inspired a number of activists outside the South to take up the panther name and iconography (including some RAM members in the Bay Area who formed their own version of the Panthers in 1966), the form and substance of the BPP’s ten-point-program owed its biggest debt to the pioneers of urban black nationalism in the North and West.40 Borrowing directly from a device employed by the NOI, the program included a list of demands (“What We Want”), each backed by a brief statement analyzing the situation facing black people in the United States (“What We Believe”).41 In substance, it was focused on the right of black communities to assert local control over housing, education, employment, police, and the justice system. Its first point—“We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black community”—echoed Malcolm X’s assertion in April 1964 that “[t]he political philosophy of black nationalism means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community.”42

On its face, the BPP’s foundational document appeared narrowly nationalist in orientation, sharing little in common with RAM’s celebration of the “Bandung World” and call for a global socialist revolution. In both rhetoric and substance, the ten-point program was overwhelmingly focused on the domestic problems facing urban black America. Of the ten points, only one was directly linked to contemporary international or foreign policy issues. In calling for African American men to be exempt from the draft, Newton and Seale insisted, “We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America.” While later revisions would add more overtly internationalist elements, the October 1966 version directly invoked only two sources of authority in legitimating its demands: the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.43 Figures such as Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and Patrice Lumumba, who would later dominate the Panthers’ rhetoric and iconography, were absent from the BPP’s charter. Absent too were explicit invocations of Marxism or Maoism and a coherent critique of capitalism. Though condemning “the robbery by the white man of our black community,” the ten-point program was not explicitly anticapitalist, instead taking the form of a broad call for “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace” without endorsing any specific doctrinal approach.44

Newton later characterized the BPP in these early years as “just plain nationalists or separatist nationalists,” and this explanation has been accepted uncritically by a number of scholars.45 In fact, despite the relatively narrow focus of the ten-point program, Newton and Seale were deeply immersed in the black internationalism that characterized ventures such as Oakland RAM and Soulbook from the very beginning. In particular, they embraced the notion of black Americans as a colonized people (rather than citizens denied their rights) whose struggle for freedom should be modeled on that of Third World revolutionaries rather than the reformism of the liberal civil rights movement. Building on the work of RAM and other Black Power pioneers, including Malcolm X and Harold Cruse, the Panthers offered an international analysis of race and racism in which capitalism played a mutual constitutive role with white supremacy at home and abroad. “The white racist oppresses black people not only for racist reasons,” declared Newton in May 1967, “but because it is also economically profitable to do so.”46 This equation was not unique to the United States or to black people. In a statement prepared for a 1967 demonstration at the California State Capitol in Sacramento, Newton linked the plight of African Americans in Oakland and the nations of the Third World to “the fact that towards people of color the racist power structure has but one policy: repression, genocide, terror, and the big stick.”47 Thus, even as they focused their actions locally, from the very beginning the Panthers situated themselves as part of a global struggle against capitalism and white supremacy. Where Newton and Seale broke with RAM and the SSAC was over how to translate this ideology into practice at the local level.

RAM and its various chapters, front groups, and publications primarily focused on a middle-class, educated audience, a strategy that flowed naturally out of its origins as a student group. Though RAM chapters attempted to engage with the local community in the early 1960s, the group’s decision to go underground in 1965 restricted its visible operations to the publication of journals and pamphlets that had limited appeal outside a select group of already committed activists.48 In forming the BPP, Newton and Seale had a very different audience in mind. While hailing figures such as Mao and Che Guevara as “kinsmen” and declaring that “the oppressor who had controlled them was controlling us, both directly and indirectly,” Newton wrote in his autobiography that BPP leaders “did not want merely to import ideas and strategies; we had to transform what we learned into principles and methods acceptable to the brothers on the block.”49 In an example of the way in which the local interacted with the international in the formation of the party, Fanon provided an important intellectual justification for this approach. As Seale described it, “Huey understood the meaning of what Fanon was saying about organizing the lumpen proletariat first, because Fanon explicitly pointed out that if you didn’t organize … the brother who’s pimping, the brother who’s hustling, the unemployed, the downtrodden, the brother who’s robbing banks, who’s not politically conscious … that if you didn’t relate to these cats, the power structure would organize these cats against you.”50 The Panthers in their early incarnation appeared to be “just plain nationalists” in large part because they deliberately downplayed their internationalist influences while seeking to reach a local audience.

Guns played the most visible role in the Panthers’ early efforts to move beyond study groups, campus activism, and academic-style publications in appealing to “the poor, uneducated brothers off the block.”51 In a piece entitled “Guns Baby Guns” published in an early edition of the Black Panther newspaper, Newton captured the party’s early focus on firearms as both a tool and symbol:

The inspiration for this strategy came from a variety of sources, especially Malcolm X’s rhetorical embrace of armed self-defense and the practical examples provided by Robert F. Williams and the armed civil rights groups such as Louisiana’s Deacons for Defense and Justice. Seale and Newton also invoked both the anticolonialism of the American Revolution and the constitutional protections of the Second Amendment in claiming the right to bear arms.53 In a 1967 article, scholars Aristide and Vera Zolberg observed that groups such as the Panthers were tapping into the old American archetype of the Minuteman, suggesting that “[t]he Molotov cocktail is but a McLuhanish extension of his self through a new medium, gasoline. The adoption of this role-model by the Negro is the greatest proof yet that the Negro is an American.”54 In the case of the BPP, however, these domestic inspirations coexisted seamlessly with examples provided by Third World guerrilla movements. In addition to Fanon and his emphasis on the violent nature of decolonization, Newton also cited “Brother Mao Tse-Tung” as well as the example of the Vietnamese NLF in explaining the BPP’s decision to “pick up the gun” in the first year of the party’s operations. “Mao and Fanon and Guevara all saw clearly that the people had been stripped of their dignity,” Newton later explained, “not by any philosophy of mere words, but at gunpoint. They had suffered a holdup by gangsters, and rape; for them, the only way to win freedom was to meet force with force.”55

In a local context, Newton and Seale’s prominent display of firearms in promoting the BPP stemmed primarily from a belief that such actions were the most effective way to spread their message of anticolonialism among a working-class African American audience unlikely to ever pick up an issue of Soulbook, attend a clandestine RAM meeting, or wrestle with a translation of The Wretched of the Earth. In explaining their plan for an armed demonstration that ultimately led them to break with the SSAC, Newton described guns as “a recruiting device”:

The party’s first weapons came from Japanese American activist Richard Aoki, “a Third World brother we knew [who] … had guns for a motherfucker: .357 Magnums, 22’s, 9mm’s, what have you.”57 The way in which Newton and Seale expanded this initial arsenal was indicative of their commitment to blend their international influences with their perception of local conditions in the East Bay. Though strongly influenced by Mao’s concept of “people’s war” and his non-Western interpretation of Marxism, Newton concluded that parroting Maoist rhetoric was not the best way to recruit the “brothers on the block.” Rather, he and Seale “initially used [Mao’s] Red Book as a commodity” by selling it to “[white] radicals on the campus” at UC Berkeley in order to raise money to buy guns. As Seale explained it, “at first the guns would be more valuable and more meaningful to the brothers on the block, for drawing them into the organization; then in turn we taught them from the Red Book.”58

“Patrolling the Pigs”: Anticolonial Activism in the East Bay, 1966–1967

Between the weapons provided by Aoki and shotguns purchased at a local department store with funds raised through sale of the Red Book, Newton and Seale were able to amass a small arsenal not long after founding the BPP in October 1966. But while they could draw on a rich vein of domestic and foreign sources to legitimate their embrace of the gun as recruiting device, the BPP’s founders faced a greater challenge in figuring out how to implement it into the daily operations of their new party. From the beginning, there were tensions and potential contradictions in the BPP’s attempts to apply anticolonialism at the local level. The party’s original name (the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) and Newton’s signature column in the BPP newspaper (“In Defense of Self-Defense”) were indicative of a carefully delineated approach to the use—or threat—of violence. This relatively cautious attitude carried over into the Panthers’ early operations in the East Bay. Newton not only invoked constitutional protections for the carrying of firearms but also insisted that BPP members pay strict attention to California gun codes in handling and displaying them.59 The party’s early emphasis on self-defense and attention to legal detail were hardly the hallmark of an armed insurrection. It is difficult to imagine Algerian freedom fighters, the NLF, or Che’s guerrilla focos consulting and abiding by local guns laws in conducting their operations. Indeed, one of the early critiques of the BPP raised by RAM members in Oakland was that by openly displaying firearms, Newton and Seale were inviting state repression without a corresponding military or political plan for seizing power.60

Responding to RAM criticism, Newton not only reaffirmed the Panthers’ commitment to revolution but also directly invoked the examples set by Castro and Che in Cuba as well as “the revolution in Kenya, the Algerian Revolution, Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the Russian Revolution, the works of Chairman Mao Tsetung, and a host of others.” In an early editorial in the BPP newspaper, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution,” he positioned the party’s decision to display firearms in an open and legal manner as only the first step in a larger campaign. Acting as a “Vanguard Party,” the Panthers would initially employ their guns in order to “raise the consciousness of the masses through educational programs and certain physical activities the party will participate in.” Avoiding acts of spontaneous and unorganized violence such as the Watts uprising (which Newton criticized as lacking direction), the BPP would build a base of support through aboveground activities such that when finally driven underground they would have already created the nucleus for a well-organized guerrilla army, which could then move against the power structure militarily. When the time came, “guns and defense weapons, such as handgrenades, bazookas, and other necessary equipment, will be supplied by taking these weapons from the power structure, as exemplified by the Viet Cong.” Using this logic, Newton concluded that the government oppression unleashed by the party’s public organizing efforts would actually be beneficial in the long run as, “the greater the military preparation on the part of the oppressor, the greater is the availability of weapons for the black community.”61

The most visible of the Panthers’ early attempts to employ firearms as way of mobilizing and educating the black community was a tactic that Newton and Seale dubbed “patrolling the pigs.” Armed with loaded weapons and a stack of law books, the two men drove around their West Oakland neighborhood and conspicuously followed Oakland police officers as they conducted their business. Attempts to monitor police conduct in black neighborhoods were not new. The Oakland chapter of the Civil Rights Congress had protested police brutality in the 1950s, and the more recent example of the Community Action Patrol (CAP) in Los Angeles had directly inspired Newton and Seale to focus their attention on the daily operations of the Oakland Police Department (OPD).62 But Newton and Seale’s decision to openly carry weapons, as opposed to the notebooks and two-way radios employed by CAP, marked a crucial difference in their underlying strategy. In “patrolling the pigs,” Newton and Seale went beyond defending their homes or protecting peaceful civil rights protesters to directly confront the exercise of police power in black neighborhoods. In doing so, they made both symbolic and material contributions to the development of an indigenous anticolonialism that linked older traditions of black nationalism with the insights of Fanon and other inspirations from the Third World.

An early account of the BPP’s police patrol operations by Ramparts magazine correspondent Gene Marine captured their ability to simultaneously highlight the violence of the state and offer local residents a counter-example of practical anticolonial organizing. Recounting an incident in which Newton and Seale refused to back down when several squad cars of police challenged their right to brandish their weapons, Marine observed:

This was a dramatic example of Newton’s strategy of using guns as way to “educate through action,” translating the militant anticolonialism articulated by RAM and in the pages of Soulbook into actions aimed squarely at the “brothers on the block.” Invoking the Cuban revolution, Newton explained that “Che and Fidel … could have leafleted the community and they could have written books, but the people would not respond. They had to act and the people could see and hear about it and therefore become educated on how to respond to oppression.”64

The symbolic importance of “picking up the gun” has attracted widespread attention from scholars of the BPP. But as originally envisioned by Newton and Seale, “patrolling the pigs” was only the prelude to a series of actions aimed at expanding the party’s reach in the local community and beyond. The initial goal of the BPP’s police patrols was to educate and recruit within the East Bay’s black communities. Ultimately, however, the BPP would mobilize “black people … under well organized machinery” in order to “smash police terror and domestic colonialism, and to shatter the war-mongering racist foreign policy that holds the rest of our Third World brothers and sisters in a vicious bind.”65 This dual program of remaking American society while linking African Americans with the Third World was drawn directly from the ideology of revolutionary nationalism espoused by RAM and its various organs earlier in the decade. The BPP distinguished itself, however, not only by its use of the gun as a recruiting tool but also by its early efforts at community-level organizing, which were intended to serve as a steppingstone to the more ambitious revolutionary goals that the party’s founders shared with RAM. The first of these efforts took place not in Oakland but in nearby Richmond, California.

Early in the morning of April 1, 1967, Denzil Dowell, was shot in the back and killed by a Contra Costa County sheriff who had pursued him in connection with a suspected burglary in North Richmond. Dowell, a twenty-two-year-old African American man, was unarmed at the time of his shooting. Outraged by the killing and lack of police accountability, Dowell’s family contacted Mark Comfort, an Oakland community organizer, who in turn introduced them to the BPP.66 The Panthers initially responded by holding a protest rally in Richmond while openly displaying their firearms. In the months that followed, however, the BPP expanded its efforts into a larger campaign against “community imperialism” in Richmond. Rather than simply protesting the actions of local police, the Panthers challenged the “abject, colonial status” of North Richmond in which “the power structure taxes them while allowing them no representation.” In response, they sought “in the interest of black people to incorporate the area into an independent city that will not be at the cruel mercy of the racist swine, the bloodsucking parasites, who are content to allow black people to wither away.” By incorporating, the residents of North Richmond would “be in control of their own police force, their own school system, and they will have the power to tax the businesses in the area, like Standard Oil Company.”67

On the surface, the BPP’s campaign to incorporate North Richmond fit comfortably into a tradition of urban black nationalism with roots as far back as Marcus Garvey’s UNIA and more direct links to the NOI and figures such as Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, and James and Grace Lee Boggs. Certainly there was nothing inherently revolutionary about the claim, as expressed in the Black Panther newspaper in May 1967, that “[t]he core city is becoming more and more heavily populated by black people; as a result… . [h]e will be able to elect political representatives and he will be able to hold such political representatives accountable to the black community.”68 What distinguished the Panthers’ early efforts at community organizing from previous examples of urban black nationalism, however, was the way in which they contextualized them against a larger international backdrop. From the beginning, the BPP’s call for black self-determination at the local level drew on connections to other anticolonial struggles. “In this day and time, when oppressed people all over the world are moving to improve their lives,” asserted BPP minister of information Eldridge Cleaver in June 1967, “there is absolutely no good reason why the people of North Richmond can’t significantly improve their lot by taking steps to incorporate an independent city.”69

The Panthers also linked local self-determination in places such as Oakland or North Richmond to the larger goal of remaking American society as a whole. While incorporating North Richmond and similar efforts at local self-determination would have immediate benefits for the residents in terms of increased control over city services and functions, these liberated communities would also serve as the nucleus for a larger revolutionary movement. Newton argued that as black Americans lacked substantial economic or political clout, they should embrace a form of military power, “arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community, throughout the nation.”70 In leveraging the gun as a way to organize and assert power on a local level, the BPP would slowly build the basis for a larger revolutionary movement centered in urban, black America. Picking up a theme advanced by RAM and Robert F. Williams from exile earlier in the decade, Newton insisted that “America can not stand to fight every Black country in the world and fight a civil war at the same time.” Building one community at a time, the Panthers would ultimately be poised to move both politically and militarily to dismantle the American Empire from within.71

“The Hour of Doom”: Sacramento, the Mulford Act, and the Limits of Self Defense

In the six months following its formation in October 1966, the BPP made significant strides in advancing the work begun by RAM and its various front organizations. Combining street theater with acts of personal courage and community organizing, Newton and Seale helped to bring revolutionary nationalism and Third World anticolonialism to the streets of the East Bay. With their guns, striking uniforms (black beret, black leather jacket, and powder-blue shirt), and acts of individual bravery, the Panthers succeeding in reaching the “brothers on the block” in ways that more cerebral organizations such as RAM and Soulbook were never able to manage. The BPP’s operations, including their efforts to sell Mao’s Red Book on the UCB campus and at local antiwar demonstrations, also drew attention from white students and activists, opening up the possibility of alliances beyond the black community. But for all their initial successes, by April 1967 the nascent BPP was in the midst of a crisis that threatened its continued existence.

Though they were more successful than RAM in raising their public profile in the black community, the Panthers still struggled to gain members. The dramatic actions that drew attention from the local community also set the bar for membership at a level too high for most black residents of the East Bay. While they might admire Newton and Seale’s courage, few Oakland residents were willing to pick up the gun and join them in facing down the OPD. The BPP’s small base of perhaps forty members (not all of whom were active at any one time) was not necessarily critical. Newton self-consciously positioned the Panthers as a vanguard party that would lead by example rather than as a mass-membership organization. But even on those terms, the party struggled to gain traction for much of the first year of its existence. Neither the police patrols nor the BPP’s early efforts at community organizing ended up producing much in the way of tangible accomplishments. Panther demonstrations did convince the city of Oakland to place a new stoplight at a dangerous West Oakland intersection, but other than that they had little to show for their efforts.72 As Harold Cruse had warned some years earlier in reference to Robert F. Williams, guns might succeed in grabbing attention, but short of a full-scale insurrection, which the BPP was not prepared to initiate, they were not particularly useful for accomplishing practical goals such as ending police brutality or gaining control over city services.73 The BPP also struggled during its early operations to draw meaningful links to nations, movements, and individuals outside the United States. In reacting to what Newton believed to be the overly intellectual approach of RAM and Soulbook, the Panthers did not dwell on the theoretical complexity of applying Third World anticolonialism in the context of the United States. Though BPP leaders were heavily influenced by thinkers such as Fanon and Mao in 1966–67, their preferred tactic of educating through direct action limited their ability to explicate the nature of the connections between African Americans and others in anticolonial struggles around the world.

With a thin base of local support and no practical ties to international or transnational allies, the BPP was highly vulnerable to state repression in 1966–67. As RAM leaders had predicted, the Panthers’ armed public demonstrations drew a swift counter-response. The most damaging blow took the form of a 1967 bill in the California legislature that prohibited the public carrying of loaded weapons by private citizens. The Mulford Act, named after conservative Alameda County representative David Donald Mulford, whose district encompassed parts of Oakland and nearby Berkeley, was aimed squarely at the BPP’s organizing efforts.74 The law made it difficult for the Panthers to continue operating as an aboveground, legal organization while simultaneously confronting the daily exercise of the state’s police power and planning for an armed rebellion. Newton had acknowledged from the beginning that such a development was inevitable, but the Mulford Act forced it on the party preemptively at time when it was unable to offer an effective response either in the form of massive public demonstrations or an underground military campaign. Newton responded with a high-stakes gamble.

On May 2, 1967, a delegation of thirty Panthers arrived in Sacramento. Led by Chairman Bobby Seale, a subset of the group clad in black leather jackets and berets and carrying loaded weapons marched toward the California State Capitol. Upon reaching the front steps, Seale read aloud Newton’s “Executive Mandate Number One” to a small crowd of reporters. Declaring that “the hour of doom” had arrived, Newton’s statement specifically targeted the Mulford Act and “legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless.” It also, however, sought to connect the BPP’s local efforts and larger historical and international developments by linking the contemporary treatment of black Americans to “the genocide practiced on the American Indians and the confining of the survivors on reservations … the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now the cowardly massacre in Vietnam.”75 Prompted by reporters, the Panthers went into the building itself and briefly appeared on the floor of the California State Assembly before being ejected by guards. Upon exiting, Seale read Newton’s statement again several times at the request of a growing crowd of print and television reporters before accidentally crossing paths with Governor Ronald Reagan, who was meeting “an eighth grade social studies class on the Capitol’s west lawn for a fried chicken lunch.” The governor beat a hasty retreat, prompting one Panther to cry, “look at Reagan run.” The Panthers then got in their cars and dispersed to a local gas station to prepare for the journey back to Oakland. It was there at the station that they were arrested by police and charged with various Fish and Game code violations, relating to their weapons, and conspiracy to invade the capitol building.76

The Sacramento demonstration catapulted the BPP from an East Bay neighborhood group to national notoriety. Television cameras captured dramatic images of the Panther “invasion,” while the press from coast to coast reported on the “grim-faced, silent young men armed with guns” and the “antiwhite Black Panther party … with bandoliers of shells draped across their shoulders.”77 An editorial in the Washington Post perhaps inadvertently reinforced the Panthers’ anticolonial analysis in declaring the scene at Sacramento to be “something … that could happen … only in the Congo or in Outer Slobovia.”78 For his part, Governor Reagan lamented the BPP’s action as “a ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of goodwill,” adding, “There’s no reason why a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons on the street today.” But while successful in garnering attention, the Sacramento demonstration did not offer an immediate solution to the problems besetting the Panthers. If anything, it led to increased public support for both the Mulford Act and a police crackdown on the Panthers. Newton later conceded that while “our tactic at Sacramento was correct at that time … it was also a mistake in a way.”79

The Mulford Act passed the legislature and was signed into law by Governor Reagan in July 1967. Even prior to the passage of the new law, the arrest of the Sacramento demonstrators and increased policy scrutiny tied up Panther resources and made it difficult to mobilize even small-scale patrols or protests. Kathleen Cleaver later recalled, “By then the organization [Newton] led had lost its cohesion, particularly after the Chairman [Seale] and other key Panthers started serving the six-month jail sentences they received for the Sacramento demonstration. The party had no funds to continue renting its storefront office in Oakland, and no meetings were being held.”80 Meanwhile, the increased police and media attention did nothing to stimulate the growth of the party at the local level. By October 1967, David Hilliard estimated that the BPP’s membership had fallen to as few as a dozen members.81 Having had little success with community organizing, forced to abandon the armed theatrics that had defined the party’s early operations, and unready to commit to underground guerrilla warfare, BPP leaders had little choice but to steer the party in a new direction in the aftermath of Sacramento. While guns would remain an important part of the Panthers’ image and public presentation, starting in mid-1967 the party began a shift away from direct action such as “patrolling the pigs” in favor of a new form of anticolonial activism.