THE BLACK PANTHER VIOLENCE AND AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE 1966-1974

Can we stop bullshitting about the Black Panther Party (for Self-Defense)? #TheBlackBourgeoisie has led all of us, who are under the condition of Blackness, into a fucking ditch. They said to get an education. Got one; and now, I owe #TheMan $200,000. They said to be nice and don't startle White folks and we could live. #ICantBreathe cause you niggas got your foot on my neck. Fuck the #WhiteMan, I wanna talk about you-- #SteveHarveys, etc.

"#FuckRonaldReagan... #Endquote: #EldrigeCleaver

Anyone who supported liked or likes Ronald Reagan was or is an enemy to the people. This fact has no end in part because Ronald Reagan was not the problem, his positioning to do so much damage was the fruit of a tree where #BlackBodies are sacrificed. Black is the condition that causes choking hazards {#IcantBreathe] and lead poisoning sanctioned by the local government with little or to no recourse for the victims. Since 1970s #BlackFolks have had alternatives to White supremacy, but the Black and Bourgeoisie told us if we hold our peace we could #OverCome.

On October 28, 1967, Huey Percy Newton and long-time friend Gene McKinney were on their way to Seventh Street, a soul-food restaurant in West Oakland, when they were pulled over by an Oakland police officer. According to Newton’s recollection, the story is as follows: Newton was driving a car registered to LeVerne Williams, a detail that the police officer seemed to overlook at first. The officer came up to Newton and sarcastically called him the “great, great Huey P. Newton .”[i] A second police officer then pulled up behind the first one and the officers began to converse. After a few minutes, the second officer went to Newton and asked to see his driver license. The officer called him Mr. Williams. “Mr. Williams?” Newton replied. “My name is Huey P. Newton, and I already shown my driver’s license to the first officer.”[ii] The officer then asked Newton to step out of his vehicle.

           Is this not a similar situation that ended in death for people under that condition of Blackness-- #SandraBland. Newton exited the vehicle and grabbed his law book on the way out, a habit he had adopted due to the frequency with which the police pulled over Black Panther Party members. He wanted to bring to the attention of the police officers any violation or misrepresentation of the law. Newton’s technique was not well received. When one police officer began escorting Newton towards the police cruiser, Newton responded to the order to go the squad car by opening his law book and saying, “You have no just cause.” The officer replied, “You can take that book and shove it up your ass, Nigger.”[iii]

A scuffle ensued. Shots were fired. In the aftermath, Patrolman John Frey of the Oakland Police Department was killed with one shot in his back and one in his knee. Patrolman Herbert Heanes was shot three times, but his injuries were not life-threatening.  Newton suffered a gunshot wound to his stomach and needed to get to a doctor right away. Newton and his friend found Dell Ross, a black man, nearby, and kidnapped him at gunpoint. According to Ross’s testimony to a grand jury, Newton told Ross to drive him to Kaiser Hospital in another part of town. In the end, Newton was charged with three felonies: the murder of Officer Frey, assaulting Officer Heanes and the kidnapping of Dell Ross.

In an article entitled, “Patrolman Killed in Coast Gunfight,” the Associated Press reported,

A young Oakland policeman was killed and a fellow officer and a leader of the militant Black Panthers were critically wounded today in a pre-dawn gunbattle in West Oakland. John F. Frey Jr., 23 years old, a patrolman for a little more than a year, died of three bullet wounds about an hour after the fight. Patrolman Herbert C. Heanes, 24 and Huey Newton, 25, self-styled “defense minister” of the Black Panthers, were wounded. Patrolman Heanes was shot in the chest, in one knee and one arm and Mr. Newton suffered an abdominal wound. He was placed under police guard in Kaiser Hospital. The police said a young woman was with Mr. Newton when Patrolman Frey, alone in his police cruiser, apparently stopped the car for a routine check. Patrolman Heanes, alone in another police car, came up and was standing by. Suddenly shots rang out. The two patrolmen fell and the police said Mr. Newton, despite his wound, fled with the woman. He later staggered in the hospital. The Black Panthers a black nationalist organization numbering about 40 in the Bay area, is the group that made an armed intrusion into the chamber of the state legislature in Sacramento last May 2.[iv]

There is only one point to be made with the above narrative. Dr. Newton survived because he fought back. But the Black and Bourgeoisie told us not to and where has that gotten us, the people under the condition of Blackness.

       In the summer of 1966, two young Black men in Oakland, California, founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The original six members were as follows: co-founder Dr. Huey P. Newton, co-founder Bobby Seale, Elbert "Big Man" Howard, Sherman Forte, Reggie Forte and Little Bobby Hutton. In November, Black Panthers began to patrol Oakland neighborhoods with loaded shotguns and other weapons, inspecting the police for the safety of the city’s citizens. Prior to the establishment of these patrols, Oakland police officers had shot and killed a young African American by the name of Denzil Dowell. For many of Oakland’s black observers, it was obvious that the young man had been murdered, for he had bullet holes in his armpit, which for them meant that he had his hands above his head.

The Panthers leaped at the opportunity to rally the public around this issue. They knew that Oakland’s entire Black population was aware of the many waves of abuse that took place in the hands of the police. In fact, the cause of black self-defense immediately increased the new party’s popularity in Oakland. But the real key to the Panthers’ early popularity may have been the sight of young and armed African-American men patrolling the streets. This image was a direct challenge to generations of media portrayals, images of black males as either passive or if aggressive soon put back in “their place” or brought to the “justice” of a public lynching. These images and stories of the black panthers would produce a large number of sensational, and, to many Americans, frightening stories in the popular media. People who believed in White supremacy paid non-White people {Bourgeoisie] to entertain and teach the people to be passive, hence the deification of Martin Luther King Jr.

How is that working out for us is 2019?          

The party’s real rise into visibility occurred as a result of these images and stories. Between November of 1966 and May of 1967, the Party members sparked mass attention with several prominent displays of loaded weapons during the Panther Patrols and in public places. On May 2, 1967, Newton sent twenty-three Black Panthers to the California State Assembly with guns in hand to protest a gun bill that would make it illegal to carry loaded weapons. The gun bill, called by many “the Panther bill,” was meant specifically to disarm the militant organization. Newspaper and television footage of these demonstrations produced what soon became recognizable as a Black Panther visual style: military poses, black leather jackets, arm-bands, dark sunglasses: which all suggested a new direction in the civil rights movement toward militancy.

Many historians as well as practically all media outlets, deify Martin Luther King Jr. for his “non-violent” approach to civil rights.[v]  Of course, the non-violence here refers primarily, and at times only, to members of King’s movement; in certain media depictions, it contains a hint of the old fixation on black passivity in the face of attack, on the heroics of black martyrdom. In fact, King’s movement was surrounded by violence, its followers scarred with wounds from attack dogs and nightsticks. The Black Power movement that followed King’s death, which is associated with the Panther movement, has proved much harder for historians to embrace or attempt to understand.[vi] The Reality is that #TheBlackBourgeoisie is officially irrelevant to liberation.

So, can we stop bullshitting about the #BlackPantherParty (for Self-Defense)? #TheBlackBourgeoisie has led all of us, who are under the condition of Blackness, into a fucking ditch. They said to be nice and don't startle White folks and we could live. #ICantBreathe cause you niggas got your foot on my neck. Fuck the #WhiteMan, I wanna talk about you-- #SteveHarveys, etc.

[i] Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 175.

[ii] Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 175.

[iii] Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 176.

[iv] New York Times, 29 October 1967, 86.

[v] Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: American in the King Years 1963-65. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999); David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., And The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Marrow & Co., 1986); Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Sacred Mission to Save America : 1955-1968. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2004)

[vi] As a whole, scholarship on the Black Panther Party is limited to biographies, autobiographies, and short histories of the Party. Meanwhile, very few offer a theoretical perspective that extends beyond the limits of being for or against the movement.