[On October
15th, 1966, the Black Panthers were founded
in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton
and Bobby Seale. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of histories and
stories connected to the Panthers, leading up to a special weekend post on an
unfolding contemporary history that echoes the group’s activism and legacy.]
On the group’s
largely forgotten inspiration, and two reasons why it matters.
Before Newton
and Seale founded
the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense on that October day in Oakland,
they had written to another group, the Lowndes
County [Alabama] Freedom Organization (LCFO), for permission to use the
black panther image and name. The LCFO had been created in 1965 with the Black
Panthers as both an organizational nickname and an emblem, as illustrated
(literally) by the
letterhead highlighted here. (In between the two organizational creations, Marvel
artists Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had also created an African superhero by
the same name.) First organized as a follow up to a SNCC voter registration
project in the county (which was 80% African American but as of 1965 had
precisely zero registered black voters), the LCFO became a significant political
entity in its own right, fielding candidates for office in 1966 (and beyond) and
advocating for voting rights and other Civil Rights and Black Power goals
across the county and state. Yet because the Oakland Black Panthers would
become and remain far better known across the nation, the story of this
original Black Panther organization and its significant
role in the movement and decade has been minimized at best.
That history and
story of the LCFO is worth remembering on its own terms and in its own right to
be sure. But doing so also helps us better engage with two underappreciated
aspects of the Oakland Black Panthers, and especially with the group’s founding
identity. The Panthers are often explicitly connected to California, not just
as the literal location of their founding but as a new center of American and
African American community and life in the mid-20th century. Through
early actions such as their May 1967
march on the state capitol in Sacramento, the group certainly emphasized
their interconnections with the state. But at the same time, California’s
African American community had been substantially constituted by the Great
Migration, or what is sometimes called the
Second Great Migration as it took place more in the 1940s and 50s; Robert
Joseph Pershing Foster, one of the three individuals on whom Isabel Wilkerson
focuses in her wonderful The
Warmth of Other Suns, moves from Louisiana to California as part of
that migration. Linking the California Panthers to the earlier Alabama ones can
help remind us of that South-to-West trend and trajectory with particular
clarity.
Despite those
links, however, California was quite different from Alabama and the South, and
the Oakland Black Panthers reflected that difference in a striking way. From their
earliest iterations and actions (like that 1967 march on Ronald Reagan’s state house)
the Panthers carried guns, and indeed made their armed status a central part of
their identity and goals; to quote what one young member supposedly
said during that march, “We’re the Black Panthers. We’re black people with
guns. What about it?” There’s no doubt that those guns were a source of
controversy and (among many white Californians and Americans) consternation,
and contributed greatly to negative
responses to the Panthers from both the mainstream media and law
enforcement. Yet at the same time, I would suggest that if the LCFO, the Alabama
Black Panthers, had made bearing arms a central part of their organization, the
responses of the white community and power structure in Alabama and the South
would have been far more apocalyptic. (Look at how they responded to unarmed,
peacefully resisting protesters
like those in Selma, after all.) Better remembering these two organizations,
then, also helps us appreciate such regional and national distinctions and how
they contributed to the decade’s social movements and debates.
Next post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Panther histories or connections you’d highlight?
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