[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 two sides to
the Panthers, and why they’re not as opposed as they seem.
As I wrote in
yesterday’s post, one of the founding elements of the Black Panthers was an
emphasis on guns, on being openly, heavily, and proudly armed. While that emphasis
was both legal and entirely understandable, it also led the group—as tends to
be the case with any
group defined so fully by firearms—to experience a number of violent
confrontations and tragedies within its first few years. Just over a year after
the founding (October 1967), Huey Newton
was arrested for allegedly killing a police officer; six months later
(April 1968), a group of Panthers led
by Eldridge Cleaver took part in a shootout with police officers, with
another founding member Bobby Hutton killed. Four months after that (August
1968), three more Panthers were killed in another gun battle with the police;
two months later (October 1968), another Panther was killed in the same manner;
and so on. Each of these incidents was unique and would require further investigation
and analysis before drawing any final conclusions, but there’s no doubt
that taken as a whole they (and many other events like them) reflect a group
caught up in, and to some degree contributing to, a culture of violence and
death.
In January 1969,
however, just three months after the October 1968 shootout, the Panthers’
Oakland chapter began a
program (housed at St. Augustine Episcopal Church) providing free breakfasts
for the city’s African American children. As that wonderful hyperlinked post by
Darryl Robertson on the African American
Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) blog details at length, the program
was the first of what would become many such breakfast programs around the
country, and of a much broader spectrum of initiatives that came to be known as
Survival
Programs. By the end of 1969 every city with a BPP chapter was running its
own breakfast program (the BPP’s national leaders had in fact mandated that all
chapters offer breakfast, with a minimum of at least ten workers and seating
for at least fifty people), and many had begun implementing other community-focused
Survival Programs as well. The Los Angeles breakfast program served an
estimated 1,200 children per week at its 1970s height (as recounted by LA
Panther Flores Forbes), to cite one particularly impressive example of the
program’s significance and success.
I don’t know
whether the Panthers who worked at these breakfast programs for children were
armed while they did so, but it seems likely to me that they were; given the
quantity of police shootouts, it’s also quite possible that some of the
breakfast servers had been involved in one or more of those violent
altercations. But despite the seeming contradiction between those two sides to
the group, I would argue that they also represent two threads of a single
pattern, one defined by a particular vision of community service. The express
reason for the Panthers’ emphasis on guns, after all, was to create citizens’
patrols that would monitor police actions and brutality in African American
communities. Perhaps it was inevitable that such an emphasis would also lead to
violence, but we cannot and should not use that result to discredit entirely
the idea that African American communities needed (if they do not indeed still
need) a level of internal, shared protection. In
that way, the Panthers’ emphasis on being armed comprised another Survival
Program, one responding to a crisis no less urgent than the hunger and poverty
that prompted the breakfast programs. Their response to that crisis was extreme
to be sure, and perhaps again destined to produce its own form of violence and
crisis—but it was inseparable from the rest of the Panthers’ work, and like all
that work cannot be dismissed.
Next post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Panther histories or connections you’d highlight?
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