The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
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The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822373537 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/17/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Revolution Has Come
Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
By Robyn C. Spencer
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7353-7
CHAPTER 1
SEIZE THE TIME
The Roots of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California
In 1944 the Observer, a local white newspaper in Oakland, bemoaned the "new race problem" caused by "the influx of what might be called socially-liberated or uninhibited Negroes who are not bound by the old peaceful understanding between the Negro and the white" and who insisted on "barging into the white man and becoming an integral part of the white man's society." This comment came on the heels of a railroad station brawl between black and white servicemen and civilians that had turned into a full-scale race riot involving two thousand people. World War II had unleashed the winds of change in Oakland, but the problems of race were hardly new. During the war thousands of African Americans migrated to Oakland from Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and other southern states. Drawn by the promise of work in war industries, these migrants swelled the city's black population from 8,462 in 1940 to over 20,000 four years later. They transformed West Oakland, a magnet for 85 percent of Oakland's black population, into a bustling, vibrant community complete with its own retail corridor that became known as the "black downtown." These migrants had a profound impact on racial politics in Oakland. Spurred to action by a growing collective consciousness and sense of empowerment as well as visceral experiences of racial discrimination, they challenged the fragile racial balance between the historic black community and the white majority. Their struggles against racism, housing discrimination, poverty, educational inequities, and police brutality in the postwar period would radicalize a new generation of activists who were, literally and figuratively, their children. This new generation would come of age politically as part of the nationwide upsurge of civil rights, social justice, and antipoverty activism in the 1960s.
The Black Panther Party was part of this groundswell. Founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, children of migrants from Louisiana and Texas, the BPP would grow to over forty chapters and branches and become one of the leading organizations of the Black Power movement. The roots of the Panthers lay in the responses of African Americans to the economic inequities and racial indignities of postwar Oakland. Postwar demobilization displaced working-class blacks from the toehold they had been able to gain in shipbuilding and other defense industries. Manufacturing jobs disappeared as trucks replaced ships and trains as the major commercial freight carriers. Some African Americans were able to find work on railroads and docks, in local canneries, government installations, and, to a lesser extent, in domestic service. However, overall economic depression, high unemployment, underemployment, and low wages were the economic fate of many blacks in this period. These structural economic conditions and visceral experiences of racism combined with the limitations of government initiatives such as urban renewal and the War on Poverty in the 1960s to galvanize Oakland's black working class.
The emergence of the BPP is the story of this uprising. It reflects the attempt of the poor to organize for social justice, economic and political transformation, and cultural self-determination. It is the story of individuals: Newton and Seale and the comradeship that developed between them as they journeyed down intersecting paths of political exploration; local activists like Mark Comfort, who laid the groundwork for grassroots black activism before the BPP; regional activists in Los Angeles and Berkeley whose struggles reverberated locally; and the many rank-and-file members who would swell the Panthers' ranks. While some members would come from Oakland's grittiest streets and were politically inexperienced, others were veterans of Oakland's civil rights struggles, student activists from local community colleges, high school students who had participated in boycotts, and former members of Oakland's many local black nationalist formations. They were united by their sense of purpose, collective identity, and commitment to seize the time.
THE FLATLANDS
The Black Panther Party was born of the problems and potential of Oakland's flatlands, a region within the city that was defined by both topography and politics. Historically, flatlands neighborhoods included West Oakland and downtown Oakland as well as East Oakland — a middle-class area that was racially diverse and contained majority-white neighborhoods in the foothills — and Fruitvale, the core of the Mexican community. However, in the postwar period segregation and exclusion made the term flatlands synonymous with the poorest and most dispossessed areas of the city that were hardest hit by Oakland's economic downturn. In March 1966 the inaugural issue of the Flatlands newspaper editorialized that race, class, and place determined whether you experienced Oakland as "the all-America city" embodied by the upscale lifestyle of Oakland's hills or as the "city of pain," experienced by the largely black and brown residents of the flatlands. The editorial's message of crisis-level socioeconomic conditions and gaping disparities of wealth was delivered alongside a message of hope: the flatlands were both the spatial expression of oppression and a crucible for resistance. They were a place that "spill[ed] over with people" and "stank with decay" and where "things were getting worst," but that also had the potential for transformation if residents would unite to fight back and declare, "We're not taking it anymore." Founded by a group of local black activists, the Flatlands reflected, nurtured, and reported about this spirit of mobilization. The editorial urged action: "We've got to decide what to do. If we're going to change things around this city, we're going to have to change ourselves too. ... This is a challenge for you [the poor] as much as for the people who sit up high and let things go on as they are."
The economic underdevelopment of the flatlands was not accidental. The downturn there was tied to structural economic transformations, institutionalized racism, and government policies in the postwar period. By 1946 more than half of the black families in Oakland lived in the flatlands in overcrowded government housing constructed in 1942 as temporary shelters for incoming workers drawn to the war industries. White property owners would often refuse to rent or sell to "minorities," and racial discrimination in the private market hindered the ability of blacks to spread out into other locales. Zoning restrictions and restrictive covenants barred black people from model suburbs created by federally sponsored wartime construction programs, and the banking industry practiced discriminatory policies in allocating real estate loans. A 1965 survey of real estate brokers starkly revealed the constellation of discriminatory practices that reinforced the residential color line: "refusing to open listings to Negro brokers, block-busting, outright refusal to sell or rent to minorities, fast-talking or shaming a client out of the desire to buy or rent, raising the fear of being unwelcome, soliciting neighborhood opinions on race, charging higher interest rates, higher prices, and more discount points, and giving shorter loan terms."
By 1966 Oakland had become a segregated city: whites had left neighborhoods in East and North Oakland and run for the hills and the foothills. With few other choices, middle-class African Americans spread into East Oakland locales that were increasingly abandoned by whites. An estimated 100,000 white middle-class homeowners left Oakland between 1950 and 1960 and were replaced by black and Chicano renters. Between 1960 and 1966, while the white population in Oakland decreased by 36,000, the black population increased by 33,500 and there was a dramatic increase in the number of Japanese, Korean, and Filipino residents.
Residential segregation was not just a result of discrimination in the real estate and home finance industry; it was reinforced by local and federal government. Suburbanization was aided by the availability of inexpensive housing and the relocation of jobs outside of the city, while transportation projects had a devastating impact on the West Oakland economy. Ferry service for train passengers arriving in Oakland and crossing over to San Francisco declined in the 1950s, and train service to Oakland was discontinued altogether in 1958, resulting in the loss of a traditional source of employment for blacks. The Nimitz Freeway, completed that same year, cut through the heart of West Oakland, dividing it in half and destroying many homes and businesses in the process. The black downtown, the economic center of the West Oakland community, never recovered from these losses.
While federal and local initiatives would prove detrimental to all flatlands neighborhoods, West Oakland was hardest hit. City Council's designation of West Oakland as a "blighted area" in 1954 meant that it was targeted for "revitalization" projects, which had a devastating impact on the community. Local government agencies destroyed many units of low-rent housing without providing affordable replacements. Between 1946 and 1966 fewer than four hundred units of public housing were built in Oakland. During the same period over seven thousand units — the vast majority of which were in high-poverty areas — were eliminated. Of the 2,334 new single-family dwellings constructed between 1960 and 1965, 1,716 of them, or over 73 percent, were built in six of the lowest-density and highest-income census tracts in the city. In contrast only ten new single-family houses were constructed in the four most densely populated tracts in West Oakland during the same period. Forty-three percent of the new multiple-unit dwellings, 4,099 units in all, built between 1960 and 1965 were around the expensive Lake Merritt area. During the same period in West Oakland only 210 new apartment buildings were built. Poor people's only choice was public housing — less than 1 percent of the city's 146,000 housing units. It was a recipe for displacement, overcrowding, and homelessness. According to the Flatlands, West Oakland had become known as "Niggersville" by the mid-1960s.
Although "slum removal" and transportation projects were billed as mechanisms to improve Oakland's economy, they did little to stem capital flight. Oakland was not able to attract new profit-oriented corporations and growth industries. As early as 1935 the Oakland Chamber of Commerce had established the Metropolitan Oakland Area Program to encourage the development of industry outside of the city. As a result, from 1952 to 1962 Oakland, formerly the only major industrial center in the county, accounted for a mere 28 percent of the county's industrial investments. Established businesses and industries left the city in search of more attractive locales. The loss of companies like Cal Pak, which employed between one thousand and five thousand people seasonally, and Marchant Calculators and Nordstrom Value, which each had a workforce of approximately one thousand, had a devastating impact on the local economy. Eighty businesses left town or simply went bankrupt between 1958 and 1963. By 1975 one third of Oakland's manufacturing jobs were gone.
Government initiatives and an infusion of federal money were no panacea for flatlands residents. The War on Poverty, launched in 1964 by the federal Equal Opportunity Act, did little to change the material conditions of Oakland's poor. Eighty percent of all black people lived in War on Poverty target areas — East Oakland, West Oakland, North Oakland, and Fruitvale — "where the average age of the residents was lower, household income was lower and household size was larger than elsewhere in Oakland." The War on Poverty was administered by four poverty centers in the target areas, four Adult Minority Employment Project offices, and a large skills center — housed, ironically, in a building whose former occupant was a manufacturer that had moved to the suburbs. Sixty-three percent of $5,935,234, the total approved budget from 1964 to 1967, was slated for service, education, and administration. The majority of the job creation allocation, $1,886,354, went to the creation of temporary summer jobs through Neighborhood Youth Corps rather than address the long-term employment needs of the "hard-core poor."
Business interests dominated the Oakland Economic Development Council, the major governing body for poverty programs. Twenty-eight of the Council's forty members were appointed by the mayor. Oakland's poor communities had only twelve representatives, three members from each of Oakland's four Target Area Advisory Committee (TAAC) areas: East Oakland, West Oakland, North Oakland, and Fruitvale. African Americans complained that too many "fat cats" had administrative power over the program as compared to ordinary flatlanders. The Flatlands editorialized, "All this government money's has been pouring in — so's the poor can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But FLATLANDS can tell you how the poor see it; the poor say there isn't nothing that's been done."
Police brutality was a persistent problem in Oakland history, especially in the flatlands. Brutality was not simply a matter of isolated instances of individual police misconduct; it was a reflection of how racial inequalities permeated the maintenance of law and order. Oakland's police force was overwhelmingly white, and many were recruited from the Deep South. Despite the fact that the number of blacks rose from 5 to 35 percent of the city's population from the mid-1940s through the 1970s, black police officers were never more than 3 to 4 percent of the total police force. The police enforced the racial status quo, forcing blacks to either remain subordinate or face the consequences. In 1931 the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, which produced the very first federal review of the police, described Oakland as a place of "unjustifiable brutality by police towards citizens." One observer commented that the police would beat "a Black man within an inch of your life back in the late '30s and all through the '40s." During this period black residents often described the police as "cold blooded" and gave them nicknames such as "'Ass Kicking' Slim." In 1947 the Alameda County chapter of the National Negro Congress called for an end to the police's "campaign of terror and intimidation" in testimony in front of the City Council after a black woman's arm was twisted and her clothes torn during the issuance of a traffic citation. In June 1948 the Oakland Committee for Civic Unity recommended prohibitions on police use of "violence, abusive language, and other indications of improper respect, regardless of race, color, creed, and social or economic status." Despite the many charges of police misconduct and brutality in the 1940s, by 1950 not one officer had been suspended for using illegal force. By this time Oakland school authorities had begun to coordinate with social service agencies, including recreation agencies, police departments, and prisons, to monitor the behavior of youth defined as delinquent. This led to increased police scrutiny of black Oakland youth.
In January 1950 Oakland held the first hearings in the country that "brought a state investigating body into a certain community to specifically investigate the single charge of police brutality particularly directed towards racial groups." These hearings provided a voice for victims of police brutality and misconduct. Several local residents complained of brutality toward black men and harassment and disrespect aimed at black women, such as when women riding in cars with white male friends were accused of being prostitutes. The Bay Area Civil Rights Council testified that black Oakland residents "live in daily and nightly terror of the Oakland police department." Although Police Chief Lester J. Devine acknowledged that there was a problem of civility and issued orders that "police should no longer refer to Negroes as 'knotheads' and 'Jigs,'" he denied the existence of "systematic racial discrimination." The irony of Devine's comments was not lost on the majority-black audience. When he opined that the police force "compares favorably with that of any Police Department in the country," the crowd erupted in derisive laughter.
By the mid-1950s the prevalence of brutality charges against Oakland police led one newspaper to editorialize, "This treatment of Negroes in Oakland has become almost a tradition. It has happened to so many Negroes, over and over, without any action on the part of the department heads[,] the feeling has grown that Negroes can look for nothing better at the hands of the police." There were over twenty demonstrations protesting police violence in Oakland between 1965 and 1966, and the California Advisory Commission of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission heard testimony at local hearings.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Revolution Has Come by Robyn C. Spencer. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1
1. Seize the Time: The Roots of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California 7
2. In Defense of Self-Defense 35
3. Moving on Many Fronts: The Black Panther Party's Transformation from Local Organization to Mass Movement 61
4. Inside Political Repression, 1969–1971 88
5. "Revolution Is a Process Rather Than a Conclusion": Rebuilding the Party, 1971–1974 114
6. The Politics of Survival: Electoral Politics and Organizational Transformation 143
7. "I Am We": The Demise of the Black Panther Party, 1977–1982 177
Conclusion 202
Notes 205
Bibliography 241
Index 253
What People are Saying About This
"Tearing down myths and distortions on virtually every page, The Revolution Has Come is the first substantive account of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland chapter—the iconic gathering that birthed the party and held on to its very last breath. Robyn C. Spencer’s incisive attention to gender, state repression, black radical alliances, philosophical and ideological debates, and the organization’s long decline makes this one of the most original studies of the Panthers to appear in years."
"Using a wealth of interviews and extensive archival research, Robyn C. Spencer narrates the untold history of the Black Panther Party from the inside out. A wonderful storyteller, Spencer shines a light on both the incredible promise of the Panther programs and the overwhelming, coordinated repression of the government programs designed to destroy them. Equally revealing, she shows that the Panthers' organizational reaction to this repression contributed to their demise. Most important, Spencer threads the voices of Panther women, showing how their critical leadership, skills, and creativity sustained the organization. Beautifully written, this brilliant and groundbreaking work is important for young activists on so many levels."