Читать книгу AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL - Lise Pearlman - Страница 14

We’re hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people.

— BOBBY SEALE

What made revolutionaries Huey Newton and Bobby Seale tick? How did they develop ideas that later attracted huge numbers of adherents? Robert George Seale was born on October 22, 1936, in Dallas, Texas, the first son of George and Thelma Seale. By the time Bobby turned seven, he had already learned how to shoot guns. He likely got his first practice on his grandparents’ 168-acre farm in Jasper, Texas, in the heart of the state’s historic Ku Klux Klan territory. Bobby’s mother, born Thelma Traylor, was an identical twin, one of sixteen farm children whose work ethic Bobby inherited along with her athleticism. Thelma was a star athlete at Jasper High School when she started dating George Seale.

Like many black youths of his generation, George Seale had dropped out of school after eighth grade, but he was good with his hands and became a master carpenter; he would pass those skills on to his two sons. George Seale often had trouble making ends meet and became abusive toward his family as his own father had been toward him. When Bobby was six, his father thrashed him for no good reason, an offense that he never forgot. Bobby also got his first lessons in exploitation from his father, who never paid him for any work he asked Bobby to do.

Thelma Seale left George more than once, raising her three surviving children with her twin sister and her sister’s son Alvin. Early in World War II, they moved from Dallas to San Antonio, where Mrs. Seale found work as a clerk at Kelly Airfield. By then George was back with the family. They decided to join the Great Migration, the mass movement of African-Americans from the rural south into big cities in the north. Bobby turned seven the year the family resettled in 1943 in subsidized rental housing in the Berkeley flatlands, just a few miles north of Oakland.

The Seales arrived in the Bay Area the year before the worst disaster of World War II to occur on continental United States soil: munitions improperly loaded by overhead nets onto cargo ships in nearby Port Chicago suddenly ignited on July 17, 1944, destroying two ships and adjacent docks. Five thousand tons of ammunition exploded less than twenty-five miles from where the family now lived, rattling windows fifty miles in every direction. The devastating accident annihilated 320 men, almost two-thirds of whom were African-American, and wounded over 400 others. It accounted for fifteen percent of all African-American casualties suffered on naval duty during the war. Outraged members of the African-American community believed the Navy and the U. S. government considered the workers to be expendable. The highly undesirable and manifestly dangerous task of handling explosives was assigned largely to untrained, predominantly black sailors in segregated units, working in conditions that many likened to a slave labor camp.

Hundreds of sailors, both white and black, refused to return to active duty in Port Chicago after the devastating explosion. Many of the resisting white sailors were transferred; none were prosecuted. Fifty blacks were tried for mutiny, a federal crime that could be punished by death. All were found guilty, but sentenced to hard labor and 15-year prison terms rather than death, most likely in light of the scathing national publicity stirred up by NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who sat in on that controversial court martial. The trial had taken place just west of Oakland on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. Outraged by what he saw, Marshall arranged to represent the convicted seamen on appeal. After the war, he succeeded in getting most of their sentences reduced significantly; it would take fifty years before the last surviving mutineer received a presidential pardon for his felony conviction. Yet behind the scenes the appalling incident quickly became a catalyst for change. As one historian put it, “U.S. government officials realized their ability to promote democracy among people of color around the world was seriously hampered by racial injustice at home.”¹ The Navy began desegregating its units in 1946.

Bobby Seale was ten as this momentous change in the armed forces got underway. His mother Thelma was his biggest early influence. As a former military-base employee, she must have rejoiced along with other civil rights advocates in the East Bay at how Marshall had triggered this major step forward toward racial equality. Thelma vividly recalled an event that she had witnessed firsthand at age eleven in Texas that provoked great despair — a “race riot” in her home town of Jasper. It was one of the many bloody attacks across the country by whites against blacks that history books recorded as the infamous “Red Summer of 1919.” It would remain the worst year of domestic violence in the 20th century until the late 1960s. Thelma Seale lived to see Jasper become infamous once again in 1998 when three white racists dragged 49-year-old hitchhiker James Byrd to his death behind their pickup truck. The notorious incident instigated passage of the Texas hate crime law and also led to enactment of the federal Matthew Shepherd/James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act signed into law by President Obama in 2009.

Once settled in Berkeley, George Seale opened a cabinet store in Oakland. Thelma Seale worked in San Francisco as a sandwich-maker and later found employment as a domestic worker. The family was always short of funds. As a young teen, Bobby made a little pocket change carrying groceries and mowing lawns. He tried out for two sports teams at Berkeley High. Both teams snubbed him; Seale blamed the slight on racist coaches. In the early 1950s, the high school’s student body remained overwhelmingly white. The largest minority were Asians; there were very few blacks and Latinos. In his mid-teens Bobby joined one street gang and then another.

Seale’s first awareness of injustice came around age sixteen when he learned of widespread and repeated mistreatment of American Indians that never made it into approved history books. He felt this injustice personally because he had Indian ancestry; Seale would not seek a better understanding of African-American history for several years. Seale quit high school and joined the Air Force, where he began studying history in earnest through books available at the library and an encyclopedia he purchased. While in the Air Force he learned to be a sheet metal mechanic. In his spare time, he started playing drums in a jazz band and splurged for a $600 set of drums on time payments, but got behind. A collection agency tracked Seale down at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. By coincidence, his commanding officer was a relative of the bill collector and took it upon himself to hound Seale for payment of the arrears or go to jail. Seale had a melt down, ripped a phone out of the wall, cursed at his commander and prepared to go AWOL. Instead, he was court-martialed and ended his three years of service with a bad conduct discharge.

By the 1950s, after living in subsidized housing for many years, Mrs. Seale purchased a home on 57th Street in the North Oakland flatlands. After his discharge from the service Bobby came home and obtained a high school degree. His mother’s motto was: “Whatever job you hold, be the best at it.”² He got job after job as a sheet metal mechanic at different aircraft companies, only to be fired by all but the last one as soon as his bad conduct discharge caught up with him. At Kaiser Aerospace his boss kept him on a missile project despite learning of his ouster from the Air Force because Seale had developed expertise that was hard to replace.

In 1960, while still working for Kaiser Aerospace, Seale started taking classes in his spare time at Oakland City College (later renamed Merritt College). This was when Seale first focused on his African heritage. He grew his hair into an Afro and now wore a moustache. As Seale became more politically aware, he quit his job because he did not want to be helping the war effort. A natural extrovert, tall and broad-shouldered, Seale had occasional success as a stand-up comic getting people to laugh about things that oppressed them. He sometimes worked as a mechanical draftsman; he was good at reading blueprints. Though his original ambition in attending Oakland City College was to become an engineer, Seale had abandoned that goal by the time he met Huey Newton in September 1962. By then Seale was getting frequent gigs doing dark-humored stand-up comedy, and he hoped to make a career of it. He had also joined as one of its first members a new West Coast chapter of the Revolutionary Action Movement (“RAM”), a secretive East Coast organization that advocated guerrilla warfare. The underground group was not sanctioned by campus officials.

RAM took as its inspiration a new book, Negroes with Guns, whose author, black activist Robert Williams, was a strong proponent of armed self-defense. The former NAACP leader had fled to Cuba in 1961. Since then, with Fidel Castro’s blessing, Williams regularly broadcasted his militant views to blacks in the South via “Radio Free Dixie.” When Seale started to dedicate himself to taking action, he once again took his mother’s advice to heart — if revolution was his goal, he would do the best job he could. His new young friend Huey Newton matched his zeal.

Like the Seale family, the Newtons were hopeful World War II transplants from the violent and unfriendly rural South. Huey’s father Walter Newton was born in Alabama and worked for several years in Arkansas before he and his wife Armelia Johnson Newton moved to her home state of Louisiana. Walter held a variety of factory and farm jobs to support his seven children. Huey Percy Newton, born February 17, 1942, was the youngest. Walter Newton also preached every Sunday at a local Baptist church. One day in 1944, he could no longer stomach verbal abuse from the white overseer of the farm where he worked as a sharecropper. By talking back, Walter earned the label “crazy nigger.”³

Every black in Monroe, Louisiana — like everywhere else at the time in the Deep South — knew you put your life at risk if you did not accept Jim Crow as the law of the land. For his own safety, Walter Newton took off for Northern California where war-time jobs were advertised. He found work in the new Alameda Naval Air Station. The rest of the family joined him the following year, when Huey was three. The family of Belva Davis — who became the first African-American woman TV journalist on the West Coast — fled at about the same time from the same Monroe, Louisiana, community that the Newton family left behind. They escaped for a similar reason: her uncle had the audacity to sue a meat plant after he was seriously injured on the job; a white lawyer won a judgment for him, but none of it got paid. Instead, her uncle and his family were targeted for tar and feathering for being too uppity.⁴

By the time the Newton family moved to West Oakland their oldest children were adults. The new environment was like a foreign country where blacks occupied a segregated city within a city — one with its own culture, schools and entertainment. Melvin Newton was seven when they arrived and recalls its isolation: “It was like a traditional Jewish ghetto, only it was a black people’s ghetto because that’s where we had to live . . . in order to protect the white people being contaminated by the rabble that had migrated here from the South.”

After the war, Walter Newton left his first job as a longshoreman and worked as a handyman and truck driver. He also volunteered again as an assistant minister at a local Baptist church. The Newtons moved several times to different parts of the Oakland community and ultimately settled in a racially mixed, working-class neighborhood in North Oakland. At Walter’s insistence, Armelia Newton never looked for work outside the home as a domestic or otherwise. The couple doted on Huey. His older sisters — Myrtle, Leola and Doris — also favored him. Melvin was the next youngest boy, four years older than Huey, whose responsibility was to look after and protect his baby brother. Melvin knew that Huey was “kind of the darling of the family.”

A very bright but shy child, Huey did not take to academics like Melvin did. While Melvin would enjoy spending weekend days in the nearest library, Huey favored the streets like his older brothers Leander “Lee” Edward and Walter, Jr., nicknamed “Sonny Man.” But Huey later confounded anyone trying to pigeonhole him. He was a quick study with a phenomenal memory and obvious potential. He pleased his mother by his willingness to clean the oven out for her whenever she asked, yet at school most teachers found him uncooperative. Melvin Newton recalls the exception after they moved to the house Walter Newton bought in North Oakland: “[Huey] wound up having a teacher called Ms. McLaren. . . . It was the only time we had the same teacher. . . . When he entered her class, she told him that she knew me and she remembered me as his brother and what a fine student I was, and she expected the same out of him. That was the only teacher that didn’t have any problems out of Huey.”

Huey never got involved in sports. Nor did he learn to dance or carry a tune, but he did display talent for playing the piano. His parents then arranged for three years of classical training, and he became a lifelong fan. His cultivated taste in music would later impress his opera-singing fiancée LaVerne Williams and his lawyer Fay Stender, an accomplished concert pianist, to whom he described fond memories of playing Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” and selections from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.

To impress the girls in junior high, Huey memorized and recited poetry and passages from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. His parents still hoped Huey would follow Melvin’s dogged pursuit of higher education and a steady job. At their urging, Melvin was one of the rare black students at Oakland Tech to take college preparatory classes. Melvin became the only one of Huey’s siblings to get a college degree. Only one other finished high school.

Growing up, Huey felt severely handicapped by his light complexion and medium build, with a Caucasian nose inherited from a white grandfather who had forced himself on Walter Newton’s mother. Newton’s handsome bi-racial features, coupled with a high-pitched voice and a funny name, were serious liabilities on the streets of Oakland. Kids on the block may not have heard of Louisiana’s demagogue Governor Huey P. Long, for whom he was named, but they teased Huey “Pee” Newton unmercifully.⁵

Black students were in the minority at his junior high school, where Huey quickly developed a thin skin. Despite the best efforts of his devout parents and brother Melvin, Huey became an indifferent high school student, often skipping school to spend hour upon hour in the pool halls. Melvin only realized later, when he read Huey’s book Revolutionary Suicide, that Huey wanted to get thrown out of class so he could avoid being exposed for “not learning what was supposed to be learned.” In high school, Melvin saw the dual track system for white and black students as a challenge to overcome; Huey took the teachers’ low expectations of black kids “as a battle while he was still in school, to the neglect of the academic program. So you have two boys from the same family, handling the impact of race and racism very differently.” Melvin later studied martial arts and realized that he and Huey illustrated how you “take the impact of something and you ride with it in another direction and then you’ll bring it back . . . I didn’t understand it academically like that, but that’s in fact what I was doing.” While Melvin tuned out those who discouraged him from pursuing his academic potential, “Huey was taking it on directly, and it was like a clash.”

The rougher elements of Oakland acted as a magnet to Huey, as they had with his oldest brother, Lee, who had already served a jail sentence. Huey also hung out with his brother Sonny Man, a Korean War veteran employed at the Naval Air Station, who spent much of his spare time at the race track. Sonny Man impressed Huey and his friends with his street smarts, teaching Huey how to aggressively defend himself against local hoodlums. Huey had admired professional boxers since the age of five when his father encouraged him to defend himself against bullies. Ever since, Huey had numerous fights with neighborhood toughs, establishing a formidable reputation on the street.

His childhood friend David Hilliard explains the contradictions people always noticed in Huey:

Growing up, Huey was greatly influenced by four strong male role models. He would eventually become an amalgam of all four: his father, a “strict disciplinarian” with “strict sense of moral character . . . deeply rooted in Old Testament values”; his “oldest brother Lee Edward . . . [who] taught Huey the meaning of standing up and holding his ground”; Walter, Jr. (Sonny Man), a ladies’ man who “represented the excitement of the street”; and “Melvin [who] would influence Huey on the importance of education.” . . . Throughout his life, Huey maintained a delicate balance of all four figureheads — [his father] Walter’s values, brother Lee’s strength, Sonny Man’s street smarts, and Melvin’s intellectual prowess.⁶

While Huey was a rebellious teen, Lee and Sonny Man influenced him the most. Constantly worrying his parents, Huey disguised his reading and learning disabilities by acting out. As an adult, doctors would diagnose him as bipolar. Misbehavior in class and truancy got him suspended from Oakland Tech in his sophomore year. In his junior year, his parents enrolled him in Berkeley High. Not long afterward, there was an incident that got Huey suspended from Berkeley High and referred to juvenile court. A gang of black kids attacked him; the next day Huey retaliated against one of them with a hammer he had brought from home. Placed on probation, Newton returned to Oakland Tech, where he managed to obtain a degree; he graduated in the bottom third of his class. Newton escaped the 1963 Vietnam War draft with a 1-Y psychiatric exemption; he attributed it to his outspoken criticism of racism in the military. Still, with a military exemption, a high school degree and family support, Huey was better off than many of his classmates. One-third of young black males in Oakland were unemployed high school drop-outs, six times the national average.

Much to his parents’ dismay and distress, Newton grew a scruffy beard and quit the family home to share a flat near the Oakland City College campus with William Brumfield, a.k.a. Richard Thorne, a cofounder of the Sexual Freedom League and later the cult of Om Lovers. Though Newton enjoyed sharing the favors of the young women Brumfield attracted, Newton had his own ambitions. In high school, Newton was told he was not “college material.” Under the tutelage of his brother Melvin, Huey began reading Plato’s Republic. For the first time in his life, he felt engaged by the written word. Perhaps to burnish his outlaw legend and self-made-man mythology, he would later claim that he was completely illiterate until then and had faked the ability to read and write in high school. As he pursued a social science degree at Oakland City College, Newton focused on the study of philosophy and militant politics, particularly the recent Cuban revolution and guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Newton had liked alcohol since he was a young teen; in a show of solidarity, he made “Cuba Libre” his drink of choice.

By age twenty, in 1962, Newton had become a well-known figure on the Oakland City College campus. He joined the Afro-American Association, an informal group that met regularly at the home of a brilliant local lawyer and scholar named Donald Warden, who later changed his name to Khalid Abdullah Tariq al Mansour. At the time, Warden also hosted a radio program called the Afro-American Association. Among the study group’s members were Ron Dellums, future congressman and Oakland mayor, and Thelton Henderson, who became the first African-American to head the federal court in the Northern District of California. Henderson remembers Newton well: “A very bright young man. A very respectful young man . . . He came to learn and he was a quick learner. He contributed a lot, and I’ve always imagined that many of the ideas he got for the Panthers’ philosophy and some of the interest areas that they had, came from those meetings at the Afro-American Association.”

Warden had been a class ahead of Henderson at the U.C. Berkeley law school, known then as Boalt Hall. In the fall of 1963, Warden invited Henderson to do some legal contract work, making occasional local court appearances that helped Henderson pay his rent. Henderson had just returned to the Bay Area after getting sacked from his first job, a plum assignment in the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert Kennedy investigating civil rights abuses in Alabama. Henderson was sent to Birmingham after the church bombing that killed four girls in Sunday school in September 1963. He stayed at the only hotel in Birmingham that offered lodging to blacks, which was where Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., also stayed. One night, out of concern for King’s safety, Henderson loaned King’s driver his car because King’s had a faulty tire. Henderson did not realize that state agents working for the FBI were tailing King everywhere he went. Henderson’s unapproved favor made headlines, and the Justice Department fired him for misuse of government property.

Believing that his career was in tatters, Henderson returned to Berkeley. Later he would be proud of his generous impulse — if King’s car had been disabled by the roadside after dark, his life could have been at grave risk that night. Several months after Henderson went back to California, three Civil Rights workers — James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman — disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi. National outrage prompted a massive FBI search over the summer of 1964 which ultimately turned up their bodies. Years later, investigators identified the KKK culprits, including a sheriff’s deputy, who tailed the civil rights workers’ car and kidnapped and killed them.

In rebuilding his life after being fired for loaning Dr. King his car, Henderson welcomed the chance to join Donald Warden’s study group:

We’d learn about our heritage. The premise of the Afro-American Association was that blacks should not accept the white historical version of a Negro . . . [The name] Afro-American was very consciously decided to reflect our African heritage, rather than whatever a Negro had come to mean. So we started studying our heritage and read a bunch of very, very interesting [books] that I had never read . . . Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Dubois, E. Franklin Frazier [Author of The Negro Family in the United States] . . . It was a very exciting and eye-opening period for me.

At first, Newton relished the group’s focus on the works of Leftist political writers like W. E. B. Dubois, James Baldwin and Jean-Paul Sartre. He also liked the way the association promoted the wearing of dashikis and the teaching of Swahili. Soon, however, he was getting restless. Since the fall of 1962, Newton had been holding forth frequently at a lunchtime speaking forum adjacent to the Oakland City College campus on Grove Street — known as the Grove Street orators. Newton liked to expound on the Cuban revolution, hand out “Fair Play for Cuba” flyers and criticize President Kennedy’s Cuban blockade and the history of American colonial power.

It was when Newton gave speeches on Grove Street that he first caught Seale’s attention. Newton tapped into Seale’s inner anger and frustration: “The experience of things I’d seen in the black community, killings that I’d witnessed, black people killing each other — and my own experience just . . . trying to make it . . . came to the surface.”⁷ Soon Newton’s roommate Brumfield introduced the pair to each other at an Afro-American Association rally. Seale already found Newton’s speeches impressive. Seale impressed Newton, too. Newton learned that Seale owned guns and was an expert marksman, and had been trained in the military to take apart and reassemble an M1 carbine blindfolded.

At the time they met, Seale was still secretly active in RAM. Seale soon suggested that Newton join,too. But when Huey applied for membership in RAM, he was rejected because he resided with his parents in a “bourgeois” mixed-race Oakland neighborhood. His home was outside the lumpenproletariat flatlands — the poorest area of the city, where pimps, hustlers, prostitutes and thieves abounded.⁸ RAM’s view did not match that of traditional Marxists. Karl Marx expected the working class to rise up to take ownership of their own labor, but placed no trust in the criminal class. Marx coined the term lumpenproletariat for outcasts in rags and low-level lawbreakers he doubted would ever attain class consciousness. Marx actually considered them “bottom-feeders” — obstacles to his dream of a classless society because of their dependence on the labor of others for their survival. In Marx’s view, even if they became true believers in revolution, the lumpenproletariat remained far more vulnerable to arrest and coercion into becoming informants. That very problem would later be the Panthers’ undoing.

When RAM snubbed him, Newton was surprised that RAM embraced a stand-up comic (Seale) but rejected a more serious Leftist philosopher like himself. Newton later scorned RAM members as just “phony armchair revolutionaries.”⁹ Ironically, at the same time RAM rejected Newton as unfit, RAM had unknowingly accepted as charter members undercover policemen intent on keeping a watchful eye on their activities.

Between 1962 and 1965, Newton and Seale saw each other only occasionally. During this time, Newton often took seasonal jobs at the Del Monte cannery in nearby Emeryville, where two of his sisters were employed. From time to time, Newton hired on as a construction worker or longshoreman or street cleaner for the City of Oakland, though he never held any job for long. Meanwhile, Newton secretly supplemented his legitimate income with petty burglaries from unlocked cars, parking lot robberies, selling stolen property and, for several months, pimping.

Huey’s reckless streak was patent. He liked to scare friends by racing his car across the railroad tracks to barely beat an oncoming train. At five-foot-ten, he did not intimidate anyone by sheer size, but he still cultivated a fierce reputation on the street. Shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Newton was arrested for stealing a book. He managed to talk his way into an acquittal. Arrested in Berkeley for burglary a year later, he again persuaded the police to let him go. Arrested once more on five counts of burglary in early May of 1964, he got the charge reduced to petty theft.

Newton had his first serious brush with the law in the late spring of 1964, when he attended a birthday dinner party and got into an argument with a scar-faced bully named Odell Lee he had never met before. Lee was so hostile and aggressive, Newton acted first. He picked up a steak knife and stabbed Lee, which got Newton arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. He cockily decided to represent himself once again. This time, after a two-day jury trial, Newton was convicted. Tom Broome, who years later became Huey’s probation officer, coincidentally had been present at the birthday party. Broome thought “there was so much provocation that a third-grade attorney could have beaten the case or at least had it reduced. Huey didn’t know how to go about it, made a fool of himself and wound up with a felony conviction to boot.”¹⁰

This conviction would be significant in Newton’s prosecution for the death of Officer Frey. Newton served six months in jail at Santa Rita before his release on three years’ probation. En route to Santa Rita, the 22-year-old spent one month in an isolation cell in the Alameda County jail, infamously known as “the soul breaker.”¹¹ At Santa Rita, Newton received similar punishment in the “cooler.” In December 1964, he watched from the Santa Rita prison yard as busloads of arrested Free Speech Movement demonstrators from U. C. Berkeley arrived for a brief stay. The political statement they made by joint action impressed him greatly.

Upon his release from Santa Rita, Newton returned to Oakland City College to take a few courses. Newton mainly wanted to use the college as a political base. From his perspective, Oakland City College’s location in a run-down flatland neighborhood was ideal for recruitment. Newton figured knowledge of the law would come in handy. He signed up for a course on California criminal law taught by Assistant District Attorney (and Ronald Reagan’s future Attorney General) Edwin Meese III. Huey quickly showed himself to be an apt student, particularly when the subjects were the constitutional rights of suspects and the dos and don’ts of California’s open-carry gun laws.

Newton’s parents must have been extremely pleased with his new devotion to studies and his new girlfriend, LaVerne Williams, an aspiring opera singer. Williams participated in a Miss Bronze Northern California competition co-sponsored by radio and TV journalist Belva Davis and won the talent competition. Williams introduced her boyfriend to Davis, praising his love of music, poetry and philosophy. Walter Newton knew Davis’s father from the days both families lived in Monroe, Louisiana. Davis was shocked when, only a few years later, the quiet young man she had met as LaVerne’s boyfriend morphed into a symbol of armed revolt.

When Newton was released from the Santa Rita jail, one of the most active and highly respected leftists on campus was Richard Masato Aoki, an eight-year army veteran. Huey already knew him as a fierce streetfighter from the late 1950s when Aoki’s family moved to West Oakland after their World War II internment. As a teen, the third-generation Japanese-American had hung out with Huey’s oldest brothers. At Oakland City College, Aoki started a chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance of the Socialist Workers Party. The Socialist Workers Party espoused Soviet Union co-founder Leon Trotsky’s view that Communism should spread across the globe through continuing revolution. Aoki invited Bobby Seale as a speaker and became good friends with Seale as well as Newton. Aoki transferred to U. C. Berkeley and continued his activism there, while keeping in close contact with his Oakland college friends.

In 1965, Newton and Seale were searching for a new base on campus. They joined disaffected blacks who founded the Soul Students Advisory Council. One of the group’s leaders was Ken Freeman, a self-educated expert on African history and editor-in-chief of a new radical political and literary magazine called Soulbook. Also among the Advisory Council’s founders was one of Soulbook’s writers, leftist scholar Louis Armmond. Armmond grew up on the East Coast before attending U. C. Berkeley, where he had become one of the handful of black activists in the early Free Speech Movement. At Armmond’s instigation, the Council opposed the drafting of black soldiers for the Vietnam War and organized hundreds of people to attend a rally — one of the largest such protests on the Oakland City College campus up to that time. The Council also increased awareness among blacks of their heritage and of the ways in which they had been relegated to colonial status. They lobbied for courses in black history and pushed for the hiring of African-American faculty.

Malcolm X‘s assassination in late February 1965 hit Seale hard. That same day Seale took some bricks from his mother’s garden, broke them in two and started hurling them at every passing car driven by a white person. He later said, “I was ready to die that day.”¹² Instead, he focused on learning more about one of the principal sources of Malcolm X’s political consciousness — the late Afro-Caribbean revolutionary Dr. Frantz Fanon. Dr. Fanon had participated in the successful Algerian overthrow of French colonial rule, an insurrection that began in 1954 and took until 1962 to achieve its goal of independence from France.

Louis Armmond introduced Fanon’s books to his friends in the Bay Area. The members of the Soul Students Advisory Council studied them like the Bible. Here was a blueprint, taken from recent successful experience, for how a liberation movement could be started from a condition of perceived total subservience. Dr. Fanon called violence “a cleansing force.” He wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction. It makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”¹³ If violent revolt could work against the French in Algeria, why not for American blacks? Seale read and reread Dr. Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and recommended it enthusiastically to Newton.

Newton was the first among the Grove Street orators to go public with the new revolutionary ideas being discussed among the members of the Council — the connection between the Algerians’ overthrow of an oppressive regime and what might be possible for blacks struggling in Oakland. Newton drew a rapt audience. Seale later pointed to the moment in 1965 when the two focused on the impact of Dr. Fanon’s writings as the true genesis of the Black Panther Party.

In March 1966, Berkeley police arrested Seale for disturbing the peace by standing on a chair on a Berkeley street corner loudly reading revolutionary poetry to passersby. Huey Newton was with him and scuffled with one of the officers, resulting in Newton’s arrest as well. Soon afterward they used Soul Students Advisory Council funds to make bail. When other members objected, the pair quit the Council. The incident caught the attention of Max Scherr, the radical lawyer who owned the Steppenwolf bar in Berkeley where activists regularly gathered. In 1965, Scherr had started publishing an underground newspaper, The Berkeley Barb, to cover the Free Speech Movement and anti-war activities in Berkeley from a leftist perspective. Scherr later claimed the distinction of being the first to report on the political activities of the two, then unknown, black militants, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, in the form of the Barb’s account of their 1966 arrest for disturbing the peace.

That same summer of 1966, Bobby Seale was hired to oversee neighborhood youths in the new federal jobs project Oakland had obtained in the wake of the Watts riot. Local activist Mark Comfort was likely instrumental in bringing Seale into a leadership role in the jobs program. Two years older than Seale, Comfort had worked with Stokely Carmichael on voting rights in Alabama in the early ’60s and returned to Oakland to become the head of the Oakland Direct Action Committee. At home among black youths in the streets, Comfort wore a tilted beret and a large gold earring. From day one, the EDA officials who arrived in Oakland from Washington considered Comfort an effective, natural leader. He established such a personal rapport with EDA’s head, Assistant Secretary of Commerce Eugene Foley, that Foley went out of his way to visit Comfort when he was jailed at Santa Rita in the summer of 1966 on a questionable charge of misconduct in a peaceful protest of minority hiring practices at the Oakland Tribune. At the time, Comfort had just competed unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for the state assembly.¹⁴

Given the opportunity, Seale brought in Newton to assist him at the North Oakland Anti-Poverty Center, where Seale supervised eighty at-risk high school students in work programs. Newton’s elementary school classmate Paul Cobb became a neighborhood youth coordinator for West Oakland. (Cobb would years later become the publisher of the regional African-American weekly paper, The Oakland Post.) Judge Lionel Wilson headed the jobs project as Chairman of the Oakland Economic Development Council.

Seale and Newton could see racial progress occurring, and not just from the new federal jobs program. By the mid-1960s, Oakland High School was thoroughly integrated: about a third of the students were black; almost a third were Asian; and the rest were white. Meanwhile, Seale and Newton were among the young men who met at DeFremery Park with Oakland Parks and Recreation Department manager Bill Patterson. A protégé of Judge Wilson who worked his way up from part-time playground director to head of the department, Bill Patterson was then in his thirties and already beginning to gain admirers for nurturing the careers of many future professional superstars, including baseball’s Ricky Henderson and Joe Morgan and basketball’s Bill Russell. Lionel Wilson himself had been a former star tennis and baseball player before becoming a lawyer. In a major move toward integration, when Patterson rose to head of the Oakland Parks and Recreation Department, he integrated all of the city swimming pools in one summer.

Both Mark Comfort and Curtis Baker, who also wore a gold earring and beret, provided the most inspiring examples to Seale and Newton. Neither was afraid to assail police brutality and directly confront white authority figures with the hatred that might easily explode into another Watts if West Oakland did not get immediate redress for longstanding governmental neglect. Baker ran the “West End Help Center” and helped start a group demanding jobs for black applicants for jobs at the new Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority. Yet the progress being made was nowhere near fast enough or broad enough for impatient young radicals like Seale and Newton in the mid-1960s. They wanted major change now.

In September 1966 Seale attended a conference headed by Soulbook magazine publisher Ken Freeman, who had led the Soul Students Advisory Council at Oakland City College. The hot topic was Stokely Carmichael’s June 1966 call for black power organizations to replace traditional civil rights groups. A front page story in The Movement newspaper described Carmichael’s Lowndes County Freedom Organization. That voting-rights effort in Alabama used a Black Panther logo and embraced a right of armed self-defense. The Alabama group adopted the panther as its symbol because animal mascots were traditional in Alabama for every political party, and the panther was said to defend itself vigorously, but not to engage in unprovoked attack. By August of 1966, with Carmichael’s support, the Panther logo was beginning to be used by organizers of black militants in cities across the country.

At the end of the three-day conference, the group announced the formation of the Black Panther Party of Northern California. Almost immediately, Seale and Freemen had a falling out. Seale quit the group and shortly afterward shared the materials he had received with Huey Newton. Both were still part-time students at Oakland City College. They began planning their own more militant organization in Oakland. Meanwhile, after the police shooting of teenager Matthew Johnson in San Francisco, SDS held a Black Power conference in Berkeley with Stokely Carmichael as the key speaker and Mark Comfort among others on the panel. Flyers describing the Lowndes County Freedom Organization with its black panther logo were distributed on campus.

In forming their own organization, Seale and Newton decided to use the same black panther logo, but added the words “For Self-Defense” to the group’s name to emphasize their more aggressive approach — carrying loaded weapons. They got together on creating the Party platform with Richard Aoki, who was now at U. C. Berkeley. Together, the three radicals hammered out a 10-point platform for their new group using the Nation of Islam’s “What We Believe” as a model. They refined the program at Seale’s home near campus and at work. Then they took it to Newton’s older brother Melvin, who was then a graduate student at Berkeley, to have him polish its language. The finished platform included a lengthy quote from the Declaration of Independence justifying the right to overthrow “absolute Despotism” after “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” Seale’s wife Artie and Huey’s girlfriend LaVerne both worked on typing up the platform. Then Newton and Seale surreptitiously made 1,000 copies late at night on the Anti-Poverty Center’s mimeograph machine. Melvin thought their proposal a timely cry for change to meet the needs of the black community, but he resisted their efforts to get him to join them. What good would carrying guns accomplish? It was probably Mark Comfort who first told Carmichael about a couple of Oakland friends using the symbol and the Black Panther name to start their own group. The SNCC leader did not think much would come of it.

As the two budding revolutionaries sought to establish their own organization, they still disdained white students at Oakland City College. But, unlike SNCC and cultural nationalist groups, Seale and Newton recognized the benefits of strong alliances with white radicals. They readily accepted money from Bob Scheer, a Peace and Freedom anti-war candidate for Congress in 1966, to help them organize support on campus. Other black student organizations on campus rejected outright Newton’s insistence that the time had come for defending the black community with guns. They considered it suicidal. So did Newton.

Taunting police to join him in a life-or-death game, Newton expected not to live more than a year, but found the prospect exhilarating. He often likened the sensation to the “deep flow of play” Buddhists characterized as the essence of life.¹⁵ The Eastern philosophical term struck a chord; it matched the sense of peace Newton felt after coming to terms with his own mortality. His older brother Melvin still hoped to persuade Huey to behave with caution; he warned his little brother the police were already digging his grave.

Reprinted with permission from It’s About Time - Black Panther Party.

First Issue of the Black Panther Party Newspaper, April 25, 1967.