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Chapter Two

The Deep Roots of the Struggle for Black Liberation

For you are prisoners of war, in an enemy’s country—of a war, too, that is unrivaled for its injustice, cruelty, meanness.…

—Frederick Douglass (in an article urging Black captives to revolt against the slave system)1

The roots of armed resistance run deep in African American history. Only those who ignore this fact see the Black Panther Party as somehow foreign to our common historical inheritance.

Many forces converged to bring about the organization bearing the name of the Black Panther Party. One of them, of course, was the powerful psychological and social force of history. In the 60s, many books began to emerge on the theme of Black history. Long-forgotten or little-mentioned figures began to come to life to a generation that, having not grown up in segregated educational environments, was less familiar with the historical currents underlying Black life.

The smoldering embers of Watts, a ghetto area in Los Angeles that burned just one year before the Black Panther Party’s formation, were also bright in the minds of Huey and Bobby.

For six days in August 1965, Watts erupted in a rebellion that saw some $200 million worth of property go up in smoke. By week’s end some thirty-five people were dead, most the result of police gunfire. In Watts, as elsewhere during that decade, conflict between Black urbanites and the predominantly white police was the trigger for this explosion.

For the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Watts was a profound eye-opener. The middle-class, somewhat genteel preacher seemed stunned by the sheer scope and rancor revealed by the Watts Rebellion. Watts appeared to mark a major turning point in his vision of what America was and what it could become.2

Post-Watts, Dr. King would speak of the Black ghetto as a “system of internal colonialism.” In one speech before the Chicago Freedom Festival, he would exclaim, “The purpose of the slum is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness.…” He would further declare, “The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and humiliated at every turn.”3

In a word, Watts radicalized King.

If Watts had that effect on a man of decidedly middle-class orientation, what of people who came from, and saw life from, the bottom of the social pecking order? For them, Watts wasn’t a shock or a surprise. It was an affirmation of the same inchoate rage that boiled in their very veins.

That radical, rebellious spirit constituted a powerful social force that would attract tens of thousands of alienated ghetto folks to either join or support the Black Panther Party. Yet that radical spirit did not begin in Watts, but came from much older, much deeper roots.

The devastation and resistance of Watts sent a powerful signal to Huey and Bobby, two men in their twenties, that Black folks were ready and willing to fight and, if need be, to die for their freedom. Huey would later write in his personal and political autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide:

One must relate to the history of one’s community and its future. Everything we had seen convinced us that our time had come.

Out of this need sprang the Black Panther Party. Bobby and I finally had no choice but to form an organization that would involve the lower-class brothers.4

Watts raises the question of the social role of mass violence in the shaping and formation of public policy.5

It is, too, a measure of the power of the corporate, white supremacist media that the term riot almost invariably evokes imagery of Black folks tearing through the streets in a frenzied orgy of destruction. But in fact, most riots were the instruments of whites, who used mass violence to terrorize Blacks and deny them citizenship.

Joe R. Feagin, a past president of the American Sociological Association, has written of the white riots of the early twentieth century:

Whites sometimes used violence to enforce informal patterns of discrimination. During one white-generated riot in 1900 in New York, a mostly Irish police force encouraged whites to attack black men, women, and children. One of the most serious riots occurred in 1917 in East St. Louis. There white workers, viewing black immigrants from the South as a job threat, violently attacked a black community. Thirty-nine black residents and nine white attackers were killed. This was followed in 1919 by a string of white riots from Chicago to Charleston.6

This racist mass violence was an important factor in the enlistment of millions of white men (not to mention at least half a million white women!) to support the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) between 1910 and 1930. In that period, Klan affiliation was a ticket to political success, as Warren G. Harding and Hugo Black both knew well. The Klan and like-minded groups waged open war against entire Black communities, and the dead cannot now be calculated.

In Black historical literature, notably in the writings of Du Bois, 1919 is known and remembered as Red Summer, for the explosions of violence against Black life throughout the US. A similar recollection does not seem to disturb the slumber of white historians. There were twenty-six white riots in 1919 alone, with major ones in Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Omaha, Nebraska; Phillips County, Arkansas; and Washington, DC.7 Even before this bloody period, white riots against Blacks were far from rare. In 1863, the so-called Draft Riots of New York City left at least one hundred people dead (the majority of them Black). That event, sparked by Irish who opposed both the aims and the necessity of the Civil War, marked the deadliest riot in US history.

White workers were attacking Blacks to sustain their social dominance, an assertion (and grim celebration) of their new-found status in the Americas as whites (as opposed to Irish—a subordinate group under British domination in their homeland).

The violence of these whites may be termed reactionary violence, as their actions served to consolidate repressive social arrangements. The violence of Watts, coming as a reaction to the violence of State actors—beating, harassing, or berating Black citizens—is not of the same order. It may be termed radical violence, or violence in response to the violence of, or on behalf of, the State.

Christiana Resistance

With this historical perspective on riots, we will look at an event when Blacks engaged in radical liberational violence, not to hurt whites, but to preserve their own freedom. This event also demonstrates how a term like riot can prove misleading by masking the objectives of acts of mass violence.

In most history texts, if this conflict is noted, it is usually done under the name of the Christiana Riot. Black historian Ella Forbes, who examines the conflict from an Afrocentric perspective, calls it the Resistance, to more accurately reflect the context and nature of the action and the explosive social and political impact of the armed Black resistance.

In early September 1851, Edward Gorsuch, a Maryland slave owner, backed by his family, friends, and a US deputy marshal, descended on the little hamlet of Christiana, in southeastern Pennsylvania, to seize several escaped captives and to return them to slavery. Unfortunately for them, their human prey was staying in an organized, armed community, which had no intention of allowing their people’s return to bondage.

William and Eliza Parker were intrepid freedom fighters who emerged as leading members of a Black self-defense group formed to defend the growing fugitive farm community of Christiana. Their resolution and determination would be tested with the coming of the Gorsuch posse.

It is unclear why the Gorsuch posse, consisting of Edward Gorsuch, his son Dickinson, his nephew, his cousin, two neighbors, a newly appointed US deputy marshal, Henry Kline, and two other paid officers,8 knew to target the Parker home. Perhaps he had intelligence gleaned from the omnipresent snitches in the area that steered him to the dwelling.

William Parker, through his own contacts in Philadelphia, was forewarned of the coming slave-nappers. When Gorsuch and his group arrived at the house in the predawn hours of September 11, 1851, they initially entered but were forced to retreat. William Parker’s account gives us some inkling of the tone and tenor of the time:

I met them at the landing, and asked, “Who are you?” The leader, Kline, replied, “I am the United States Marshal.” I then told him to take another step, and I would break his neck. He again said, “I am the United States Marshal.” I told him I did not care for him nor the United States. At that he turned and went down stairs.9

Gorsuch, William Parker, and others present engaged in an extended discussion of the Bible, quoting passages from memory as if their recitations would dissuade either man from his deeply entrenched position. At length, they tired of the games and the true object of the meeting became plain:

“You had better give up,” said old Mr. Gorsuch, after another while, “and come down, for I have come a long way this morning, and want my breakfast; for my property I will have or I’ll breakfast in hell. I will go up and get it.”10

What the old slave owner didn’t know was that inside the entrance were a number of well-armed men. His son, however, standing at a point of elevation, saw into the upstairs room, sprang down, and caught his father before he went further, yelling, “O father, do come down! Do come down! They have guns, swords, and all kinds of weapons! They’ll kill you! Do come down!”11

The nine armed whites had not reckoned on five armed Blacks who were determined to be free.

When Dickinson argued with his father to leave and hire one hundred men to return to take them by force, William Parker was unmoved, telling them to bring 500 men. “It will take all the men in Lancaster to change our purpose or take us alive,” he answered.

Eliza Parker then signaled to nearby members of the community Black defense group by blowing her horn. This garnered an immediate response from the US marshal, who fired a shot at Eliza. He missed her, and she continued to sound the alarm.

Her alarm brought out some forty-five Black men and women and some neighboring white, Quaker farmers.

Eliza’s horn had signaled not only the neighboring Black self-defense organization, but the next phase of the resistance. Indeed, her role, according to William, did not end with the clarion call to the community. For when some inside the house began to weaken in the face of the threats from the slave-nappers, it was she, Eliza, who scuttled the idea of surrender.

William Parker would later write that she “seized a corn-cutter [similar to a machete] and declared she would cut off the head of the first one who should attempt to give up.”12 Parker later wrote in detail of his face-to-face struggle with the stubborn Gorsuch, who, by not leaving, apparently opted for his “breakfast in hell”:

I … struck him a heavy blow on the arm. It fell as if broken. I doubled my fists to knock him down.… Bricks, stones, and sticks fell in showers. We fought across the road and back again, and I thought our brains would be knocked out.

I caught him by the throat.… Then the rest beat him.… If we had not been interrupted, death would have been his fate.

We were then near enough to have killed them, concealed as we were by the darkness.

I told him we would not surrender on any conditions. I intend to fight.… I intend to try your strength. I told him, if he attempted it, I should be compelled to blow out his brains.

Before he could bring the weapon to bear, I seized a pair of heavy tongs, and struck him a violent blow across the face and neck, which knocked him down. He lay for a few moments senseless.13

This was a battle, one fought with fists, corn-cutters, and swords. Most battles are fought for land, for wealth, or for the whim of kings. This was a battle for freedom, and though little known, as significant as any in American history.

For those who tasted freedom, who worked their own plots of land so that their families could survive and prosper, who knew what life was worth, freedom was not to be surrendered easily.

It would be wrong to paint the Parkers as people who fought for the freedom of others who were unwilling to fight. They all fought. They had to fight.

The Christiana Resistance was waged a year after the government’s ignoble passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (FSA) of 1850, which threatened the lives and liberty of all Black people whether slave or “free.” As the contemporary Black nationalist Martin Delany explained:

By the provisions of this bill, the colored people of the United States are positively degraded beneath the level of whites—are liable at any time, in any place, and under all circumstances, to be arrested—and upon the claim of any white person, without the privilege, even of making a defence, sent into endless bondage. Let no visionary nonsense about habeas corpus, or a fair trial, deceive us; there are no such rights granted in this bill, and except where the commissioner is too ignorant to understand when reading it, or too stupid to enforce it when he does understand, there is no earthly chance—no hope under heaven for the colored person who is brought before one of these officers of the law.…14

Under such provisions as these, Africans had slim and grim choices: resistance or a return to bondage.

Thousands chose resistance.

From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hundreds fled to Canada to escape the reach of the FSA. According to the Liberator of October 4, 1850, “nearly all the waiters in the hotels” left for the border. “They went in large bodies, armed with pistols and bowie knives, determined to die rather than be captured,” the radical journal recorded. An entry referring to Blacks crossing the border from Utica, New York, was similar.

The revered Harriet Tubman, called “Gen’ral Moses” by her admirers for her courageous role in bringing freedom and hope to thousands of people in bondage, spoke for many when she said she could “trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer.” The Fugitive Slave Act and its repressive provisions forced her to carry her charges “clear off to Canada.”15

The Gorsuches were shot (Dickinson, although badly wounded, survived), their other relatives were beaten and driven from the homestead, and the US deputy marshal, Kline, beat a full and hasty retreat. The women, full of fury at men who would steal their people to return them to the hated slavery system, rushed from the house at the fallen Gorsuch armed with corn-cutters and scythe blades, and in Parker’s words, “put an end to him.”16

With the slave-catching posse dead, wounded, beaten, and dispersed, the Christiana rebels had to flee the area. William Parker and two of his men who began the resistance (believed to have been Samuel Thompson and a man named Pinckney) used the well-known routes of the Underground Railroad to make their way northward. They stopped briefly in Rochester, New York, at the home of the most famous Black abolitionist of the age, Frederick Douglass, himself an escaped captive from Maryland and a defender of freedom by any necessary means. Douglass conducted the harried and hunted party to their final depot: freedom in Canada. As thanks, Parker presented Douglass with Gorsuch’s pistol. Although it was bent and unable to fire, the abolitionist prized the souvenir. Later, Eliza would join William, and they would raise their family there on a farm, in freedom.

Meanwhile, the armed rebellion of Christiana ignited a firestorm of controversy in the US, north and south. The Philadelphia Bulletin used the event to launch a broadside at what it perceived as the greatest evil, abolition:

The melancholy tragedy of Christiana, in this State, by which two citizens of Maryland lost their lives, has established, in letters of blood, the dangerous character of the modern abolitionists.… We have, on more than one occasion, predicted this result from the doctrines of the abolitionists—Men who advocate an armed resistance to the law, especially in a republic, are enemies of order.17

Order, to the editors of the Philadelphia daily, meant legal support for slavery; any who would resist that evil, even ex-slaves themselves, were branded “enemies of order.”

To Douglass, ever the radical abolitionist, the lawfulness of the Fugitive Slave Act must yield to the rightness of resistance to it. The radical journalist and editor of the antislavery journal The North Star cared little what the press said. He lauded the events of Christiana as dealing a fatal blow to an evil law:

But the thing which more than all else destroyed the fugitive slave law was the resistance made to it by the fugitives themselves. A decided check was given to the execution of the law at Christiana, Penn.… This affair … inflicted fatal wounds on the fugitive slave bill.18

Indeed, Douglass argued, the Christiana Resistance came close to making the hated fugitive slave bill “a dead letter.”19 Historian Philip Foner called Christiana “one of the major harbingers” of the coming Civil War. Just over a century (and fifteen years) after the so-called Christiana Riot, another so-called riot, Watts, would spark militant movements across the nation. As Christiana signaled the coming of the Civil War, so Watts signaled a rising militance of Blacks, one expression of which was the Black Panther Party.

Beneath the fact of Watts, beyond the existence of the Black Panther Party, was a seething anger, a bubbling cauldron of Black rage, that Martin Luther King’s somewhat sweet, ethereal speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, several years before, could hardly assuage.

More to Black urban appetites was the cutting, insightful, militant speech of Malcolm X, whose critique of the heralded March on Washington was widely read, and heard over Black radio:

The Negroes were out there in the streets. They were talking about how they were going to march on Washington.… That they were going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land. I’m telling you what they said. That was revolution. That was revolution. That was the black revolution.

It was the grass roots out there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death; I was there. When they found out this black steamroller was going to come down on the capital, they called in … these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, “Call it off.” Kennedy said, “Look you all are letting this thing go too far.” And Old Tom said, “Boss, I can’t stop it because I didn’t start it.” I’m telling you what they said. They said, “I’m not even in it, much less at the head of it.” They said, “These Negroes are doing things on their own. They’re running ahead of us.” And that old shrewd fox, he said, “If you all aren’t in it, I’ll put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it. I’ll endorse it. I’ll welcome it. I’ll help it. I’ll join it.”

This is what they did at the march on Washington. They joined it … became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over, it lost its militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all.…

No, it was a sellout. It was a takeover.… They controlled it so tight, they told those Negroes what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make, and then told them to get out of town by sundown.…20

Martin’s “dream” is better known to most Americans, but to Black people, especially those teeming millions barred within US ghettos, Malcolm’s words were closer to the mark, closer to the heart.

When Watts erupted, it did not erupt in a vacuum. In 1964 and 1965, violent outbreaks were occurring in every part of the country. In Florida, the killing of a Black woman and the threat to bomb a Black high school caused an uproar; when a white minister who sat in front of a bulldozer to protest housing discrimination was killed, Cleveland erupted; the fatal shooting of a fifteen-year-old Black boy by an off-duty cop set it off in New York City. Similarly, mass violence (called “riots”) rocked Rochester, Jersey City, Chicago, and Philadelphia.21

And then there was Watts. What became the most violent urban outbreak since World War II began with something that had been commonplace in African American communities—violent police behavior.

A Black motorist was forcibly arrested, a bystander was clubbed, and a young Black woman was seized and falsely accused of spitting on a cop. Watts exploded. The uprising raged from August 11 to 16, 1965; fires swept through the neighborhoods. Some 4,000 people were arrested during the rebellion.

The summer of 1966 showed that Watts was not the end of conflict and suggested it may have been a kind of beginning. Cities burned and armed conflicts raged, some between members of Black self-defense groups and the National Guard. Firebombs were hurled in Chicago; Cleveland saw several Blacks shot by white cops and white civilians.

By 1967, rebellions were raging all across America—123 major and minor uprisings or “outbreaks,” according to the National Advisory Committee on Urban Disorders. Some eighty-three people died of gunfire, mostly in the mass violence that occurred in Newark and Detroit. As the committee noted, “The overwhelming majority of the persons killed or injured in all the disorders were Negro civilians.”22

It was into this social context of mass disorder and urban chaos that the Black Panther Party emerged—as a response to the massive violence perpetrated against Blacks and as a way to focus and organize the resultant mass anger into a cohesive political movement.

Riots, by their very nature, are disorganized and incoherent. The Black Panther Party wanted to signal an end to this disorganization and introduce the revolutionary alternative: organization, discipline, purpose, self-defense.

Beginnings

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense began with books. Huey Newton had done extensive reading about revolutionary organizing and revolutionaries. He scored several hundred copies of the Red Book (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung) from several radical Asian friends and began hawking them on the campus of the nearby University of California, Berkeley. Bobby Seale would later write that Huey came up with that idea because he suspected the very idea of “Negroes with Red Books” would spark the curiosity of Berkeley’s white radicals and thereby move them to support the fledgling effort.23

That, however, was a tactic, not an objective. Selling the Red Book made money; and money would be used to buy what revolutionaries the world over found indispensable: guns. While the predominant civil rights groups of the era pitched their raps to the press, or the white liberal community, or the Negro bourgeoisie, Huey knew that mere words would not break through the thick shell that ghetto Blacks had to have to survive in racist America. Huey knew that guns, openly and freely displayed, would reach them.

To reach them, he had to attract their attention.

Attention would not be long in coming. The Black Panther Party started as an Oakland phenomenon, with perhaps a dozen members who could be relied upon to make meetings. Nearby Richmond was also showing a small degree of interest.

Newton had studied the California penal codes (he suggests, in Revolutionary Suicide, that such knowledge made him a better thief) and learned that weapons possession was protected by state statute, and guns could be carried in public as long as they were not concealed. The Party therefore developed the nation’s first armed police monitoring patrols. Party members would be armed, with loaded weapons, cameras, tape recorders, and law books. When approaching a traffic stop, they would loudly announce state law allowed citizens to observe police stops and arrests. Huey’s legal research would ensure that the proper legal distance would be kept. People would see members of the Party standing in their defense against the hated representatives of the white power structure. The Panthers would advise suspects of their legal rights. Such actions proved a powerful organizing tool in the first year of activity.

In April 1967, a twenty-two-year-old Black man named Denzil Dowell was shot and killed by a white deputy sheriff in Richmond. Some of Dowell’s family members contacted the Party when local authorities ruled the killing was justifiable homicide, and the Party launched its own investigation. More importantly, for organizing purposes, the Party sent “twenty Panthers out there armed with guns, disciplined, standing thirty or forty feet apart on every corner of the intersection” where the Black man was murdered.24

The Panthers announced the results of their preliminary investigation, which cast considerable doubt on the police version of the killing, and rallied in the streets against the slaying. They denounced the brutality of the cops, “in full view of the local police.”25 As Seale would later write, “[W]e were educating the people that we would die for them. This was the position we always took with brother Huey P. Newton.”26 The rally was a brilliant organizing success because “just about everybody out there joined the Party that day.”27

The Dowell case provided a further opportunity for the growing group. On April 25, 1967, the first issue of The Black Panther Community News Service came off the press, in the form of a mimeographed, four-page newsletter, edited by Eldridge Cleaver. The Black Panther’s maiden edition was full of fire:

[T]he white cop is the instrument sent into our community by the Power structure to keep Black people quiet and under control … it is time that Black People start moving in a direction that will free our communities from this form of outright brutal oppression. The BLACK PANTHER PARTY FOR SELF-DEFENSE has worked out a program that is carefully designed to cope with this situation.

Eldridge, paroled after an extended stint in California prisons, brought a bite and a wit to The Black Panther that ensured that Black folks who dared read it would be moved as by nothing they had read before. Cleaver’s articulate phrasing, married with the clever artistic depictions of Emory Douglas, would make The Black Panther a reading experience that few would forget.

The Richmond demonstration, the newsletter (soon to be reborn as a full-fledged newspaper), and the armed community police patrols would prove irresistible to ghetto youth who had simmered under the glare of overtly racist cops. They longed to join the swelling Civil Rights movement, but had not because they could not bear to join any group which would meekly submit to racist violence, as demanded by some civil rights organizations. The 1967 revolts marked a rise in Black militancy, a psychic change of pace that the middle-class leaders of the southern-based Civil Rights movement could not address, and word spread about the actions of the Black Panther Party. The Black journalist William Gardner-Smith remarked, “The ’67 revolts marked the entry of the tough ghetto youths into the race battle, and the existing organizations, led by intellectuals or the middle-class, could not cope with them—the Panthers had to be born.”28

Just over six months into the Party’s existence another event would push the organization into the minds and consciousness of millions around the nation. On May 2, 1967, armed members and supporters of the Party “invaded” the California State Assembly in Sacramento. The state assembly had probably never seen armed (not to mention, Black) “lobbyists” on its debate floor before, and the incident resulted in tremendous visibility for the Party.

Huey Newton, on parole for a past offense, wisely opted to sit out the event. Despite being arrested along with twenty-five other Panthers, Bobby Seale, following Newton’s instructions to the letter, read the entirety of Newton’s boldly penned Executive Mandate denouncing the pending Mulford Bill. The bill was a direct legislative attempt to change California gun laws in response to BPP armed police patrols. Newton wrote:

Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned and demonstrated, among other things, to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetrated against Black people. All of these efforts have been answered by more repression, deceit, and hypocrisy. As the aggression of the racist American Government escalates in Vietnam, the police agencies of America escalate the repression of Black people throughout the ghettos of America. Vicious police dogs, cattle prods, and increased patrols have become familiar sights in Black communities. City Hall turns a deaf ear to the pleas of Black people for relief from this increasing terror.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense believes that the time has come for Black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late. The pending Mulford Act brings the hour of doom one step nearer. A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere. We believe that the Black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction.29

While the Party’s armed Black presence probably contributed to ensuring the passage of the bill, the Party’s message was clearly stated in the startling photos of leather-clad Black men marching through the state’s capitol buildings with arms at parade rest.

The Sacramento demonstration launched the Party into a national orbit, perhaps long before it was ready. The Party was swarmed with applications from young men and women around the nation who wanted to open branches of the new organization in their local communities.

The Party, not yet a year old, was growing at a rapid pace.

Over the next three years, the Party expanded almost exponentially. It first spread to Richmond, then over the bay to San Francisco, and then southward to Los Angeles.

It sprang out from California to every possible region where a Black community welcomed its youth and energy; north to Seattle; east to Kansas City; to the Black Mecca of Chicago; to Boston; New York’s Harlem, Bronx, and Brooklyn boroughs; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Baltimore; Nashville, Tennessee; and New Orleans.

By 1969 over forty chapters and branches existed, with several thousand people sworn to membership in the Party.

In Philadelphia, the nation’s former capital, a handful of young men would form the core of the Black Panther Party in that city. I was among them—in the spring of 1969, beginning my fifteenth year of life:

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment the Black Panther Party was formed in Philadelphia, because, in fact, there were several such formations: one in South Philadelphia, one in Germantown, and one in North Philadelphia. The North and South Philadelphia formations would merge, and the Germantown group, a mysterious gathering that apparently only sold papers, would wither.

As in any such political organization, there was intense jockeying for power, divided between younger and older and between north and south sections of the city. The men met each other, quietly, in a Center City bookstore, where The Black Panther and various books were sold. Some days later they met in a tiny ghetto apartment in South Philly, at 14th and Kater Streets, right over a bar. The men were to argue and debate who would lead and who would follow. An aggressive, tall, fast-talking young man named Bill Crawford seemed to have the edge, with his fiery tongue and dark shades covering his strange, amber-colored eyes. His only real adversary was an older, slow-talking, darker-hued man, Terry McCarter, whose clever, patient, southern-cadenced manner had appeal.

It was decided that a phone call would be made to Black Panther National Headquarters to solve the dispute, but the answer related to us was that Oakland would choose no one. According to one caller, either David or June Hilliard, the BPP Chief of Staff or his assistant, when asked about formally recognizing the Philadelphia branch, replied, “You don’t hafta be a Black Panther to make revolution.”

His statement, while objectively true, did not discourage those of us who were determined to join the organization that seemed closest to our dreams. The meetings continued, as we pondered National’s seeming indifference. Did they get calls like that all the time? Were they being cautious of folks they didn’t know? Were they seriously trying to limit expansion? Was this a test, to see if we were serious about opening a branch?

These questions were never sufficiently answered. Or perhaps they were answered by our actions, as we stubbornly resolved to just do the work. Officers were chosen, and daily tasks were assigned. When the oldhead, Terry, was chosen for captain, the young buck, Bill, raged out of the apartment, vowing to catch the next thing smoking to Oakland to resolve this problem. He clearly felt he was the superior candidate and hinted that Oakland would change our choice. In fact, we never heard back from him.

I was chosen Lieutenant of Information, a heady role for a manchild who had barely reached his fifteenth summer, and assigned to develop propaganda for the Party—even though no office had yet been opened. Leaflets were prepared, drawing largely from the BPP newspaper for style and tone, announcing the existence of a local branch.

How does one provide contact data on a leaflet in the absence of an office? Not to worry. I simply attached my home number to the bottom of the leaflet, which would not have been remarkable were it not for the fact that “home” was where I lived with my mother. This led to some interesting, if somewhat passionate, exchanges between us. It also led to some remarkable telephone calls.

Caller: Yello—Is zis uh, Moo-my-uh, of the Black Gorilla Party?

Answerer: This is Mumia of the Black Panther Party—who the hell is this?

Caller: Yeah—This is Roy Frankhouser of the United Klan of America, headquartered up ’ere in Reading, PA. We’re havin’ a burn-a-nigger festival this weekend, and we wanna invite cha to come. You interested?

Answerer: I doubt I’ll be able to make it, but you can bring yho ass down to Philly—we got somethin’ real nice for ya.

Caller: Well, uh—can I ask ya a question there, Moomyah?

Answerer: What’s that?

Caller: Do niggers eat shit?

Answerer: Do you?

Caller: Nah, uh—really! I’m curious! Isn’t that where yer brown color comes from?

Answerer: I can’t believe you that silly, man. Ain’t you got nothin’ better to do?

Caller: Well, we got the kill-a-nigger festival I told ja about....

Answerer: Man, I can’t believe a grown man your age ain’t got nothin’ betta to do than play ona damn phone! Are you retarded, man?

Caller: Naw, I’m curious.

[The phone is hung up.]

The call probably wasn’t formally reported to my captain although I’m fairly certain that we discussed it, more like—“Man, you ain’t gonna believe the nutty shit that I’m getting on my phone.…” What is memorable, however, is the distinct accent of the caller. His high-in-the-throat, almost nasal pronunciation sounded more at home in the ethnic enclaves of South or Northeast Philadelphia (pronounced “Fluffia” by them) than distant, rural Reading. Was it really the Klan; were they really so stupid, so childish, that a teenager could so quickly dismiss them as juvenile?

It may have been, but to the youth on the receiving end of the call, it sounded like a typical Philadelphia cop.

Terry, because of his low-key, laid-back approach, was incurring more criticism than acceptance in his role of captain. It did not help matters that he seemed more drunk than sober these days. Inevitably, another power struggle developed, and Captain Terry was quietly retired in favor of a younger, more aggressive (and sober!) North Philadelphian—Reggie Schell. Captain Reg would corral the necessary resources to open the first office of the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia in late spring 1969. The site he selected at 1928 West Columbia Avenue was in the very heart of North Philly, the site of a police-sparked revolt (the city’s press would say “riot”) several months before. The office would become a magnet, attracting radical and revolutionary Black youth (and others) from all corners of the city.

The New York chapter, which had regional jurisdiction over the East Coast, sent its Deputy Field Marshal, Henry Mitchell, to check out the branch. With acerbic, earthy speech and arrogant, proud authority, New York gave Philadelphia its intense scrutiny.

Mitchell, his face seemingly etched with a permanent scowl, was barking like a drill instructor as he issued orders to the novice troops and the newly minted captain. But by day’s end, the city was given a passing mark. We were told to strengthen and fortify office and housing, ordered to report regularly, and abruptly left alone.30

Thus was the Philadelphia branch of the Black Panther Party born.