AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman
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