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Edwards helped organize his students so they could improve their treatment at the school, and they forced the cancellation of a football game—the ultimate act of university sabotage. Governor Reagan wanted to send in the National Guard to police the field; the RAM milieu offered Edwards its own guerrillas if need be. But the school had to face a hard truth: It couldn’t operate without the participation of black students. The game was not played. The “revolt of the black athlete,” to quote the title of one of Edwards’s books, that began in San Jose and spread across the country attracted international attention and embarrassed the American government, which from the state’s perspective defeated the whole point of international sport. But despite the drama, SJSU had a very strong program, especially in track and field. One of Edwards’s protégés was a national champion sprinter, and the school recruited a second from Texas. Only after Olympic organizers agreed to exclude South Africa from the 1968 games in Mexico City did the SJSU sprinters agree to represent the United States. When the teammates took gold and bronze in the men’s 200-meter, there must have been a moment when Team USA’s white leaders patted themselves on the back. Then Tommie Smith and John Carlos mounted the podium in stocking feet, bowed their heads, and raised their fists, one black glove each. The gesture humiliated America on the global stage, turning a national triumph into a searing Black Power tableau, an indelible salute of international solidarity. The last will be first, and then: Look out!
At the College of San Mateo (CSM), liberal efforts to recruit black, Chinese, and Chicano students were so successful that they undermined themselves. A minority-student retention program, for example, succeeded in scaring the board of trustees, which defunded it to death, leading to protests and the birth of a CSM Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) coalition. The state recognized its interest in providing more nonwhite students with at least vocational higher education, but the people hired to run these programs tended to be sympathetic to the radical critiques—when they weren’t directly involved in the radical projects themselves. Bob Hoover, the Stanford grad student whom CSM hired to help run the retention program, was a good example. Hoover and his wife, Mary, were both SNCC veterans and Stanford grad students studying education, and like other black people with impressive qualifications, they could not live in Palo Alto. Instead they bought a house across the highway, and after a visiting Stokely Carmichael advised local education organizers not to try too hard to integrate into the proverbial burning house, the Hoovers helped start the Nairobi Day School in East Palo Alto to teach black students an anticolonial curriculum.31
One member of the TWLF at San Mateo was a young Chicano from South Texas named Aaron Manganiello. He moved to the Bay as a teenager and joined the antiwar movement in the early 1960s. As a CSM student, he volunteered in Hoover’s minority-student retention program. Like most leftists, he radicalized in the ’60s, particularly around the Black Panther Party model. In 1966 when two Los Angeles Chicanos, Carlos Montes and David Sanchez, founded the Brown Berets, he persuaded them to let him set up some Northern California chapters. After the CSM board killed the retention program, Manganiello teamed up with other TWLF students to help them set up their own experimental college programs. They enlisted the help of Bob and Mary Hoover, and together they built two independent Third World community colleges: Nairobi College, in East Palo Alto, and Venceremos College, in Redwood City’s Chicano section. The contradictions in the country’s Cold War human-capital strategy rose to the surface: White America needed black and Chicano people but didn’t want them. The Hoovers and other East Palo Alto SNCC veterans turned Nairobi College into the kind of community college they thought black youths deserved, teaching an Afrocentric curriculum and channeling students into professional occupations rather than the vocational roles the state had planned for them. As far as the state was concerned, though, that wasn’t the worst possible outcome. At Manganiello’s Venceremos, they channeled students into armed communist revolution.32
America remained dependent on the next generation of workers, even though the human-capital production system was hostile to everyone except certain white men, as eugenicists designed it. Yet some individuals made their way toward places in the skilled labor car. Bobby Seale, for example, was an air force vet studying engineering and design at Merritt while he worked at Kaiser Aerospace.33 Huey Newton was in and out of prison as a kid, and he disdained the substandard Oakland schools until he made his way to Merritt, where he studied law and thrived. There they got pulled into the RAM milieu, from which Newton and Seale spun off their own, distinct local analysis. Democrats were not totally insensitive to the situation’s perilous dynamics. Johnson’s War on Poverty attempted to alleviate the urgent pressure in the ghetto as unemployment mounted, partly by hiring black college students and recent graduates to do community work. Critics on the right called the programs bribes to the black communities, while critics on the left said they were the state’s one step forward to go along with capitalism’s two steps back. The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) put federal funds in the street, especially in the summer months when white fear of unemployed black teenagers was at its peak. In the summer of 1966, Newton and Seale both got OEO jobs. At the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center, Seale oversaw 200 teenagers, teaching literacy and small-job skills, and keeping them busy.34 In January of 1967, with the money from their OEO gigs, Seale and Newton opened the first office of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, a few blocks away from Merritt College.
Instead of the mythic, individualist founding story, in which young Bobby and Huey suckled from a mother panther’s teats, we have a multifarious account. There was SNCC and the southern movement, with its successes, failures, and concluding splits between liberals and radicals, black organizers and white supporters; there were the community colleges and the OEO; there were the anticolonial struggles around the world, from China to South Africa; there were the street riots and police violence and unemployment and criminal gangs and discrimination and assassinations; there were the revolutionary black student associations, with their heterodox Marxisms and passionate guest speakers; there were the cultural nationalists, with their Swahili classes and new names. And there was the black American tradition of armed self-defense, the one they had used to free themselves once before. The BPP came to a synthesis of these influences the same way SNCC found itself with its pockets full of pistols: Once they were determined to intervene in history, it was a practical necessity. That determination was the one thing that wasn’t predetermined, the imaginative wriggling of butterflies that threatens to bring history’s glass display case to the ground in pieces. Pound for pound, no American political group had nearly as big an impact during the period, and it’s worth going through a brief but detailed history of the Oakland BPP to frame the next section, when we will return to Palo Alto proper.
Studying constitutional law at Merritt and at an OEO library, Newton became convinced that people had a right to police the police with their own guns, as long as they were very careful about how they did it. These community patrols enraged the cops. When they confronted the patrols, BPP members recited the specific law and affirmed their compliance. The patrols oversaw arrests to prevent brutality and followed arrestees to lockup and bailed them out when they could. Kids, teenagers, and young adults in the community were enraptured, and the BPP recruited quickly. It didn’t hurt that Seale had spent the summer as a mentor to dozens of unemployed young black residents. The Panthers also had style, which developed into the beret-and-leather-jacket uniform. Coming out of the highly intellectual RAM milieu, they had a detailed explanation for the importance of looking cool, drawing on Freud and Fanon. Disdainful of cultural nationalism—or what they called pork-chop nationalism—the Panther leadership nonetheless recognized that black pride was an essential part of Black Power.
Unlike the RAM groups, the Panthers were gender-integrated in a serious way. Within months of the Oakland office’s opening, a sixteen-year-old student at Oakland Technical High School named Tarika Lewis walked through the door and asked Bobby Seale two questions: “Can I join?” and “Can I have a gun?”35 Seale said yes. Lewis was a born activist, organizing the high school’s black student union, hanging out with older activist cousins, and ditching school to sit in on lectures at Merritt. (Other Oakland Tech students were early members, including Bobby Hutton—one of Seale’s OEO mentees—and Reginald Forte, the younger brother of a Merritt student organizer.) In her book The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, Robyn Spencer explains that the insurgent Panthers made for a more appealing movement home for young women in Oakland than other militant organizations did. The party combined Maoism’s strict gender egalitarian orthodoxy with the reality of women’s community leadership, the latter of which structured the southern movement’s gender dynamics. By staying underground, RAM could remain male-dominated despite its declared feminist convictions. The Panther tactic of bearing guns near the police was too recklessly open for RAM, but it also guaranteed women’s participation. Panther women are often associated with the party’s community survival programs, particularly their work clothing, feeding, and educating children, but the armed patrols, too, were gender-integrated from the beginning, and patrolling with arms is what Tarika Lewis joined to do.
The armed cop-watch strategy relied on California’s liberal gun law, and soon after the Panthers started patrolling, the state legislature moved to tighten it. In their most visible action to that point, the BPP went with their guns to the state capitol building, in Sacramento, to protest the gun-control bill—another legally protected activity. Guards couldn’t find any statutory reason to keep them out of the gallery, and the images of armed Panthers in the capitol astounded the country. (The pictures are still somewhat astounding today.) By the time the Panthers were ready to drive home, local police had figured out an excuse, and Seale kept the armed standoff from turning into a shoot-out. The organization had an international profile now, and new chapters started popping up around the Bay. In the early days, when people in other states called and asked how they could start a chapter, the Oakland Panthers told them to just go for it. The party in the late 1960s had a pragmatic, ad hoc flexibility that contrasts with the organization’s later rigid centralism. Though they had understandable reasons for that, too.
RAM’s main critique of the Panther strategy was that the police would immediately find ways to destroy the organization. Asymmetrical guerrilla war was one thing, but you couldn’t expect to win public standoffs with the police. If they didn’t shoot you dead in the street, they could kill you in jail or assassinate you any way they pleased. (The poorly explained death of left-wing Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, in 1961, was never too far away in the Pan-Africanist mind.) The first months of 1967 suggested that was an exaggeration, that the Constitution did provide some level of protection, even for armed black militants calling the police pigs.xi But after the Mulford Act passed in record time, the loaded guns had to stay in pockets and trunks. In October, a car stop gone awry left one pig dead and Huey under arrest for murder. In April of the following year, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. set off riots across the country, but not in Oakland, where Panther strategy opposed spontaneous uprisings. Instead, they planned a community picnic. The night before the planned gathering, a shoot-out erupted between Panthers and cops; the Oakland PD murdered the teenage Bobby Hutton while he surrendered, stripped down to his underwear to prove he was unarmed. If you patrolled with guns and talked about war—within your rights as Americans or not—the pigs were going to take you up on it.
“Free Huey!” became an international rallying cry after his conviction for voluntary manslaughter, in 1968. The Panthers fought “in the belly of the beast”—taking it to Uncle Sam within the country’s own borders, exposing the contradictions at the empire’s core. That meant political repression—or, rather, an intensified version of the political repression black people already faced in the United States. After surviving the shoot-out that killed Hutton, Panther minister of information Eldridge Cleaver skipped bail and fled to Cuba, then to Algeria, where he set up an international section of the party. In Los Angeles, the FBI pitted Ron Karenga’s cultural nationalist US Organization against the Panthers with infiltrators and poison-pen letters, and after a UCLA black student union meeting, a US member shot and killed Panthers John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. It had been less than a year since Carter founded the chapter. Newton was freed in 1970 after an appeals court ordered a new trial, and the prosecution found itself unable to convict him in several attempts. The feds understood the Panthers as the country’s biggest domestic threat, and the Nixon administration’s FBI pursued them under a wide-ranging counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), treating the organization as the revolutionary vanguard it claimed to be.
While at San Quentin, Newton allied with a black Marxist revolutionary prison group led by a young intellectual named George Jackson, who became a Panther field marshal on the inside.xii After Jackson was moved to Soledad State Prison, he narrowly avoided a race riot in the yard during which guards killed three black inmates.36 Four days later, Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette allegedly killed a white guard in retaliation, for which they would surely be sentenced to death.37 This led to one of the era’s most dramatic moments, when George Jackson’s teenage brother, Jonathan, led an armed takeover of the Marin County courthouse and demanded the release of George and the other two Soledad Brothers, as they were popularly known. Jonathan, three of his comrades, and Judge Harold Haley were killed in a shoot-out. The guns were registered to Communist Party USA leader, UCLA philosophy professor, and friend of the Panthers Angela Davis. She went on the lam, a global resistance icon for the age. The FBI finally caught up to her, but an all-white Santa Clara County jury found Davis not guilty of all charges in 1972.38 Soledad guards killed George Jackson—during an escape attempt, they said. The state’s violent machinations—perhaps epitomized in the blatant assassination of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in December of 1969—seemed to confirm the Panther analysis.
Despite the state attacks, the Panthers inspired Americans the way no domestic left-wing group had, at least for the previous few decades. They disciplined and radicalized other organizations on the left by example. They provided a revolutionary model, and not just for black revolutionaries. In the summer of ’69, the Panthers led the United Front Against Fascism conference in Oakland, bringing together the broad interracial Bay Area left under one (sometimes contentious) roof. (Frustration with white participants from SDS led the BPP to redouble service efforts in Oakland’s black community, leading to a vast proliferation of programs, including sickle-cell testing, clothing and food drives, transportation to visit incarcerated loved ones, education, child care—the list goes on.)xiii A number of new organizations drew explicit inspiration from the Panthers: the Red Guard Party, out of San Francisco’s Chinatown; the Brown Berets, organizing Chicanos; the Young Lords, for Puertorriqueños; and even the midwestern Young Patriots, for poor white proletarianized Appalachians. Panther leaders, comparatively experienced with regard to the anticolonial question in America, nudged other Third World groups toward revolutionary internationalism rather than cultural or mere representational politics.
Although the Panthers were clearly and unapologetically black as an organization, they did not see their role as limited to the black community. If the last were now first, that put them in a leadership position. We can observe how BPP members handled that responsibility at another California school, San Francisco State College. SF State existed at the nexus of several nonwhite communities, and the school featured an advanced internationalist milieu. That was in large part thanks to George Murray, a SF State graduate student in English, popular freshman instructor, black student union leader, and minister of education for the Black Panther Party.39
Murray was an avid internationalist, and he led the BSU into a coalition with the campus’s other Third World student groups, which became the Third World Liberation Front. Murray exemplified black student-instructor radicalism, and he and others like him drove Governor Ronald Reagan nuts. At an international conference in Cuba in the fall of 1968, Murray affirmed Panther support for the North Vietnamese, telling the crowd that every American soldier killed in Vietnam was one fewer they had to deal with at home. The governor put pressure on the state board of trustees to deal with Murray, and Murray pushed right back. In front of thousands of students at Fresno State College, where trustees were meeting, Murray told the crowd that the country needed “an old-fashioned black-brown-red-yellow-poor-white revolution.”40 Quoting Mao (as was the Panther wont), he said, “We maintain that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. If you want campus autonomy, if the students want to run the college, and the cracker administrators don’t go for it, then you control it with the gun.”41 The BSU began pushing for a student strike to test its support on campus, and the Monday after his Fresno State appearance, Murray got up on a cafeteria table and encouraged students to arm themselves. The college president reluctantly suspended Murray; the BSU went on strike, joined readily by the whole TWLF and a group of white supporters. They were out from November to the following March, when the school agreed to establish the country’s first ethnic studies department, though not to rehire Murray.xiv Some things were beyond the pale.
