Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers

By Stephen Shames and Seale Bobby

This pictorial history tells the story of the revolutionary Black Panther Party in the words of its co-founder, Bobby Seale.

 

Coming toward the end of America’s epic Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party was one of the most creative and influential responses to racism and inequality in American history. They advocated armed self-defense to counter police brutality, and initiated a program of patrolling the police with shotguns—and law books.

In words and photographs, Power to the People explores the impact and achievements of this revolutionary organization. The words are Seale’s, with contributions by other former party members. The photographs are by Stephen Shames, the Panther’s most trusted documentarian. Power to the People is a testament to their warm association, combining Shames’s memorable images with Seale’s colorful in-depth commentary culled from many hours of conversation.

Shames also interviewed major party figures for this volume, including Kathleen Cleaver, Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Ericka Huggins, Emory Douglas, and William “Billy X” Jennings. His photography is supplemented with Panther ephemera and graphic art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ABRAMS
• Release date: Oct 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781613122990

Book preview

Student, Intercommunal Youth Institute, Oakland

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

HÉLDER CÂMARA

Like many boys of my generation, I built myself a radio receiver from a kit. Every night I crawled under the covers with an earphone (so my parents would not know I was still awake) and listened to music and the very popular comedy show Amos ’n’ Andy.

Today Amos ’n’ Andy seems like a bad joke, but nobody in my 1950s Father Knows Best world thought this program was an inaccurate depiction of black Americans. My eight-year-old brain had no other reality to compare it with. Despite the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, when the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Republican former governor of California, decided unanimously that public schools could no longer be segregated—that separate but equal was no longer the law of the land—nothing much had changed. This momentous decision, which overturned a century of legal opinion, did not have any effect that my youthful eyes could see. No black children or teachers entered my primary school. No African American families moved in next door. The America of my childhood remained deeply segregated.

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton also came of age in a segregated America. Born in the South—Huey in 1942 in Monroe, Louisiana; Bobby in 1936 in Liberty, Texas—both participated in the second migration of African Americans when their families moved to California: Huey’s to Oakland in 1945, when he was three, and Bobby’s to Berkeley in 1944, when he was eight. While moving out of the South provided some degree of economic advancement, relocating in the West did not allow Huey and Bobby to escape racism, poverty, and inferior schools.

In his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, Huey remembered, that I constantly felt uncomfortable and ashamed of being black. He wrote, During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.¹ Huey was illiterate when he graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1959. He taught himself to read by studying Plato’s Republic.

Bobby’s family lived in poverty during most of his childhood. He recalls, I was raised in Berkeley, California, in the old University Village, in the government projects built during World War II. Bobby attended Berkeley High School but dropped out and joined the U.S. Air Force in 1955. There he became a structural repairman on high-performance aircraft. He earned his high school diploma at night while working as a sheet metal mechanic at various aerospace plants. Then, until 1962, Seale attended Merritt College in Oakland, where he studied engineering—and met Huey.

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966. From its original six members, the Panthers grew into a political organization of more than ten thousand men and women in forty-nine chapters. Their legacy continues to inspire today, fifty years later.

Harlem, 1970

My Involvement with the Panthers

In 1966, I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. One of my roommates, Marty Roysher, had been on the steering committee of the Free Speech Movement the year before. With his guidance I became active in student government and the anti–Vietnam War movement. In August 1967, after a summer job at a plastics factory, I hitchhiked to the East Village of New York City. I bought my first camera during the Summer of Love. When I returned to Berkeley in September, I realized I was not suited for the endless meetings and bickering of politics. My contribution to the movement would be as a photographer. Documenting the Black Panthers became my first long-term project.

The first time I saw Bobby Seale and Huey Newton was on April 15, 1967, during the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. My father had come up from Los Angeles, and we were marching together through the streets of San Francisco when my eye caught Bobby and Huey in their leather jackets selling Mao’s Little Red Book. Their charisma and confidence captivated me. I took one frame.

I started hanging out with the Panthers, attending their rallies. Bobby Seale became my mentor and friend. He introduced me to David and June Hilliard, Elbert Big Man Howard, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, Emory Douglas, and Bobby’s brother, John. I was granted incredible access. Over the next seven years, culminating in Bobby Seale’s 1973 campaign for mayor of Oakland, I documented this group of young men and women, who were at the forefront of the Black Power movement and who became the vanguard of the revolution that was sweeping America.

What Was the Black Panther Party?

The Black Panther Party was a revolutionary political organization. Although its members were leaders of the Black Power movement, they were not black nationalists. Their black pride was not based on denigrating whites, but on showing the black community how to take control of its own destiny. The Black Panther Party worked for economic justice and power for all people.

Bobby Seale explains, The Black Panther Party was an ‘All Power to All the People!’ organization. It was a powerful grassroots activist organization that formed coalitions seeking to further our civil human rights and achieve real freedom and justice for all the people. These were the political revolutionary objectives of my Black Panther Party.

In their landmark book, Black against Empire, Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr. wrote:

What is unique and historically important about the Black Panther Party is specifically its politics. . . . They created a movement with the power to challenge established social relations. . . . From 1968 through 1970, the Black Panther Party made it impossible for the U.S. government to maintain business as usual, and it helped create a far-reaching crisis for U.S. society. . . . At the center of their politics was the practice of armed self-defense against the police. . . . The Panthers’ politics of armed self-defense gave them political leverage, forcibly contesting the legitimacy of the American political regime.²

Many scholars have characterized the Black Panther Party as the most influential black movement organization of the late 1960s. Professor Judson L. Jeffries has called the Panthers the most effective black revolutionary organization in the 20th century.³ Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Héctor Tobar called the organization a serious political and cultural force and a movement of intelligent, explosive dreamers.⁴

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 1971

Why Armed Self-Defense?

The Panthers rose from the ashes of the very successful civil rights movement. In the 1950s and early 1960s a growing movement demanded that black Americans be granted equal rights, including the right to vote. Nonviolent civil disobedience was used to challenge segregation. Rosa Parks and others refused to sit at the back of the bus. Young people sat in at segregated lunch counters. Citizens tried to register to vote. Millions marched.

The response was not nonviolent. Civil rights workers were beaten and murdered. The nation witnessed peaceful demonstrators being attacked by police dogs and sprayed with water hoses. I remember seeing George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, on TV, saying, Never, as he temporarily blocked the doors of the University of Alabama to keep out a black student. We listened to white-haired old men defend segregation as a way of life on the floor of the United States Senate.

On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed, murdering four beautiful little girls. That act of terrorism became a turning point for the civil rights movement. In 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. A year later, the Voting Rights Act was enacted.

While appreciating its accomplishments, we must acknowledge that the legal end of segregation fell short of bringing African Americans to full equality. Joshua may have Fit the Battle of Jericho, but the walls of racism did not come tumbling down. Although segregation was now illegal, many issues remained. Being able to sit at a lunch counter or ride on a bus next to whites—or even to vote—turned out not to be enough to gain African Americans equality in this wonderful country of ours. Blacks still unequally lacked jobs, were victims of unfair treatment by police, and lived in segregated neighborhoods in decrepit housing, while their children attended underfunded schools where they had trouble concentrating due to hunger.

Frustration was rampant. From 1964 to 1967 rebellions exploded in major American urban areas, including Harlem, Watts, Cleveland, Newark, and Detroit. Something more was needed. The Kerner Commission, established by President Johnson in 1967, concluded that the riots resulted from frustration over lack of economic opportunity. It blamed white racism for the urban violence and urged America to create new jobs, build decent housing, and end de facto segregation. The commission warned, Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.⁵

Something more was needed. That was Black Power, articulated by Stokely Carmichael in June 1966, when he said, Everybody owns their own neighborhoods except us. We need Black Power.⁶ But how to get there? Nonviolence, a powerful tool in the South, had less appeal to residents of northern ghettos. When Martin Luther King led a march through Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, in 1966, white residents threw bottles and bricks at the marchers—and demonstrators tossed them back.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 1971

Even earlier, Malcolm X, the most influential voice of the Black Power movement, renounced nonviolence and preached self-defense. During the 1964 presidential campaign, Malcolm made his famous remark that in 1964, it’s the ballot or the bullet.⁷ Malcolm X’s murder on February 21, 1965 had a deep influence on Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. The day Malcolm X was killed became a turning point in Bobby’s life. He decided I’d make a Malcolm X out of my own self. He and Huey created an organization with a road map for achieving Black Power—for control by black people of their own neighborhoods. Like Malcolm, civil rights activist Robert Williams in North Carolina, and the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana and then other southern states, they advocated self-defense.

Harlem, 1971

Self-defense is a cherished American value. We applaud John Wayne, Jason Bourne, John McClane, and Rambo when they defend themselves after a long train of abuses.⁸ The Panthers’ self-defense advocacy put them at the center of American political thought. Consider this: My dad, a World War II veteran from Texas, came from a family who lived with little deference and much resistance, so the theater of nonviolence did not appeal to me. I understand its power in demonstrating the brutality of legal segregation, but it seemed un-American to me because Americans fight back.

What American said that? It was Gloria Abernethy, a proud Black Panther. Gloria’s defense of cherished all-American patriotic values made Republican politicians proud, right? Well, not exactly. In 1966, when the Black Panthers carried guns (and law books) legally and peacefully while patrolling the police, then-Governor Ronald Reagan—that conservative icon—signed a very strict gun control law to stop young black men and women from carrying guns.

Compare this to the reaction after a white man killed twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Conservatives in Congress defeated President Obama’s attempt to limit rapid-firing assault weapons, while right-wing commentators vilified him and the National Rifle Association advocated arming teachers. In 2015, after a white racist murdered African Americans praying in church, we heard the same slippery-slope arguments—although in fairness, I must admit that apparently no one suggested arming pastors, priests, or the church choir.

In 2013, a Florida jury set George Zimmerman free after he claimed he stood his ground when he shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager. Huey and Bobby stood their ground against attacks by armed racists, not against unarmed civilians. While the government and the media dwelled on Panther guns, the vast majority of violence came from government agencies.

More important, the Black Panther Party was much more than a group of men and women who advocated self-defense. They were a revolutionary political party with an idealistic, yet very practical, Ten Point Program of what needed to be done to end racism and bring a greater degree of economic justice and power to ordinary people. (The Ten Points are discussed later in the introduction and in the last chapter of this book.)

The party sought to build a community through service to the people. In 1968, Bobby Seale initiated the Free Breakfast for Children Program, the first of what Huey Newton, in jail at the time, called survival programs—to keep the community healthy and strong, pending revolution. Huey stated, We recognized that in order to bring the people to the level of consciousness where they would seize the time, it would be necessary to serve their interests in survival by developing programs which would help them to meet their daily needs. For a long time we have had such programs not only for survival but for organizational purposes.⁹

Toward this end, the party provided free food, clothing, and shoes to children and families. They established People’s Free Medical Clinics and escorted seniors in crime-ridden neighborhoods. In all, the Panthers initiated more than sixty community programs.

Oakland, early 1970s

The Legacy of the Panthers

The Panthers remain cult heroes today, a half century after their founding. They left a legacy of hope to black people in America—both youth and adults. Their courage, discipline, and dedication to serving the community continue to inspire.

Their survival programs provided a model for political action. We can thank the Panthers for shaming the federal government into action by feeding tens of thousands of children while the richest nation in the history of the world let them go hungry. The Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children Program preceded the government’s school breakfast and lunch programs.

Many of the free medical clinics they started are still operating today. The Panthers were among the first to bring national attention to sickle-cell anemia, a disease that primarily affects black people.

The Panthers founded their own school to educate children of Panthers. Their charter school was cited as excellent by the California State Legislature and became a model in poor communities.

The Panthers’ efforts for community control of the police, including their failed referendum to establish such control in Berkeley, paved the way for community policing.

The Panthers electrified a generation of black youth. The Black Panther Party gave purpose to aimless, angry young people who loitered on street corners. The Panthers molded them into disciplined, hard workers who served their community and showed respect for their mothers, fathers, and elders in general. The Panthers provided a model for how to reach these disaffected kids. By comparison, our underfunded, piecemeal efforts to reach youth today often end in failure.

The Panthers were ahead of most of their contemporaries in regards to equality for women and gay rights. As Ericka Huggins observes:

Another thing that is part of the legacy of the Black Panther Party is that we were not afraid to look at race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. All of it. Huey wrote in support of the woman’s movement and the gay liberation movement. Who the heck—what black man, what white man, what any man was talking like that in 1970? Huey talked about it in terms that anybody could understand. We had our own gender issues, not so much sexual, but gender issues within the Black Panther Party. But, we worked that too. We really were ahead in terms of thinking and acting.¹⁰

The Panthers’ voter registration drives and Bobby Seale’s unsuccessful campaign for mayor in 1973 led to the election of Oakland’s first black mayor four years later. Even before that, Huey Newton’s 1968 Peace and Freedom Party campaign led to Ron Dellums’s election to Congress in 1970. Dellums finished his illustrious career in the House of Representatives as chairman, and then-ranking member (senior Democrat), on the Armed Services Committee. The number of elected African American officials at all levels nationwide in 1968 numbered in the hundreds. Today, tens of thousands of black elected and appointed officials serve our nation, including the president of the United States, the attorney general, and sheriffs in Mississippi and Alabama. Numerous former Panthers have held elected office in the United States, including Charles Barron (New York City

Reviews for Power to the People

[librolindsay · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A striking visual chronicle of the organization, though after reading Jamal Joseph's Panther Baby, I was hoping for more East Coast representation. Moving nevertheless!

[deckla_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Intimate black and white photographs of the Black Panthers, circa 1970, quite evocative of the heady hope and frustration of the time. Includes Black Panther party platform.