these recollections reveal are the various strands of thought that were circulating through the Black student and radical community at the time, and would later coalesce and congeal as the beginnings of ideology. The two men seemed to be searching for something—perhaps answers to why the world was as jumbled up as it seemed, perhaps for a way out of their daily grind, perhaps for that which Black Americans had searched for centuries—for freedom.
They were looking for an organization that would represent their collective voice. Even at this early stage, there existed positions that would later re-emerge espoused and reflected by the Black Panther Party: a questioning of the status quo; a sense of alienation not only from the US government, but, reflecting a class divide, also from the elite of the Civil Rights movement; and the germ of recognizing the importance of the international arena to the lives and destinies of Blacks in America.
Their first interaction also suggests the beginnings of the power relations that would last for the duration of the existence of the Black Panther Party. It is clear that, although younger, Huey P. Newton possessed a mind far more active, far more flexible, and far more wide-ranging than did Bobby Seale. Newton emerged as the teacher, though Seale too was pivotal.
Seale would introduce Newton to the Caribbean-born Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon through his masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth. A notoriously slow reader, Newton would read the extraordinary book six times.3 For Newton, and for many other Black Americans, Fanon’s words were a revelation, not merely of African colonial conditions, but of the world’s problems and why Black America was in such a wretched state:
The mass of the people struggle against the same poverty, flounder about making the same gestures and with their shrunken bellies outline what has been called the geography of hunger. It is an under-developed world, a world inhuman in its poverty; but also it is a world without engineers and without administrators. Confronting this world, the European nations sprawl, ostentatiously opulent. This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and the subsoil of that under-developed world. The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races.4
For one seeking to make sense of the vast, bleak panorama of poverty in the American ghetto, as contrasted with the projected stately order and opulence of white wealth, Fanon’s brave and passionate prose held powerful illumination. Black folks in America saw themselves in the villages of resistance and saw their ghettos as little more than internal colonies similar to those discussed in Fanon’s analysis.
Fanon’s anticolonial and anti-imperialist perspective was not the only influence on the young Newton. The Black nationalist Malcolm X had a powerful impact upon him, one he termed “intangible” and “deeply spiritual.”5 Newton regularly visited Muslim mosques in the Bay Area and discussed the problems facing Black Americans with members of the Nation of Islam (NOI). He heard Malcolm X, accompanied by a young convert then named Cassius Clay, speak at Oakland’s McClymond High School and found the intense young minister an impressive man “with his logic” and his “disciplined” mind.6 He seriously considered joining the NOI, but growing up as a preacher’s kid
I could not deal with their religion. By this time, I had had enough of religion and could not bring myself to adopt another one. I needed a more concrete understanding of social conditions. References to God or Allah did not satisfy my stubborn questioning.7
Fanon’s analysis mixed well with Malcolm’s militant anti-establishment oratory. Malcolm spoke often about the anticolonial liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. He spoke also of the Bandung Conference (1955) in Indonesia where African and Asian nations pledged support to the anticolonial movement. Malcolm X and Fanon were deep influences on Newton and played a role in moving him to develop an anti-imperialist and radical perspective:
From all of these things—the books, Malcolm’s writings and spirit, our analysis of the local situation—the idea of an organization was forming. One day, quite suddenly, almost by chance, we found a name. I had read a pamphlet about voter registration in Mississippi, how the people in the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, had a black panther for its symbol. A few days later, while Bobby and I were rapping, I suggested that we use the panther as our symbol and call our political vehicle the Black Panther Party.… The image seemed appropriate, and Bobby agreed without discussion. At this point, we knew it was time to stop talking and begin organizing.8
Black and Third World freedom struggles, nationally and internationally, deeply influenced the two men that formed the Black Panther Party. Several books in addition to Fanon’s were pivotal to this process.
While Robert Williams’s 1962 Negroes With Guns, as well as the works of V.I. Lenin, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Dostoyevski, Camus, and Nietzsche fed the growing intellect of Newton, young people of that era were being fed soul food—cooked on the burning embers of Watts, the ghetto rebellion that raged the year before. The books of Black revolutionaries and other thinkers were deeply influential, but what to do?
In his twenty-fourth year of life, Newton would organize a group that would spread across the nation like wildfire. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPPFSD), founded on October 15, 1966, and later renamed the Black Panther Party (BPP), would gain adherents in over forty US cities, with subsidiary information centers (called National Fronts Against Fascism offices) across the nation.
The Black Panther Party was born.
Southern Roots
If one examined the places of origin of leading members of the organization, despite its founding in northern California, one could not but be struck by the number of people who hailed from the South. The first two Panthers, Newton and Seale, were native to Louisiana and Texas, respectively. The BPP’s Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, was born in Arkansas and the Los Angeles chapter’s Deputy Minister of Defense, Geronimo ji-Jaga (né Pratt), was also born in Louisiana. The Party’s Chief of Staff, David Hilliard, and his brother, Roosevelt “June” Hilliard, were country boys from Rockville, Alabama. BPP Communications Secretary, and one of the first women to sit on the Central Committee, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, was born into an upwardly mobile Black family in Texas.9 Elbert “Big Man” Howard, an editor of The Black Panther newspaper for a time, was a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
It seems the young folks who established and staffed the organization came from predominantly southern backgrounds and therefore had to have suffered a kind of dual alienation. First, the global, overarching feeling of apartness stemming from being Black in a predominantly white and hostile environment. Second, the distinction of being perceived as “country,” or “southern,” a connotation that has come to mean stupid, uncultured, and hickish in much of the northern mind.
They were born into families that brought up the rear of the Great Migration, that vast trek of Black folks fleeing the racial terrorism, lack of opportunity, and stringent mores of social apartheid of the US South. Although they arrived in California as youths and adolescents, they never truly felt at home there, looking to the bayous, deltas, fields, and farmlands of their birthplaces almost as ancestral homes. This was perhaps best voiced by David Hilliard:
Yet Rockville remains a profound influence on my life.… “We’re going back to the old country,” my cousin Bojack used to say when we were growing up and preparing for a trip south. Rockville remains the closest I can get to my origins, to being African.10
For millions of African Americans living in the North, the same can be said. This almost rural mindset would have repercussions for the Party as it grew and expanded into northern cities with teeming Black ghettos.
Roots of Black Radicalism
For
