Today, in the wake of the deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo and Staten Island and the shooting of a black child with a toy gun in Cleveland, we have a groundswell or protests over police treatment of people of color.
In the mid-1960's, the response to similar treatment was different, particularly in the Western part of our country and then spreading through the rest of the Midwest and Northeast: the Black Panther Party, which was founded in Oakland after a series of events of police brutality and probable outright murder.
The Panther's idea was, in part, to shadow the police and be present as armed witnesses to any potential police brutality. At that time, California had an open carry law, and it was within every citizen's legal right to observe their police officers at work. In uniform, Panthers would follow the police. "If they took out their guns, we took out their guns." White officers describe the experience as chilling and intimidating.
The Panthers came out of Oakland Direct Action Committee (founded by Mark Comfort, who came out of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Lowndes County, Alabama, the darkest of counties in the darkest of dark states when it came to Civil Rights.) Comfort also brought back the Black Panther symbol, which was there used to represent a branch of the Democratic party. Here's Wikipedia again: "ODAC and the newly founded Black Panther Party worked together to follow police after blacks were arrested, follow them to the police station and often bail them out as well.
The instigating incident for the Tea Party-like stand-off between the Panthers and the California State Assembly was this:
"In 1967, a black man, Denzil Dowell, was murdered by a Contra Costa County sheriff's deputy. A grand jury ruled the killing a "justifiable homicide." The police claimed to have shot Dowell three times, but a coroner's report noted that he bled to death after being shot ten times. The family was not allowed to see the body nor to take possession of his clothing to determine how many times he had actually been shot. When Mark contacted Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, they accepted the request for assistance. The media coverage over this gave the Black Panther Party exposure into homes of millions of Americans."
1]A Republican Congressman, Don Mulford, introduced a bill to repeal the law that permitted citizens to carry loaded weapons in public places so long as they were openly displayed. Mulford, wanted to eliminate the Black Panther Police Patrols. His bill forbade the carrying of loaded weapons within the limits of any California City.
Like a reverse negative image of today's Tea Party Open Carry Supporters, the Panthers showed up at the California Assembly House, dressed in black leather jackets, shades, and black berets, armed and standing at attention like a paramilitary group. Then Governor Ronald Reagan scurried to his waiting helicopter and spoke to the press: "There's no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons."
Reagan signed the Mulford Act, which prohibited "the carrying of firearms on your person, in your vehicle, and in any public place or on the street." He also signed off on a 15-day waiting period for firearms purchase.
Which just goes to show you: when white males show up at a political gathering armed to the teeth, they are assiduously courted by one of our major political parties. When black males show up at a political gathering armed to to the teeth, white America shivers in their boots, the FBI makes them target number one, and Ronald Reagan signs off on gun control laws.
This is a photo of Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, (1942-1969) who died at the age of 26 in a shoot out at UCLA.
Yup. It was a shoot-out at Campbell Hall, in the Black Student Union, during a meeting to create a balanced faculty in the African-American studies department.
I have looked hard for background on Alprentice. I know he was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and at some point, moved to Los Angeles, probably as a child. In the late fifties, he became a member of a Slauson street gang, then moved up to the Slauson Renegades, the inner circle of that gang. Ultimately, he was the leader of the Slausons, which had, at that time, over 5,000 members. He was known in those days as the Mayor of the Ghetto.
Then, he was sentenced to four years for armed robbery. Sent to Soledad, he was exposed to the teachings of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and he converted, but after his release in 1963--he was twenty-one--he met Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panthers, left Islam, and instead joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
It's important here to try to lay some groundwork for inner city Northern blacks in the early sixties. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, (SCLC) the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, (SNCC) etc., were still focused on the Jim Crow South, where blacks had been subjugated legally since the end of slavery, it was nearly impossible for them to vote, and lynchings were status quo.
In Northern Cities, the issues were different. People of color were kept packed in isolated neighborhoods, by landlords who refused to rent to you, realtors who refused to sell homes in white neighborhoods and communities who might literally blow your house up or burn it down if you moved in. If you managed to buy a home you usually could not take out loans, as white residents of their town did, in order to improve that house, because banks had redlines drawn on their maps around Black neighborhood and refused to give loans. As for jobs--most unions were just beginning to let you be a member, which still put you in the last hired first fired role, and other than union jobs, you were often restricted to low-paying labor.
Add to that the police department, which was staffed by people who had been raised to be racist, like most of the rest of the white population at the time. We've all been learning about how white people in general and police officers in particular frequently mis-read African-Americans as huge and impossibly dangerous (If you're interested in teasing out some of your own biases, you can take some interesting tests online at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/) That was obviously true in the past as well, and in Oakland and in Los Angeles, as in many other parts of the north, people in what were then called Negro neighborhoods were used to being roughed up by the police, if not killed by them.
When we moved to South Central Los Angeles, we heard story after story from our neighbors about police brutality they had and continue to experience. This was eye-opening to me, who had been raised in white suburbia, at a time when Jews were beginning to be considered white. I had been taught that the police officer was my friend, someone to turn to if I were lost, someone who would probably give me ice-cream while I waited for my mama to come and rescue me.
Then, I heard our neighborhood stories, and I witnessed it myself--a police officer harassing our neighbor who was walking the dogs with us one night after having us over for dinner, and multiple officers profoundly and repeatedly harassing a beloved teenaged neighbor in a way that frightened us so deeply that it was part of why we moved. I became deeply aware that my childhood ideas were not--and still are not--the usual experience for children of color, who often see the adults around them humiliated or handled brutally by police--much like Jews in Eastern Europe even before Hitler, where men were routinely humiliated in front of their families, with no kind of practical recourse, since resistance meant death, rape for their women folk, etc. (Although not resisting might lead to the same results.)
Martin Luther King was a great leader. And he was pushed forward by impatient young men and women of SNNC. And he was both pushed and supported by an army of mostly unmentioned women who forced, organized and publicized on the ground the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The South's non-violent protests proved highly effective, largely because of this mountain of planning, the support of LBJ, who was a passionate racial activist president and consummate bully politician, and the aforementioned great inspiration of MLK's leadership--though none of that would have made a difference if not for the fact that television brought Southern Brutality into the homes of millions of white Americans, as it was their shamed awareness that allowed change to come.
But members of SNNC, reeling from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, were already growing impatient with the slow pace of social change and Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and the Black Panther party had already chosen a more in-your-face approach when Martin Luther King finally turned his eyes to the poverty of northern cities, just before he was assassinated. They founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and they scared the heck out of white America. Armed with Marxist rhetoric as well as bristling with guns, they told the world they were tired of being roughed up by the police, and would fight fire with fire to defend their own. The Panthers were rooted in Marxist ideology and inspired by the liberation theories of countries around the world, especially South and Central America and Africa. They studied law, started schools, free breakfasts for poor children, but they also "shadowed" police officers, carrying the California Penal code and toting shot guns.
And that will have to be that, for today. Next time--I hope to get to Ronald Reagan throwing all his political weight--you won't believe this-- in support of gun control.
