Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America

13. Inside the Panther Revolution: The Black Freedom Movement and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California

Chapter 13 Inside the Panther Revolution The Black Freedom Movement and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California Robyn Ceanne Spencer The publication of John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi and Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle in the mid-s laid the groundwork for scholarly analyses of the Black Freedom movement that did not revolve around the actions of charismatic national leaders or government officials. Instead, Dittmer and Payne crafted richly textured historical narratives centered on the process of political empowerment that led ordinary local people, far away from the spotlight or the headlines, to become active participants in the struggle for civil rights. In their analyses local people were important not only because of the political changes their activism set into motion but also for the lessons about participatory democracy, collective action, experiential learning, and grassroots leadership evident in the flowering of their political consciousness . Although many scholars have elaborated and expanded on Dittmer’s and Payne’s bottom-up approach to re-analyze the civil rights movement, few have extended their methodologies or analytical frameworks to study the thousands of African Americans who fought for dignity, self-determination , and social justice in the Black Power movement. While civil rights historiography has focused on dramatic and transformative events and highlighted individual and collective triumphs on the national and local level, Black Power has only recently been analyzed by scholars as a local phenomenon that revolutionized grassroots politics in urban America,  and as a mass movement in which the process of change was just as important as the outcome of change.1 Instead, many scholars have characterized the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement as two distinct entities with dissimilar goals, strategies, tactics, and movement cultures. In this conceptualization Black Power was a divisive backlash born out of disillusionment with the shortcomings of the civil rights movement; characterized by anger and violence; and spearheaded by Northern blacks who, according to one leading historian, were “filled with rage and looking for a way to affirm themselves.”2 When local people have been poor black youth in prisons, high schools, colleges, and street corners in inner-city areas stigmatized as dysfunctional and pathological, their attacks on entrenched power and privilege have not been valorized. Yet it is precisely these local urban struggles that so clearly demonstrate the inability of scholarly analyses of black protest premised on impermeable boundaries between civil rights and black power to capture the complexity of the Black Freedom movement. This essay analyzes the impact of the Black Panther Party, one of the leading organizations of the Black Power movement, on the people and politics of Oakland, California. It argues that the Panthers’ political impact was multilayered—not just measurable in their actions but also inscribed in the way they lived, the revolutionary values they tried to emulate , and their attempts to empower, educate, and politicize oppressed people. The Black Panther Party was a political vehicle created by local people who drew on Southern resistance traditions and the contours of their urban experience to defy police brutality, housing shortages, unemployment , racism, poverty, and their own fear and apathy, and to take collective action to transform their conditions. Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, two streetwise community college students in , the Panthers captured the imagination of a generation of American youth and inspired them to drop out of school and brave alienation from their families and friends to work for social change. They were committed to remaking the world—and themselves—or literally die trying, and they created alternative lifestyles premised on the notion that the personal was profoundly political. Despite the ravages of a powerful campaign of political repression unleashed against them by the FBI in , the Panthers successfully challenged Republican dominance of local politics, created and staffed innovative free social programs that cushioned the blow of poverty for hundreds of families, and registered thousands of voters in the quest for community control. Perhaps most important, this work was done by a Inside the Panther Revolution  committed cadre of rank-and-file members whose courage and vision changed the face of grassroots politics in the United States. Local Context By the mid-s blacks in Oakland, like Newark, New Jersey, Detroit, Michigan, and other urban centers nationwide, were in the throes of...