In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

“Raising the Consciousness of the People”: The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 1967–1980 JONINA M. ABRON The Death of Huey P. Newton I was headed out the door to my job as managing editor of Black Scholar magazine in Oakland, California, when my phone rang the morning of Tuesday, August 22, 1989. The caller, a sister who had been a fellow Black Panther Party member in Oakland after first working in the party in Houston, Texas, rushed out the words: “JoNina, have you heard? Huey’s been shot. He’s dead.” She explained that a friend in Oakland had heard the news and called to tell her. Shocked, I had barely hung up the phone when it rang again. On the other end was another comrade sister (in the party, women were “comrade sisters” and men “comrade brothers”) calling to ask if I had heard that Huey had been killed. “I miss him already,” she said. Grief overcame me as I realized that Huey P. Newton, whose name thousands across the world once chanted in the cry “Free Huey!” and who had been an international symbol of black resistance to white oppression, was dead. Violence had consumed Huey’s life almost daily in the twenty-three years since he cofounded the Black Panther Party, and violence finally took his life at age forty-seven. The following Monday afternoon, August 28, at Huey’s funeral, inside and outside east Oakland’s Allen Temple Baptist Church, over 2,000 people—including ex-Panthers from Baltimore, Boston, Houston, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and other places—mourned Huey’s death and celebrated the enduring contributions that the Panther leader and the party made to the political empowerment of black and other disenfranchised people in the United States. I was asked to speak at the funeral because I was an editor—the last editor—of The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, the BPP’s newspaper. As I stood crunched in line waiting to enter the sanctuary with Huey’s family members and other speakers on the program—including ex–party leaders Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins, David Hilliard, and Emory Douglas—I found myself looking into the faces of two Panther comrades whom I had not seen in fifteen years. We embraced—sad for the occasion that had reunited us, but happy to be reunited. 336 | JoNina M. Abron When I stood on the podium to speak, I nearly broke down and cried as I looked into the faces of my Panther comrades on the front pews. I thought about all the good and hard times we had gone through together “serving the people body and soul.” I said that I had been privileged to serve in the Black Panther Party for nine years and that I would die a Panther. I know I said something else, but I don’t remember what. When Elaine Brown took the podium, it was the first time many ex-Panthers and party supporters had seen her since 1977, when she resigned from the party for personal reasons. Her capable leadership held the BPP together from 1974 to 1977, when Huey was in exile in Cuba after being charged with killing an Oakland prostitute. He had survived being shot by one policeman, and three years of prison for killing another policeman in the same incident; other confrontations with law enforcement; and numerous trials. In her comments, Elaine said she had thought Huey was invincible and that he would live forever. Moving to the podium and putting a black beret on his head (in the party’s early days, the Panther uniform consisted of a black beret, black leather jacket, and powder blue shirt), BPP cofounder and chair Bobby Seale brought the congregation to its feet in tribute when he raised his clenched fist and shouted the Panther rallying cry: “All power to the people!” Then he recalled how he and Huey met as students at Merritt College in the early 1960s, and how their mutual concerns about police brutality, poverty, and other problems in the black community led them to found the BPP in Oakland in October 1966. Just as he had in the old days, in his familiar strident cadence, Bobby then recited from memory the entire BPP Ten Point Platform and Program. For a few minutes, it seemed as if the congregation at Allen Temple Church was at a Panther rally in 1968. After the funeral, ex-Panthers, family members, and friends gathered...

Share