The Campus and the Street: Race, Migration, and the Origins of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA

Abstract

The great exodus of poor people out of the South during World War II sprang from the hope for a better life in the big cities of the North and West. In search of freedom, they left behind centuries of southern cruelty and repression. The futility of that search is now history. The Black communities of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Newark, Brownsville, Watts, Detroit, and many others stand as testament that racism is as oppressive in the North as in the South. Oakland is no different.

Huey Newton ¹

Keywords:

• Black Panther Party
• Black studies
• migration
• Oakland

Notes

Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1973), p. 14.

Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1976), p. 11.

Manning Marable, “Foreword” in Rod Bush's The New Black Vote: Politics and Power in Four American Cities (San Francisco: Synthesis Publications, 1984), p. 3; Nicolas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1991), p. 6.

Quoted by Albert S. Broussard, “In Search of the Promised Land: African American Migration to San Francisco, 1900–1945,” in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in Calfiornia, Lawrence de Graafe et al., eds. (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 2001), p. 190.

Charles Johnson, The Negro War Worker in San Francisco: A Local Self-Survey (San Francisco, 1944), p. 1.

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population by Age, Race, and Sex in Oakland, Calif. by Census Tracts: 1940.

U.S. Department of Labor, “Data from Census Bureau Estimates for Oakland, California,” 1980 Census, Run No. 831120, p. 4.

For a sustained discussion of the complex relation of the Black Panther Party to the concept of Black Power, see Donna Murch, “When the Panther Travels: Race and the Southern Diaspora in the History of the BPP, 1964–1972,” Conference Paper, Diaspora and the Difference Race Makes Symposium, Black Atlantic Seminar, Rutgers University, February 16, 2007.

Donna Murch, “The Urban Promise of Black Power: African American Political Mobilization in Oakland and the East Bay, 1961–1977” (UC Berkeley: Ph.D. Thesis, 2004).

After conducting extensive oral history interviews with activists in the Bay Area Black Power movement for my dissertation, I was struck by how many had served time in the California Youth Authority and other penal institutions. For representative sample, see Donna Murch, “Interview with Emory Douglas,” March 7, 2002, “Leon White,” August 9, 2002, “Fritz Pointer,” March 12, 2002; Judith May, “Struggle for Authority: A Comparison of Four Social Change Programs in Oakland, California” (UC Berkeley: Ph.D. Thesis, 1973).

Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, pp. 110–127; Murch, “Interview with Ernest Allen,” February 3, 2002; Murch, “The Urban Promise,” p. 147; Paul Alkebulan, “The Role of Ideology in the Growth, Establishment, and Decline of the Black Panther Party: 1966 to 1982” (UC Berkeley, Ph.D. Thesis, 2003), p. 104.

Quote taken from Jeanne Theoharis, “‘Alabama on the Avalon’: Rethinking the Watts Uprising and the Character of Black Protest in Los Angeles” in Peniel E. Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Tights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 33.

Murch, “Interview with Melvyn Newton,” March 15, 2002.

Albert Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1945 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1993); Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), p. 17.

Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 30.

Broussard, p. 192; Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Johnson, Negro War Worker.

According to Charles Johnson, in the 19–24 age group, women outnumbered men by 2 to 1; Charles Johnson, The Negro War Worker, p. 6.

Lawrence B. De Graaf & Quintard Taylor, “Introduction” to Seeking El Dorado, p. 24; Murch, “Interview with Walter Bachemin,” June 28, 1998, p. 1; William Henry Brown, Class Aspects of Residential Development and Choice in Oakland Black Community (UC Berkeley Ph.D. Thesis, 1970), p. 86; This dynamic was re-enacted inside the state itself. Large numbers of southern migrants who first settled in Los Angeles, which had a much older and larger African-American community, later chose to move north in search of a less hostile environment; Floyd Hunter, Housing Discrimination in Oakland, California; A Study Prepared for the Oakland Mayor's Committee on Full Opportunity and the Council of Social Planning, Alameda County (Berkeley, California: 1964), p. 14.

In my oral history interviews with migrants, this theme frequently emerged. See for example, Murch, “Newton,” “Bachemin.”

Donna Murch, “The Problem of the Occupational Color Line,” unpublished paper, p. 15.

Charlers Wollenberg, Marinship at War: Shipbuilding and Social Change in Wartime Sausalito (Berkeley: Western Heritage Press, 1990), p. 71.

C.L. Dellums, International President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Civil Rights Leaders, Northern California Negro Political Series, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley; Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

Committee of Fair Employment Practice, Final Report, June 28, 1946, Institute for Governmental Studies, University of California Berkeley, p. 77.

Oakland Police Department Report (6), p. 23, Oakland Public Library; Marilyn Johnson, Second Gold Rush; Murch, “The Problem of the Occupational Color Line.”

Edward, C., Hayes, Power Structure and Urban Policy: Who Rules in Oakland? (San Francisco: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1972), p. 48.

Ibid., p. 44.

Hayes, Power Structure and Urban Policy; Marilynn Johnson, Second Gold Rush, p. 167; Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, “Deindustrialization, Urban Poverty and African American Community Mobilization in Oakland, 1945 through 1990s,” Seeking El Dorado, pp. 343–376.

Johnson, Second Gold Rush, p. 167; OPD Report (6).

May, “Struggle for Authority,” pp. 115–117.

May, “Struggle for Authority,” pp. 115–117; Evelio Grillo, Black Cuban, Black American: A Memoir (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2000), p. 131; Laura Mihailoff, “Protecting Our Children: A History of the California Youth Authority and Juvenile Justice, 1938–1968” (UC Berkeley, 2005).

May, “Struggle for Authority,” p. 24.

Ibid., p. 128.

May, “Struggle for Authority,” p. 130; Oakland Police Department History 1941–1955, Part 6, 36–40.

May, “Struggle for Authority,” pp. 130–135; Oakland Police Department History 1941–1955, Part 6, pp. 36–40.

May, “Struggle for Authority,” p. 130.

Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Self, American Babylon; Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). For new literature on the history of Black Studies see also Peniel E. Joseph, “Black Studies, Student Activism, and the Black Power Movement,” in The Black Movement, pp. 251–277 and Noliwe Rooks, White Money, Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).

For a sustained discussion of the roots of the Bay Area Black Power movement in postwar struggles over California higher education see Murch, “Urban Promise of Black Power.”

John Aubrey Douglas, “Brokering the 1960 Master Plan: Pat Brown and the Promise of California Higher Education,” in Responsible Liberalism: Edmund G. “Pat” Brown and Reform Government in California 1958–1967, Martin Schiesl, ed. (Los Angeles: Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs, 2003), p. 86; John Aubrey Douglas, The California Idea and American Education; Sidney W. Brossman and Myron Roberts, The California Community Colleges (Palo Alto, CA: Field Educational Publications, 1973).

“Completion Levels: Percentage of High School and College ‘Completers’ (Aged 25 and Over) in Selected Cities, 1969,” Historical Statistics of Black America, Jessie Carney Smith and Carrell Peterson Horton, eds. (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995), p. 530.

Jonathan Spencer, Caught in Crossfire: Marcus Foster and America's Urban Education Crisis, 1941–1973 (New York Univeristy: Ph.D. Thesis, 2002), pp. 361–363.

Jonathan Spencer quotes an article from 1952 in which the planners of the new McClymonds building described how their choice of design suited “the modified curriculum” meant to “fit the needs of the pupils in the area.” Although, biology was still required, McClymonds possessed a different “set of contents and set of objectives…[with] a good deal of attention…to the care of the hair, skin and feet.” Spencer, “Caught in Crossifre,” p. 361.

Spencer, p. 363.

Warden, Letters to the Ice Box, Daily California, 1 March (1961), 22 March (1961)

Murch, “The Urban Promise,” p. 99.

Lisa Rubens, “Interview with Donald Hopkins,” unpublished transcript, Regional Oral History Office, UC Berkeley, September 29, 2000.

Murch, “Interview with Ernest Allen,” July 3, 2001.

Murch, “Interview with Dawson,” July 26, 2002; “Interview with Khalid Al Mansour,” July 22, 2002.

Ibid.

Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, The US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003), pp. 25–29.

Murch, “Dawson.”

Murch, “Mansour”; Khalid Al Mansour, Black Americans at the Crossroads–Where Do We Go From Here? (New York: First African Arabian Press, 1990).

Brown, Fighting for US, p. 28.

James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 260–262.

Murch, “Dawson”; Timothy Tyson, “Introduction: Robert F. Williams, ‘Black Power,’ and the Roots of the African American Freedom Struggle,” in Robert F. Williams, Negroes With Guns (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), p. xxvii.

Murch, “Dawson.”

Murch, “Mansour.”

Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, pp. 60–66; Bobby Seale, Seize the Time (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 21; Murch, “Interview with Mary Lewis,” March 18, 2002.

Murch, “Allen.”

Murch, “Melvyn Newton.”

Gabrielle Morris, Head of the Class: An Oral History of African-American Achievement in Higher Education and Beyond (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), pp. xvii–xviii.

“Special Report on Minority Group Relations Presented to the Trustees,” Peralta Colleges Bulletin, 5(8) (January 12, 1968), p. 2.

Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1959), p. 108.

Seale, Seize the Time, pp. 3–6.

Ibid., pp. 3–12.

Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, p. 69.

Seale, Seize the Time, pp. 26, 30.

Murch, “Interview with Leo Bazile,” February 19, 2001.

Seale, Seize the Time, p. 20.

Ibid., pp. 30–31.

Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, pp. 108–109.

David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), p. 228; Robyn Ceanne Spencer, Repression Breeds Resistance: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA, 1966–1982 (Columbia University: Ph.D. Thesis, 2001), p. 44.

Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, pp. 115–116.

Murch, “Newton.”

Interestingly, Warden distanced himself from the successes at Merritt rather than claiming credit. He described the Merritt student movement with the following words, “…that leadership tended to be what the press would call more militant, more radical, and out of that grew the Black Panther movement.” Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, p. 72; Murch, “Mansour.”