Abstract
In the mid-1960s, the Oakland-based Black Panther Party (BPP) emerged as a revolutionary new form of black politics that linked the local struggles of African Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area with the global and transnational struggles of socialism and decolonization. Catalyzed by the War in Vietnam, Malcolm X, and the tide of national independence, the Panthers defined their vision for African American liberation in internationalist terms. Ironically, this militant transnationalism grew out of very specific local conditions. Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPPSD) articulated the grievances of the East Bay’s African American community whose origins lay in the mass migrations of the Second World War and its aftermath. The core leadership, as well as the rank-and-file, consisted of first- and second-generation migrants whose families traveled north and west to escape the southern racial regime, only to be confronted with new forms of segregation and repression. In his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, Huey Newton placed the emergence of Oakland’s BPP within this postwar history of flight, exile, and internal migration of African Americans. Newton explained:
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 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.1
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Notes
Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1973), 14.
James Gregory, “The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed: Demonstrating the Census Public Use Microdata Samples,” Journal of American History 82, no. 1 (June 1995), 118.
Muhammad Ahmad, We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations 1960–1975 (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 2007); Donna Murch, “Interview with Eddie Ellis,” March 17, 2007; “Interview with Sam Anderson,” June 8, 2008; “Interview with Ted Wilson” August 7, 2006.
Donna Murch, “The Urban Promise of Black Power: African American Political Mobilization in Oakland and the East Bay, 1961–1977,” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 110–127; Murch, “Interview with Ernest Allen,” February 3, 2002;
Paul Alkebulan, “The Role of Ideology in the Growth, Establishment, and Decline of the Black Panther Party: 1966 to 1982,” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004, 104.
Robyn Ceanne Spencer, “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, CA, 1966–1982,” PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2001.
Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1959), 108;
See Gerald Horne, “Black Fire: ‘Riot’ and ‘Revolt’ in Los Angeles, 1965 and 1992,” in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, Lawrence Brooks De Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor, eds. (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 2001), 384;
Tomas Almaguer, Racial Faultlines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California, 1994);
Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006);
Mark Brilliant, “Color Lines: Civil Rights Struggles on America’s ‘Racial Frontier,’ 1945–1975,” PhD Thesis, Stanford University, 2003;
Joel Wilson, “Invisible Cages: Racialized Politics and the Alliance between the Panthers and the Peace and Freedom Party,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, James Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 191–222.
Manning Marable, “Foreword” in Rod Bush’s The New Black Vote: Politics and Power in Four American Cities (San Francisco, CA: Synthesis Publications, 1984), 3.
Nicolas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1991), 6.
James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2005), 9.
Kim Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora 10, no. 2 (2001): 194; Brent Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 66 19, no. 1 (Spring 2001).
For examples of recent scholarship see Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
Stokely Carmichael, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (New York: Scribner, 2003), 462.
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995): 166.
Charles Johnson, The Negro War Worker in San Francisco: A Local Self-Survey (San Francisco, 1944), 1; US Bureau of the Census, Population by Age, Race, and Sex in Oakland, Calif. by Census Tracts: 1940; US Department of Labor, “Data from Census Bureau Estimates for Oakland, California,” 1980 Census, Run No. 831120, 4.
Angela Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: The Women’s Press, 1988), 160–167;
Earl Anthony, Picking Up the Gun (New York: Pyramid Books, 1970); Murch, “Interview with Ernest Allen.”
Ruth Ann Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007);
Laura Mihailoff, “Protecting Our Children: A History of the California Youth Authority and Juvenile Justice, 1938–1968,” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2005.
Chris Booker, “Lumpenization: A Critical Error in the Black Panther Party,” in The Black Panther Party Revisited, Charles Jones, ed. (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998), 337–362.
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), 228.
Gerald Horne, The Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 129;
Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in Malcolm X Speaks, George Breitman, ed. (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), 23–44;
C. Eric Lincolm, Black Muslims in America (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1961); Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 113.
Murch, “Interview with Leo Bazille,” February 19, 2001; Hugh Pearson, Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 1996), 108.
Brown , A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 311–327.
Murch A, “Interview with Erica Huggins”; Robert O. Self, American Babylon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Alkebulan, “The Role of Ideology,” 7; Huey Newton, “Speech Delivered at Boston College, November 18, 1970,” in To Die For the People, Toni Morrison, ed. (New York: Writers and Reading Publishing, 1995).
Tiffany Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review 43, no. 1, Special Issue on the Diaspora (April 2000): 20.
Stephen Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
Mary G. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
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© 2012 Nico Slate
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Murch, D. (2012). When the Panther Travels: Race and the Southern Diaspora in the History of the BPP, 1964–1972. In: Slate, N. (eds) Black Power beyond Borders. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295064_4
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