SEIZE THE TIME

The Roots of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California

In 1944 the Observer, a local white newspaper in Oakland, bemoaned the "new race problem" caused by "the influx of what might be called socially-liberated or uninhibited Negroes who are not bound by the old peaceful understanding between the Negro and the white" and who insisted on "barging into the white man and becoming an integral part of the white man's society." This comment came on the heels of a railroad station brawl between black and white servicemen and civilians that had turned into a full-scale race riot involving two thousand people. World War II had unleashed the winds of change in Oakland, but the problems of race were hardly new. During the war thousands of African Americans migrated to Oakland from Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and other southern states. Drawn by the promise of work in war industries, these migrants swelled the city's black population from 8,462 in 1940 to over 20,000 four years later. They transformed West Oakland, a magnet for 85 percent of Oakland's black population, into a bustling, vibrant community complete with its own retail corridor that became known as the "black downtown." These migrants had a profound impact on racial politics in Oakland. Spurred to action by a growing collective consciousness and sense of empowerment as well as visceral experiences of racial discrimination, they challenged the fragile racial balance between the historic black community and the white majority. Their struggles against racism, housing discrimination, poverty, educational inequities, and police brutality in the postwar period would radicalize a new generation of activists who were, literally and figuratively, their children. This new generation would come of age politically as part of the nationwide upsurge of civil rights, social justice, and antipoverty activism in the 1960s.

The Black Panther Party was part of this groundswell. Founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, children of migrants from Louisiana and Texas, the BPP would grow to over forty chapters and branches and become one of the leading organizations of the Black Power movement. The roots of the Panthers lay in the responses of African Americans to the economic inequities and racial indignities of postwar Oakland. Postwar demobilization displaced working-class blacks from the toehold they had been able to gain in shipbuilding and other defense industries. Manufacturing jobs disappeared as trucks replaced ships and trains as the major commercial freight carriers. Some African Americans were able to find work on railroads and docks, in local canneries, government installations, and, to a lesser extent, in domestic service. However, overall economic depression, high unemployment, underemployment, and low wages were the economic fate of many blacks in this period. These structural economic conditions and visceral experiences of racism combined with the limitations of government initiatives such as urban renewal and the War on Poverty in the 1960s to galvanize Oakland's black working class.

The emergence of the BPP is the story of this uprising. It reflects the attempt of the poor to organize for social justice, economic and political transformation, and cultural self-determination. It is the story of individuals: Newton and Seale and the comradeship that developed between them as they journeyed down intersecting paths of political exploration; local activists like Mark Comfort, who laid the groundwork for grassroots black activism before the BPP; regional activists in Los Angeles and Berkeley whose struggles reverberated locally; and the many rank-and-file members who would swell the Panthers' ranks. While some members would come from Oakland's grittiest streets and were politically inexperienced, others were veterans of Oakland's civil rights struggles, student activists from local community colleges, high school students who had participated in boycotts, and former members of Oakland's many local black nationalist formations. They were united by their sense of purpose, collective identity, and commitment to seize the time.

THE FLATLANDS

The Black Panther Party was born of the problems and potential of Oakland's flatlands, a region within the city that was defined by both topography and politics. Historically, flatlands neighborhoods included West Oakland and downtown Oakland as well as East Oakland — a middle-class area that was racially diverse and contained majority-white neighborhoods in the foothills — and Fruitvale, the core of the Mexican community. However, in the postwar period segregation and exclusion made the term flatlands synonymous with the poorest and most dispossessed areas of the city that were hardest hit by Oakland's economic downturn. In March 1966 the inaugural issue of the Flatlands newspaper editorialized that race, class, and place determined whether you experienced Oakland as "the all-America city" embodied by the upscale lifestyle of Oakland's hills or as the "city of pain," experienced by the largely black and brown residents of the flatlands. The editorial's message of crisis-level socioeconomic conditions and gaping disparities of wealth was delivered alongside a message of hope: the flatlands were both the spatial expression of oppression and a crucible for resistance. They were a place that "spill[ed] over with people" and "stank with decay" and where "things were getting worst," but that also had the potential for transformation if residents would unite to fight back and declare, "We're not taking it anymore." Founded by a group of local black activists, the Flatlands reflected, nurtured, and reported about this spirit of mobilization. The editorial urged action: "We've got to decide what to do. If we're going to change things around this city, we're going to have to change ourselves too. ... This is a challenge for you [the poor] as much as for the people who sit up high and let things go on as they are."

The economic underdevelopment of the flatlands was not accidental. The downturn there was tied to structural economic transformations, institutionalized racism, and government policies in the postwar period. By 1946 more than half of the black families in Oakland lived in the flatlands in overcrowded government housing constructed in 1942 as temporary shelters for incoming workers drawn to the war industries. White property owners would often refuse to rent or sell to "minorities," and racial discrimination in the private market hindered the ability of blacks to spread out into other locales. Zoning restrictions and restrictive covenants barred black people...