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The Language of the Unheard—Black Panthers, Black Lives, and Urban Rebellions

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-4209314

1558-1454

Robyn C. Spencer,

American Political and Social Dynamics

The urban rebellions of the mid to late 1960s have operated in complex ways in US history and memory. For the first generation of post–civil rights scholars, these uprisings served as a definitive turning point. Erupting less than a week after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the grim tally of the Watts riots—six days, thirty-four lives, over $50 million in property damage—seemed to signal a rejection of the notion of interracialism, tactical nonviolence, southern-centered movement narratives, respectability politics, beloved communities, and even hope. The more than a dozen rebellions that exploded in places like Harlem, New York; Newark, New Jersey; Detroit, Michigan; and Chicago, Illinois, in the 1960s both defined "the good sixties"—an imagined time when united nonviolent protesters were led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who worked closely with the White House—and signaled its demise. These declensionist narratives have been challenged by scholars who have analyzed the preconditions that shaped the rebellions, complicated depictions of Dr. King, excavated the deep roots of Black Power organizing before 1965, and recovered the long history of armed self-defense in the South. However, the origins, meanings, and legacies of these rebellions are still up for debate inside the academy.Outside of the academy, these urban rebellions continue to haunt a contemporary political landscape where postracial narratives of progress have proven illusory. In the past five years, the sixties rebellions have become the backstory to urban protests in Ferguson, Missouri; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; as well as in other cities organized under the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today's rebellions, sparked by incidents of police violence (much like their predecessors) have brought the persistence of poverty, state violence, and antiblack racism in the United States to national and international attention. Although protesters have been overwhelmingly nonviolent, relying on blocking transportation arteries, marches, and other protest tactics, they have been accused of encouraging or engaging in violence.1 The long shadow of the sixties rebellions looms over contemporary activism as if property damage, unruly black and brown bodies, the specter of urban guerilla warfare, and the still-scarred urban landscapes of today are its only legacy.It is important to recover the ways that sixties rebellions inspired and challenged a new generation of activists in the 1960s to try and transform the material conditions of their lives. These rebellions helped sound the alarm about police brutality and poverty at a time when grassroots political organizations were proliferating under the banner of Black Power. The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, was deeply influenced by the uprisings in the nation's cities, especially Watts, a few hours away. Black people in Oakland faced unemployment, substandard housing, segregated schools, and police brutality so severe that Panther cofounder Huey Newton argued that "we had more contact with the police than we did the city council."2 One month after Watts, Oakland was identified by the US Community Relations Service as one of eleven cities outside of the South likely to explode in racial violence and a city containing "one of the most dismal and explosive ghettoes in the nation."3 It was depicted in the popular press as "another Watts," a designation that brought federal dollars and hastened reform efforts. Oakland's War on Poverty infrastructure became more evident in the wake of Watts. Yet by 1966 the material conditions of Oakland's poor remained largely unchanged. The majority of War on Poverty's funds went toward education, administration, and job creation centered around temporary summer jobs rather than long-term opportunities.4 Sixty percent of Oakland's 75,000 poor were black, and the vast majority of them lived in War on Poverty target areas; yet when a San Francisco Examiner reporter asked a poor black family in 1966 in East Oakland if they knew that there was a poverty program in place to help poor people, their response was "unrestrained laughter."5 A study of 701 Oakland households done by the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, corroborated this anecdotal evidence with hard facts: only 39 percent of respondents were even aware of local antipoverty efforts.6The failure of everything from federal-government initiatives to the civil rights establishment to transform these conditions fueled an important chapter in grassroots organizing in Oakland. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale drew inspiration from organizations in Watts like the Temporary Alliance of Local Organizations (TALO), a broad alliance of organizations created after an incident of police brutality. TALO would launch the Citizen's Area Patrols, an activist network which dispatched activists with tape recorders and cameras to the scenes of questionable police activity and organized cars to follow Los Angeles Police Department officers in the conduct of their duty.7 Newton wrote in his autobiography about the impact of the Watts rebellion on his political consciousness: "We had seen how the police attacked the Watts community after causing trouble in the first place. We had seen the Oakland police and the California Highway Patrol begin to carry their shotguns in full view as another way of striking fear into the community. We had seen all this, and we recognized that the rising consciousness of Black people was at the point of explosion. One must relate to the history of one's community and to its future. Everything we had seen convinced us that our time had come."8 There had been over twenty demonstrations protesting police violence in the city between 1965 and 1966,9 and one of the Panthers' first actions was to launch community patrols of the police.Although they drew inspiration from ongoing activism in Watts, the Panthers never advocated street actions like rebellions. When Newark and Detroit erupted in rebellion in July 1967, Newton argued that "the black masses are handling the resistance incorrectly." He critiqued Watts for transmitting a "manner of resistance" that is "sporadic, short lived, and costly" to the "ghettos of the Black nation."10 In Watts and other rebellions he saw proof that black communities "will not tolerate any more oppression by the racist dog police. They are looking now for guidance to extend and strengthen their resistance struggle."11 In 1968, after King was murdered, Newton directed Panther chapters nationwide to "try to contain the community from open resistance" to avoid a brutal backlash.12The Panthers worked to provide organizational alternatives. They launched one of the most successful alternative newspapers of the 1960s; convened a gathering of activists to rewrite the constitution; advocated for community control of the police; participated in election campaigns; and launched over sixty community programs around the country designed to highlight the contradictions of capitalism. They worked alongside organizations like the Revolutionary Action Movement, the League of Revolutionary Black workers, and the Welfare Rights Movement to attempt to transform the structural conditions that caused the sixties rebellions.In 1967 the Kerner Commission warned that "Our nation is moving towards two societies: one white, one black—separate and unequal."13 Writing in the wake of "Ferguson, Staten Island, now Baltimore" Harvard sociologist Bruce Weston noted in 2015 that "nearly 40 years ago, the Kerner Commission warned us of all of this. We didn't listen." Black Lives Matter activists have evoked King's 1966 assertion that "a riot is the language of the unheard" to buttress themselves against the persistent charges of violence. King went on to clarify exactly what America had failed to hear: "It has failed to hear the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. It has failed to hear that large segments of the white society are more concerned with tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity."14 In recent years Americans watched transfixed as tear gas, national guard troops, and military-style weapons were used against protesters, who recorded and tweeted unfolding events. Today, the media attention has shifted, but the material conditions persist. Transforming these conditions has become the mission of organizations born before, after, and during those moments of rebellion. Groups like the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, Baltimore Bloc, and Dream Defenders, and longstanding activist networks like Cooperation Jackson, the Organization for Black Struggle, and Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, are again choosing organization over rebellion and raising the demands that still too often go unheard. Is anyone listening?