Panthers Past -- A Party To Change: In New Books, Elaine Brown And David Hilliard Reflect On Their Years In The Revolutionary Organization
Elaine Brown came not to praise the Black Panther party, but to keep history from burying it.
With her demure build, copper brown skin, beguiling confidence and hair clasped stylishly at the nape of her neck, Brown could have stepped off the cover of Lear's magazine for the mature sophisticate.
But even that step from fantasy to reality wouldn't seem as large as the leaps she has made in her lifetime. Brown led the Panthers from 1974 to 1977; founder Huey P. Newton had tapped her for power before he fled to Cuba because of a murder charge.
Brown, now living in Paris, reminisced and theorized, at times flirting and preaching, to 200 people who gathered in the Elliott Bay Book Co. on a recent Saturday night. In discussing her recent book, she meshed the Panthers' revolutionary '60s message with her cosmopolitan '90s style.
"A Taste of Power" (Pantheon, $25) is Brown's journey from North Philadelphia's housing projects to cocktail waitressing in West Hollywood's Pink Pussycat strip joint to reaching the pinnacle of the Black Panther party.
"Me taking over a male-dominated, gun-toting organization - that was pretty incredible," Brown said with a dry laugh. "Through my eyes we do enter into that so-called turbulent and violent movement called the '60s. But this is the story of one black woman."
Praise and burial also occupied David Hilliard's mind last Monday as he stood on the same podium where Brown had the previous week. The former Panther chief of staff started writing "This Side of Glory" (Little, Brown, $24.95) in 1989, after Newton was shot to death in a drug deal gone awry.
Hilliard hoped to both praise and give an honest burial to the party and, in the process, lay his piece of the party to rest on the shelves of American history.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the methods of the Black Panthers or these sometimes contradictory accounts, Brown and Hilliard, both 50 this year, say they wrote their books to put the Black Panthers back into the pages of history.
"We have been erased in the history books," Brown said. "Whatever the reason, we've been erased."
In 1966, the summer after Watts violently imploded in economic despair, Huey Newton announced to Hilliard that he was forming a political party based on "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." Newton, then 24, named the party after a group in Lowndes County, Ala., called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. He soon dropped the self-defense tag because of the vigilante connotation. The black panther, he said, is an animal that attacks only to defend.
In the "Ten Point Program," Newton and co-founder Bobby Seale explain the party's central belief: "Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny. We want freedom: jobs, housing, education, an end to police brutality" - applying Malcolm X's slogan, "By any means necessary."
Newton groomed both Hilliard and Brown as party leaders. He and Hilliard shared a tough childhood on the streets of Oakland. Brown was Newton's lover and a student of revolutionary philosophy.
In their books Hilliard and Brown describe, in poignant and lurid detail, Newton's brilliance and his later spiral into cocaine and paranoia.
In October 1967 Newton was jailed after a police stop escalated into a scuffle that left Newton wounded and a policeman dead. The subsequent "Free Huey" movement galvanized people - across races, on college campuses, in ghettos and Hollywood mansions - behind the Panther cause.
The coalition did take some getting used to. Hilliard writes about a hippie showing up at party headquarters in a psychedelic bus "plastered with `Free Huey!' signs and posters:
" `Man, what is that?' Charles Bursey, a new member, asks when a hippie traipses into the Grove Street office. . . . Problems crop up between us and the hippies. With their stringy hair and pasty faces these long-haired, bell-bottomed, tie-dye flakes stoned on acid seemed to have no self-respect."
The nation watched as Newton was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter for the death of one police officer, but acquitted for assault on the other officer. He was imprisoned, but was released on appeal in 1970. Ultimately, the pressure to be superhuman did Newton in.
"When Huey Newton came out of prison, he was larger than Martin and Malcolm," Brown said. "People expected him to leap tall buildings and chew up pigs. When Huey did not do that, people got mad. People made him into a messiah."
Newton's drug addiction contributed to the party's deterioration, but Hilliard stressed that the Panther party is not what drove Newton and him to drugs. Poverty and despair led to the chemical addiction Hilliard said they developed in their teens. After the Panthers fell, Hilliard introduced Newton to cooking cocaine into crack, an addiction Newton failed to kick. Hilliard writes of the degradation inside a crack house:
"I look around. Other people lie on the floor, everyone sealed off in their own drugged-out world. I lower myself onto the hardness, curl into a ball, trying to shelter myself. People are shadows in the sparse, early-morning light. The place smells putrid, the stench of human desolation. Death is all around: I'm in the hold of a slave ship in the middle passage."
Hilliard has been sober for four years, and adheres religiously to the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program.
"I am constantly reminding myself that I am only one drink away from being where Huey Newton is," Hilliard said. "Today it's enough that I've changed. I don't have to carry the business of the world on my shoulders."
Hilliard and Brown save their sharpest barbs for J. Edgar Hoover, who as head of the FBI waged a war of harassment, spying, midnight weapons raids and fatal shootouts on the Panthers and declared them to be "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." This was in 1968, several months after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
"It was not about guns, it was about ideas," Hilliard said, his words speeding with the rush of injustice. "There is so much misinformation about the Black Panthers. The U.S. government fought us like a foreign war."
At first glance Hilliard looks like somebody's dad, slightly graying, hair moderately receding, a resigned compassion emanating from his dark eyes. He lives in Berkeley and negotiates contracts for the United Public Employees Union in Northern California. He strikes a professorial air as he speaks about his history.
"The Black Panther party was not just some freak accident," said Hilliard. "Since the first slaves landed in Jamestown in 1619, from Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre to Nat Turner, there were always those who would rather risk the grave than live as slaves."
Revolution is as much a part of America and American history as the freedoms Hilliard said the party sought to protect: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. With the same passion the Panthers exhibited in the '60s to protect their right to bear arms, Hilliard urges people in the '90s to exercise their freedom of speech.
"It is on us to have another march on Washington," Hilliard said. "We need to go to this new president and people in Congress and tell them we just wanted to see how they were doing. It's called accountability. Nobody is doing that these days."
Hilliard and Brown are both critical of the media's portrayal of the party as militant. The Panthers, Hilliard said, chose an image of self-defense after news clips of Southern blacks being firehosed and attacked by dogs convinced them that King's nonviolence was not the answer.
But in a conversation a few months before he was killed, Newton told Hilliard his one regret was letting the issue of guns scare people away from the party's social-service programs. At its height, the Black Panther party boasted 37 chapters in 40 cities and ran schools and fed breakfast to thousands of children.
The violent element did exist, however.
As riots raged in urban centers in the days after King's assassination, Hilliard said he argued with Eldridge Cleaver over whether the Panthers should incite a riot in Oakland. Hilliard lost the argument, and a gripping passage in the book describes the clash with police that sent Cleaver and Hilliard to prison and made 17-year-old Bobby Hutton the first Panther casualty.
By the time Brown inherited the party in 1974, Hilliard - still in prison - had been expelled, a victim of Newton's drug- and FBI-induced paranoia, and gangsterism had begun setting in. Brown had Newton's nod, but she still had to wrest control.
"I have all the guns and all the money, I can withstand challenge from without and from within. Am I right, comrade?" Brown rhetorically begins her book's first chapter. "I'm telling you this because it's possible some of you may balk at a woman as the leader of the Black Panther party. If you are such an individual, you'd better run and fast!"
The book ends with Brown fleeing to Los Angeles from the Panther's Oakland headquarters in 1977, after Newton's return from Cuba releases the resentment that many male members had of Brown and the other women she placed in leadership positions.
"One woman was beaten so severely that it became clear to me that the issue of gender had become so serious I could not stay in the party," Brown said.
In the 450 pages between those first and last chapters, Brown comes of age: Attending a mostly white school, she discovers other children have refrigerators with food in them. No rats scratch inside their walls at night; no cockroaches scatter when lights are switched on.
"I was a colored girl only on York Street. . . . I was fooling everybody, because I was not really colored anymore. `You know, Elaine, you're not like the other coloreds. You're different. You don't even look like one.' My white friends and classmates were telling me that all the time.
"I learned to speak exactly like white people, learned to enunciate their language, to say `these' and not `dese.' Finally, I became white. At least until 2:17 p.m., when school let out, and I would be returned by fate through the subway tunnel . . . and back to being black."
Brown paused during her lively banter with the Elliott Bay crowd, her voice dropping to a rare quiet seriousness: "That was the most difficult sentence for me to write."
Brown's escape from the ghetto led her west, to the Pussycat lounge, where she was introduced to Frank Sinatra and began dating a married wealthy Jewish writer, Jay Kennedy. It was her reintroduction to the ghetto - different coast, same conditions - that led her to the Black Panthers in 1967.
Brown, still oblivious to black consciousness, agreed to teach piano lessons to children in the Jordan Downs Housing Project in Watts, two years after the riots.
"When I saw them, I knew they did not need piano lessons from me," Brown told the Elliott Bay audience. "They needed a new world to live in. It was a consciousness-raiser. Then I decided to become black again overnight."
As a child Brown attended Thaddeus Stevens Elementary, named after a white Philadelphia congressman who pushed for the newly freed slave families to receive 40 acres and a mule to build their economic future. Today, this Reconstruction-era promise is a rallying cry for African Americans still left out of the economic structure and emerges from a period also lost in many history books.
"Don't tell me about welfare reform," Brown said. "How are we going to pay the debt for that crime? Blacks would feel better if they knew we were being paid for that debt owed to us."
After leaving the party, Brown stumbled through a series of jobs, trying to earn a living for herself and her daughter. She attended law school, dropped out. She began writing her book in therapy.
"It was traumatizing to be in the Black Panther arty," she said. "It is also traumatizing to be black and a woman in America. I had to heal myself. This book was part of that catharsis."
Her life took a fairy-tale twist in 1989, when she moved in with Pierre Elby, a wealthy French industrialist she met at a party hosted by Suzanne de Passe, former Motown vice president and an old friend.
Other former party leaders have moved on to new lives. Bobby Rush won a congressional seat in Chicago last November. Bobby Seale lives and lectures in Philadelphia. Stokeley Carmichael changed his name to Kwame Toure and lives in Africa. Eldridge Cleaver, now a Republican, runs a recycling business in Berkeley. Kathleen Cleaver is an assistant law professor at Emory University in Atlanta.
Despair has spawned a new generation of addicts and criminal gangs, apolitical and amoral, organizing the same streets, many viewing the Black Panthers as gangsters like them.
"It took 30 years for people to realize the contributions of Malcolm X, to see the value of Malcolm X as a thinker," Hilliard said. "The Black Panther party is not unlike that. I call this our defining moment in history, where we can share with America the true nature of our organization. In the final analysis, our greatest contribution was our ideas. We are opening up the history books so people can see the true nature of America's most revolutionary organization."