African-American rights campaigner
KNOWN as “Big Man” thanks to his linebacker’s build, Elbert Howard was one of six founding members of the Black Panthers, a revolutionary party which campaigned against police brutality towards AfricanAmericans at the height of the civil rights movement.
While he did not carry high-profile status like other party leaders, he shaped the group’s communityfocused identity via various social programmes and his mantra of “All power belongs to the people”.
Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Howard grew up in the Deep South surrounded by racial violence, once seeing a relative horsewhipped by Ku Klux Klan members.
His father Anderson died when he was young leaving mother Emma to raise the family. After several years in the US Air Force he relocated to Oakland, California.
At Merritt College he met fellow Panther co-founders Bobby Seale and Huey P Newton. In 1966, the black community’s distrust of the Oakland authorities came to a head amid African-American shootings by police and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was formed.
In California it was permissible to carry a loaded rifle or shotgun as long as it was publicly displayed and pointed at no one. The party adopted a strategy of shadowing police officers on foot and by car holding law books and loaded guns.
This tactic attracted widespread opposition and was denounced by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI as the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.
But Howard believed the group was just misjudged, saying: “People didn’t understand what our survival programmes meant: schoolkids’ breakfasts, feeding the hungry. Those helped immediate problems.”
He also created educational programmes for prison inmates and medical clinics for the sick.
In later years internal conflicts led to the party’s demise and he left the Panthers in 1974. In 2001, he self-published his memoirs Panther On The Prowl and four years later rekindled a relationship with Carole Hyams, a nurse he had first dated in 1967, and the couple were married in 2008.
He died following a long illness and is survived by Carole, and a daughter from his first marriage.