San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Black Panther Party’s legacy, future tied to city
In one of his final televised interviews before his murder in August 1989, Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton reflected on the party’s accomplishments during an appearance on KPIX-TV in January 1988.
“We accomplished some of the goals we set out for, but of course, Blacks are not free in the United States to this very day,” Newton said. “But I hope that we laid down a history, that we contributed to the continuing struggle for freedom.”
More than three decades later, the party’s history still isn’t presented to the public with the clarity Newton desired. But that could change in the Black
“The Black Panther Party is somewhat like a genealogy story for the culture of Oakland.”
Panther Party’s hometown.
On Aug. 30, the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation announced plans to open a $5 million facility in downtown Oakland next year called the Dr. Huey P. Newton Center for Research and Action. The project has roots in the backroom conversations Newton had in the 1980s about creating community spaces for future Black activism. The center will also be used to preserve the party’s story through audio and video recordings of aging members, and residents whose lives were touched by the party’s community programs.
Located in a former art gallery on the 1400 block of Broadway, the center will be within shouting distance of another hotbed for political activity in Oscar Grant Plaza. In the years to come, the foundation hopes to open similar centers in six other major cities, as well as a Black Panther Party National Park in Oakland, which will have a 75,000square-foot facility of its own.
The foundation plans to raise the $5 million it says it needs to cover the center’s build-out and operating budget for three years. To do that, the foundation has to sell the public on why this project is necessary.
Xavier Buck, a Black history scholar and the deputy director of the Huey P. Newton Foundation,
Fredrika Newton and Xavier Buck hope to turn a former Oakland art gallery into a space honoring the Black Panther Party.
sees it as an investment in the portrayal of Oakland’s identity.
“The Black Panther Party is somewhat like a genealogy story for the culture of Oakland,” Buck said. “This center is about saying: ‘What is the personality of Oakland? It is the Black Panther Party and the legacy they have left.’ We are set apart as a city because of the work this organization did.”
Some of that work included fostering valuable cross-culture alliances during a civil rights era marked by racial tension. Those lessons would be valuable today, as the Bay Area struggles to navigate an important conversation about antiAsian hostility in a way that
unites rather than divides Black and Asian communities.
Fredrika Newton, a former Black Panther, widow of Huey Newton and co-founder and president of the Huey P. Newton Foundation, said Oakland needs a large, accessible, technology-filled space where these alliances can be strengthened today.
“Huey always talked about the party being the vanguard of the revolution when, in fact, it was the people who are the vanguard,” she said. “This center will be for the people.”
The Black Panther Party created community organizing blueprints around issues like early childhood education, food scarcity, affordable health care and voting rights that are still
Xavier Buck, deputy director of the Huey P. Newton Foundation
relevant.
This isn’t to say the party was perfect. Its own ideological infighting, along with sexism and violence, helped fuel the distorted narrative America has of the party now. Correcting that narrative, as the foundation seeks to do, means telling the whole, complicated story.
History isn’t always pretty. And the public isn’t always comfortable with discomfort, especially when it comes to the Black Panther Party.
When the National Park Service awarded UC Berkeley a $98,000 grant in 2017 to document and preserve the Black Panther Party’s regional history online, conservatives railed against the proposed venture. The Fraternal Order of Police even wrote a letter to President Donald Trump to express its outrage. The park service pulled the funding a month later.
In Oakland, preservation is only part of the center’s mission. Another is advancing Huey Newton’s fight for Black freedom.
Newton believed freedom from police violence, and from economic and political disenfranchisement, couldn’t materialize unless Black folks seized control of the institutions
working to marginalize us. Black representation has slowly improved, yet disparities persist.
Black Oaklanders are more likely than any other demographic to be stopped by police while walking or driving; to be homeless or living below the poverty level; and to face housing discrimination, including higher rates of mortgage loan denials.
“With this center, it takes the (Black Panther) party’s tactics — you provide for people ... you tell them why their conditions are the way they are and then you organize them around those issues — and you elevate their consciousness so en masse, they can change what’s going on,” Buck said.
During his KPIX-TV interview, Newton said the Black Panther Party had “not accomplished freedom” for Black America.
If he could see the plans for the center that will bear his name in Oakland, I wonder if he’d be hopeful that we could soon get closer to it.