![]() ![]() One at the Oakland Arena on his 26th birthday drew 6,000 people and, when his trial began on July 15, 1968, more than 5,000 protestors and 450 Black Panthers stood on the courthouse grounds in support.Ī month after the photo was taken, Newton was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, and sentenced to two to 15 years, but the Free Huey movement didn’t end with his imprisonment. For the ten months that Newton awaited his proceedings, rallies rippled across the country to oppose his prosecution and later, his incarceration. If she wasn't, she says, she was somewhere else doing a similar thing. The civil rights movement’s methodical disobedience provided a stark contrast for the party’s controversially militant, sometimes confrontational revolutionary agenda.Ī one-time political prisoner and former leader of the Black Panther’s New Haven, Connecticut chapter, Huggins can't recall if she was at that Oakland rally. Whether that was perceived as political or socialist or Marxist or nationalist or all of those things, it created self-determination and community-based solutions under the auspice of “power to the people.” Its membership grew ferociously from its first chapter in Oakland to more than 2,000 members by 1968, clustered in more than 30 chapters in cities across the country and eventually the world. Originated in October 1966 by Newton and co-founder Bobby Seale, it was an organization invested in resisting government oppression and police brutality. This image contradicts that dramatically and effectively.”įor the Panther Free Food Program, children prepare bags of food for distribution at the Oakland Coliseum at theīlack Panther Community Survival Conference in March 1972.Īsk ten different people to explain what The Black Panther Party was and you’re likely to get ten wildly different answers. “I think at the time and even since, the popular public image of the Black Panther Party as a super masculine group of men who were violent and fought the authorities pervades public sentiment. It didn't simply improve or get larger, or devolve and get worse, it goes up and down,” he says of the photograph’s inclusion. “Women's participation and the issue of gender equality ebbed and flowed within the Panthers’ history. The wall-size display confronts visitors as soon as they enter the space. The Smithsonian’s senior curator Bill Pretzer hand-selected Jones’ photo to be part of the exhibition, “A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond,” now on view at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “It brings to mind the memories of all of the women that I met and knew,” she says, “and I wonder where those women from that photograph are now? What are they doing, who remembers them, who knows their names?” When former party member Ericka Huggins looks at the photograph now, it invokes a different kind of nostalgia. What isn’t visible is the utopian 72 degree-day or the thousands of members, neighbors and onlookers who peopled Defremery Park’s sun-beamed lawns to hear the Panthers’ message. Husband-and-wife photojournalists Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch captured the image of the women on stage in August 1968. All but one was systematically excluded from the selection process. Of the 152 potential jurors who were interviewed, only 21 were black. Newton’s fate was to be decided at the superior court in overwhelmingly white Alameda County, where it seemed unlikely that a black revolutionary could get a fair trial. On this day, supporters assembled to demand the immediate release of Huey Newton, co-founder of the party and its national minister of defense, who was being held for assault, kidnapping and first-degree murder charges in the October 1967 death of police officer John Frey. There, a grove of trees honors Bobby Hutton who, at just 16, had been the Panthers’ first enlisted member and at 17, died after police shot him-purportedly, as he tried to surrender. Even their afros are emphatic and resolute as they stand in tandem in Oakland’s DeFremery Park, then and now a popular gathering place for the community’s African-Americans. It’s a striking photograph: six young black women with a spectrum of complexions, faces paused in mid-exclamation, fists raised in simultaneous solidarity at a Black Panther rally.
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