smash-pacifism-zine

the Black population did not embrace his pacifist beliefs.
Chicago, where King had attempted to organize just two
years before, saw some of the worst rioting.
In fact, even while reformist groups were receiving
millions of dollars a year in government and corporate
funding, their actual support among Black people was at its
lowest point. At the time of his assassination, King and the
SCLC were switching their focus to the 'Poor People's
Campaign,' advocating jobs and education. King was also
beginning to turn against the Vietnam War, which he had
seldom addressed publicly. After King's death, the SCLC
carried through with a planned tent city in Washington, DC.
The SCLC had trouble
mobilizing even the bare
minimum of protesters they
believed necessary to occupy
the tent city (some 3,000),
which fizzled out after
deteriorating into a muddy,
wet, fiasco.
Black Panthers
sermon at Rochester's Central Presbyterian Church, Young
[SCLC's executive director] confessed that he represented 'a
group [that] was as unpopular as anybody else...
Nonviolence had been so misinterpreted in the Negro
community of the North that to come as a member of a
nonviolent movement... is to put two strikes on you to start
with...'”
(To Redeem the Soul of America, pp. 196-97)
The Panthers were the exact opposite of King and
the SCLC. While the SCLC were Southern middle-class
church-goers and ministers, sworn to nonviolence, the
Panthers were primarily Northern youth from
urban ghettos, the very terrain that King and
the SCLC had attempted to colonize in
Chicago in 1966:
“The membership of the Black Panther
Party was recruited from the ghettos of the
inner cities. The Party itself was founded by
two Black men who came straight out of the
ghetto.”
(Panther member Safiya A. Bokhari,
quoted in We Want Freedom, p. 172)
In contrast to the
bloated bureaucracies of the
official civil rights
movement, the most active
and dynamic groups in the
late 1960s were the Black
militants, primarily the Black
Panther Party which had been established in Oakland,
California, on Oct. 15, 1966. Their original title had been
the Black Panther Party for Self- Defense, and in many
ways they were the legacy of Malcolm X.
“The leading exponent of a nonracialist, Marxist-
Leninist brand of black liberation continued to be the Black
Panther Party. During the late 1960s the Panthers'
reputation grew, especially after they disrupted a session of
the California legislature in 1967... By 1969 the Panther's
newspaper, The Black Panther, had achieved a circulation
of over 100,000 nationwide... Panther chapters across the
country initiated various community programs of a less
than inflammatory nature: free breakfasts were served to
more than 20,000 children in 19 cities; Liberation schools
were opened for youngsters during the summer vacation,
and a free health program was initiated.”
(Black Radicals and the Civil Rights Mainstream,
p. 68)
Bobby Seale & Huey P. Newton, founders of
the Black Panther Party in Oakland, 1966.
In 1966, King and the SCLC attempted to establish
themselves in Northern ghetto areas, including Chicago and
New York:
“But the SCLC staff members found it hard going:
such was the hostility among young blacks to 'nonviolence'
that the staff found it prudent not to mention the word. In a
“The Black Panther Party of Chicago
emerged on the city's West Side in the
autumn of 1968. As one of 45 Black Panther
chapters around the country, the “Illinois
Chapter” gained over 300 new members
within four months of its founding...”
(Encyclopedia of Chicago,
http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/142.html)
While ghetto youth had little time for King and his
Christian pacifism, they joined the Panthers in the
hundreds. High school kids, college students, prisoners, and
gangsters, all became members of the Black Panther Party.
Many committed their lives to revolutionary struggle,
organizing meetings and protests, selling newspapers,
training, and studying.
In the climate of urban riots and insurrection that
marked the period, the Panthers symbolized and promoted a
warrior spirit among Black youth. The first chapter
appeared in Oakland, California, conducting Police-Alert
Patrols. Armed with rifles, law books, tape recorders, and
cameras, the Panthers monitored police in the Black ghetto.
They helped get those arrested out of jail, and advised
people of their rights.
The Panthers were established in Oakland by Huey
P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Newton was a college student
who had studied law. It was his understanding of the legal
code that led to the police patrols—although provocative,
they were not intended as armed confrontations or assaults
on police.
The armed patrols were, at the time, legal under
California law: weapons could be legally carried in public
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