Abstract
White police officers patrolling black communities has always been a source of racial confrontation. From the Antebellum slave patrols of three to six white men “hunting” runaway slaves to the police beatings of civil rights activists during the 1961 Freedom Rides, white police officers and black men have always mixed like oil and water. By the mid-1960s, however, that mixture reached its boiling point when poor urban blacks pushed back against the presence of police brutality in their neighborhoods. Many of the urban riots of the era were, in fact, touched off by white police violence against innocent black men and women. There was the arrest and beating of thirty-four-year-old Odessa Bradford that started the 1964 Philadelphia Riot; the shooting of a fifteen-year-old James Powell by an off-duty police lieutenant that started the 1964 Harlem Riot; the speeding arrest of Marquette Frye by the highway patrol that set off the 1965 Watts Riot; and the shooting of fifteen-year-old Matthew Johnson by white police officers patrolling all-black Hunter’s Point that touched off the 1966 San Francisco Riot. And those riots were more the substance of the dispute than the tip of iceburg. Indeed, they were just the beginning.1
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Notes
For more reading on the historiography of the Philadelphia Riot, see “The North: Doing No Good,” Time Magazine, September 4, 1964; for the Watts riot, see Gerald Horne, Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995);
Jerry Cohen and William S. Murphy, Burn, Baby, Burn!: The Lost Angeles Race Riot, August 1965 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1966); for the Harlem Riot see,
Shatema A. Threadcraft, “New York City Riot of 1964,” in Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, edited by Walter C. Rucker and James N. Upton (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 478–80;
Paul T. Miller, “San Francisco (California) Riot of 1966,” in Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, edited by Walter C. Rucker and James N. Upton (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), 583–84.
Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1962), reprinted (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998).
Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1991), 155.
Point Seven of the Panther’s Ten Point Program read, “We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People: We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self- defense.” Philip S. Foner, The Black Panthers Speak (New York: De Capo Press, 1995), 247.
John M Lee, “Bernstein Denies Shift on Panthers: Conductor Affirms Support for their Civil Liberties,” New York Times, Feb. 22, 1970, 78. See also, Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau Mauing with Flak Catchers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970).
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Betrayed: A History of Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).
Thomas J. Davis, “More than Segregation, Racial Identity: The Neglected Question in Plessy v. Ferguson,” Wash. & Lee Race & Ethnic Ancestry Law Journal 10 (2004):1–42.
Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 22.
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971). See also, Davidson M. Douglas, Reading, Writing, and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Henry William Brown, Class Aspects of Residential Development in the Oakland Black Community (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1980), 169.
George Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1965);
Steve Clark, Malcolm X: February 1965, The Final Speeches (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1992);
Bruce Perry, Malcolm X: The Last Speeches (New York: Pantherfinder Books, 1989).
Malcolm X, Autobiography of Malcom X: As Told to Alex Haley (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 124.
Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 189.
Manning Marable, “Rediscovering Malcolm’s Life: A Historian’s Adventures in Living History,” in Black Routes to Islam, edited by Hishaam D. Aidi and Marable Manning (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 301.
Seale, Seize the Time, 14, 20; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 71–72; Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 73–83; “Mass Poison Plot Laid to Negroes: Extremists in Philadelphia Also Face Riot Charge,” New York Times, September 28, 1967; Emanuel Perlmutter, “16 Negroes Seized; Plot to Kill Wilkins and Young Charged,” New York Times, June 22, 1967.
Williams, Negroes with Guns, reprinted version; Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999);
Robert Carl Cohen, Black Crusader: A Biography of Robert F. Williams (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1972).
Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 106–12; “The Deacons and Their Impact,” National Guardian, September 4, 1965, 4–5; Roy Reed, “The Deacons, Too, Ride by Night,” New York Times Magazine, August 15, 1965, 20. The Deacons for Defense and Justice was a militant group founded to prevent police brutality.
Huey P. Newton, War against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 119–22. See Appendix A for a complete listing of the Ten Point Program.
Lawrence Lader, Power on the Left: American Radical Movements since 1946 (New York: Norton, 1979), 218.
David Hilliard and Donald Weise (eds.), The Huey P. Newton Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 72.
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© 2012 Donald F. Tibbs
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Tibbs, D.F. (2012). Negroes with Guns. In: From Black Power to Prison Power. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_2
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