The Black Panthers in Baltimore
by Maryland Shaw and Epiphany Butler

Black Panther Party in Baltimore
By Epiphany Butler

An alternative to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophy of non-violent direct action was a more militant approach used by the Black Panthers. The Panthers, who started in Oakland, spread their message across the country including to Baltimore.

The Baltimore branch of the Black Panthers was founded by Warren Hart and it was operational by October 1968.1 The Panthers started programs to help the community like the free breakfast and lunch program. One place where this occurred was at Saint Martin de Porres church on Eager Street. The Black Panther Party feed about 200 toddlers and preteens year round.2   Another community service was the free clothing and shoes program. This program gave clothes and shoes to people that were lacking in these areas. The Panthers would clothe them and tailor and press their clothes too.3 According to Steve McCutchen, a former member of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party, “these programs were the backbone of the Black Panther Party.”The Black Panthers’ military philosophy put them at odds with the police, church leaders, politicians and community leaders. For example, despite the attempts at such good deeds as free breakfasts for the poor, many civil rights leaders didn’t openly embrace this organization. For example, Lillie May Jackson’s daughter stated, “Now the only group that my mother never supported was the Black Panthers because they advocated violence.”4

Pastor and civil rights leader Marion Bascom stated when asked why organizations like the Panthers or other militant groups have been relatively unsuccessful in the mainstream, “poverty, police harassment, surveillance and intimidation…Blacks can’t win with force…coalescing is the name of the game. Not coalescing from a point of weakness, point of respect for each other’s position. So that militancy-physical, violent, militant is absurd.”5

Another leader was Evelyn Burrell. She believed in the Panther philosophy. She stated, “Now I had the pleasure and I say pleasure, because the program saw that the Panthers put or in this city, I felt was outstanding and very helpful.”6

Whether one chooses to agree or disagree with the Black Panther Parties ideas, people never argued that trouble seemed to follow Panther party members all over the United States. Here in Baltimore the case involving Panther Marshall “Eddie” Conway is a prime example. Conway was in the military serving in Germany in 1966 considering volunteering for a tour of duty in Vietnam when he saw a picture in the Army’s Stars and Stripes newspaper, “I saw a picture of a small tank with a .50-caliber machine gun pointed at, like, a 50 black women on a street corner in Newark, New Jersey-on the front page of the newspaper. I’m looking at this picture, and looking at the uniform hanging up on my locker, thinking, This is not right. I would have been over in Vietnam, fighting for democracy, and here the Army was fighting people in the black community.”7 In 1966, while in Germany, he saw a play about Malcolm X. This made him interested in Malcolm. Not long after reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X he became political. When Conway ended his military service in 1967, he came home and joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). Later on he joined the Panthers where his work led to political and social activism in Baltimore.8

On April 24, 1970, two police officers were shot in west Baltimore. One police officer died and the surviving officer said there were three men involved in the shooting. A couple of blocks away, Officer Nolan remembered exchanging fire with another man. Soon after this incident, the police picked up two people a few blocks away: Jack Johnson, Sr. and James Powell. Both of these men were Black Party members. Two days later, the police picked arrived at the main post office with a warrant for Conway’s arrest. He was charged with murder and attempted murder. The police did not have any evidence against Conway except for Officer Nolan’s testimony that said he saw someone running into an alley at night and he engaged shots with that person.9

The police felt that Conway was their man but they admitted that a conviction was no sure thing: “The greatest difficulty in the state’s case was that we didn’t have any direct evidence and we didn’t have any direct eyewitnesses. There were a lot of incriminating circumstances that we had to tie together to form a total picture.”10

Nana Njinga Conway, the wife of Eddie, claims the charges against her husband are false and says the police know it. She states, “Jack Johnson was beaten and coerced into signing a statement that they [the police] wrote, and in that statement, it stated that he, Jack Johnson and Jack Powell, were involved in the police shooting, and that Eddie Conway was also involved.”11

Despite the controversy surrounding this case, Eddie Conway is still incarcerated. His fight is not over as illustrated by a recent benefit by The Partnership for Social Justice to raise money for his defense on February 24, 2007.12

The Black Panthers in Baltimore were not in the newspaper daily for committing violent acts. They were a small organization that tried to better the community the best way that they know how or in a way that was different then the traditional way. The Baltimore chapter ended in the summer of 1972. It ended, according to community leaders, “due to the unacceptability of its original gospel of armed struggle; the publicity it received in its confrontations with police, and the murder case against several of its members, accused of murdering a comrade suspected of being a police informer.”13

Steve McCutchen
former member, Baltimore chapter of Black Panther Party
image from Baltimore CityPaper

From Black Panther newspaper, 1971, www.itsabouttimebpp.com

From Black Panther newspaper, 1971, www.itsabouttimebpp.com

The Black Panther Party
By Maryland Shaw

The Black Panthers had a great impact on the civil rights movement. The Panthers were coming up during the time Martin Luther King, Jr. was using non-violent direct action to make a change in the society of the United States. In this reading I will show you how the Black Panthers used a different approach. The Black Panther Party was formed in California in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The two met through a program called RAW (Revolutionary Action Movement). The Panther symbol was borrowed from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama. They used a panther because this is an animal that has the nature to attack and when backed into a corner, it will protect himself by wiping out its opponent. The Black Panther Party was created because people were tired of police brutality. Throughout history black people have been mistreated by police and this treatment has been magnified during the civil rights movement including during the voting rights marches of Selma. The Panthers did not think the nonviolent direct action of King and fighting laws through the U.S. court system were moving fast enough to help black people. Their solution was to confront the problem head on by any means necessary.

Black people have consistently objected to the harassment and the occasional physical brutality of the police. Baltimore Black Panther members felt this same way as they were targeted by police a few occasions. One such occasion was when W. Paul Coates picked up two Panthers at Panther headquarters on Gay Street and drove to a house on Aisquith Street where one of the Panthers rented a home. None had a key, so they kicked in a cellar window and began unloading rifles and shotguns from the house to the car. Coates remembers walking out of the house and seeing the three other Panthers with their hands in the air, surrounded by what seemed like 100 police. Coates was arrested for the first time and charged with 15 counts of intent to murder.1 Coates challenges this by saying, “[i]f I had been pointing that gun at those cops with an intent to murder them, I doubt that I’d be here to tell this story right now.”2

The harassment continued by the Baltimore Police department. Steve McCutchen, a Baltimore Black Panther member who kept a diary from 1969 to August 1970 that was later published in the book The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, remembers Panthers being hunted everywhere even when they were helping the community and giving free breakfasts to local students.3   McCutchen wrote on April 30, 1970, “[t]hey attacked us this morning. Pigs ran into the breakfast program at the Church looking for Panthers. They snatched Larry (Wallace) coming from the pad on Aisquith Street. The vamp was about charges from last year.”4
 They also complained about the lack of police protection in crime-ridden ghetto neighborhoods. In 1967, a Detroit survey was made because the Negro community did not trust the legal system. Ninety-two percent of the Negro respondents did not believe that the laws were fair to all people. An even larger percentage believed that there was general inequality in law-enforcement. Few people agreed that laws are enforced equally. Few felt judges to be completely honest. Only one in twenty-five felt judges were honest all the time. This report showed the distrust of the legal system in Detroit and the Black Panthers believed this survey was relevant to all cities where there were racial problems.5

The Black Panther 4 April 1970 www.itsabouttimebpp.com

The Panthers said they wanted an immediate end to police brutality. They had a platform they followed called the 10-point platform. This platform was created by the suggestion of African American people in the community and can be read at the end of this essay.

Baltimore Black Panther Party member Steve McCutchen explains what he remembers about police brutality in Baltimore, “Police brutality, a lot had gone unreported except for what we reported in the Black Panther newspaper or what the Afro-American news reported. Over the course of the experience in Baltimore, there were day to day instances of brutality but a lot of it went unreported and a lot of it we weren’t privy to so we were not able to record and present that information.”6

Not everyone embraced the Black Panthers. Adam Hochschild wrote, “there were a lot of great things about the 1960s that we need to recover, but the Black Panther Party was not one of them.” He says the Party soon became the target of a vicious, well-documented program of provocation and murderous raids by police and FBI. The Panthers quickly degenerated into a criminal gang, aborting merchants, trading drugs and beating and killing people who got in their way.7 Community leaders in Baltimore didn’t embrace the Panthers either and stated why they think they failed, “the Black Panthers failure here was primarily due to the unacceptability of its original gospel of armed struggle, the publicity it received in its confrontations with police, and the murder case against several of its members, accused of murdering a comrade suspected of being a police informer.”8

Hochschild’s comment about the government targeting the Panthers is supported by former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who stated in 1968, that “the Black Panther Party is the single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.”9

Alice Walker, best known for her novel The Color Purple, wrote this about the Black Panthers: “Women in the Panther Party experienced a taste of power but at other times they were being used sexually by the men.”10   Former Panther Elaine Brown states that women were being disciplined by a gathering of brothers one of whom wields a bullwhip against her bare back.11

Despite critics of the Black Panthers, others believed that the Panthers had a positive impact on the communities they served. One thing the Panthers did was to organize community programs from breakfast for children to free health clinics, to rent strikes resulting in tenant ownership of their buildings and to free clothing for poor people. I interviewed Black Panther Steve McCutchen who said, “these programs were the backbone of the Black Panther Party.”12 One could argue that the Panthers influenced the government to establish similar programs such as free school lunch, expanded medicare and day care facilities.

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton
http://www.tcnj.edu/~havelin2/Black%20Power%20Movement.htm

Black Panther member Sundiata Acoli credits the Black Panthers for serving the needs of the people so they get what they need now and not later, for using Socialist principles, for using mass organizing techniques, for practicing women’s equality and for using propaganda techniques through the use of its newspaper The Black Panther.13

Of course, Acoli’s claims above are disputed by the poor they claimed they helped to women who were a part of the organization. With that being said, you also have to agree with Acoli that the Panthers did address the successes he claims the Panthers achieved.

Another view of the Black Panthers comes from ordained Baptist minister and University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson who states, “The Panthers were neither thugs nor saints. They were soldiers of misfortune in a brutal battle against racist supremacy, vulgar capitalism, and the violent oppression of blacks.”14

Former co-founder Bobby Seale said that “The Black Panther Party was about all power to all the people. Whether you’re white, black, blue, red, green, yellow, polka dot. We knew and defined the enemy as avaricious, corporate money-rich who controlled who perpetuated oppression over all the people.”15

The Black Panther Party was a controversial group who often were feared by the police and elected officials. But there was another side to the Panthers and that was the community service they offered to people who often felt neglected by the establishment. The Panthers’ philosophy was created because they could no longer just sit back and wait for things to change over time. They went on the offensive to create change but due to their forcefulness, it led to problems.  

Baltimore Black Panther Party members Warren Hart, Hezekiah Claxton, and Charles Smith
NCF—Blacks in Baltimore, Maryland Historical Society.

From: “To Determine the Destiny of Our Black Community”: The Black Panther Party 10-Point Platform http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6445/
The Black Panther Party: Platform and Program
WHAT WE WANT
WHAT WE BELIEVE
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the CAPITALIST of our Black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. 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.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being, tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.