My People Are Rising (17 page)

In those days, Oakland was very much like a war zone. Wherever there was a party chapter and racist police, there would be confrontation and often bloodshed. I had the overwhelming feeling that there was a lot of work waiting for me back in Seattle in order to get the comrades organized into a disciplined force as had been done in Oakland.

The following day, I said my goodbyes to my new comrades. On the flight home, I did a lot of thinking. I pondered my immediate experiences in Oakland and reflected on the movement's growth from riots and demonstrations to armed resistance and grassroots organizing of the most downtrodden elements of the Black community.

It was clear that when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, a change had occurred in the political consciousness of young Black America. The door of the nonviolence movement had been slammed shut, but a window had been opened. Revolutionary thought was replacing the civil rights approach, manifesting with a seriousness, an intensity, that had not been in the earlier movement. The young would look to a new group of individuals, such as Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, and to organizations led by people like those I had just met in Oakland—Tommy Jones, Robert Bay, Captain Bill Brent, Landon, Randy, and Matilaba. I thought about my newfound friends, my comrades in arms, about the night at 7th and Wood and how I was embraced by them, encouraged and loved by them, unconditionally.

I visited Oakland many times during those early years, creating a lasting and unbreakable bond with these comrades.

July 1968, Seattle

Bobby Harding (left) and Lewis “LewJack” Jackson (right), Seattle, 1968.

12

The Panther Comes to Seattle

Move up a little higher Some way, somehow

'Cause I've got my strength And it don't make sense Not to keep on pushin'

—The Impressions, “Keep On Pushing,” 1964

This is what we all had been waiting for
, whether we realized it or not. Revolutions were unfolding all over the world. Liberators such as Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, and Patrice Lumumba were international heroes, and Huey was poised to join that list. We were on the cusp of making history and could feel its power and danger eerily creeping up behind us.

Back home in Seattle after my week in Oakland, I felt more prepared. I was now armed with a mission to organize the Seattle chapter into a disciplined wing of the Black Panther Party. Exactly how this would transpire, I had not the faintest idea. I was merely a passenger on the train, and it had just so happened that I was assigned to the front of this particular car. I could only hope that with some wisdom, my eyes and instincts would guide us in the right direction.

Our first and foremost task was to find a storefront office in a central location. We were fortunate to find one at 34th and Union in Madrona, only three blocks from my parents' house across from Madrona Park. The storefront was across the street from Miss Ruby's house. O
ne of our big neighborhood supporters, from her large blue house Miss Ruby would operate as our eyes and ears, informing us when the police were snooping around. In front of Miss Ruby's house stood
Mrs. Jackson's record store, where Mike Dean and I had spent a good portion of our high school years listening to Motown sounds and turning over our hard-earned money to buy the latest hits. Madrona was still the same quiet, working-class neighborhood it had been while I was growing up. But all that was about to change.

The storefront we had our eyes on was part of another connecting storefront, owned by Brill Realty. Mr. Brill, the building's owner, had never been particularly friendly to anyone in the neighborhood, especially not young people. When Willie Brazier, Chester Northington, Curtis Harris, and I approached the squat, bowlegged, pale Mr. Brill and asked him about renting the vacant office, he responded in an abrupt, dismissive manner, “No, I will not rent to you.” We left quietly, though confidently. Later that night, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the storefront, causing superficial damage. About a week later we approached Mr. Brill again, while he was repairing the building. This time he promptly agreed to rent to us.

Within days we opened our storefront office, getting several desks and chairs donated, as well as a mimeograph machine. Word spread like wildfire through the Central District and the Rainier Valley to the south, and we began taking applications from new recruits. In the first two months we received more than three hundred applications.

As I had seen in Oakland, the party attracted people from a wide spectrum of the Black community. Most were young Black high school kids. Others were in their twenties, and a few were older than thirty, like Ron Carson, a smooth-skinned brother who ran a local poverty program. He was known to carry several pistols, and was not one to bite his tongue. One cat was almost forty. This being Seattle, it was not unusual that a handful of the new recruits were Asian—like fifteen-year-old Guy Kurose, who was Japanese; seventeen-year-old Mike Gillespie, a Filipino trumpet player; and Mike Tagawa, a Japanese Vietnam vet. These guys had all grown up in our neighborhood and identified with young Blacks in many ways.

The new recruits signed up for a variety of reasons—some for the sense of belonging to something that instantly gave their life meaning and purpose; others because they had felt the sting of racism, the cuts of injustice, and felt this was their opportunity to strike back. A few were simply curious. A few others came with their own agenda and notions as to how the liberation struggle might be able to benefit them personally.

The array of characters was impressive. Chester Northington, John Eichelburger, and Vietnam vet Bruce Hayes were older cats who had been involved in other Black Nationalist organizations. I had met them previously at Voodoo Man's house. The Noble brothers brought two carloads of young recruits with them from the South End, including their two sisters. The Noble brothers earned the nickname “F-Troop,” not so much for any resemblance to the bumbling idiots on the TV show
F-Troop
but due to their wild appearance and frequent lack of discipline.

Two seventeen-year-old students, Warren Myers, who went to Catholic school, and Steve Philips, later proved to be two of our bravest and best warriors. Also among the recruits were brothers who had been involved in street life and saw the party as their way of evening the score as well as redeeming themselves in the eyes of the community, like Willie Brazier and Jimmy Davis. And there was always a steady trickle of Vietnam vets.

Among the first Vietnam vets to join were three buddies who grew up together, went to war together, and were fortunate to return together—Bobby White, Bobby Harding, and Mike Tagawa. They brought invaluable experience and dedication to the chapter. Mike Tagawa and Bobby Harding drew on their military experience to instill discipline in the young Panther recruits. They started teaching classes on how to break down and clean weapons, how to aim and discharge weapons properly. They led close-quarter military drills with the Panther recruits three times a week. We needed a structured activity for all the new recruits. As the party considered itself a paramilitary organization, the chapters in Los Angeles and Oakland had adopted military-style drilling and marching, and now we did as well. All new Panther recruits were required to go through a six-week training program.

We gathered at Madrona Park, the scene of childhood memories of muddy football battles, wild baseball games, and occasional fights. Now in this same setting, dozens of Black young men, dressed in the Panther black, berets tilted to the side, were learning military formations, how to stand at attention and stand at ease—and, most important, how to follow orders. In Oakland and possibly in Los Angeles, Panther women also participated in the drills, but in Seattle they were not required to.

Bobby White, a slight brother who wore prescription sunglasses along with his beret, was one of the most dynamic writers in Seattle. He became lieutenant of information. He took charge of the community news bulletins that we put out every couple of weeks; he also decorated the office with posters and revolutionary slogans, and painted the Panther colors, baby blue and white, on the outer walls of the storefront, with “Black Panther Party” in the center. Bobby Harding was also a writer, a poet, and often the three of us shared our work and talked about someday getting published.

The new recruits were not only men. Many young sisters joined up, some of whom were tougher than the brothers. Joyce Redman had long been regarded as one of the baddest sisters in the neighborhood. No one wanted to mess with her because she was known to beat the hell out of her opponents, male or female. Maud Allen, articulate and hard-nosed about party rules, became the captain of the women. There were the two Kathys—Kathy Jones, still in high school, and tall, thin Kathy Halley, who had transferred to the UW from Wilberforce University, a Black college in the Midwest. She later changed her name to Nafasi, and became my close confidant, constantly worrying about my safety. I also met a little, cute, fiery sister named Tanya, a couple years older than me. She soon became my girlfriend and was the woman to whom I lost my virginity.

Buddy Yates and Curtis Harris were two brothers with similar personalities, and early on it was obvious they had an agenda that had very little to do with the liberation of Black America. Curtis, my brother-in-law, was two years older than me. He made up a title for himself, “assistant captain.” It was a move that should have alerted me and others, but at the time we ignored it—a mistake for which we would pay plenty.

Of the many colorful individuals who signed up, none was as memorable or as committed in those early days as Lewis Jackson. “LewJack,” as he was called, must have been about twenty-three years old. He had moved to Seattle from New Orleans, and used to tell many stories about growing up in the tough Ninth Ward of New Orleans. He had a tattoo of a football right between his eyes, thus his second nickname was “Football.” His beady eyes lit up when he talked about the fights he had been in and what he wanted to do to the pigs, although sometimes his French Creole dialect made him hard to understand. One of the few recruits to come equipped with a weapon, a .45 that he carried everywhere, LewJack appointed himself as my personal bodyguard. He followed me around constantly, even sleeping out in front of the house in his car when there were threats against my life.

New recruits were given a packet of information, which included the party's national and local leadership structure, ten-point program and platform, twenty-six rules, and a “Pocket Lawyer of Legal First Aid,” listing one's legal rights. Panthers were also given Mao's Little Red Book and a list of additional required reading, and were charged with memorizing Mao's Three Main Rules of Discipline.

Recruits were instructed to attend weekly meetings, which were not always held consistently in those early days of figuring things out. There seemed to always be something coming up to change the schedule. Sometimes I led the meetings and at other times Lieutenant of Political Education Willie Brazier led them. We formed a Central Staff, composed of officers appointed at the time of the initial meeting with Bobby Seale. In theory, the Central Staff was supposed to serve as the governing force of our chapter, similar to the Central Committee in Oakland. Of course, it never functioned as we had envisioned. There were just too many strong personalities, and at the time I did not quite have the confidence to command the necessary respect.

When Chairman Bobby was in Seattle, he had described an organizing tool created by James Forman, the former executive secretary of SNCC. Along with fellow SNCC leaders Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, Forman had recently been drafted into the Black Panther Party. The tool he developed, known as the “10-10-10,” called for dividing the organizing area or community into ten sections, further dividing each section into subsections, and dividing subsections into blocks. Each section had a section leader, and each subsection had a subsection leader as well as block captains.

We attempted to use a variation of this tactic, as did other new chapters, dividing our organizing area into three sections and appointing section leaders. This was supposed to be a means of not only organizing the community but also engaging and coordinating the new recruits according to their assigned sections. During this time period, though, it was very difficult to make “10-10-10” work for us. Events were occurring at high speed.

Early on, because so many young people had signed up, discipline proved to be a problem. Elmer, who was rapidly becoming my solid right hand, organized a “goon squad” to administer some discipline to those young comrades who were not following orders or were conducting themselves in a rowdy, disorganized fashion.