Panthers to Gather to Commemorate 'Victory'
http://www.lawattstimes.com/component/content/article/52-featured/1318-panthers-to-gather-to-commemorate-victory.html
December 03, 2009
BY THANDISIZWE CHIMURENGA
Dec. 8, 2009, marks the 40th anniversary of the Los Angeles Police
Department's shootout at the Southern California Black Panther
Party's headquarters.
Local members of the party will honor those who survived the
altercation with a program at 6 p.m. at the Southern California
Library for Social Studies and Research at 6120 S. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles.
Entitled "Victory: A Day of Remembering," the program will include
eyewitness accounts from members involved in the shootout, as well as
a viewing of the film "41st and Central" by filmmaker Gregory Everett.
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), co-founded in 1966 by
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, was a community-based
organization which had a platform that called for a number of rights
and liberties for black people, including free health care, full
employment, decent housing and decent education. The platform also
called for an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.
"That principle seemed to get the most attention," said Richard
"Dhoruba" Moore, a member of the New York chapter of the BPP at the
time, in "Framing the Panthers," a documentary on Moore.
The BPP emphatically espoused the right of African Americans to
self-defense, up to and including against local police departments,
which put them in conflict with those agencies. The party also
insisted that African Americans control their own political destiny,
as reflected in party documents and speeches.
The BPP's commitment to such principles, in addition to their "Serve
the People" programs such as free breakfast for children and free
sickle cell anemia testing, are what led to then-Director of the FBI
J. Edgar Hoover's labeling of the BPP as "the greatest single threat
to the internal security of the country," in a Sept. 8, 1968, New
York Times article, according to "The Cointelpro Papers: Documents
from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States," a
book written by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall.
The LAPD assault of the BPP headquarters on East 41st Street and
South Central Avenue in Los Angeles occurred about four days after a
similar pre-dawn raid of the party's Illinois headquarters in Chicago
that killed Illinois Chairman Fred Hampton and Defense Captain Mark Clark.
The Chicago incident was one of several acts against BPP headquarters
across the country at that time.
Some people said they thought that a confrontation in Los Angeles
between the Panthers and local police was imminent.
"There was a national plan for local police, egged on by the FBI, to
attack Panthers all across the country," according to Ayuko Babu,
currently the Executive Director of the Pan African Film Festival,
and a community activist who worked with the Panthers at that time.
"We found out about it because (an official) in Seattle, Washington,
said that he wasn't going to go along with the plan. It was in all
the papers at the time."
Roland Freeman, a survivor of the shootout on Central Avenue, says
that about one week before the shootout, a police officer had
attempted to enter the party's office.
"He was told to leave," Freeman said. "He knew he was not welcomed in
our office, a shotgun was pulled on him, and he ended up leaving."
According to Freeman, that confrontation was used as the pretext for
the police to come and search for weapons.
"They had done some dry runs in the community, so they had been
planning it," Freeman said. "They came in there to kill us, they were
going to kill us; there's no doubt in my mind."
The LAPD's account about what led to the shootout bears some
similarity to Freeman's.
"A community relations officer named Morton and two patrol officers
observed the occupants of 41st and Central training their weapons on
police cars and officers as they drove by," said Sgt. Chuck Buttitta
with the LAPD Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team.
"Officer Morton tried to resolve the problem, and entered the
headquarters and observed two occupants inside. One of the occupants
inside pointed a .45 caliber weapon at Officer Morton," he said. "The
other occupant picked up a shotgun and told Morton
'Count to three
and you better be out of here.' Officer Morton exited the premises
and notified supervisors and a crime report was made."
The charge was assault with a deadly weapon on police officer,
Buttitta added. A search warrant was then secured for the location
and the warrant was served on Dec. 8, 1969, he said.
The SWAT unit had been created in the late 1960s but their first
"challenge" came with the Panther confrontation in 1969, according to
the unit's Web site.
Under the section "Challenges Faced by S.W.A.T.," the Web site
states, "The Black Panthers resisted and attempted to shoot it out
with 40 members of the SWAT Team. In the ensuing four-hour siege,
thousands of rounds of ammunition were fired, resulting in the
wounding of three Panthers and three police officers. The Panthers
finally surrendered to SWAT officers, whose first mission was now an
indelible part of history."
Albeit for different reasons, the LAPD and the Panthers consider the
event to be historic.
The Los Angeles SWAT Foundation, a nonprofit organization, sells an
unofficial SWAT patch that contains the number "41" on it, which
commemorates the confrontation on East 41st Street and South Central Avenue.
The patch is not worn on SWAT tactical deployment uniforms, but it
can be purchased and worn on a jacket or T-shirt, Buttitta said. The
patch is generally sold to other law enforcement officers.
Everett, whose film is part of a documentary project to tell the
story of the Southern California chapter the BPP, says the incident
was a defining moment for both the LAPD and the Panthers.
"Eleven people
the majority of them teenagers 19 and under, in a
five-hour shootout with over 300 police officers, including SWAT.
It's SWAT's first public mission and they break out 16 millimeter
film cameras to film the event, no one is murdered, and they (the
Panthers) eventually beat the case
this is the climax of the Black
Power Movement in America," Everett said.
Talibah Shakir, an 18-year-old member of the party at the time, also
described the confrontation as a defining moment.
"We were like, 'We're tired of turning the other cheek.' We were
tired of seeing our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, shot down in
the street by the local police agencies, the occupying force, and
then it being classified as justifiable homicide time and time
again," she said.
Babu, who described the incident as a victory that should be
celebrated in the same way as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, cites a
plaque he saw in Soweto, South Africa, as proof of the historic
nature of what happened that day in 1969.
At a museum dedicated to the struggle against apartheid that Babu
visited in 2007, he observed the plaque that was dedicated to the
black youth of the United States in the 1960s who helped inspire us
(South Africans) to stand up and carry out our struggle.
"That act on Central Avenue had a worldwide effect," he said.
A Dec. 24, 1971, Los Angeles Tribune article detailed the acquittal
of all the Panthers involved in the Dec. 8 shootout, according to
"The Cointelpro Papers."
"(It was) one of the longest trials in California history, if not the
longest at the time," Freeman said. "That was a highlight of the
struggle; it didn't get much better than that."
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
