By Otis R. Taylor Jr.
February 20, 2020
Every week or so, Fredrika Newton receives a flyer with an offer to buy her home.
Newton, widow of Huey P. Newton, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, lives in West Oakland.
She sees a connection between the Black Panthers’ fight for social justice for African Americans in the late 1960s and the battle she and her neighbors face just to stay in West Oakland, where home prices are skyrocketing and wealthy buyers are moving in.
Founded in the city in 1966, the Black Panthers are remembered for wearing black leather jackets and black berets while patrolling West Oakland streets armed with rifles and pistols.
In 1969, the group began feeding children at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church on 29th Street before school. By the end of the year, they were feeding 20,000 kids in 19 U.S. cities in what would later become the blueprint for the federal government’s school breakfast program.
That’s a nugget of black history to chew on.
Oakland’s history is inextricably linked to the Black Panthers, but you wouldn’t know it if you recently moved here. There are no commemorative plaques or statues.
“Nothing to show the breakfast programs, nothing to show the free food giveaway, nothing to show the presence,” Newton said.
Newton, president of the Huey P. Newton Foundation, is on a quest to erect a monument to the Black Panthers and, eventually, a Black Panther museum. Think about it: Here we are near the end of another Black History Month and there’s little in Oakland to mark the compelling and complex legacy of the Black Panther Party.
Here’s more food for thought. A half century ago, West Oakland was a low-income, black neighborhood populated by families who migrated to California to work in the bustling wartime shipyards. West Oakland was one of the few areas blacks could live because of redlining, the systemic and discriminatory practice of refusing to issue them loans in certain neighborhoods.
Redlining enforced neighborhood segregation, and the practice crippled black neighborhoods by denying crucial investment dollars needed to purchase property and develop neighborhood resources.
The Black Panthers are known for fighting police brutality and racial inequality, but they also fought against the destabilization of the black community.
The organization was confrontational in the early years when members openly carried firearms legally. It led to violent clashes and the death of Oakland police officer John Frey — Huey Newton, who was also shot in the incident, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the case but the verdict was reversed on appeal and the charges eventually were dropped.
But when the Black Panthers put down their weapons, the organization focused on education, health care and self-reliance.
Long neglected, West Oakland today is where the hot property is — at prices inaccessible to many of the neighborhood’s longtime residents. And for the folks who own their homes like Newton, they just have to open their mailboxes for offers to leave so they can make room for someone else.
“We’re looked upon as strangers in our own community,” Newton said. “It’s like people are moving into the neighborhood and not even being neighborly. So the people that have lived there all their lives are treated as though they don’t even belong in their own neighborhoods.”
I met Newton last weekend at the de Young Museum, where she appeared to discuss the cultural resonance of her late husband. The talk coincided with “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” an exhibition that unflinchingly approaches racial turbulence in this country.
Newton, who was born in Oakland, spent part of her childhood on Bateman Street, a short block in Berkeley. Her mother was a white, Jewish activist and her father a black musician. Their neighbors included Tom Hayden, an anti-war and civil rights activist who later became a politician, and Robert Scheer, the former editor of Ramparts, a political and literary magazine. Jane Fonda would host political education classes on the block. Newton’s mother introduced her to Huey Newton.
About five years ago Newton, a retired addiction nurse, took on a more active role in the foundation she co-founded in 1995 with David Hilliard, former chief of staff for the Black Panthers. She envisions a monument near Lake Merritt, and a traveling exhibition of Black Panther archives. The foundation is raising money for the monument.
We talked about the tension in Oakland caused by housing insecurity that was punctuated when a group of mothers moved into a house in West Oakland without the owner’s permission. Moms 4 Housing was protesting the companies they see as profiting from the displacement of people in black and brown neighborhoods.
Oakland pridefully thumps its chest when celebrating the city’s culture, but what happens when the people who create and embody the culture can’t afford to live in Oakland?
“That’s why it’s so important that the histories of the people of the community are known,” Newton, 68, said.
Damien McDuffie, a West Oakland native, has been working with Newton since June. Growing up in the Acorn Projects in the 1990s, McDuffie, the foundation’s director of brand strategies and archives, told me that he knew the Black Panthers were from West Oakland. But that’s it.
He sees the foundation’s work as an opportunity to preserve the richness of Oakland’s impact on black history.
“What kind of environment is West Oakland and Oakland in general that creates a space where the Black Panther Party is needed and can exist?” he said. “How could West Oakland be a place that produces an organization that has such a rippling impact across the world and then also be the place that I lived?”
That’s history that can’t be forced out of a neighborhood.
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