LITMIR.BIZ

      4. TAKIN’ CARE OF BUSINESS

      Some people say we’ve got a lot of malice Some say it’s a lot of nerve But I say we won’t quit moving until we get what we deserve We have been bucked and we have been scorned We have been treated bad, talked about as just bones But just as it takes two eyes to make a pair, ha Brother we can’t quit until we get our share.

       — JAMES BROWN, “SAY IT LOUD”

      Newton and Seale’s new revolutionary party started out slowly. At the invitation of their friend Richard Aoki, the two fund-raised in the fall of 1966 by hawking copies of the quotations of Chairman Mao for $1 apiece at anti-war demonstrations on the U. C. Berkeley campus. They figured, correctly, that inner city blacks would do brisk business with white radicals when they offered them Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book, with sayings like “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” At seventy-cents’ profit per copy, the proceeds mounted quickly. They used them to purchase guns as an inducement to enroll new Panther Party members.

      Aoki had started wearing the same black leather jacket and tilted beret as the Panther leaders, his eyes shielded by dark glasses. With his moustache, practiced grimace and sunglasses, he exuded a fierce image despite his slight stature. Seale and Newton gave the 29-year-old Japanese-American the title Field Marshal, the only non-black who would ever achieve any rank in the party. Newton had told him “The struggle for freedom, justice and equality transcends racial and ethnic barriers. As far as I’m concerned, you black.”¹ After all, Aoki’s entire family had endured worse violation of his civil rights than almost anyone else Newton knew — Aoki spent years as a child prisoner of war in a Utah internment camp with no indoor plumbing or heat, his parents scorned as enemies despite the fact they were both born and raised in America. Aoki had quit the army because he did not want to kill Vietnamese civilians. The ex-GI still bore the psychological scars of his family’s mistreatment. Before their relocation, his grandfather ran a successful Oakland noodle company. Internment split up his parents. On their return, they found the family home vandalized; his father became a hardened criminal. As a teen in West Oakland, it was easy for Aoki to identify with disaffected black hustlers on the street.

      Aoki earned his title of Field Marshal by supplying Seale and Newton with their first weapons; he also gave Newton and new recruits like young Bobby Hutton firearms training. Unbeknownst to either Seale or Newton or anyone else in their circle, since 1961 Aoki had been a government informant helping the FBI track Communists and other dissidents.² Aoki told the FBI he did not support the Soviet Union and would help them unmask Communists; he became a key informant on the Free Speech Movement at Cal. The shocking revelation of Aoki’s duplicity would not occur until almost five decades later as the accidental byproduct of Freedom of Information Act requests by investigative reporter Seth Rosenfeld, author of the 2012 best-seller Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power. When the news went public, Bobby Seale refused to believe it was true. A lifelong friend of Aoki’s from the days when they were both young radicals found it just as astonishing, but realized that Aoki had long led a compartmentalized life.

      The FBI was focused on Communists when the bureau originally recruited Aoki. When he started taking classes at Oakland City College, it was the FBI that suggested he open a chapter of the Trotskyite Student Socialist Alliance. Over the next fifteen years, Aoki secretly reported to the FBI on various leftist groups, including the Panthers. But when Aoki first joined Seale and Newton in 1966 to help write their party platform, the FBI did not have any interest yet in either Seale or Newton. No evidence would ever emerge that the FBI used one of its standard provocateur tactics to put Aoki up to offering the Panthers weapons and weapons training in 1966 to lure them into confrontations with the police. Aoki may have provided the weapons out of genuine desire to abet their new venture; he had witnessed the brutality of police in West Oakland firsthand.

      Aoki graduated from Cal in 1968 with a sociology degree and, after obtaining a master’s degree in 1970 in the same field, went on to a 25-year career as a teacher and administrator at Merritt College (formerly Oakland City College). When Rosenfeld interviewed Aoki in 2007 for his book about the Free Speech Movement, Rosenfeld stunned Aoki with news that an FBI agent had identified him as a long-term informant listed in their records as T-2. The ex-GI at first retreated into silence; then he offered a denial with a cryptic explanation: “It is complex. Layer upon layer.”³ Three years later — before Rosenfeld’s discovery went public — Aoki committed suicide at his home. On the bed near where he shot himself he had carefully laid out his Panther regalia and his freshly ironed Army uniform.⁴

      Many informants led two lives. At Cal in 1966, Aoki become one of the most active Asian students lobbying for ethnic studies. He invited his good friends Seale and Newton to campus and provided Seale with a speaking opportunity. John Burris was an undergraduate that fall and became an early fan of Seale’s oratory. But Burris disagreed with the Panthers’ overall strategy: “There was a call for all black men to be armed. . . . My sense is if you have guns then you might be placed in a position to use them. . . . I was not a person who believed in violence and so I would not put myself in a position to harm anyone or to have anyone harm me . . . and I would not own a gun, and carry a gun, promote . . . any activities of that kind. . . . I didn’t think that was realistic. . . . I had a real sense of the power of the U.S. Government . . . and that you could be wiped out, a whole mass of people could be wiped out.”

      Burris was not alone in his squeamishness about packing a gun. Most of the Cal students who gravitated towards the Panthers likely had a similar reaction. Newton headed off campus to recruit more streetwise acquaintances. The promise of guns quickly lured neighborhood toughs and high school truants to Newton’s lectures about his new party’s philosophy. The Panthers’ first recruit, sixteen-year-old Bobby Hutton, had been one of Seale’s charges at the Anti-Poverty Program in Oakland. Newton routinely carried a pump-action shotgun, Hutton carried an M3 carbine, and Seale a .45 automatic in a holster. As they gained off-campus supporters, the Panthers started to become an intimidating force.

      By 1966, the whole atmosphere at Oakland City College had already become racially polarized. Many black students became campus bullies. Unofficial taboos kept most whites from using a particular water fountain the black students favored, maybe in retaliation for Southern “whites only” drinking fountains. Whites began to feel extremely uncomfortable if they congregated with black students in the hallway outside of classrooms; blacks also monopolized the snack room. White students who made eye contact with black males while walking around campus often generated icy stares; whites who were not radicals faced derision as “honkies.” Graffiti on campus included death threats against honkies. When members of the new Black Panther Party brought rifles on campus, the open display of weapons intimidated and frightened many students while inspiring and empowering others.