Jane Tyska via Creative Commons
A mini museum in Oakland, California, on the history of the Black Panther Party.
For decades after her husband, Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton, was shot and killed in front of a house in West Oakland, California, Fredrika Newton wanted there to be some kind of historical marker to acknowledge his legacy on the streets where he lived and died.
But beyond the occasional, temporary tribute from private citizens or organizations, that didn’t happen.
“We fed children. We clothed people. We made sure that we protected the community from police violence and killings, and all of these issues are as relevant today as they were in 1966.”
“There was nothing in the city on public land that showed that Black Panther Party history not only existed, but was born in Oakland,” Newton says. “It’s criminal that the state does not recognize the work of the party and other Black Power movements.”
Other people have become aware of this absence, too. Shortly after Jilchristiana Vest moved into her West Oakland home two decades ago, she noticed something peculiar: Every so often, a tour van full of people would arrive on her street and disembark in front of the house across the street.
“The first couple of times it happened, I don’t think I paid much attention,” Vest recalls. “And then there was one time the group was particularly large, so the leader of the group was speaking to them through a megaphone. That’s when I learned it was a Black Panther tour.”
The man speaking out of the megaphone and leading the tour was David Hilliard—a former chief of staff of the Black Panther Party who briefly served as the party’s interim leader after Huey Newton was arrested in 1967. Vest recognized Hilliard as he declared, “We’re standing on the location where Huey Newton was assassinated.”
Until then, Vest had no idea that she was living across the street from where one of the most important leaders in the Black freedom struggle had been killed. And she was no ordinary neighbor: Vest was a student of the Black Panther movement who had Angela Y. Davis as a professor at San Francisco State University.
She quickly learned that the tour Hilliard was leading took people to a number of other unmarked historical Black Panther sites around the city—multiple former party headquarters, one of which is now the site of a much-loved bakery, and the Episcopal church that housed the party’s first Free Breakfast Program.
“All of these places don't have any physical markers,” Vest said. “So if you don’t know what they are, it’s not like you're going to see something that tells you when you walk by.”
The Black Panther Party had more than sixty chapters across the country and, in many ways, shaped the modern progressive movement. But in cities across the country, that history has been erased.
“Chicago is a city full of memorials to labor radicals and things like that from past decades, but I’m not aware of anything specific commemorating [deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party] Fred Hampton,” says Ian Rocksborough-Smith, professor at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada, and author of the book Black Public History in Chicago.
There remains, for now, not a single Black Power-related site in the entirety of the National Park System. It’s not exactly a secret why.
“The civil rights era tried to work inside, to some degree, that belief that if you just work hard and do the right things . . . then we can make this country beneficial for everyone,” says Carroll Fife, a member of the Oakland City Council. “The radical Black movements of the sixties challenged that thought and challenged those principles, and said that, ‘No, this thing is rotten at its core.’ ”
For Fredrika Newton, the Black Panther Party was threatening to the state precisely because it was exposing the state’s failings.
“We fed children,” Newton says. “We clothed people. We made sure that we protected the community from police violence and killings, and all of these issues are as relevant today as they were in 1966.”
Even relatively minor efforts to commemorate the party’s legacy have been met with fierce resistance. In 2017, for example, the Fraternal Order of Police sent a letter to then-President Donald Trump vehemently opposing an allocation of less than $100,000 in the National Park System budget for a Black Panthers-related project; it was then put on hold.
Since the national Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of 2020, however, Newton says there has been a paradigm shift.
Last year, thanks in large part to the work of Newton, a bust of her husband was unveiled just down the street from where he was killed on a street that now bears his name. It’s the first permanent public art piece dedicated to the party in the city.
Newton, Fife, and other leaders are working with the National Park Service to build a Black Panther National Park encompassing some twenty-plus sites around Oakland and the Bay Area. Next month, they will travel to Alabama with a delegation including U.S. Representative, and one-time Black Panther Party volunteer, Barbara Lee to study civil rights monuments and memorialization in the state.
Progress is being made outside of Oakland as well. On April 19, the village of Maywood, Illinois, designated Hampton’s childhood home as a historic landmark following a campaign by Hampton’s family. Newton says memorialization efforts led by former party members are underway in cities like Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Meanwhile, private citizens unwilling to wait for state action are taking matters into their own hands. In the summer of 2020, noting the minimization of Black women in protest movements, Vest offered the side of her house for a mural to the women of the Black Panther Party.
After the mural was completed, she decided to go a step further—opening up the bottom floor of her house to the public as a Black Panthers museum, the first of its kind in the country. Another effort is being led by Oakland organizer Damien McDuffie, whose phone and iPad app Black Terminus AR uses augmented reality to show users curated videos overlaid on specific Black Panther-related murals around the city.
In some neighborhoods, the history remains very much alive. Newton says it’s hard to go by a mural featuring her late husband in West Oakland “without people telling you stories of either their interactions with the party or how the party impacted their parents or impacted their grandparents.”
But as party members and the people they served grow older and less visible in public life, those personal connections will become more remote. That’s why this is a particularly important moment to institutionalize the history of the Panthers and how they were crushed.
Fife says that, as an elected official, she owes it to Newton and others to help ensure that their fight to secure the legacy of the Black Panthers and “all marginalized movements who have blood in this soil” is successful.
“I want to see that [history] represented in physical space,” Fife says. “I want to see that represented in curriculum. I want to see that represented in the people who are running for office. And when we do that, I think we’ll start to see a move toward the equity that all of these different groups were fighting for.”