Sonoma State University recalls the Black Panthers

More than 150 people filled the University Library to hear four former members speak, as well as view black-and-white portraits of other Panthers on display in the gallery.|

Billy X Jennings joined the Black Panther Party right out of high school in 1968. He was 17.

Jennings said he and the other members worked in the community every day. They shadowed police patrols, but also provided legal aid, medical services and free breakfast to children, and taught people how to organize themselves - lessons that can be applied to the social justice movements of today, he said.

“The Black Panther Party was a vanguard organization. We set examples so young people could follow them today,” said Jennings, who lives in Sacramento.

He was among the four panelists Monday who discussed their experience in the Black Panther Party at Sonoma State University. The others were Barbara Easley Cox, Emory Douglas and Elbert “Big Man” Howard, who lives in Sonoma County.

More than 150 people filled the North Gallery on the second floor of the University Library to hear the four former members speak, as well as view black-and-white portraits of other Panthers on display in the gallery.

The images were taken by documentary photographer Suzun Lucia Lamaina, who traveled around the country for five years photographing former members of the Black Panther Party. She also spoke at Monday’s event.

Lamaina, who captured their portraits on traditional film she developed in a darkroom, asked the Panthers she interviewed to reflect on their time in the group. She included those stories in the exhibit, titled “Revolutionary Grain: Celebrating the Spirit of the Black Panther Party in Portraits and Stories.”

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland in late 1966 to combat police brutality and white oppression and build their community in the face of what they perceived as white oppression.

Howard said he believed in the need for self-defense.

He said he’d witnessed the abuse of poor people, particularly blacks, but never saw any repercussions for it.

“No results came of it, and no one came to the people’s rescue,” he said.

Howard met Newton and Seale while studying revolutionary theories and practices at Oakland’s Merritt College. He was one of the original Panthers, who he said were falsely painted by various publications as violent “evil doers” out to destroy the white population.

“That had nothing to do with self-defense and defending one’s self, one’s family and dwelling,” Howard said Monday. “All this sort of nonsense, that’s where it came from, pretty much like it is today.”

Communities are facing similar conditions, he said.

“There is major concern about how to struggle against the upcoming fascism that we’re facing, that our people are facing,” he said.

As a young woman who grew up in East Oakland, SSU president Judy Sakaki said the party’s impact was “evident all around me.”

She said the free breakfast program the Panthers started in 1968 in an Oakland church later became a model for school breakfast programs across the country.

“The Black Panther Party is not part of a distant and remote past, but as Suzun’s photography shows so beautifully, is part of the rich heritage, the texture of our collective experiences that has shaped who we are and the society we live in today.”

Talayah Hudson, chair of SSU’s Black Student Union, said it was important to learn from the Panthers, particularly those involved in social justice, such as the Black Lives Matter movement.

“They’re an organization that was made for and by black people, and they were successful,” she said.

“At the end of the day, we’re fighting for the same things. We’re fighting for the liberation of black people.”

Lamaina said The party was widely misunderstood, Lamaina said. Members provided food, clothing, dental services, medical care and other social services in their communities, but she said the media and government discredited them through covert operations, Lamaina said.

One man, John Cheney of Petaluma, stood up at the event and accused the Panthers of being “murderers.”

Cheney said he was a corrections officer at San Quentin at the time of the 1970 Marin County courthouse shootout that left four people dead, including a judge.

“I hear you guys speaking of peace,” he said.

“How many shootouts with the police have you had?

Douglas responded, “quite a few,” before some in the audience booed at Cheney and event organizers asked him to sit down.

Lamaina said she first came up with the idea for the project while she was an undergraduate student in Philadelphia in the late 1970s.

She started reaching out to members, but some had gone underground.

“By no means was it easy,” she said Monday about the project.

There were no grants available, so Lamaina, who also produced a book that shares the exhibit’s name, said she took on two to three jobs to cover the cost of travel and materials.

“I shelved the project and I didn’t forget about it,” she said.

“In 2008, I said, ‘I’m not getting any younger, neither are the Panthers.’”

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