Equity Rising S1 : Episode 13
Roots of the Black Power Movement with Aaron Dixon; Albuquerque, New Mexico
In this powerful conclusion to a season of global connections, Trae comes full circle with a rich and instructive conversation with Aaron Dixon, founder and former captain of Seattle’s Black Panther Party. Now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Aaron is truly a living legend. His memories of ‘60s-era organizing—where you never knew, from one day to the next, whether you’d see your comrades again; where families were torn apart and new ones were built—show us where we come from, and how far we have yet to go. After a lifetime of radical activism, youth organizing, regional politics, and more, Aaron says that mostly what he does now is witness. He listens to and encourages the new leaders of the movement, allowing them to find their way to the actions that this modern world demands. We are deeply grateful for the opportunity to learn from this dedicated and accomplished leader as we close out Season One.
And special bonus - this week’s Chime In features Trae’s mom, Tracie Holiday-Robinson.
This episode was produced by Linnea Ingalls & Julia Drachman and edited by Josh Berl.
Transcript
Josh Berl 0:03
I'm Josh Berl, one of the producers for the Equity Rising podcast from King County Equity Now. In our season one finale you will hear our hosts Trae Holiday speak with Aaron Dixon, founder and former captain of Seattle's Black Panther Party. Aaron shares some stories from a lifetime of radical activists and offers advice to current movements for racial justice. Aaron and Trae show us where we come from, and how far we have yet to go. Thanks for listening.
(music)
TraeAnna Holiday 0:32
Well, everybody, welcome to our final episode of equity rising for season one. I have just been elated as your host, Trae Holiday is y'all know me out there. And this right here, this episode just culminates it all, we've been talking to changemakers all over the world. And with me today is Mr. Aaron Dixon, who really helped to champion and start the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party. Welcome, Mr. Dixon to equity rising.
Aaron Dixon 1:05
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
TraeAnna Holiday 1:07
Absolutely. We like to start off with our first things. First, I got to ask you, how are you taking care of yourself?
Aaron Dixon 1:14
Okay, I saw that, and I made a list. Okay. So, writing is one thing, writing is very important to me, it really helps me to be able to center myself, because there's so many things that are happening, and so many things I would like to say. So writing really helps me a lot. So I do a lot of that reading as well meditating. I've been practicing Transcendental Meditation for about eight years now. So I meditate twice a day for 20 minutes. Exercise, you know, I work out a lot, eating right, you know, eating the right food, that's the most important thing, we got to take care of our bodies. Our food in America is so processed, and so poisonous, you know, and they don't care about us. So we have to read and we have to understand what are the right types of food that we need to eat, because this is a long struggle, we got to take care of ourselves, we got to be able to struggle for a long time, we can't let all these little illnesses like blood pressure, and diabetes, and all these things that we can deal with, just by eating right, we can't have them taking us out, you know, so that's very important. We got to eat right, and we got to exercise, we got to take care of our bodies, and staying involved, you know, staying involved, you know, it's been very good for me to be involved with the people in Seattle with the peace initiative, you know, and then working with them, even though I realized I came to realize is, you know, I, there's really not that much I can say to them, because they are so much on point. But just the fact that I'm there, and just the fact that I'm presence there. I know it means a lot to them. And it means a lot to me. And so those are the things that I do to take care of myself, and stay healthy and stay committed.
TraeAnna Holiday 3:09
Absolutely. It is so great to have you every day, just about every day in the work I do. The Black Panther Party is kind of like the guiding light for us, honestly. And so thank you for all of the work you've done. We're going to get into it here because there's a long history to cover. And I want to just start at the beginning. Clearly, there was a chapter in California. And this is the first chapter Seattle is the first chapter outside of the original chapter. And I want to hear from you about the beginnings of starting the Black Panther Party here in Seattle.
Aaron Dixon 3:43
Well, first of all, we were the first chapter outside of the state of California, Los Angeles became the second chapter outside of the original chapter in Oakland, via we the first chapter outside of the state of California, I was looking at the questions that you sent me, and I think it was talking about what led me to join the Black Panther Party. Actually, my father had a lot to do my parents, primarily my father had a lot to do with my and My brothers and sisters, political awareness, and political understanding my father when Emmett Till was murdered. My father wrote a poem, which is in the book, my people are rising about the death of Emmett Till. And I memorized that poem and I would take it to school when I was in elementary school, and I would take it to school and, and the teacher would let me read it in front of the class. And so that poem really helped to shape my my political awareness of racism and what was taking place in America. When I was 13 years old, I had a chance to march with Martin Luther King and meet him as well and talk with him. I told him that he needed to have a bodyguard. And then, of course, he was assassinated some years later. So I, you know, I got in, in the University of Washington, and in 67, we're only 30 Black students there. And we organized the first BSU in the state of Washington in the Northwest. So that was the beginning of my activism and really being involved with the BSU and marching on Franklin High School and making some demands on them, which we were arrested for. And while we were sitting in the King County Jail, Martin Luther King was assassinated. And that was a turning point for me, because prior to that, I had been involved in the civil rights movement, I've been going on marches and demonstrations and picket lines, and, you know, singing, we shall overcome and holding the picket signs of a when Martin Luther King was assassinated, I had heard about the Black Panther Party, but I remember that later on that night, when I went back to the bunk, I was locked up, I told myself that my picket sign was going to be replaced by the gun. And right after we got out, we ended up in San Francisco State where we met Bobby Seale. And we went to the funeral a little Bobby Hutton. And a week later Bobby Seale came to Seattle. And that's when the Black Panther Party began. And so, you know, for the last prior to that, for at least eight to 10 years, this movement had been building, there is a civil rights movement and the student movement and SNICC. So there was always this heavy feeling of a movement, you know, then here comes the Black Panther Party. So it just answered our prayers, because we didn't know what we were gonna do as angry young people. And, of course, riots had been breaking out, starting in 1965. In Watts California and every year after that, there were major riots and all the major cities in America. And these were young people just expressing their anger and their frustration, and not really having an outlet for their anger and their frustration. And then for us, the Black Panther Party came along and they provided what they provided for us was a vehicle in order for us to be able to have an energy to put our anger and frustration into. And it was a organization that required discipline and required reading, and studying required analyzing, it required, you know, not spontaneous action, but thinking first, you know, and to the party, provided things that we could get into, like the, you know, free breakfast program and the free medical clinics. But before before, we implemented that, when the Black Panther Party started in 1968, President Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, FBI head, and Attorney General John Michell called a press conference and said the Black Panther Party was the number one threat to the security of America. So they began, we didn't know that they had the secret program to wipe us out. They had told themselves amongst themselves that they were going to wipe us out by 1969. And so we immediately became under attack. And so after the Seattle chapter, started, chapters started opening up all across the country, you know, Chicago, and New York, and many, many, many places. And so they wanted to, you know, stop us and destroy us. So our first thing that we participated in was arming ourselves and learning how to protect ourselves. And they had police patrols in Oakland, we had a limited small version of armed police patrols here in Seattle, you know, the most important contribution that the party provided us was studying and reading, you know, reading rest of the earth, we were given a book list of books we had to read. We had to have political education class once a week or twice a week. And so a lot of our time was spent reading and also we had to read the Black Panther newspaper, because Huey had the wisdom to understand that when he started the Black Panther Party, we had to have a political outlet, a news outlet for us to be able to say what was happening in our communities and what was happening in the world. And we were taught the statement that power is the ability to To define phenomena, and they can act in a desired manner, which means whoever is defining the phenomenon that is happening, has the power. And so since the media has the weapon of disseminating information, they had the power, but through having our own newspaper, we shifted that power over to us. Because through our newspaper, we were able to define the truth about what was really happening, not just in America, but what was happening in the world. That's how we had an international section in our newspapers. So we could learn about what was happening in Palestine, we could learn about what was happening in Vietnam, and why the people of North Vietnam were fighting to free themselves and to gain control of all of Vietnam. And so you know, we learned about all these different movements as juggles all over the world.
TraeAnna Holiday 11:00
I'm sorry. But that right there is is exactly right. When you talk about the education, we see that now that so much of the work that we do, and we're talking about Black liberation, and anybody fighting towards equity now, basically, is doing the same thing, because ultimately, one of the gaps that is so experienced in our communities is the lack of understanding or education, particularly around the political process, and how our people really end up staying out of it thinking what our elected officials are going to handle that, or, hey, that's not in my wheelhouse. I'm not gonna worry about that. But so much of this is really about staying engaged in the Civic process. So I love hearing that. That's where you guys were rooting yourself in. And even for us, you know, at King County equity Now, we talk a lot about the education, the books, we need to read staying abreast as to some of the decisions that our legislative officials, our elected officials are making, kind of on the citizens behalf. But I love that you guys also had an understanding to look at things from an international perspective, because that's what this platform, my podcast equity rising is helping us do is to hear from people all over the world who are doing the work on the ground, and what that even looks like so that we can find ways to support each other and connect and have a collective model around this work. Because I think a lot of the time, we're dealing in silos and we're trying to eradicate those silos. Did you guys experience that as well?
Aaron Dixon 12:33
Well, I mean, we started off, one of the things that the Black Panther Party did very early was to develop coalitions with other groups and other people and other organizations from the very get go. So one of the first correlations that the Black Panther Party established with the Peace and Freedom Party, which was a, a white progressive organization that began to run candidates, opposite of the political system candidates. And so actually, in 1968, the Peace and Freedom Party ran, Huey P. Newton ran Eldridge Cleaver as political candidates. And in Seattle, we work with the Peace and Freedom Party, and we ran two members of the Black Panther Party on the peace and freedom banner. But then later on, of course, we established Coalitions with the brown berets in LA, and the Young Lords of Chicago, the young patriot party in Chicago. And that's what really made the Black Panther Party a major threat, because it's one thing to take a position of black nationalism. But when you start taking a position of internationalism, and uniting with all other struggles, and that that becomes a real threat to the establishment. And so that's what we really begin to do very early.
Trae Holiday 13:56
It's beautiful, because we're doing so much of what you guys were doing back then. Because unfortunately, all of the work that y'all put in all of the work that's been put in, it seems that it has made incremental changes that really haven't affected the whole. And when we think about where we are today, you know, seeing the global protest movement happen after George Floyd's death, and really so many deaths that led up to that, and just people being tired of seeing that and experiencing it, even if they were not Black, because what we saw here in Seattle, and I'm sure you also add some of this to, whereas we have a bunch of white allies who are just, they're like, Look, we're tired of this as well. We want to get rid of, you know, white supremacy and white privilege and, you know, really dismantling a lot of the things that have allowed for systems of oppression to thrive, right, it's beginning to affect so many more people. And so what did you feel that were some of your guys's biggest achievements in what you guys did in the time that you You guys were alive and thriving?
Aaron Dixon 15:02
Well, of course, I think the breakfast program was a major achievement because it was such a powerful achievement that J Edgar Hoover came out and said that the breakfast program by the Black Panther Party was the number one threat to America. Can you imagine that feeding hungry kids became the number one threat. And eventually, in 1974, because of the impact of their breakfast program, we forced the government to turn it into a national program. In 1974, it became a national program. And kids all across the country, whatever race they were at, were able to get free breakfast and free lunch or at a reduced rate. So I think that was one of the major accomplishments, the medical clinic also was a major accomplishment, we opened up 13 free medical clinics all across the country. And in 1974, the government allocated money for community based medical clinics, because at that time, there were no community clinics that existed. So we embarrassed and forced the government to put money into establishing medical clinics, I think those are some of the major contributions and our other programs the free legal aid program that we operated, where we had attorneys at our office three days a week, and people from the community could come in and meet with a lawyer and get legal advice, and legal assistance, and that they made that into a national program too the government. And I think that program is still in existence today. Those are major accomplishments. And what we wanted to show is that we had the ability to solve our own problems that we didn't have to march and demonstrate and demand that we could solve our own problems. You know, wherever there was a problem in our community, we attempted work towards dealing with that problem. You know, like the Winston Salem chapter, the Black Panther Party, started a free Ambulance Service. You know, the Harlem chapter started a free Ambulance Service, because you know, the old joke was, the ambulance isn't going to come to the Black community, we said, okay, we're gonna start our own. And we started our food giveaway program, we started giving out bags of groceries out of our community centers once a week. And in Oakland, when we kicked off Bobby Seale's run for mayor, we gave out 10,000 bags of groceries was a chicken in every bag. And out of the giving away the food came the food banks, you know, a lot of people don't realize that the Black Panther Party, were the ones that established laid the groundwork for the food banks to exist. So a lot of those examples were some of the major achievements of the Black Panther Party. But you know, in the party, we were taught that nothing stands outside of change. Everything is in a constant state of flux, you can't be the same as you were two years prior. because things are always changing. So you have to be able to adapt to the changes. And that's what we were always about, you know, 1969, we had orders to take off our uniforms, because our uniforms were separating us from the community. And number one, number two, they made us a target. So we had to take our uniforms off. And at one point, we also were told that we had to start developing relationships with the churches. And so we we had to go to churches, and we had to establish relationships with the churches, you know, and we had established relationships with small Black businesses as well. So we were always adjusting in 1972. That's when we began to run Bobby Seale for mayor and Elaine Brown, for City Council. Now prior to that, Shirley Chisholm, the first Black Congresswoman, decided she wanted to run for president. And so we were the first Black organization, probably one of the few Black organizations that went to support her. And to be quite honest with you, a lot of the Black elite, a lot of the Black politicians would not support Shirley Chisholm. They turned their back on her, because they felt as a woman who was she to come up and say he wants to run for president. So they didn't support her, you know, in the party. We worked very hard to deal with sexism. You know, we, we said that women are equal, you know, we didn't have work for women and work for men. You know, everybody did the same. Everybody did the same. In many cases, men did a lot of the cooking, they did most of the cooking. And women were doing other things organizing, learning how to use weapons. The Boston chapter was headed up by a woman. The Connecticut chapter at one point was headed by a woman. Many women were on the secure committee of the Black Panther Party in 1974. Elaine Brown became the head of the Black Panther Party as a woman because a lot of Black nationalist organizations, they didn't believe in that they didn't believe that women were equal, you know. So we set the example that that is not how women should be treated, you know?
TraeAnna Holiday 20:12
Well, that's beautiful. Thank you for leading the charge on that, because one of the things that I've experienced and I think that, you know, my elders here in community tell me all the time to be sure that I am sharing my story that I am writing down the things I'm doing for our community, the ways that I'm connected to different organizations to really bring about the education, the awareness, to make sure that people have a way of feeling collective and connected to these issues. And that is something I really take to heart because I think that one of the biggest things is, you know, a lot of women were a part of these movements. And yet, their stories were not told at scale, right, so that people could understand and identify and see themselves in these powerful women who are a part of, you know, leading the party and different chapters leading it on nationally, at one point, like, those are the women that you know, have given so much of their life and their life force, to again, be working towards equity and working towards justice, particularly for Black folks. And so it's so inspiring to listen to you talk about how you guys worked with other Coalitions that's exactly, you know, what King County equity now is doing as a 501c4, we are representing a bunch of 501c3's that are in the community that we now need to take all of the information that they have all the expertise and knowledge they have, and move it into real sustainable policy changes, right, taking all of that stuff down to Olympia, you know, checking in with our representatives in the state, our representatives in the house, and really bringing the knowledge that is so profound in our community to the forefront. Because I think there's always been this gap of, you know, there's things happening on the ground. And yet there's people that are in certain positions of power or authority when it comes to setting policy that are just they're not connected, right? They're not connected to that ground game. And it sounds like you guys were very much on the ground, but also understood this bridge into policy. How do you feel that that really helped to submit you guys in the work that you were doing, because you understood that there needed to be that connection?
Aaron Dixon 22:33
What it did was other organizations began to look to the Black Panther Party for guidance. You know, we were considered to be the vanguard of the movement, the leaders of the movement, and you had that anti war movement going on, you had a lot of other different movements going on the student movement. And so the fact that we became the vanguard was very important. And that, you know, in 19, let me see, in 1967, the state of California, changed their gun laws, so that the Black Panther Party would not be able to carry their weapons out in the open. And in 1969. In the state of Washington, they did the same thing. They changed their gun policy. So the Black Panther Party members would not be able to carry their weapons out in the open. And these are, you know, things that the white right has been so heavy on about gun rights. But nobody ever talks about how they tried to take our gun rights away from the Black Panther Party. You know, I think our newspaper really played a tremendous role. We had a circulation of somewhere up to 200,000 or more papers every single week that went all over the world. You know, and in America, our papers were in the barber shops, they were in the beauty shops, we have patches to standing out on corner selling newspapers. And you know, every Panther was ordered to sell 100 papers a day. Because we understood that was the most important weapon that we had. The FBI tried to do everything they could to stop that paper from coming out. No, we would go pick them up from the airport, they would be burned, they would be wet, they would be lost, they would be disappeared. And so we had to come up with strategies, you know. So what we did was we had Panthers fly out from Chicago, and fly out from New York, and we had the newspaper printed on a, I'm not sure what it was, so that they would carry this back to Chicago, carry it back to New York and have it printed there and distributed from there. No matter what they threw at us. We were always able to respond whatever it is that they threw at us.
Trae Holiday 24:57
Wow. And I think that's what it really boils down to so much of it is about being willing, and being ready to deal with whatever kind of comes your way. My mom's famous quote that I love and I carry with me all the time, is that you have to be fluid and flexible, right? It's like moving like water. Because I think that, you know, Black people in America have experienced this so much. And then I'm learning that Black peoples all over the world are experiences in different facets, that it's important that we be resilient, because there are so many attacks that come our way from all over different places, this over here, this party over there, because people have their own intentions, and they have their own agendas. But when you're fighting for the people, a lot of the times that just rubs certain powers that be in the wrong ways. And I feel like you guys experienced that full throttle. I know we're gonna get into it when we start talking about how the attacks began to come at you guys. But I also just want to give some time here to ask you about some of the things that you felt like you said, you guys talked about the importance of the the newspaper, it was about educating people all over the world. And that being one of the biggest threats, really, because you guys were in the vein and pathways of education. How was the community responding to you guys and what you guys were doing and building?
Aaron Dixon 26:27
The community responded beautifully, you know, there are some elements in the community that didn't respond to us. And the FBI head was not only creating informants in the Black Panther Party, but they were creating informants in the community as well. But the response from the community was tremendous. And we were told by Bobby Seale that we know we are doing our job when the community comes out to protect us. That happened on several occasions happened in Chicago before Fred Hampton was killed, they came out and raided, tried to raid the Chicago office, but the community came out and protected them. And Seattle, when they surrounded our office and attempted to raid our office, because they wanted to arrest one of our members to community came out. At one point there were one more community, people out there, then the police. And so when they raided the LA chapter, after the murder of Fred Hampton, what they did was, they cordoned the area for almost three or four blocks. And they had the police cordoned and the whole area off because they knew that the people were going to come out. And so even though that shootout lasted six to seven hours, the community was still out there, they couldn't get to where we were, but they were out there to make sure that they weren't going to murder us. So that was, you know, really important, because what we did was we put ourselves in between the community and anybody that would do the community harm. We made people accountable, you know, we, we made the preachers accountable, we would call them out. You know, we've made the pimps accountable in Seattle, Seattle, it always had a long history of prostitution, because of the military base is important to us. And all the military installations around prostitution was always a big thing. So people started coming to us about their daughters being missing and their daughters being put on the streets. And so we actually we waged a campaign against a pimp, you know, a very physical campaign against him and actually, ran them out of Seattle, they had to go to Tacoma. And if we saw any of the young ladies that we knew, we would pick them up and take them home. You know, the people could call us for almost just about anything, you know, because we were there to stand between the community and any entity that one wanted to harm the community, you know? Yeah.
Trae Holiday 29:02
And you know, that's what we talk about often here. Our approach is very relational, right? We don't want to be extractive we don't want to be transactional. A lot of what we're doing is built off of relationships. Because we grew up together, we went to school together, we know each other from growing up in the central district and south end and we have brought a lot of that unity together to say, you know, what the biggest struggles are outside of us. And what we can do is bring it into the center. And I know that gentrification has just disrupted so much of the community that you all really had right here in the central district in the south end - you guys had that concentration of Black families that were right here. And so you guys were able to get, you know, hey, give us a call. We'll see to it that your daughter gets home. You guys had that but it really sounds like you guys. also built what you guys had on for the relationships. that you had in community as well, was that a part of how you guys moved?
Aaron Dixon 30:04
There's no doubt about it, you know, the little kids around the corner that used to hang out at our office. And sometimes they got mad at us, and they would throw rocks at us. But we had a relationship with them, you know, we had a relationship with their parents, you know, we had a relationship with people. And that was a really beautiful part, you know, about being in Seattle, it was the same in other places, as well as the relationship that we have with people in the community, you know, we would have events at the park at Garfield, we get bands to play, we have barbecue whenever people out there and you know, just the very festive occasion of us coming together, eating and talking and listening to music. And then we have, you know, speakers to talk about what was going on politically, because our whole purpose was also to work towards raising the political consciousness of people in the community, which is something that we always did. So, you know, wherever we went, whatever we were doing, we were always talking and educating the people in the community, we were at the grocery store, you know, educating, we went to jail, we were educating people in the jail. And oftentimes, they would take us out of our cells and put us into isolation, because we understood we had to have the people on our side, they were our defense. But we also understood we had to help the people understand what was really happening in America, what was really happening in the world. So we were always always talking and educating on the bus, no matter where we were, we were always educating.
TraeAnna Holiday 31:47
Well, you know, that's a beautiful thing. And to be honest, I'm just loving to hear about all the work because no matter what, you can read it in books, and there's been so many different things published about the Black Panther Party, but hearing it from you, personally, is really resonating with me in a different type of way than studying it, you know, academically or something else. Because, again, when we talk about building relationship, I think that that's where, as we're having this discussion, I'm learning so much that yes, I've read so much about the Black Panther Party. But I'm also really understanding a lot of the nuance that isn't captured when they're just looking at it from a factual perspective, or an academic perspective, there are certain parts that are hard to actually capture in that way. So again, I just really appreciate this.
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Josh Berl 32:35
For this week's chime in, we have the honor of hearing from Tracy. Tracy Holiday Robinson, who is fed by the Black Panthers free breakfast program as a child in Seattle in the 1970s.
Tracy Holiday Robinson 32:48
The Panthers man, a wonderful organization to me as I was growing, and being fed a hot breakfast, before I went to school. And to have a group of Black people tell you, as a young, Black person that you are Black, and you are beautiful, has sustained me my whole life, because they were feeding us and they were telling us that we can be whatever we want it to be, we just had to work hard. But they also told us that, you know, we got to work really hard because they don't want us to succeed. I am very grateful to be able to say that I was one of the kids that was fed by the Black Panthers, not just food, but I was fed, my soul was fed. And so I'm really grateful to be able to say that I am a child of the Black Panthers.
TraeAnna Holiday 33:44
How did you feel as the Panthers began to be attacked, and be broken down?
Tracy Holiday Robinson 33:54
Well, as a little girl, you don't even know what's going on. But I can tell you this one morning when we went to go get breakfast and it wasn't like we didn't have breakfast at our house. But a lot of people didn't. But my brother thought it was really good to go and listen to these people. So we used to do that. And one day we went and they were gone. And there was no explanation. There was nobody at the house. The door was locked. And it was just over. That just it felt wrong. Even as a little girl, I must have been about seven years old. And it just felt wrong. When I think about it as I grow up as I've grown up and I read about how what really happened to Huey, what really happened, you know, and how the drugs came in for the Black Panthers. That's one of the things that people don't even understand. crack cocaine was introduced in Oakland, California by the FBI and the CIA to get rid of the Black Panthers and they labeled them as the terrorist organization to get rid of them. Black Lives Matter owes a whole bunch to the Black Panthers. Because it was them that said, we are Black and we matter. We are Black and we matter today. What are we doing? marching for Black Lives Matter, we got white people who are booing. All we want to do is matter. And all these people want us to do is not. And we can't, we cannot. We cannot just sit back and go, Well, that's just the way things go. No, no, no, we cannot. We can in the Black Panther showed us that we don't have to.
Josh Berl 35:46
Thank you so much to Tracy Holiday Robinson for sharing her story. And now back to the interview.
(music)
TraeAnna Holiday 35:54
Before we get into a bit of how the Black Panther Party ended, I want to ask you, because we did talk about some of your greatest achievements. What do you believe were maybe some of the the biggest mistakes which may lead to some of the reasons why or how it got dismantled the way it did.
Aaron Dixon 36:10
I think our biggest mistake, one of our biggest mistakes was cultivating a personality around certain leaders of the party, party members kind of putting some of these leaders on a pedestal. You know, the one person that did the most damage to the Black Panther Party was Eldridge Cleaver. Eldridge Cleaver was a great orator. He was one of the greatest speakers. He was a fiery speaker. He was a great writer, even though I never liked his book, Soul on Ice. I thought it was very sexist, you know, but there are a lot of people in the party who looked up to Eldridge and you know, did put him on a pedestal but you know, they all do to raise responsible for the death of little Bobby Hutton because of some adventurism. You know, when Martin Luther King was killed, Huey gave the order from jail, that he wanted party members to go out on the streets, and tell people not to riot and not to destroy the community. And because Huey was locked up, and Bobby Seale was locked up, Eldridge took it upon himself. Because he was an adventurist as he was somebody who glorified the gun, even though he'd never carried a gun, he glorified armed revolution, which he wasn't really willing to really participate in. But he influenced other people, that that's what should be done. But that's not what the Black Panther Party was about. We never were about was reacting. You know, we weren't about reacting or overreacting. But Eldridge took advantage of the fact that Huey and Bobby were not around. And he got together some of the early party members to go out on the streets and seek revenge for the murder of Martin Luther King. And that ended up in the murder of little Bobby Hutton, and ended up in the arrest of over, you know, 15, Black Panther Party members who had been around for a very long time. And most of these members over a period of time would have to go to prison, you have met these very important leaders are all of a sudden taken off the streets because of this stupid act by Eldridge Cleaver, and most importantly, little Bobby Hutton, the first person to join the Black Panther Party at 14 years old. I mean, imagine what little Bobby Hutton could have contributed had he stayed around any of those other people like Charles Bursey. So that was one of the biggest mistakes. And even after that, you know, you had party members who like worship Bobby Seale, you had party members who worship David Hilliard, and ultimately, mainly Huey P. Newton. You know, he became someone that party members worship. And so I think that was one of the mistakes that we made, even though we talked about it. We talked about the code of the personality, and how dangerous it was to develop a code around a personality. But it began to happen in the party. And so that was one of the things that was a setback to the Black Panther Party, but you know, they started murdering Black Panther Party members at a very early point. People know about Fred Hampton, but they don't know about Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, Bunchy Carter was handed the Southern California Chapter the Black Panther Party, which was the most powerful chapter of the Black Panther Party, Bunchy Carter had been once head of the largest gang In LA called the Slausons, he was known as the mayor of the ghetto. And he was very much like Huey P Newton in a lot of ways, you know, and he was killed in January of 1969. Him and John Huggins were the two leaders of the Southern California Chapter, and they were killed. January of 1969, on the campus of UCLA, working towards creating Black Studies program, a lot of people don't know that the Black Panther Party is responsible for Black Studies, not only Black study, but all the other studies that came after Women's Studies, Asian Studies, Latino Studies, a Black Panther Party led the way on all of that. But anyway, when Bunchy Carter was killed, that left a tremendous void in the LA chapter, you know, there was nobody who could take Bunchy Carter place in LA, and so that weakened the LA chapter, even though they were still very strong, but Geronimo could not replace Bunchy Carter, and 11 months later, the next most powerful chapter was the Chicago chapter. And the most powerful leader was Fred Hampton. And 11 months later, he was assassinated. So those are the two most important leaders outside of the people on the central committee of the Black Panther Party that were murdered Chicago, would never be able to replace Fred Hampton people left after Fred Hampton was killed, some people left after Fred Hampton was killed. And the chapter never was the same as it was. And you know, J, Edgar Hoover sent out a memo he wanted three chapters of the Black Panther Party destroyed. That was LA Chicago and the Seattle because Seattle chapter was considered one of the most powerful chapters as well. And I had two assassination attempts on my life. One by the Seattle Police Department, they put a $25,000 contract on my head. And I was set up by some informants who were in the party who I went to school with in high school, and they set me up to be killed. And it was only by the grace of God, it was only by the grace of our relationship with people in the community that I survived because the police had me trapped in this backyard. And if this man hadn't had come out, and pulled me in his to his house, I would have been killed. And a second attempt on my life was my shotgun shells, were gotten alhold of, the FBI took the gunpowder out and put high explosives in the place of the gunpowder. So when I was out, testing the weapons, and I fired my shotgun, it blew up. Luckily, I wasn't firing it from my shoulder would have blew my head off. I fired it from here, but it Damn it blew my arm off. I had to have four surgeries on my arm to save, they want to amputate it. But my mother said no, the FBI was very targeted on who they wanted to kill, you know, to weaken the party. And as I had mentioned earlier, there are over 20 party members that were killed. And you know, in a two, three year period, and you know, getting back to Eldridge, one of the most damaging things that happened, see Eldridge was creating a, a another phenomenon in the party, which was armed guerrilla warfare, where, you know, Huey had the wisdom to know that we weren't ready for no armed guerrilla warfare. that was a fallacy. We weren't in Cuba, where we could go to the mountains, and get the people to support us. And we come down and take over the Capitol. This was not Cuba, this was not anywhere else. This was America. And so Eldridge was glorified, he glorified the armed revolution. And so that kind of created a schism in the party because you had party members who wanted to go out, and you know, do guerrilla warfare. And those of us who understood that we took orders from central headquarters at tablets and the correct thing to do when we started the breakfast program. There were party members who thought that was not revolutionary, and they left the party, you know, they couldn't see that as being a very viable part of what the Black Panther Party had to do. And so when Elgridge went into exile, and there was some contradictions that were taking place with people who are in charge, he led the split of the Black Panther Party members of the New York chapter, and other members on the east coast. There are some members in Berkeley and some members in San Francisco decided with the split and they join the Black Liberation Army. And the Black Liberation Army wanted to go out and commit guerrilla warfare, which we knew that was suicide. And as a matter of fact, the BLA did not last very long at all. That's what led to Assata Shakur ending up in prison and now having to be in exile, because she had got caught up into that. And that's why so many Black Panther Party members ended up in prison for 40 years because a lot of those members who were in the BLA, were captured and were sent to prison for a very long time. So that was probably one of the most damaging things. Eldridge Cleaver did the most damage to the Black Panther Party and that split, it really affected Huey a lot because Huey was a founder of the Black Panther Party, how dare somebody come and want to take his organization over and split it? And so when that happened, there were people who wanted to go to war with the BLA. And Huey said, No, he said, we cannot have a war in the Black community between us and another Black organization, you know, but it still created a lot of tension. And so you know, Huey as a result of that created a security force in Oakland. So you know, those are some of the devastating things that happened to the party. I think if Eldridge had not been allowed to do the things that he did, those things really affected the Black Panther Party. Then of course, the FBI, you know, killing Bunchy Carter, John Huggins, killing Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, was very devastating. And during that split, Sam Napier, who is one of the head of the distribution of the Black Panther newspaper, Sam Napier was the hardest working member of the Black Panther Party, he worked his ass off, because he believed in that newspaper and getting that newspaper out. He was responsible for the circulation of that newspaper worldwide. And he dedicated himself to that newspaper. And he's a very loving human being. You know, I don't think Sam Napier had a mean bone in his body, but he ended up being killed by members of the Black Liberation Army while he was in New York and Corona in New York killed and tortured I might add. So, you know, this was horrible, you know, to have Sam Napier, killed and tortured the way that he was, you know?
TraeAnna Holiday 47:15
Well, it's, it's so disheartening to hear this, but also so informational, because we talk a lot about learning the lessons from the past, so that we're not repeating them now. Right, and that we have a lot of history that we can look to, to help cement us and ground us in the movements that we make, and then the things that we think are important and that we deem necessary for the times now. So Wow, I mean, what a great way that you just painted that timeline for us, man, I just didn't even know all of the nuance, again, that you speak to because you know, when you talk about people being glorified like that, and being on this pedestal, and what that can bring to the larger party. And when it talks about, you know, the destruction, I mean, clearly, there were outside forces at play here, which I really want to get into next. Because globally, folks also understand the influx of the drugs that came into the community that really began to start to also splinter people off as their intentions and their desires, maybe begin to move or migrate or change as the times were kind of changing before then. So that was really about what the FBI has done. They were very much targeting the Black Panther Party and strong leaders within the party. And so tell me a bit about how the outside forces of the FBI and the federal government, these COINTELPRO agents really infiltrated the party and to also lead to you know, the party having to dismantle
Aaron Dixon 48:53
Yeah. Well, first of all, the CIA was while they were in Vietnam, they got into the heroin business, by helping the kingpin of Laos to be able to distribute more heroin. They connected the heroin kingpin with the mafia kingpin in New York, and that's when heroin started coming into America. And it devastated Harlem, you know, that heroin devastated Harlem, and, you know, 67 - 68, just overall, during that time period, particularly in the early 70s, and all through the 70s. Cocaine began to come into America in large amounts. And you had a lot of smugglers that were bringing cocaine in the cocaine was a casual drug at that time. Everybody was snorting it, everybody was doing cocaine, the Hollywood people, politicians and you know, I can name a few politicians that you might know that I started cocaine with You know, so it was a casual drug, and a lot of it was coming in to the Bay Area. Matter of fact, when I went down there in 1972, it seemed like cocaine was just raining down everywhere. You know, it was it was just so available. So when Huey got out of prison, somebody introduced him to snorting cocaine because prior to that Huey did not use any drugs at all. He might have smoked a little weed, but he didn't use any drugs. And Huey very complicated person. I would just say a little bit about Huey because I'm working on a book about Huey, he came from Louisiana. His family were sharecroppers. His father wanted a better life for his family with seven kids. Huey was the youngest of seven kids. So he brought his family to Oakland. And Huey had one brother, one of his oldest brothers was a I guess you would say a hoodlum. You know, a street fighter. And he taught Huey how to fight. His other brother was a college student, and he taught Huey how to read. And so the two things that he loved more than anything else, was going to the middle class clubs in North Oakland, and debating doctors and lawyers and professors. He loved that. He also loved to go down to West open, and hang out with the hoodlums and the thug. And he would tell him all he said, You guys are all Black panther party members. Those were the two sides of Huey, he was a very complicated person, he was a genius. But at the same time, he was also known as somebody who didn't take no shit when it came to fighting and defending himself. So when I first went down to Oakland, I saw there was so much cocaine coming in, you know, so he did start snorting cocaine, it started to affect him. And the incident with the split, that really messed him up, it really fucked him up, you know, he didn't want to trust nobody after that. And he was very angry about that. And that's why he created this security squad in Oakland, to make sure that any of those people who wanted to try to make any attempts at hurting party members, it would be dealt with. So when the movie, The Godfather came out, you know, Huey began to, you know, he started losing his reality, and in some ways, you know, and so he did get hooked on, you know, snorting cocaine, it affected his judgment in many ways. There's one thing that affected Huey tremendously was the death of George Jackson. When George Jackson was killed, Huey stayed in bed under the covers for a week. That's how depressed he was, because he knew George was his equal ideologically and in everything else. Outside of that, there weren't any party members who really had the intellect that Huey had. He attempted to start an ideological Institute, because what he wanted was, he taught us how to think big, he wanted people to think big, he wanted party members to learn how to think, and think big. And so he, he wanted to start a ideological Institute, where he could bring leaders of the party to open where we could study and study philosophy, study ideology, and really begin to like a think tank, you know, really wanted to have a think tank, but a lot of those party member didn't want to do that a lot of those leaders on the other chapters and branches. They didn't want to do that, you know, Fred Hampton would have done it Bunchy Carter would have done it, but they were they were dead. So that was very disappointing to Huey, you know, that he couldn't get his own party members to come together and to understand that they had to study bigger and broader. And so it made him feel like he was just operating in a vacuum by himself. You know, there are a lot of very good dedicated party members, but there weren't people around him that had intellectual understanding that he had, and it was very frustrating for him. And I think it at some point, his position, it was a tremendous weight on him because he had become in effect he had become the new Che Guevara. He was looked upon throughout the whole world as a guiding force. And so I think all these things affected him. Eventually it led to the downfall of the party. There's a lot of other things that happen. So after the party was gone, the CIA under ronald reagan in order to raise money for the Contras, who overthrew the Sandinistas overthrew the Leader of Nicaragua who was General Samoza, one of the worst dictators in South America, the Sandinistas were a revolutionary organization, a socialist organization, and they overthrew him. Ronald Reagan did not like that. So he got together with Oliver North to create a counter insurgency for us to take Nicaragua back. The Congress wouldn't give him the money because of the Vietnam War was still fresh on the minds of everybody. So they started to smuggle cocaine into America as a way to raise funds for the Contras millions and millions of pounds of cocaine started coming into the United States, in Nicaragua, before Somoza was overthrown. There were these two guys who were known as the King of drugs. And I realized that they were the ones that were bringing cocaine into Oakland in the early 70s. You know, because we used to wonder who was bringing the cocaine in? We thought it was the mafia. But it was these two Nicaraguan drug dealers, who now in the 1980s, started working for the CIA, and bringing cocaine into America. Most of that cocaine ended up in Los Angeles, and the guy who was in charge of distributing it, didn't know how he was going to distribute it. Until he met a young Black man who was very smart. all through high he wanted to go to college and play tennis. That was Ricki Ross's dream. But when he tried to go to college, he couldn't read or write because they just pass them through like they did so many Black kids. And so he became discouraged. He started selling powder cocaine. And then when he met this guy from Nicaragua, who was sitting on all this cocaine, then that's when he created his business. And that's when crack was created. And the rest is history crack, devastated Black America because of this cocaine that was coming into America, that the CIA was bringing in. And Ricky Ross, you know, he was a businessman, you know, he, he wasn't trying to do the Black community any harm. He was just doing what other people have done selling some drugs to make some money, but he didn't know how addictive this crack was. He didn't realize that, you know, he would sell somebody a $20 pack and 15 minutes later, they come back for more and more and more and more and it just mushroomed in groups. Now that Bloods and Crips, you know, the Crips really wanted to be a revolutionary organization, you know, after the Black Panther Party. But so many members of the Black Panther Party had been killed in LA, so many more in prison. So many of them were suffering from just the time in the party, that the Crips didn't have anybody to really guide them or really give them any leadership. And so they morphed into this gang, and then you had the Bloods. And so when crack started, and Ricky Ross's business began to expand. That's when the gangs began to expand the two fed off each other, the crack epidemic, and the gang epidemic happened around the same time and they fed off each other and they expand they expanded. And when Bloods and Crips are looking for new territory, they start going north, you know, they went to Portland, and establish Crips in Portland, and they went to Tacoma, and then went to Seattle, bloods, and Crips in Seattle, there were no gangs in Seattle up until 1981. There were no gangs in Seattle, you know, and I'm writing about this in my second book, it just so happened that one of the leaders of the Black Gangster Disciples was in Seattle, and he met with some of the Seattle young people. And they formed a Black Gangster Disciples, as a defense against the Bloods and the Crips. That's how that came about. And so in a very short period of time, you know, you had gang warfare in Seattle, and in Tacoma and in Portland, where before they did not exist, it did not exist. And so what is spread all across the country, the crack spread, the gang spread, and it became one of the most devastating things to happen to the Black community since slavery. A lot of people don't understand that. Black mothers were the most maternalistic women in the world, in the world because they had to raise the slave masters kids. After slavery, they still had to take care of the slave master kids because that's the only job it could do. So when they finally had a chance to raise their own kids, they were very protective of their kids. But when you smoke, crack that maternalism disappeared, you didn't give a damn about your kids, all you cared about was getting a hit. There were no Black kids in foster care up until the mid 80s. Black kids did not go to foster care, because we had extended family we had aunts We had uncles, we had grandparents, we had friends, we had relatives, where kids could always go, if something happened to the parent but when the crack cocaine hit. Aunts, Uncles, everybody got addicted, everybody damn near was addicted or either were involved and selling. And so that broke down the family structure of the community. So by 1990s, the foster care system was flooded with Black kids. And so that led to the destruction, not the total destruction, but the tremendous breakdown of the Black family. And that was precipitated by integration. Because if integration hadn't came about, in the 70s, I think we would have been more able to protect ourselves that the Black Panther Party had not been eliminated, we would have been able to deal with that as well. But with the Black Panther Party eliminated, and all the other Black organizations gone, it was wide open, there was nobody there to protect the Black community. And so it's been almost 40 years of us going to that epidemic us finally trying to come together and get our families back together and try to build ourselves up from the ashes. You know, I was a single parent, I had to take my two daughters from their mother because she was addicted to crack and I had raise him as a single parent. And while I'm raising them, I'm working as a gang counselor. Now I'm working with all these gang youth. A lot of these kids that I was working with, when I first started off, in West Seattle, a lot of these young people I was working with their parents were on crack. So when I left them, and they went home, they went home to an empty house. When I left them, I went home, I went home to an empty house, except for my kids. So I experienced that whole epidemic. And the whole breakdown of the Black family, you know, and not only was the CIA bringing crack in, they were also bringing in guns, high powered weapons, high powered automatic weapons. And there's many, many stories about like a train car full of weapons being left in South Central on a railroad tracks. I've heard the same story in New York, I've heard the same story in Chicago. And you know, when the Black Panther Party was around, we could not get our hands on any automatic weapons. I mean, we did, but it was very difficult to get our hands on automatic weapons. But in the 80s, automatic weapons everywhere, ak 47, uzis, you know, all these type of weapons now are in the hands of young Black people. That's when you saw the explosion of gun stores, you know, these gun stores are opening up in all throughout California, and in LA, because they saw a way where they can make money. And that's where the NRA really began to grow. Because of this growth, and this thirst for weapons, which was fueled by this gang war that was all over the country. It was devastating. You know, there's so many foster kids. And that also led to the prison explosion. So many young Black and Latino men and women going to prison. That's why we got two and a half million people in prison. And that figure has not changed in the last 20 years. It's like it stuck at two and a half million people. Those are some of the things that happened that really set our our community back and said our people back, but you know, it is it's really great to see that we are rising, you know, we're rising back up, and we weren't wiped out, you know, it set us back a lot. You know, we've had a lot of families destroy, you know, a lot of our people were killed. You know, so many young, Black and Latino youth through the gang warefares were killed. And you know, it was very common to see young Black boys in wheelchairs, that was not something that you saw before 1980 you know, but 1980s and 90s it became very common.
TraeAnna Holiday 1:04:27
This is this is just you know, no matter how many documentaries I've seen, or books I've read, or people I've spoken to just to hear it coming from you so eloquently, the timeline and how there was so much attack, because, you know, folks, were just doing the work of bringing community together of educating community of empowering and uplifting community and the resilience that we have in the Black and Brown community that was very touching for me and one of my last questions here for you, because this has just been phenomenal. As you said, you know, there we're coming back, there is a resurgence of groups coming together, ecosystems being built that really encompass the best and the brightest of all of us to come together, again, be educated, understand that we're taking our stake back in this country that, you know, we are going to be involved in the Civic process, that we want to educate that future generations. So they understand and see themselves as a part of all of this change. What's some advice that you would have for new movements now that are springing up and that are coming out and voicing, you know, their concerns in a collective way, again, fighting those same powers that be
Aaron Dixon 1:05:51
Yeah, I think one of the things that we should look towards focusing on and you've touched on it early on, is putting ourselves in a position where we could change policies. And we could have an effect on policies, which means getting progressive people elected to office, you know, particularly starting with the local community, you know, getting our powerful progressive people onto the city councils, and even maybe into the mayors, and getting our state legislators getting powerful progressive people into our state legislatures, and getting people into Congress and to the Senate. You know, like Cori Bush, you know, you're familiar with Cori Bush is a very powerful woman, you know, and she was homeless. But now she's in a position to really make some change. And you got Ocasio Cortez you got Ilhan from Minnesota. So you, you got some very powerful people, progressive people that are getting into position to really affect some change. And unfortunately, we had the Black Caucus that had been in the Congress for a very long time, but they haven't done shit, all they've done is carry that same liberal mentality that has really held us back and really set us back. And we have to replace them, they have to be replaced by new young, progressive, radical people. So that we could work towards creating the policies, and the changes that we need to make America be a more humane place, and make America be more accountable for people of color, and more accountable for you know, the people of the world.
TraeAnna Holiday 1:07:53
Absolutely. Ashe, thank you so much, Mr. Dixon, this has been so phenomenal What a way to end our first season here on equity rising, I can't thank you enough for your work, your efforts, the books that you are writing, I'm trying so hard not to be emotional. But man, that is like what you said, is affected so many Black families, mine included, the crack epidemic hit my family very hard here in Seattle. And my mom always talks about being a recipient of the free breakfast program that you guys did. And so I just when you're talking about the history of Seattle, and then how it just affected so many people, I mean, man, kudos to you and your work, I'm so glad that you are still with us so you can share your expertise and your wisdom. I'm honored that you work with us on the peace and safety initiative here in Seattle, so that we can really understand, you know, some of the best ways to move forward. So we're not again, falling into the lessons that you all have learned that we're actually building from them instead of recreating them or replicating them. So thank you, again, for being with us on equity rising today. And I look forward to your next book dropping.
Aaron Dixon 1:09:09
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
TraeAnna Holiday 1:09:12
I can't thank you enough. What a powerful way to end our season. Thank you so much.
Aaron Dixon 1:09:17
Thank you. Thank you. Hope to see you when I come to Seattle.
TraeAnna Holiday 1:09:20
Yes, we'll have to make sure I get your number and everything before we let you go. We'll make sure that that happens because I need to stay connected with you. I might just have to call you like every two weeks.
Aaron Dixon 1:09:32
Other people always call me so you might as well call me too.
TraeAnna Holiday 1:09:34
You got it.
(music)
Josh Berl 1:09:42
Thanks for listening to season one of Equity Rising. If you enjoy the podcast or have learned something from this season's conversations, please tell your friends and rate and review us on Apple podcasts. You can follow King County Equity Now and Trae Holiday on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. Thanks for tuning in.