AMERICAN JUSTICE ON TRIAL. Lise Pearlman

was witnessing history: “The Bay Area felt like ground zero in a generational battle for the soul of the country.”²⁴

      City officials were just as indignant as the protesters; while the crowds railed against injustice, the city’s leaders ranted about the disruption and chaos. Businessmen at their club breakfasts and lunches deplored Oakland’s growing notoriety. District Attorney Frank Coakley brought conspiracy charges against key planners of the anti-war protest; the county’s top prosecutor D. Lowell Jensen would eventually try them together as “The Oakland Seven.” A team of three defense lawyers, headed by Lawyers Guild veteran Charles Garry, quickly assembled. The defense team audaciously planned to invoke the Nuremberg Principles as their clients’ justification for blocking entrance to the induction center. They wanted to make the case that the Vietnam War was a crime against humanity — and put the war itself on trial.

      It was hard to imagine at the time that another Oakland arrest would generate enough coverage and controversy to drown out the noise surrounding the “Oakland Seven,” while pitting the same lead counsel against one another — with the police and establishment on one side, and anti-war activists joined with civil rights protesters on the other. Just two weeks after “Stop the Draft Week” came the spark Hoover dreaded that would merge two protest movements on a shared goal: the synergy of anti-war and civil rights activists that Dr. King urged in 1967 on a national stage got a powerful boost from a single bloody confrontation in the very same city where the Oakland Seven would be tried.

      In his book Oakland’s Not for Burning, published in mid-1968, Bradford noted: “Oakland, to its credit, came through 1966, 1967 and the first half of 1968 without a serious [race] riot. But, like all our cities, it will remain in precarious balance, on the edge of violence, until far more than is now in view can be done to improve life for those who dwell in the ghetto.”²⁵ Bradford omitted from his book any reference whatsoever to the headline-grabbing West Oakland shooting on October 28,1967, which left Officer John Frey dead and Huey Newton and one other officer seriously wounded. At a time when the FBI was treating the Panther Party as a growing threat to national security, Bradford gave the Panther Party only brief mention in his book on fragile race relations in Oakland, calling the Panthers a “militant group of young Negroes, which had become active in Oakland in 1967, operating patrols to follow police cars and to advise those arrested in the ghetto.” Bradford referenced only a single shootout between a dozen or so Panthers and the police in April of 1968 that “seemed likely to trigger a riot,” but did not.²⁶ The shootout was the one that ended with the police killing unarmed teenager Bobby Hutton.

      Bradford’s omission from his book of the polarizing Newton murder case was telling. The looming outcome of that death penalty trial — covered daily on the front pages of local papers and on the evening news — was a glaring and obvious source of enormous tension. Bradford had to have seen the historic security measures at the courthouse where uniformed Black Panthers in their late teens and early twenties urged on unprecedented crowds of mixed race protesters with chants like “Revolution has come. Time to pick up the gun.” Black youths from the flatlands had found a voice they felt spoke for them, a seemingly fearless voice backed up with arms and ammunition.

      With full-throated support from the business community and the Oakland Tribune, Mayor Reading repositioned himself on one side of a new and bitter chasm dividing City Hall and the black community, the police and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense — vanguard of the revolution. Amory Bradford published his book, not in triumph that the federal government’s intervention had averted another Watts, but in guarded hope that Oakland truly was not for burning.

      Oakland Post Collection, MS169, African American Museum and Library at Oakland, Oakland Public Library, Oakland, CA.

      Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party.

      3. THE PANTHERS’ ROOTS

      We’re hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people.

      — BOBBY SEALE

      What made revolutionaries Huey Newton and Bobby Seale tick? How did they develop ideas that later attracted huge numbers of adherents? Robert George Seale was born on October 22, 1936, in Dallas, Texas, the first son of George and Thelma Seale. By the time Bobby turned seven, he had already learned how to shoot guns. He likely got his first practice on his grandparents’ 168-acre farm in Jasper, Texas, in the heart of the state’s historic Ku Klux Klan territory. Bobby’s mother, born Thelma Traylor, was an identical twin, one of sixteen farm children whose work ethic Bobby inherited along with her athleticism. Thelma was a star athlete at Jasper High School when she started dating George Seale.

      Like many black youths of his generation, George Seale had dropped out of school after eighth grade, but he was good with his hands and became a master carpenter; he would pass those skills on to his two sons. George Seale often had trouble making ends meet and became abusive toward his family as his own father had been toward him. When Bobby was six, his father thrashed him for no good reason, an offense that he never forgot. Bobby also got his first lessons in exploitation from his father, who never paid him for any work he asked Bobby to do.

      Thelma Seale left George more than once, raising her three surviving children with her twin sister and her sister’s son Alvin. Early in World War II, they moved from Dallas to San Antonio, where Mrs. Seale found work as a clerk at Kelly Airfield. By then George was back with the family. They decided to join the Great Migration, the mass movement of African-Americans from the rural south into big cities in the north. Bobby turned seven the year the family resettled in 1943 in subsidized rental housing in the Berkeley flatlands, just a few miles north of Oakland.

      The Seales arrived in the Bay Area the year before the worst disaster of World War II to occur on continental United States soil: munitions improperly loaded by overhead nets onto cargo ships in nearby Port Chicago suddenly ignited on July 17, 1944, destroying two ships and adjacent docks. Five thousand tons of ammunition exploded less than twenty-five miles from where the family now lived, rattling windows fifty miles in every direction. The devastating accident annihilated 320 men, almost two-thirds of whom were African-American, and wounded over 400 others. It accounted for fifteen percent of all African-American casualties suffered on naval duty during the war. Outraged members of the African-American community believed the Navy and the U. S. government considered the workers to be expendable. The highly undesirable and manifestly dangerous task of handling explosives was assigned largely to untrained, predominantly black sailors in segregated units, working in conditions that many likened to a slave labor camp.

      Hundreds of sailors, both white and black, refused to return to active duty in Port Chicago after the devastating explosion. Many of the resisting white sailors were transferred; none were prosecuted. Fifty blacks were tried for mutiny, a federal crime that could be punished by death. All were found guilty, but sentenced to hard labor and 15-year prison terms rather than death, most likely in light of the scathing national publicity stirred up by NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who sat in on that controversial court martial. The trial had taken place just west of Oakland on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. Outraged by what he saw, Marshall arranged to represent the convicted seamen on appeal. After the war, he succeeded in getting most of their sentences reduced significantly; it would take fifty years before the last surviving mutineer received a presidential pardon for his felony conviction. Yet behind the scenes the appalling incident quickly became a catalyst for change. As one historian put it, “U.S. government officials realized their ability to promote democracy among people of color around the world was seriously hampered by racial injustice at home.”¹ The Navy began desegregating its units in 1946.

      Bobby Seale was ten as this momentous change in the armed forces got underway. His mother Thelma was his biggest early influence. As a former military-base employee, she must have rejoiced along with other civil rights advocates in the East Bay at how Marshall had triggered this major step forward toward racial equality. Thelma vividly recalled an event that she had witnessed firsthand at age eleven in Texas that provoked