Spreading the word of the Black Panther code
Date March 24, 2013
John Elder
Continuing the fight: Black Panther Billy X Jennings. Photo: Simon Schluter
We believe … that all black and oppressed people should be armed for self-defence of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces - from rule seven of the Black Panther Party's 10-point plan.
Billy X Jennings, 62, still lives the Black Panther code, still has his guns locked up at home - believing that so much may have changed for black Americans but so much has stayed the same. The fight goes on.
''Oh yeah, I just don't carry the guns around any more, but I still live by the 10-point plan,'' he says.
A younger Mr Jennings (right) with Black panther co-founder Huey Newton.
Mr Jennings is in Melbourne this week to attend a Marxism conference, and to promote the legacy of the Black Panthers; playing down the gun-toting aspect, and talking more about the social programs that shamed the US government into taking action on hungry children, elderly people at risk from violence on the street, and raising awareness about the high risk of sickle-cell anaemia in the black population.
''The programs that we started
have since been taken up by the government, and they're still going,'' he says.
What remains larger in history's picture book are those images of black men and women in berets, leather jackets and sunglasses, toting guns on the steps of the state Capitol building in Sacramento in May 1967.
What scared the hell out of whitey - ''no one had seen anything like it'', says Jennings - provided an alternative vision for black America to that conjured by Martin Luther King.
Billy Jennings was 16 years old at the time, running a school radio program, growing up on a naval base in the San Joaquin Valley. Mr Jennings' father was an ordnance man. His mother, a native of Alabama, was hot-blooded as far as white people were concerned.
''She wasn't a follower of Martin Luther King,'' he says. ''She didn't believe in turning the cheek. If she saw blacks being beaten up on TV, she'd say to me, 'Don't you ever let anyone treat you that way'.''
When the Sacramento confrontation made the news, Billy Jennings got so excited he went to school the next day and demanded the social club change its name from the Buccaneers to the Panthers.
Mr Jennings graduated from high school the next year, 1968 - when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and the first of the Black Panthers had been killed in a shoot-out with police. The night he finished school, he got on a bus and headed for Oakland, California, where the Black Panthers were headquartered.
''I wasn't thinking of joining at that point, it was a coincidence - I just wanted to start college,'' he says.
One day he was in a criminology class when he heard a commotion. The co-founder of the Panthers, Huey Newton, was being taken into court on charges of shooting a police officer - and there was a huge rally going on.
''The message was arm yourself, politically and militarily … it resonated with me,'' he says. ''I'd experienced racism from when I was five years old.''
He became a Panther in training, which meant reading 30 political books, learning the slogans and arming himself. He was 17, and bought his first gun, a .38 Special, for $50. Later, he bought a Finnish assault rifle.
Mr Jennings gradually moved up in the party, eventually acting as Mr Newton's bodyguard, as the erratic leader faced a series of murder trials.
He believes the party was at its most stable and effective when Mr Newton - who had drug and impulse-control issues - was in jail. Mr Jennings quit in 1974, feeling the Panthers had lost direction.
Later, he joined up with some former members and has since become the party's archivist - and is committed to campaigning for the dozens of Panthers who remain in jail, 40 years on, as ''political prisoners''.
Mr Jennings will speak at the Melbourne University Student Union on March 30 at 3pm. Leave your guns at home.
