Party Music: The Inside Story of the Black Panthers' Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music

ISBN-13: 9781613744925

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Publication Date: 10-01-2013

Pages: 432

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

Rickey Vincent is the author of Funk: The Music, The People, and the Rhythm of the One and has written for the Washington Post, American Legacy, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches at the University of California–Berkeley. Boots Riley is a rapper, producer, activist, and the lead vocalist of The Coup and Street Sweeper Social Club.

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Party Music

The Inside Story of the Black Panthers' Band and How Black Power Transformed Soul Music

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

"Party Music"

The Story of the Lumpen

As the backing band, the Freedom Messengers, winds down their final song in the Merritt College auditorium, the packed audience of hundreds of students, young radicals, and community members from the North Oakland area feel the anticipation building in the room. The lights go down, a drum roll starts, and a voice from the shadows bellows out:

"Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters. The Black Panther Party very proudly presents, [drum roll] ...

"The Lumpen!"

The sound of the band crashes in with a high energy rhythm and blues groove. The Lumpen members rush the stage and begin to step, kick, and spin — the show is off and running.

This is how the Lumpen began their concert on November 10, 1970, as well as their many other shows during a ten-month span from midsummer 1970 to the spring of 1971. They were billed as "The Black Panther Party's Revolutionary Band," and like many of the community programs produced by the Black Panther Party at the time, they delivered the goods. The Lumpen represented the goals and ideals of the Party and performed their radicalized renditions of popular black music through some of the most tumultuous moments in the Black Panther Party's existence. This is their story.

The story of the Lumpen began in San Jose, California, in 1968, just as the student uprisings that had been taking place at college campuses nationwide landed at the small South Bay campus of San Jose State University, fifty miles south of San Francisco. The cataclysmic events of that year — the murders of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy — and the continuing horrors of the Vietnam War and racial conflict at home had fostered the rise of a radicalized student movement on many campuses. Northern California students and activists in particular had been inspired by the leaders of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State University, which had successfully mobilized a student walkout to demand the creation of a Third World College. As a result of the TWLF, students on college campuses throughout Northern California began a series of walkouts in an effort to address inequalities at their schools and to support causes in the larger community. As Dr. Jason Ferreira states: "It was as if the students throughout the region were engaging in one big strike."

For entirely different reasons, San Jose State was becoming world famous in its own right. San Jose State was the home of the world-renowned United States Olympic track team, and its most celebrated members: Lee Evans, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos. While the student athletes trained at "Speed City," they also found themselves on the front lines of social change. A year earlier, the protests of disenfranchised blacks at SJSU — including a young, fiery black sociology instructor named Harry Edwards — had led to the unprecedented cancellation of the 1967 college football season opener due to the threat of an athletic boycott by the black players. The success of the black boycott emboldened the athletes, who along with Smith and Edwards spearheaded the Olympic Project for Human Rights, an effort that advocated a total black American boycott of the Olympic Games to be held in October 1968 in Mexico City.

The drama of the proposed Olympic boycott was one of the most consuming international stories of 1968. Some black athletes, such as Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), then an All-American basketball star at UCLA, honored the boycott and refused to participate in the Olympic games. The climate of protest was pervasive and tense, and as a result, the boycott plan and Edwards himself would fade into the background as the games approached. The remaining athletes were left to choose their own method of protest. On October 16, after their medal-winning performances in the Olympic two-hundred-meter final, San Jose State students Smith and Carlos would shock the world by raising their black power fists on the victory stand in Mexico City.

The impact of that moment at the Olympic games would be felt far and wide and would consume the lives of Smith and Carlos for decades. Yet the Olympic protest events were only part of a larger movement for social change taking place in the black community. Black college students who were facing daily insults, disorienting and often racist curricula, segregated and second-class facilities, and little or no administrative support felt a strong compulsion to participate in protests and challenges to the status quo. However, many black students also felt a different type of pressure, as the act of simply attending college was seen by their families as a personal breakthrough, and one not to be sacrificed on the altar of social protest.

In the streets of the Bay Area, young people were witnessing a visible assault on the black community, and on Black Panther Party members in particular. The imprisonment of Huey Newton in the fall of 1967 and the April 6, 1968, killing of young Bobby Hutton and wounding of Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver by Oakland police were clarion calls for many black youth that in 1968 a war with the power structure was imminent — if it had not already begun.

Into this mix, three black militant students arrived at the center of a storm of social upheaval at San Jose State. These young men had the conviction that they would take the struggle further than the student strike at SF State, further than the Mexico City events. They were prepared to seize the time.

That fall semester of 1968, a recent Berkeley High School graduate and former youth NAACP member named Michael Torrence enrolled at San Jose State. He was one of the first participants in the statewide Equal Opportunity Program (EOP), an emerging program spawned from student activism that sought to increase minority college enrollment. Torrence immediately began to organize black students on the campus, using as his guide the image of the Black Panther Party. "At that time I wanted to be a Panther. That was my goal," he recalls. Torrence and his allies developed a coalition with the Black Student Union at nearby San Jose City College, where they met William Calhoun, leader of the BSU there. The larger Black Student Alliance they formed then began a regimen of Black Panther Party functions, including the distribution of the Black Panther newspaper and political education classes. The young would-be Panthers also volunteered their time (along with many others) for some of the basic work of the Black Panther Party. They worked the weekly shipping detail in San Francisco, binding copies of the Black Panther for distribution nationwide.

As the fall 1968 semester progressed, the San Francisco State TWLF student protest had grown in size and intensity, involving almost daily confrontations between police and protesting students. Under Torrence and Calhoun's leadership, the San Jose State BSU attempted to generate a student walkout in solidarity with the San Francisco State actions. However, with the proposed walkout scheduled to take place only days after the Olympic games, the San Jose student body was not as prepared (nor was the community as effectively involved) as San Francisco, and the BSU leaders found that their brand of politics faced stiff resistance. Torrence recalls:

In November of '68, we did vote to go out on strike. That was my first arrest; I got arrested for inciting a riot. When we got out of jail — there was me and three other brothers — we got out of jail, came back, and found out that the students had voted to call the strike off. They — I guess they got intimidated ... you know, so there were probably some threats of suppression coming down.

Torrence and the others attempted to recruit the Olympic athletes but found the track stars had little interest in controversy after the noise they had already made. "We supported them, but then when it came down to the strike, they didn't support us. ... The athletes' position was basically, 'I'm not going to blow my scholarship for this here,'" Torrence recalls. Lumpen founder William Calhoun had a similar recollection of the young men who had nevertheless become heroes within a global movement of resistance with their symbolic gesture on the podium at the Olympic Games:

[To us] they were not seen as revolutionary types, they were just track runners. Myself, Harry Edwards, people who had made speeches, people who had been on the stage, people who had been at demonstrations, those were the "movement people." Tommie, Lee, and them, they were supportive, they were part of it. ... They were at meetings, and they clapped their hands and all of that stuff, but that's all there was.

With the chaos surrounding the Olympic boycott and the backlash forced upon the track runners, their return to San Jose State was fraught with controversy and conflict — hostile administrators, a hostile national media, a virulent backlash from self-described "patriotic Americans" against a gesture deemed offensive by some, and ironically, an impatient black radical community that was often urging them to take further protest action. It was perhaps understandable that under the circumstances the athletes' support did not extend beyond the track field. Calhoun states:

I knew Tommie Smith, Lee Evans, and John Carlos and all those guys. We were trying to talk them out of going to Mexico at all. Just not even showing up. It was Harry's thing to go down there and boycott or whatever. We didn't think they should show up at all. From our position, if you're going to boycott, boycott. But things kind of got diffused. And because it wasn't organized — it was kind of like the Million Man March; everybody wanted to do it but nobody kind of quite knew what we were doing or why we were doing it. So it kind of got diffused in terms of its actual application. So people went, and you had the protest with Tommie and John, but that was strictly spontaneous. They were very serious brothers, and I love them both with all my heart, but that wasn't planned.

The young would-be Panthers continued on with their plans to organize the black students and the community of San Jose. In early 1969 Michael Torrence was elected chair of the San Jose State Black Students Union and set about recruiting other politically adept black students, one of whom was fellow EOP student Clark "Santa Rita" Bailey. Bailey had gone to Oakland's Castlemont High School and had enrolled at San Jose State in the spring of 1969. "Michael and them, they basically bombarded me with information, and they wouldn't leave me alone," Bailey recalls. "With that being said, some of the material that I read was very interesting to me, and it was material from Huey [Newton]." Bailey joined the campus BSU and quickly immersed himself in the campus protest movement.

The paths of student activists Torrence, Calhoun, and Bailey would take another turn. Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver had been in exile since the summer of 1968, and his whereabouts were a complete mystery for a time. He had been recently "discovered" in Cuba, thanks to a cover story in the Black Panther in the spring of 1969, which incensed the law enforcement community. As the San Francisco Panther chapter prepared for a May Day rally, the San Francisco police raided the Panther Party headquarters, which was Eldridge Cleaver's former home. Tensions grew, and a call was put out for "reinforcements." Torrence recalls the situation:

The SWAT team in San Francisco had vamped on the Fillmore office. That was two days before the rally, and they made a lot of arrests to try to disrupt the rally and they [the Panthers] had called us and asked if we could send some cadres up there, any sort of support we could — money and bodies. So about two carloads of us rolled up to San Francisco and camped out in the Panther houses for a couple of days, you know, behind the barricades and stuff.

Torrence remembers the nature of his own particular experience of "firearms training" that first chaotic night at the San Francisco offices:

So the first night they put myself and another brother, we call him Poison, up in the front window, and gave me what was called a Panther special [a rifle] and basically told us, "You got the front window; if the Tac squad pulls up in a Safeway van, they're gonna have a spotlight in it. If they open up the spotlight, your job will be to shoot out the spotlight and fall back." That was the first night.

The only training at that point was, "Here's the safety; here's the trigger. And don't let it go off because you got twenty people behind you that are sleeping but they all got guns next to 'em." That first night was really intense. The police were at all corners. As time went on you learned more. It wasn't a real trigger-happy operation by no means.

Through this trial by fire the young activists were on their way to earning the responsibilities and respect of being a Panther. As difficult and frenzied as the process of becoming Party members was, Torrence, Bailey, and Calhoun had a shared commitment to revolution that was not going to waver in times of crisis. This inner drive would serve all of them well over the next few years.

And from that point on, we pretty much kind of became sort of like a cadre of the Party; we were at that time called Panthers in Training or community workers, and that summer we picked up two properties on the east side of San Jose, which was the community, and we opened up the [Panther Party Chapter and Community] Center.

Eventual Lumpen founder and songwriter William Calhoun was just as committed as Torrence and Bailey. "I was tired of jiving," Calhoun recalls. "If we were going to have a revolution, then I wanted to be part of something that was revolutionary. And the only thing I could see was Huey P. Newton's Black Panther Party. And when Michael and Santa Rita [Bailey] and myself all hooked up at San Jose State, I guess we all had that kind of in mind." Calhoun was the most experienced organizer of the trio. The jump to join the BPP was a part of a process of growth, activism, and soul-searching for him:

The one thing as I made my progression through the movement years, from SNCC — I was one of the West Coast coordinators for the Poor People's Campaign right after the Prophet [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.] was shot — I kind of progressed very quickly, but I touched a lot of different groups. I was the national cochairman of the House of Umoja for a very little while. But with each of these groups, there was something missing. There was a disconnect between that which we espoused and that which we did. I sensed in the Black Panther Party that disconnect was not there. And the more the brothers came down with the P.E. classes, the chief of staff [David Hilliard] came down one time, and brought some brothers and sisters with him, we got to meet them, we got to see them and see that these were some serious people. They're not just talking junk, they are out here doing it. And when the thing happened with Eldridge [the spark for the police raid], I was gone. It was a phone call, and I was in the car.

After the May Day crisis had abated, the young men returned to San Jose and continued to organize the Panther chapter there, but they were just marking time until they were assigned to the central offices.

Through their daily organizing work, Torrence, Calhoun, and Bailey discovered that they each had a musical background, and the trio would sing as they passed the time. "A lot of evenings after we were through with whatever political work we were doing, we would like to just sit around and sing," Torrence recalls. They sang as they worked the Wednesday night routine of binding the Black Panther at the Howard Quinn Printing Company on Alabama Street in San Francisco. They sang along with what was on the radio — soul music — as well as traditional blues standards and gospel music. Shipping night involved many volunteers, and the three singing Panther paper handlers became known to the Party staff and leadership. Calhoun recalls:

This was a big coming together on Wednesday night. If there was a social event, if you want to consider it social, this was a social event. Food was prepared, and Panthers came from everywhere to do this work to get this paper out. And as it goes with black folks — I'm sure it goes with other cultures, but I know ours better — as it is with black folks, once you get a little beat going, a little rhythm going, pretty soon someone starts humming and off we go.

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Excerpted from Party Music by Rickey Vincent. Copyright © 2013 Rickey Vincent. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword Boots Riley ix

Preface xiii

Introduction: "Revolution in the Air" 1

1 "Party Music": The Story of the Lumpen 19

2 "Power to the People": Bay Area Culture and the Rise of the Party 49

3 "The Lumpen Theme": James Brown, the Rhythm Revolution, and Black Power 87

4 "People Get Ready": Civil Rights, Soul Music, and Black Identity 125

5 "For Freedom": Cultural Nationalism and the Black Panther Party 167

6 "Bobby Must Be Set Free": Panther Power and Popular Culture 217

7 "Ol Pig Nixon": The Protest Music Tradition, Soul, and Black Power 263

8 "Revolution Is the Only Solution": Protest Music Today and the Legacy of the Lumpen 309

Acknowledgments 339

Sources 343

Notes 363

Index 383