In May of 1967, on a dry, lifeless Sacramento day, members of the Black Panther Party from the San Francisco Bay area converged on the California state legislature with M-1 rifles and 12-gauge shotguns cradled in their arms, 45-caliber pistols and cartridge belts at their waists.
Newspapers and broadcasts all over the country gave feature coverage to the Sacramento “armed invasion.”
The Party had come to announce its opposition to a bill severely restricting public carriage of loaded weapons. Since this was not prohibited under current law, the police were impelled to return the weapons they’d begun confiscating from the Panthers in the corridors outside the legislative chamber. Eventually eighteen Party members were arrested on charges of disrupting the state legislature (a misdemeanor) and conspiracy to disrupt the state legislature (a felony). Conspiracy was big back then.
The Panthers weren’t in fact particularly interested in whether or not the gun bill passed. They’d continue to own and carry weapons, visibly, legally or not. Their real purpose was to direct media attention, people’s attention, to the fact that blacks in ghettos had little recourse but armed self-defense.
They were expressing the desperation and anger of a people pushed aside and set against themselves, a desperation and anger no civil-rights legislation or social program had ever touched or was likely to.
I watched the Sacramento confrontation on TV within hours of its happening, in a bar on Magazine, five or six Scotches into what became a long evening.
Years before, during the course of the events I’m putting down here, I’d gone with Hosie Straughter to hear a black American novelist living in Paris give a talk at Dillard on a rare U.S. visit. Reading passages from his books, he said that slavery, discrimination and racial hatred, even poverty, were only the first steps toward the destruction of a people: the final one was the terrible, irrevocable damage his people were now doing to one another.
I thought of Sacramento and of that novelist again just yesterday-almost thirty years later-as I sat in the Downtown Joy on Canal watching Boyz N the Hood.
So much time has gone by. So little has changed.