A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story.

• Date: 22 March 1993
• Author: Dunbar Ortiz, Roxanne
• Published date: 22 March 1993
• Author: Dunbar Ortiz, Roxanne

BOTH DAVID HILLIARD AND KATHLEEN CLEAVER, FORMER LEADERS OF THE Black Panther Party, have stated that they do not recognize the Black Panther Party that Elaine Brown describes in her new memoir. Cleaver, now a university professor of law, is quoted in The New York Times Magazine feature (January 31, 1993) on Elaine Brown: "Elaine gives a very negative description of the Black Panther Party; the organization she wrote about is not the organization I belonged to."

Hilliard, now a union organizer, made a similar statement when he spoke about his own memoir in January at Cody's Bookstore in Berkeley, California, explaining, however, that his active years in the party were in the early period, 1966--1970, and Brown's national leadership spanned the 1970s. Hilliard went to prison in 1971, just about the time that Newton brought Elaine Brown to Oakland, and Newton expelled him from the party, abandoning him to three years of prison. By the time Hilliard was free, Brown had become head of the party and Huey Newton was in exile in Cuba. Kathleen Cleaver, with her husband Eldridge, were also active in the early period and then expelled.

Therefore, Elaine Brown's account is important for an understanding of the decline of the party and of Newton. She does not pretend that her memoir is the story of the Black Panther Party, but rather her personal story, "a black woman's story" of "a taste of power."

When Huey Newton was freed from prison in 1970, he brought Elaine Brown to Oakland to replace the expelled Eldridge Cleaver as Minister of Communications and editor of the party newspaper. As chairman, Bobby Seale was Newton's enforcer until his own expulsion. Newton set the standard for arbitrary discipline, rules made up along the way from which only he was exempt, and all down the line, violence was the method used. Brown relates an example:

One morning, we were an hour late. Bobby began screaming at me. It

would cost the party money.... Too much time had been spent editing, he

shouted, looking at me. I was the editor, and I was responsible, and I was

subject to discipline for that.

I took the punishment, the way most comrades did. Bobby's order was

sufficient. There was no real appeal. It was our judicial system, made up

mostly as we went along. If we had been in Bolivia with Che, we told

ourselves, we would be shot for violations of rules or orders. Discipline

was essential in the vanguard, we told ourselves. So I silently faced the

punishment, which was always an act of violence.

John Seale was strangely gentle with the ten lashes I received from the

whip he held. We were in a small basement room at national headquar-

ters. My bare back hardly felt the sting.... My rage was so intense, each

lash stung me only with the face of Bobby, who was not there. My skin

developed welts but was unbroken by the tenth lash. I refused the

attempts of John and the other men there to put salve on my back (Brown,

p. 275).

When Brown complained to Newton, her lover although he lived with and would later marry another woman, he promised to make it up to Brown: "Then he laughed, and kissed me, over and over, until I shamelessly abandoned the business of Bobby Seale and allowed myself to forget Gwen" (pp. 275--276).

Elaine Brown was ordained by Newton to assume command of the party in 1974, when he fled to Cuba to elude new murder charges. Hilliard reports that Newton was said to have chosen Elaine Brown as his top official because the choice amused him. He quotes Panther supporter, Marty Kenner:

Her loyalty was very valuable to Huey. Her weakness was her strength;

she had no place to go, could organize no independent base. Huey would

chuckle that she might be a son of a bitch, but she was his son of a bitch

(p. 365).

During her three years' tenure in Newton's absence, Brown welded the party into a powerful local and state political force, in part facilitated by the 1974 election of Jerry Brown as governor. In the process, Brown confronted virulent sexism, which she described in the following way:

A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best,

irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. A woman attempting

the role of leadership was, to my proud black Brothers, making an

alliance with the "counter-revolutionary, man-hating, lesbian, feminist

white bitches." It was a violation of some Black Power principle that was

left undefined. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was

said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the

black race. She was an enemy of black people (p. 357). Her strategy for functioning as a woman was to rely on the membership's loyalty to Newton, and it worked, to an extent:

...I had introduced a number of women in the party's administration.

There were too many women in command of the affairs of the Black

Panther Party, numerous men were grumbling....

It was a given that the entire Black Power movement was handicapped

by the limited roles the Brothers allowed the Sisters and by the outright

oppressive behavior of men toward women. This had meant little to me

personally, however.... And because of Huey -- and now Larry -- I had

been able to deflect most of the chauvinism of Black Panther men. My

leadership was secure...