Grey Panther Keeps Black Power Alive

ERIC ELLIS, Oakland

10/29/1997

HIPPIES become yuppies, activists become presidents, communists become ultra-right conservatives and Black Panthers become, well, "Grey" Panthers.

For David Hilliard, the past 30 years have been a trip from Mao to Mammon, with stopovers in Hell along the way.

The Mao part was 1967 when Hilliard was the founding chief-of-staff of the militant leftist Black Panther movement that found fertile ground in the oppressed black neighbourhoods of Oakland. In San Francisco, the children of America's white elite were having their Summer of Love, the blizzard of drugs which fuelled it filtering across the bay to ultimately claim the movement, many of its charismatic founders and 20 years of Hilliard's life.

Today, the movement's afro hairdo has given way to a distinguished grey fleck around Hilliard's isolated temples, the trademark sash of bullets replaced by a sweater from Gap.

The fire-in-the-belly once burning for the revolution to topple "the racist, imperialist, capitalist thieves and oppressors" is now directed at promoting $US25 ($17) tours of Panther sites.

"Things change, we all do," says Hilliard, fondling his pet white poodle, Nelson who he says hasn't been the same since playmate Winnie the cat left a few months back.

Now a respected commissioner for the City of Oakland and a model for the US's emerging black middle class, Hilliard is a college lecturer and chief merchandiser of the memory of the Black Panther movement.

Operating from the basement of his comfortable home in suburban Oakland, Hilliard oversees a burgeoning empire in $US20 tours, $US25 photo albums, the $US1,500 limited edition lithograph, various souvenirs, biographies and documentaries, Internet sites and the big budget feature film soon for production.

The movement which counted Mao and Kim Il-sung, Castro and Che as its heroes, and was once described by FBI chief J Edgar Hoover as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States" has found a mammon of sorts, though Hilliard says the movement's aims to "emancipate" African-American community are still relevant.

Hilliard is treasurer of the Dr Huey P. Newton Foundation, the organisation set up in honor of the Panthers' principle founder, who was slain by a drug dealer's bullet in August 1989.

The tour is an evocative trip down memory lane, into a part of US contemporary history most remembered by the controversial "Black Power" salutes at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics by 200m gold and bronze medallists Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who were also barefooted to symbolise black poverty. (The silver medallist was Australian Peter Norman who wore a civil rights badge in support of his fellow medallists).

It includes the first Black Panther Party office on Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard, where party cadres raised money by selling copies of Mao Zedong's so-called Little Red Book. Today, the site is a pristine shop where the It's All Good Bakery does a roaring trade in pecan pie.

Store-owner, Oakland-born Kim Cloud, or `K-Cloud` as he prefers to be known, was just five when the Panthers were founded.

"They were my heroes, much more than any sports guys," he says.

"I mean, I learnt how to shoot a shotgun with those guys. They were big." Cloud is a product of the best of the Panther movement, the side which Hilliard says was overlooked in all the "sensation".

Cloud remembers being fed breakfast by the Panthers, as part of its survival program which provided food, clothing, medical care where authorities did or would not.

"I wouldn't be here ownin' this bakehouse if it weren't for the Panthers," he says.

Another site on the tour takes in an innocuous street corner where in 1967 armed Panthers - including convicted murderer Geronimo Pratt who was released in June after a long jail term - stopped cars to escort black children across the street to school, because then white-dominated Oakland council refused to install traffic signals.

Punctuating the tour are the frequently silhouetted images of Newton's fallen body found spray-painted on footpaths around Oakland's poorer neighbourhoods.

Thirty years ago it was the Black Panthers who rather more provocatively stormed the State legislature with guns demanding their constitutional rights to bear arms in self-defence, in their case against white oppressors.

"I guess our methods change but the basic message is still the same."