By Rosette Royale, Contributing Writer
In the era of Androids and iPads, it’s easy to forget that
45 years ago, people used rotary phones and typewriters. Anyone who lived in
Seattle in 1969 and picked up a phone and dialed EA5-8794 would have been
greeted by the smooth baritone of Aaron Dixon, captain of the Black Panther
Party of Seattle. Or maybe Dixon wouldn’t have answered, due to the jail time
served because of a certain typewriter. But that phone line patched directly to
a man who played a pivotal role in the history of the Emerald City in the late
’60s.
If you dial that number today, a voice will tell you the
number has been disconnected. But Dixon’s memory of that era is fully intact.
And what an era it was: Black men with rifles, their Afros partly obscured by
black berets, stood on the steps of the capitol in Olympia; protestors who
supported black contractors arrested by Seattle police at the airport; Black
Panthers, troubled by interactions with law enforcement, barricaded offices in
Madrona. If Dixon, 64, wasn’t there when these events went down, as the head of
the local Panther party he was involved in some capacity. The role gave him a
close-up view into the birth — and demise — of a revolution.
He tells the story of that era in his recent autobiography,
“My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain” (Haymarket
Books, $17.95). He’s written a quiet book, calm and clear-eyed, with his
recollections of moving to Seattle as a youth, starting the local Panther
chapter at 19 and fighting to avoid serious jail time. Perhaps the smooth tone
of the book makes sense. In person, Dixon embodies calm. Even when he speaks of
the violence that swirled around him, the brother remains centered. When we sat
down to talk, he laid it all on the line: his first time in jail, the loaded
shotgun and the story behind the typewriter.
R.R.: How about you tell me your first memory of a
Black Panther.
A.D.: I’d been out playing tennis across the street
from the house I was growing up in. My mother called me in for dinner at 6
o’clock, and I came in the house and went by the TV. The news was on, the
national news, and they were talking about these protests being led by this
organization. These black men had leather jackets on and black berets, and they
were carrying shotguns and rifles. And I looked at them and said, “Wow. Wow.
Look at that.” I thought that was cool. But actually I just wanted to hurry up
and get back out to the tennis courts ’cause I was trying to be another Arthur
Ashe.
R.R.: And what were your first recollections of
coming to Seattle?
A.D.: The mountains and Lake Washington and,
you know, all the white people, of course. We had lived in the south side of
Chicago, and then we lived in Champaign, Ill., in a black neighborhood. And how
quiet everything was (in Seattle) and how slow everything was and how peaceful
everything seemed to be. It was almost like being in a country town.
R.R.: So how about if you talk about the first
time you were arrested, in April 1968?
A.D.: I was a member of the BSU (Black Student
Union at the University of Washington). I was one of the founding members. We
had also organized a BSU at Garfield High School, had been trying to organize
one at Franklin. Franklin High School was mostly Asian and black students, but
none of the faculty was people of color, except for Roberto Maestes (founder of
the cultural agency El Centro de la Raza, who died Sept. 22, 2010). There was a
fight between a black student and a white student, and the black student was
kicked out, and the white student remained in school. The black student called
us and felt that both of them or neither of them should’ve been kicked out. So
we had tried to negotiate with the school to get him back in, and they refused.
We decided this was a good opportunity to lead a protest demonstration against
Franklin. So we gathered all the BSU members from the University of Washington,
from Garfield — must’ve been about 20 of us — and we marched into the
principal’s office chanting our Black Power slogans, demanding to meet with the
principal. He refused. We went into his office and kept chanting, and he
decided he was just going to send all the staff home. We were there with the
students and decided to hold a rally in the auditorium. It felt victorious: We
chased them outta there.
A couple of weeks later while I was doing some homework, the
police knocked on my door and told my mother they had a warrant for my arrest.
So I was arrested, charged with unlawful assembly and taken down to the King
County Jail. And when I got there Larry Gossett and Carl Miller were there.
R.R.: And you mean Larry Gossett, who is now chair
of the King County Council?
A.D.: Mmm hmm. Also my brother Elmer had been
arrested at Garfield High School.
The day we were arrested was April 4. We were sitting in the
day room watching the news. Walter Cronkite said that Martin Luther King had
been assassinated, so it was a double-whammy for us: The first time being
arrested, being put in this archaic King County Jail, which looked like a
dungeon, we find that Martin Luther King is killed. Martin Luther King was our
hero. And suddenly he was gone. Riots broke out all across the country, and we
could see it on TV. And here we were, sitting in jail.
R.R.: Whatever happened to that charge?
A.D.: I think we had six months probation.
R.R.: How much longer was it after that that you
ended up meeting Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party?
A.D.: It wasn’t long at all. Matter of fact,
as soon as we got outta jail, we went down to San Francisco State College to a
Black Student Union conference. The Black Panther Party (had been) out on the
streets with guns, and they got into a confrontation with the police, and there
was a shootout. Several Panthers were wounded, one Panther was killed, and 18
Panthers were arrested. The Panther that was killed was Little Bobby Hutton: He
was the first Panther to join at 14 years old and the first to die at 17 years
old. So when we went down there, we found out that they were having Little
Bobby’s funeral. So we went over to Oakland, and that was the first time we saw
Black Panther party members face-to-face, lined against a wall. Marlon Brando
was there. The funeral was really very emotional: His family was there crying
and wailing, but on the other hand, the Panthers standing on the wall were very
stoic. Later on that evening, Bobby Seale and Kathleen Cleaver (communications
secretary who became the first woman to hold power in the national Panther
party) came to San Francisco State College to do the keynote address. Bobby
Seale just came back from burying someone who was a very good friend of his.
This was the first major attack on the Black Panther Party. It was probably one
of the defining moments.
R.R.: In the book, you say that that’s when you
decided to start a chapter in Seattle.
A.D.: We approached Bobby Seale, made a
beeline to him and told him we wanted a Black Panther Party chapter in Seattle.
We gave him our contact information. A week later, he calls and says that he
and the Minister of Information would be on their way up: Pick them up from the
airport. We met at my mother’s house for a three-day period, and there were
young people from all over: SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee),
CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), BSU. We were just so eager to learn, ready
to take in whatever they had to offer. It felt more immediate: Martin Luther
King, Jr. is dead. The nonviolent movement is over now. Now it’s time for
violence.
R.R.: When you say violence, what do you mean?
A.D.: The analogy that I used was: I decided
that when Martin Luther King was killed, that the picket sign for me was gonna
be replaced by a gun.
R.R.: And you were ready to use a gun?
A.D.: Yes. Most of us were ready.
R.R.: Had you ever used a gun before?
A.D.: Yeah, .22s, BB guns. Growing up
everybody had a BB gun, .22s. We used a BB gun to shoot at bottles and birds
and stuff like that.
R.R.: But shooting at a bottle and a bird is
different than shooting at someone to prove your political point.
A.D.: Exactly. But when I say using a gun,
we’re talking about for self-defense. Because we grew up in an era of political
assassinations starting with John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers (civil rights
activist shot in his driveway in Jackson, Miss., in 1963), Malcolm X, Martin
Luther King and then Robert F. Kennedy. Not to mention all the people who were
always shot, innocently killed throughout the country and even in Seattle. We
were saying, “We’re not gonna take this anymore: If you’re gonna shoot at us,
then we’re gonna shoot back. We’re gonna defend ourselves.”
R.R.: One of the stories that really got me in
this book was about the typewriter.
A.D.: Well, we were not aware the local police
authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would infiltrate the
organization. We just recently found out the FBI had a program, called Ghetto
Informant Program, where they were recruiting people in the community to be
informants. So when we opened our office up, we took over 300 applications from
people who came to join the Party. Some of those people were police informants.
While we were trying to get our office together, we were in
need of a typewriter. Someone says, “Oh, Aaron, so and so says that he’s gonna
give us a typewriter down by Model City. All we have to do is come down there
after 5. The door will be open.” I said, “OK, good.” So we went up there after
5; I carried it out, and I carried it into the office. I didn’t know that there
were some detectives a block away that were observing me. Probably about two
months later, they issued a warrant for my arrest for stealing a typewriter,
and in the process they raided our office and began to carry out files and
different things out of our office.
R.R.: How did it resolve?
A.D.: First of all, it led to the only major
riot that Seattle’s ever had. When word spread to the community that I’d been
arrested, we organized a rally at Garfield Park. The rally turned into a
rebellion. Rebellions had been taking place all across the country: Detroit,
Chicago, everywhere. Now this was the time for that explosion in Seattle. The
riot lasted three days. Helicopters were shot at, police cars were overturned
and a lot of buildings were firebombed. Young people were out there just going
crazy. It ignited a war between the Black Panther Party and the Seattle Police
Department. And it lasted all through the summer of ’68. I mean, if you would
read a blotter page of things around the country, you would’ve sworn that the
revolution had started. Finally by wintertime, things had subsided. I went to
trial in December, and William Dwyer, considered the best lawyer in the state,
he came down to our office and offered to take my case. It boiled down to the
secret witness that the prosecution had (that) they said was gonna seal the
deal for them. I was facing seven to 10 years.
R.R.: For stealing a typewriter?
A.D.: Yeah. Larceny is what they call it.
(Laughs.) The secret witness never showed up, so I was found not guilty.
R.R.: You mentioned earlier that if you would’ve
looked at the paper in ‘68, you would’ve sworn that the revolution was
happening. Well, here we are, it’s 2013. What happened to the revolution?
A.D.: A lot of things. One was a program called
COINTELPRO (or Counter Intelligence Program) that the FBI had put together not
only to destroy the Black Panther Party, but other organizations, because there
were a lot of organizations: The Brown Berets (Chicano nationalist and
Mexican-American group), you had the Red Guards (radical Chinese-American
group), you had AIM, American Indian Movement, you had SDS (Students for a
Democratic Society, a radical left student group), you had the Weathermen
(radical left group), you had Patriot Party, which was white leftist
hillbillies, the Women’s Movement, the Gay Rights Movement. It was just really
powerful and really beautiful to see so many people coming together. We were
able to create a lot of change. The Gay Rights Movement was one we supported.
And you had the anti-war movement, which was probably one of the most powerful
with 200,000 – 300,000 students all over the country that were protesting
against this war.
But the repression against that was pretty heavy,
particularly against the Black Panther Party. We didn’t know until recently
that they had planned to have us killed by 1969.
Fred Hampton, he was going to be the next great leader in
America, if not the world. He was just the most phenomenal person. At 19 years
old, he starts the Chicago chapter. December 1969 he was assassinated, and of
course the Chicago chapter never rebounded from his assassination.
Then the whole leadership of the New York chapter is
arrested and charged with conspiracy to blow up buildings. Afeni Shakur,
(rapper) Tupac’s mom, was among them. All across the country offices were being
raided and attacked, and leaders were being killed.
You got people from those cities that I just named that are
still in prison to this day because of the organizing that we were doing with
the Black Panther Party. So they were hitting us really hard and heavy.
We had orders that we had to fortify our offices. We had
double sandbags all the way up to the ceiling. We had steel plates on the door,
we had gas masks. Party people had to be on security two hours a night, all
through the night. People got kidnapped, people were mysteriously killed. (The
FBI) even contacted the Hell’s Angels to participate in trying to wipe out the
Black Panther Party. So we were under a tremendous assault.
We had The Black Panther Newspaper, which was one of the
most powerful alternative newspapers ever created. At its height we had a
circulation worldwide at 250,000, and these papers came out every single week.
It was the voice of the people. And the FBI, they burned the papers. A lot of
times different chapters and branches would go get the papers from the airport:
They’re burned, they’d been soaked with water, they disappeared. It was just a
constant battle.
The L.A. chapter was the most military minded of all the
chapters: They had machine gun nests inside the roof. (The FBI) used
helicopters and armored vehicles in this assault on the Panther headquarters,
and they had a shootout that lasted for eight hours. Two or three days later
the (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) leave, and they come
to Seattle. They try to conduct the same type of raid in Seattle, but Mayor Wes
Uhlman refuses to give them support from the Seattle Police Department. Because
Mayor Wes Uhlman, he saw what happened in Chicago and LA, and he didn’t want to
have that blood on his hands. Seattle was a smaller city, and we were much
entrenched in the community.
In the summer of ’68, the Seattle Police Department had put
a $25,000 contract on my head to end the firebombing because they couldn’t stop
it. They figured the only way to stop it was to have me killed. So some
informants in the Seattle chapter tried to set me up with the police in a
shootout, and it didn’t work.
In 1971, I went out to the gun range with another Panther
member to make sure all our weapons were working, and the last weapon we fired
was a shotgun. I was gonna fire from my shoulder. A voice told me, No. I fired
it from my waist. And the shotgun blew up. My arm was hanging off. I made it to
the hospital, and they were going to have to amputate it, and my mother told
them, “No.” We had the shotgun shells tested and find out that gunpowder had
been taken out and high explosives had been put in its place.
R.R.: (In) this book you described yourself as
someone with a shy, inward nature. So how does that jibe with starting a
chapter of the Black Panther Party?
A.D.: I’m sure it surprised a lot of people,
because I was a pretty shy and quiet guy, but I was also a very serious person.
My elders used to tell me all the time, “Oh, you take things too serious.” So I
guess that’s what the tradeoff was. I was a serious person. Once I committed to
something, I stuck to it.
R.R.: At the beginning of this book, you said that
in ’89, when Huey Newton (the other co-founder of the Black Panther Party) was
gunned down, there was a memorial service. Someone approached you and said you
should write a book about your experiences. And it took two decades. Why did it
take you that long?
A.D.: Because I was going through what many
Black Panther Party members were going through. We didn’t know that we had some
form of post-traumatic stress (disorder). We were trying to find our footing in
this new dynamic, nonrevolutionary environment, trying to make sense of what
had happened and all the deaths and all the people that had been killed. I
became a single parent. My kids’ mother had got addicted to crack cocaine, and,
you know, the whole crack cocaine thing, it was just really devastating to the
black community.
R.R.: Yeah, it got my brother.
A.D.: That’s what my second book is gonna be
focused on.
So not only did I end up raising my kids, but I was raising
other people’s kids. Then I became a gang counselor, working with at-risk
youth. I went back to school at Seattle U. full time and worked full time. I
had too many other things going on in my life. But you know, even though I had
so many other things, it was always in my mind that I was gonna get this book
completed.
R.R.: How does it feel to be a part of history?
A.D.: Like I said, it was a very hard, serious
time. It left us with a lot of scars and wounds, things that will always be
with us. Stories that will always be with us. But, on the other hand, we made a
tremendous contribution, not only to this country but to humanity as a whole. A
lot of our programs that we started are embedded in our society now, like the
medical clinics, the free legal aid programs. The whole memory of the Black
Panther Party is something that will always last forever, not just in this
country but in the world. People revere the Black Panther Party so much. It was
a special time; it was a very special time. I still feel privileged to have
been a part of it.
Reprinted from Real Change News, Seattle.
This article appears in 2013-03-15.