Reports from the Black Power era

By Susan Sherrell and Dave Welsh

Oakland, California

JoNina Abron-Ervin, a journalist and former editor of the Black Panther Newspaper as well as former managing editor of the Black Scholar Magazine, gave a talk at the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland on Oct. 9. Abron-Ervin spoke about her book “Driven by the Movement: Reports from the Black Power Era,” which follows 20 ordinary people who did extraordinary things for the Black Liberation struggle from 1965-1975. 

Abron-Ervin told an overflow crowd that Panther members did the grassroots and community work that kept the movement going. She spoke about the sacrifices made by these activists, the need to pause and rest, and, “Don’t think you have to do everything,” because you may burn out too soon. 

Abron-Ervin said conditions today are even more difficult and dangerous than they were in 1967, when Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the BPP to deal with the overt racism and brutality of the Oakland Police Department. 

She had first learned about the Black Panthers on television when she saw them marching into the state Capitol in Sacramento, California, to protest the Mulford Bill, which would deny them the Constitutional right to bear arms. 

Her earliest work with the Party, taking relatives to visit loved ones at Jackson Prison in Michigan, deeply affected her once she witnessed the conditions of their incarceration. 

She described her earliest encounters with COINTELPRO, the U.S. government program designed to discredit and disrupt the BPP. Two FBI agents went to a laundromat in Oakland where she was doing her laundry, told her they knew about her and tried to convince her to turn against the Party. 

Later COINTELPRO was responsible for the infiltration of the Party and the deaths of hundreds of members. 

And yet, Abron-Ervin said, quoting BPP member Melvin Dickson, “The Party was irresistible.” It evoked tremendous loyalty from its members and the community, which received benefits from its many survival programs, beginning with the Free Breakfast for Children program, on to the SAVE program — which drove seniors and people with disabilities to medical appointments — and clinics providing free health care. 

The BPP’s Oakland Community School won a California state award for its quality of education in September 1977. The school breakfast program was adopted by the government to feed children, and the Party’s sickle cell anemia program educated thousands of people. 

Abron-Ervin recommended that people today create their own organizations and coalitions to deal with our current situation. She stated, “The Black Panther Party challenged the power of the state.” Now, however, the state has more insidious and complicated ways of oppression, and new ways must be found to counteract them. 

JoNina was accompanied by her spouse, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, a former BPP and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member, who gave a talk at the West Oakland branch library on Oct. 7, also to a sold-out crowd.