Elaine Brown: October 6, 1998
Elaine Brown (born 1943) is the only woman to have ever chaired the Black Panther Party (BPP). She had been Huey Newton’s right hand prior to his arrest and escape to Cuba. Faced with a decentralized, failing party, as well as a strong attitude of misogyny, she tasked herself with rebuilding and transforming the Panthers and the fight for Black Liberation. She ran the BPP from 1974 to 1977, and later described this experience, and her life more generally in her autobiography titled A Taste of Power. After leaving the Panthers, Brown continued her activism through writing and lecturing with a focus on reform in the criminal justice and prison systems, she even ran for president in 2008.
Even before she became a member of the BPP, Brown was writing about and challenging the misogyny perpetuated by the black revolutionary groups (Brown 123). Elaine Brown joined the Southern California chapter of the BPP in 1968 following the assassination of MLK, Jr. and the killing of Bobby Hutton (Brown 131). The goal of the BPP was to be the leader of a revolution to finally and totally free blacks from poverty and oppression, as well as to overthrow the U.S. government to replace its racist capitalist agenda with a socialist system to the benefit of all oppressed peoples.
Elaine Brown visited SUNY Plattsburgh in October of 1998 as part of the President's’ Speaker Series. She delivered a speech titled “1968 The Black Panthers in America,” in which she discussed “racism, gender oppression, and class disparity” (Cardinal Points Oct. 8, 1998). She spoke about the history of institutionalized and systemic racism in the United States, pointing out the irony that the founding fathers who wrote “all men have been created equal,” owned slaves. Black people did not originally come to the United States of their own free will, and have been stripped of their cultures, languages, and freedom. She discussed the further injustices perpetuated by the U.S. in the form of Jim Crow laws and Supreme Court cases, as well as how class disparity is perpetuated through discriminatory neoliberal social welfare programs rather than challenged by redistributing the accumulated wealth of the 1%. In contrast, she described the BPP’s programs such as the free breakfast program and health clinics. She then discussed the police brutality that the Panthers attempted to disrupt, but which is still occurring, including a predatory justice system that places great numbers of black people into prisons. Brown spoke about the persecution faced by the Party from both the police and the federal government. The FBI had declared the BPP to be public enemy number one.
Her speech was generally received well by those in attendance, and one student commented that the points Brown addressed were not often spoken about on campus. Separately, the speech occurred at a point of change on the campus in which University Peace Officers were being granted more rights as law enforcement officers with the ability to carry firearms, becoming what we now know as University Police. This change was met with mixed reviews from the student body.
--Alyssa Scott ‘19