Elmer Dixon (Hagans)

## Before the Black Panthers

Elmer Dixon was born in Chicago, Illinois in the year 1950 and spent his time between his hometown and Champaign. His father worked on illustrating aircraft designs for engineers. He moved to the Northwest after his father had found a job at Boeing as an illustrator.

As of February 28, 2013 he had been working for an organization called The Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research. For the 26 years prior to the interview he had been working in the field of diversity and cross-cultural communication”

When talking about his housing as a child he said, “while I don’t remember much about the neighborhood in Champaign-I know we were in a housing project there-I don’t remember too many different-color friends at that young age.” Due to his experiences, Dixon’s father “had a fierce protective sense about his family and about his kids.” While throwing eggs at cars with his friends, Dixon missed and was scolded by the man driving the car. Dixon believed he had no ill will, but was rather telling him what he was doing was wrong. Dixon was 11 at the time and was scared out of his mind. He got away, ran home, and told his father the man was attacking him. Solidifying the quote early, his father grabbed the nearest thing to protect his son. Dixon is the middle son. He has a sister and two brothers. Dixon’s father played opera music while the children would wax the floors. Dixon said this because his father wanted them to have “learned an appreciation of opera at a very young age.” His father would have his Scandanavian friends over, and from these friends, Dixon got to experience different cultures alongside his own.

Dixon marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965. He says he “wasn’t aware of things that were happening along the way,” but he does remember “significant events.” Dixon, like many families did and still do, had a routine. The kids would get home and finish their homework. Once they were done with their school work, they “could go to the park or go do something.” Dinner was at six o’clock and homework was done. Everyone had to be there at the table. His father believed it was important for them to eat together at the table. “We did that every night,” Dixon says. After dinner and cleaning up, it was time for TV. The dichotomy of firemen and police officers being the protector of the people, but seeing them “being brutal” towards blacks was an interesting thing for young Dixon.

In 1967 Dixon began becoming more aware of the color of his skin. He didn’t want to be white, but he wanted what the white people had. In his senior year in high school, Dixon joined the SNCC, and eventually became the co-chair. While trying to create a club for the black members of his school, a Black Student Union, he became part of the band in order to “agitate” things. He wouldn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and would sit down when the band played the Star Spangled Banner. He got kicked out sometimes. Another thing he got kicked out of school for was starting a chant of “bing, bing, bang, bang, ungawa, Black Power.” He was threatened to get kicked out of school when *he* threatened to call a boycott on classes. The principal believed nothing would happen, but Dixon was well known in the school, and “no one was going to class.” He got a Black Student Union and was the first to do so on the entire West Coast. His first arrest was because he was “speaking out, you know, against this black young woman being brutalized by these cops.” A black student at Franklin, a high school in the area, was expelled because of her afro. The other students wanted to organize a BSU in order to get the girl reinstated. Dixon and his brother, along with some friends, sat in the high school principal’s office. They ended up staying the night and got a call the next morning saying, “Look, you can have-we’ll address these demands. You’ll have-they’ll get a BSU. Please leave our building.” He and his crew were later arrested for unlawful assembly. Within the hour of his arrest King was shot. Dixon says his parents believed something was beginning to change with their children after realizing both of their children were in jail that night.

In April of 1968, Dixon moved out and had his own apartment. Thinking back to before he left, Dixon remembers people calling the house saying they were going to kill him. His mother believed he could take care of himself, so when people called saying those things she would say, “‘Go ahead and try.’”

The next several years would truly start his involvement in the Black Panther Party.

## Dixon and the Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party wasn’t a very specific thing to Dixon. He knew what they were, and what the overarching goal was, but not how they did things. He remembers going down to a march and seeing them in their uniforms and thinking they were a “black army.” He remembers it as a discovery of who he was as a black man. “It was a stark contrast to what I saw on TV, with the singing demonstrators walking arm-in-arm, you know, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’” says Dixon.

He finally settled on what he was going to do after seeing Bobby Hutton’s body at his funeral filled with holes.

He started his town’s chapter of the Black Panther Party after returning home at the age of seventeen. It was the first chapter organized outside of California. He mentions an interesting little fun fact. The Black Panther Party wasn’t always just “the Black Panther Party,” but was originally “the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.”

Elmer Dixon says, “my identity as a Panther never was talked about or spoken about.” This was because of his work and the clients he had. He says, “I’ve sat in offices with the CEO of PepsiCo and other major companies around the United States, and no one ever knew.”

Dixon credits his father to his joining the Black Panther Party. He says he took his father’s personality of being a big dreamer, and it turned into his own “can-do attitude.” He says, “which would come into play initially [the can do attitude] when I got into the Black Panther Party…”

Dixon says because the Black Panther Party would use their second amendment right so frequently, the Black Panther Party was asked to do things, and “that was not what we were about.”

Many people had to be expelled, Dixon recalls, because they were only in to look good. They didn’t truly understand what it meant to be a Panther. It was just about looking good, but rather about being an actual part of the revolution.

While the FBI began targeting certain chapters, Dixon would set up target practices in order to protect himself. It was at one of these ranges where his brother destroyed his arm. They were at a shooting range, and his brother decided that at the last second he would shoot his shotgun from the hip. It was that shot that caused the shotgun to explode, destroying his arm. “Of course, had he fired it from his shoulder, he would have blown his head off.”

After Fred Hampton coined the phrase “rainbow coalition,” branches of the Black Panther Party shot up all over the world. Due to his multicultural upbringing, Dixon believed things came together “like a full circle.” Dixon’s program ended up having five breakfast programs feeding over two thousand kids.