Elbert Howard

## Early life

Elbert Howard was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1938. He never knew his father and was raised by his mother and aunt. In 1954, there was talk of combining the high schools, white and black. Elbert did not have a real problem with the combining of the blacks and white because he had his friends and did not really care that much. His teachers were worried about him and tried to teach him how to survive in this world. In 1956, he joined the Air Force after talking to family members about how *"the army was the catapult for going into combat.."* He was sent to Europe and went to different countries over there and got immersed into their culture. *"and to me it was a revelation and eye-opening to meet people of other cultures, and realize that even though the people were Caucasian or white if you want to give it a color, they were very different than the whites that I had a great fear of in the South, that I grew up with. So that was a revelation and a learning experience, and to immerse myself and learn about their cultures, learn how to drink wine and go to art museums and be taught stuff, and you know, that was a good part of maturity, maturing, to me."* After four years of service in the Air Force he decided to be discharged in Northern California and live off his GI bill and attend City College.

## Black Panthers

### Starting the Black Panthers

Elbert Howard began to study black history at Merritt College and began associating with other students who had the similar interests. That is where he met Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale. After their classes, they would meet and talk about things they wanted to change. They focused on a way to deal with police repression other than the Civil Rights movement and non-violence. They started the Ten Point Platform and Program. *“other organizations that dealt with culture, Swahili camps, learning the language, and stuff like that. We were more interested in trying to deal with combatting the ills in the community, on a progressive and a revolutionary level.”*  they got a lot of their philosophy from Mao Zedong, Malcolm X, and Che Guevara. They all realized that they were not in Cuba or China so they had to come up with revolutionary ways to get these philosophies across the country. He hung out with Bobby Seale a lot, and Huey was very knowledgeable about the justice system. Richard Aoki and Bobby Seale were still working on the ten point program when Howard had a run in with the police that pushed him towards the party more. Elbert was on a date at a jazz club. After the date was over he went to go get the car for him and his date. He had a brand new red pickup truck that had got ticketed, but none of the other cars around him did. He asked the officer what was happening, and the officer replied with something smart; and Elbert went to jail along with his pickup. He quickly realized that this was what Huey and Bobby were talking about, he talked to Huey about going to court. The Judge said, *“‘He’s probably guilty, but I’m going to dismiss it.’”* He soon joined the party after this incident.

### During The Black Panther Party

The party started out with patrolling the police, just the same as they had done to the Panthers. They did it to show the people that the have rights. When they were patrolling and someone was getting arrested they followed them to the court and bailed them out. After that happened the people they bailed out joined the party, which in return made the authorities mad. *“If you’re not creating animosity or hate, then you’re not doing very much against the system or the people that propagate, or the repression.”* There was an incident in Richmond, California that lead the police to shoot a black teen, Denzil Dowell, while he was climbing the fence to get away from the police chasing him. Denzil's mother said that he could not have possibly jumped a fence because he was injured. The Party mimeographed what really happened to Denzil and the lies his family had been told. They handed out the paper and asked people to come to the rally to support Denzil's family, it was the first organized rally they had.  After seeing how many people came to the rally after giving out the pamphlets, the Panthers decided to started the Newspaper. Elbert was the first editor of the newspaper, and then was replaced by Eldridge Cleaver. Elbert was the deputy minister of information, which let him put cohesive information out to the communities. Elbert thought, *“It (the newspaper) was vital because we were combating the Oakland Tribune and all their negative shit that they put out about us, and the San Francisco Chronicle, because they were, just printed everything negative that they could. So, we knew people in the community bought those papers and stuff, and we said we got to put out things that were the truth.”*

They soon started to go out and print from a newspaper store. They had trouble getting it printed until Max Scherr, who ran the Berkeley Barb, said that they could use theirs. They had made so much money that the big printers who turned them down, was starting to let them print. The FBI warned the printers to not let the party use their printers.

Eldridge started to become a famous spokesperson, so Elbert had other people come in and take over little responsibilities, while he dealt with people going to jail. *“I began to crisscross the country going to different penitentiaries and jails to see about Party members, to see what they need, if they had any needs, and also see what the legal situation was, and see how I could help with their legal defense, talk to lawyers and help lawyers, and what things that they needed.”* The biggest issue was when Bobby Seale, Ericka, and all the people from New Haven started to be framed.

Elbert engineered programs for the communities that needed the extra help. *“We had people that would contribute money for bail, and things of this nature, and if I was in a community and they needed more community support, I would engineer survival programs, if you would. Help with free breakfast programs, help them set up a free clothing program in their community, and get people to contribute to those things and as a result, it began to get community support behind these incarcerated Party members, to try to get them out of jail and get them through the court system and get them free.”* He taught teens who went around causing trouble to help the communities they live in. Elbert gave them the job of cooking and going out and get donation for the programs the party was running. *"We can feed 250,000 children free food every single day that school’s in session. Why can’t the government do anything about it? If we can test people for sickle cell anemia, which is a disease that they pretty much ignored, if we can establish free health clinics where people could go and be tested and engage in preventative medical care, why couldn’t the government do it?"*

Elbert then served as the international ambassador for a while until Bobby Seale got put in prison in New Haven under the charge of the murder of Alex Rackley. After the trial, he received a call that Attica had blown up and that the prisoners wanted the Panthers to negate terms of peace, and was told that Bobby was coming. *"We were trying to do something, and the prison warden and those people were hopeful that we would be able to quell it and all of that, but as a result, Rockefeller wasn’t having it, and one thing that could’ve saved that explosion was for him to just show up, or say he was going to show up."*

### Leaving the Party

Elbert Howard left the party due to political differences. It started when Huey disbanded all the chapters to bring them into Oakland to "work on the Bobby Seale for Mayor campaign". But Howard thought that it was to hard on Huey to have the internal and national chapters and cater to their needs. *"So in my opinion, he did a disservice to the people who had followed the Panther philosophy and had worked their tails off to develop programs—to gain resources, to do that in their communities, and all of a sudden you’re telling them you’re closing down the chapters, and the people in the community that benefited from what happened in those chapters. So, that was one of my personal criticisms of that move."* Then after lots of people started to leave, Bobby Seale left without warning, so to Elbert it was over.

## After the Black Panther

After he left the Panthers, Elbert moved back south and worked in K-mart for thirteen years. It offered him some of the same benefits of being part of the Panther Party, mentoring kids. After Billy X kept after him about attending a reunion, he finally went to one in Washington D.C. After the reunion, he moved back to California, expecting to not find police repression. He found the quite opposite and decided to get involved again. He established, *"the Police Accountability Clinic and Helpline, and we established like a twenty-four hour telephone line where people can call and make a report, and we would take that report and put it in the database, and if some point people wanted to file suit against a police or whatever, we could go to that database and provided that information for them to take to court or whatever."* There was on case that he was working on that stuck with him. *"Really upsetting that they killed thirteen-year-old Andy Lopez, cops shot him in the back. He was walking in his own neighborhood in the middle of the day, not bothering anybody, and he had a toy weapon that this cop that shot him said it looked like an assault rifle. But you can tell how a kid carries a heavy weapon as to a toy, and so they opened up with him and all they did was shout at him. And before the words got out of their mouth, they opened up and shot him about seven or eight times and killed him. So that became a major issue and created demonstrations and stuff, and the bad part about it is that the sheriff deputy it was not indicted and he was put back on the job—put back on the streets, and so it seemed like it never ended."* In 2001, he wrote a memoir about the rise and fall of the Black Panthers. Elbert "Big Man" Howard died July 23, 2018 due to an illness that he had.

## Resources

Elbert Howard dies at age 80

Alex Rackley

Denzil Dowell newspaper story

Library of Congress