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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
David Hilliard wants to win an Oakland City Council seat by flogging the legacy of the group that still haunts the city. His failure to gain support shows how little the Panthers matter to its future.
Mar 6, 2000 | "I am West Oakland."
That's what David Hilliard, the burly 57-year-old former Black Panther "chief of staff," told a reporter recently as they toured the Oakland turf he hopes to represent come the Tuesday City Council election. Someone else might hesitate before declaring himself the Louis XIV of this blighted community, but not Hilliard.
In this month's election, he's running against an incumbent, Nancy Nadel, who is as radical as the Panthers used to be, and is easily the farthest left of the city's liberal council members. But Hilliard has justified his run against a fellow progressive by claiming his African-American birthright. Nadel is white, though she has long ties to the community, and her late husband, an African-American, was a well known community organizer and activist. But Hilliard dismisses Nadel's credentials with a straightforward call to race: "These are hard times for black folk," he told a reporter in October. "It's not about Nancy Nadel."
In November, former Panther leader Elaine Brown attacked Nadel as a "would-be closet consort [to Mayor Jerry Brown]," whose "silence exposes her. Ironically casting herself as a 'progressive,'" Brown went on, "Nadel silently says yes to busing 10,000 new white people into District 3."
In fact, Nadel has been Mayor Brown's sharpest council critic, opposing his plan to develop downtown for 10,000 new residents as gentrification. The mayor has repaid her by endorsing another candidate in the race -- not Hilliard, but Hugh Bassette, a high school teacher who ran against him for mayor in 1998. But Elaine Brown and her Panther allies have never let the truth block their drive for power, and as they come together behind Hilliard's City Council race -- expelled Panther Bobby Seale is Hilliard's nominal campaign manager -- they won't start now.
Ironically, it was Jerry Brown's mayoral candidacy that got Hilliard moving on the path to electoral office, and it was Elaine Brown who reconnected Hilliard with the former governor -- once her close ally and sometime consort -- when he decided to run for mayor in 1997. Brown's campaign was perhaps the apex of local influence for Hilliard and Elaine Brown in their decade-long political comeback bid, which had begun with the murder of their old friend, Panther leader Huey Newton, a crack addict who was shot by a dealer in West Oakland in 1989.
Hilliard had always trailed Newton, Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and Brown herself in the charisma department. But through attrition, he rose to lead the Black Panther Party during the late '60s and early '70s, when Newton was in prison for killing an Oakland cop (his conviction was later overturned, and he went free after a third trial) Seale was locked up for the l967 Sacramento armed "invasion" of the legislature (and later expelled from the party by a jealous Newton) and Cleaver was in Cuba, fleeing charges arising from a l968 shootout with Oakland cops, a Panther ambush for which Hilliard himself eventually served four years in Folsom.
After the paranoia and elitism that characterized the reins of Newton and Cleaver, Hilliard was to many Panther rank and filers a welcome change. But he presided over a party that continued its thuggish ways, and disappeared into oblivion. So did many Panther leaders. Newton developed the crack addiction that would lead to his death, and Cleaver, who appeared to overcome his own crack problem, died a few years later. Hilliard himself fought a cocaine and alcohol habit.
But Newton's death was a boon to Hilliard, at least professionally. He inherited the Panther mantle at a time when there was new interest in it, and for a decade has made himself the gatekeeper of access to the party legacy, culminating in his ill-advised and unlikely-to-be-successful City Council bid. Hilliard's try for office is a measure of how entwined the Panther legacy is with Oakland's past; that voters aren't flocking to support his bid is a measure of the health of Oakland's political future.
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