The Panthers had already attracted attention from the local mainstream press for their rally in Richmond and armed escort of Malcolm X’s widow into the city from the airport earlier in the year. The Sunday San Francisco paper on April 30, 1967, ran a blaring headline — “Oakland’s Black Panthers Wear Guns; Talk Revolution” — accompanied by photos of the two armed Party leaders.18 San Francisco State was only one of many new platforms the Panthers sought to broadcast their views. The Black Panthers took over Black House from the Black Nationalists that spring as well. In April of 1967, after the Richmond rally, a local radio station invited Newton to speak on a call-in talk show. When he read the 10-point program on the air, an irate Assemblyman from Piedmont named Don Mulford phoned in to announce to the radio audience his sponsorship of a new bill in Sacramento to ban carrying loaded guns in public and to prohibit unapproved instructors from teaching the use of firearms. Newton came up with a bold and immediate response to this threat. Looking for volunteers, Seale shared Newton’s plan with Garrett and her roommates. Seale would lead an armed group of Panthers and members of the Dowell family on an eighty-mile drive to the State Capitol in early May to oppose the bill and introduce the Panther Party and its 10-point program to the world.
Emory Douglas joined Seale in that historic trip as did Mark Comfort. They packed loaded guns in the trunks of their cars, planning to display them on arrival. Cleaver went along with no gun, on official assignment to cover the event for Ramparts magazine. Newton wisely accepted the recommendation that he stay home — he remained on probation, and they anticipated trouble. On May 2, 1967, 24 men and 6 women — most dressed all in black — emerged from six cars driven in a caravan to Sacramento. Many of them wielded rifles, 12-gauge pump-action shotguns and Magnum .357s. Seale also sported a .45 caliber pistol on his hip. Some had slung on bandoliers of ammunition. Following Newton’s strict instructions, they kept the weapons pointed straight up or down at the ground as they marched toward the Capitol building. Like Newton, those on parole could not carry hand guns, nor could Hutton, who was still under age. At the time, carrying loaded weapons in plain sight and not directed at anyone was legal. Still, Newton counseled Seale that, if fired upon, he should shoot back.
As the attention-getting entourage approached their destination, Governor Ronald Reagan happened to be standing on the lawn with a group of visiting school children. Members of the press corps were already on hand to cover events at the Capitol. At the startling sight of an armed squadron of black militants, Reagan broke into a trot in the opposite direction. Stunned cameramen and reporters followed the unknown group of black militants as they made their way into the Capitol building.
Caught off guard, the security detail let the expanded entourage of Panthers and media head upstairs to the Assembly much like any other visitors. All the while TV cameras were rolling and photos were snapped. The guards stopped a few of the Panthers in the building and took away their guns, but afterward gave the weapons back and let them go. On prior occasions when white NRA members had worn guns into the building the guards had not relieved them of their weapons. Reportedly, a few Second Amendment hardliners had already shown up that day in the visitors’ gallery wearing holstered hand guns. But a squadron of armed blacks boldly exercising their right of protest alarmed legislators as white gun owners had never done. Cameramen kept filming as the proceedings abruptly came to a standstill at the intrusion. Then, to the immense relief of the Assemblymen, Capitol police quickly ushered out their unexpected visitors without any violence. One of the surprised freshman was San Francisco Assemblyman Willie Brown, at the start of his long political career. He would soon become a Panther lawyer and ally.
On both the way in and out of the Capitol building, Seale stood on the Capitol steps to read to the media Newton’s “Executive Mandate Number One,” which attracted immediate television coverage. It accused the California legislature of seeking to keep the black community “disarmed and powerless” while police repression increased throughout the country. The statement echoed the new bellicose direction of SNCC since the spring of 1966 in asserting the American black power movement as part of an international struggle against imperialism, linking U. S. domestic policy to the “racist war of genocide in Vietnam.”19
Safely observing television coverage of the breaking news out of Sacramento from his parents’ home in Oakland, Newton reacted with glee at the success of what he called ‘shock-a-buku’ — sudden moves that keep the enemy off balance.”20 The story hit the next front page of all major newspapers in the state with headlines like “Armed Men Invade Assembly,” “Guns in Capitol” and “Armed Foray in Assembly Stirs Wrath.”21 It made Melvin nervous: “It got a lot of press, which was Huey’s object. He wanted . . . a colossal event, and the colossal event really was a recruitment effort. . . . [But] to go to Sacramento with the guns [was] a two-edged thing. . . . [I]t got the publicity and the attention of the youth that wanted to be Panthers. . . . The other side of it was that it . . . drove some people in the opposite direction. . . . I would not have done it, but it was done. . . . I’d never thought the guns served a good purpose.”
As the Panthers drove out of Sacramento, they were arrested on a variety of minor charges and taken to the city jail. During the next few days, the media deluged the Panthers with inquiries as the London Times and other international papers featured their spectacular political confrontation. To Barry Scheck, as a politically aware high school senior in New York, the Panthers suddenly sprung “out of nowhere . . . into the news . . . going to Sacramento, carrying guns, with the black berets and the black leather . . . This was a very powerful message . . . These were people that were not going to get beaten and . . . hosed by police in the streets” like the nonviolent civil rights marchers following Dr. King’s approach.
The governor’s office immediately demanded tighter security at the Capitol. As chief of staff, Ed Meese already had open channels to the FBI from his days as chief prosecutor of protesters in the Free Speech Movement. He could easily find out what Hoover knew about this revolutionary group calling itself the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Shocked newsmen raced to report the incident as an armed invasion, though the Panthers had never actually threatened anyone and were surrounded the whole time they were in the Capitol building by reporters, camera crews and school kids with tales to tell of their most unusual civics lesson.
At first, no one in the media could concentrate on anything other than the guns, but as coverage continued, TV reporter Belva Davis proposed a new angle. As the first African-American woman hired by KPIX-TV in San Francisco, she had a different perspective than her white colleagues. She suggested that they look at the Panthers’ motivation for the stunt. She told her boss they aimed to get publicity for their 10-point program to change society for the better. The Panthers wanted to improve education for kids in black communities; they dreamed of starting school breakfast and lunch programs and their own school. With persistence, Belva Davis got the background story on the air — one she believed would otherwise never have been broadcast.
By the time of the Panthers’ startling May debut, Soulbook magazine contributor Louis Armmond had already left for the East Coast fully committed to armed revolt. He had seen hundreds of thousands of protesters marching in the streets in the past couple of years. Armmond and a number of militant colleagues “thought at that time that there was going to be a general insurrection in the United States.” While he kept his plans secret, Armmond and some of his radical associates were then determined to