[News] ‘We Can’t Be Duped by Petty Reforms’ - Kent Ford, who founded the Portland, chapter of the Black Panther Party

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/kent-ford-interview-black-panther-party/
‘We
Can’t Be Duped by Petty Reforms’: A Q&A With a Black Panther
By Jules Boykoff - June 25, 2020
------------------------------
Kent Ford, who founded the Portland, Ore., chapter of the Black Panther
Party, says we’re finally seeing Fred Hampton’s multiracial coalition in
action.

For the past three weeks, Kent Ford has hit the streets of Portland, Ore.,
to protest police brutality and fight for racial justice. Ford, 77, knows
more than his fair share about both police repression and political
activism. Fifty-one years ago, he founded the Portland chapter of the Black
Panther Party. After being released from jail, where he had been held for
two weeks on riot charges, Ford walked onto the steps of the old city
police station in downtown Portland and publicly launched the chapter,
stating, “If they keep coming in with these fascist tactics, we’re going to
defend ourselves.”

It was June 1969 and the chapter was already abuzz with activity in
private. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Ford started
meeting with a group of like-minded African American activists for weekly
political education classes where they would read and discuss texts like
Kwame Nkrumah’s *Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism*, Mao
Zedong’s *Little Red Book*, and Huey Newton’s pamphlet, *Executive Mandate
Number One*. Soon they would have two health clinics: the Malcolm X Dental
Clinic and the Fred Hampton People’s Free Health Clinic.

Violence and erasure are both part of state repression, and it’s vital to
keep the histories of suppression alive. When dissent is crushed or goes
underground, there can be a certain thinning of the threads that latch one
generation to the next. Ford is determined to thicken those threads,
working with a younger generation of activists to spread the lessons of
protests past while keeping the horizon open for new tactics and techniques.

Ford’s register is a sort of ferocious kindness. To discuss his experiences
as an activist and his thoughts on the present political conjuncture, I
spoke with Ford at numerous protest events and did two formal interviews in
June.

*—Jules Boykoff*

*Jules Boykoff: A recent spate of police killings of African
Americans—including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—has galvanized people
across the country
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/13/us/george-floyd-protests-cities-photos.html>
to take to the streets in protest. How does your own repression connect to
what’s happening today?*

*Kent Ford:* Back in the day, the community was a tinderbox, just like it
is now. The police were always on us, stopping us for minor infractions. A
license plate light here, a turn signal there. Jaywalking. Just real petty
stuff. My own run-ins with police brutality go back to the late ’60s, when
cops snatched me out of a police car and roughed me up. I was handcuffed
just like George Floyd was. They claimed I was swallowing something even
though I wasn’t. They slammed me onto the ground, just beating on me. One
stuck his finger in my mouth, and I bit down on it. He started hollering,
“He bit me. He has my finger.” When they stopped beating on me, I let his
finger loose. They charged me with riot and inciting a riot, and they took
me to jail. I promised God that night that if I lived through this, I would
struggle against the system as long as I lived. I was acquitted, by the
way, and a federal judge awarded me a $6,000 settlement.

Point 7 of the Black Panther Party’s 10-Point Platform read, “We want an
immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.” That was
written in 1966! This is 2020, and it’s relevant as ever. When the police
in Minnesota killed George Floyd, it was murder, a public lynching plain
and simple. Same for Breonna Taylor. Practically every city across America
has similar stories. Here in Portland, there’s Keaton Otis, Aaron Campbell,
Kendra James. Keaton Otis got shot 23 times
<https://www.oregonlive.com/projects/keaton-otis/> by Portland Police, only
months after they dusted Aaron Campbell
<https://projects.oregonlive.com/focus/campbell/>. I go to a vigil
<https://www.pnwfamilycircle.org/keaton-otis-vigil-2/> for Keaton Otis
every month.

I try to connect what’s happening in Portland with what’s happening in
other places. You can’t understand what happened to George Floyd without
talking about Palestine. Palestinians have lost their homelands to
Zionists. You can’t understand what’s going on in this country if you don’t
talk about the US war machine abroad. A line runs straight through. I got
to admit, I drank a bit of the Kool-Aid that under Obama things would get
better. But let’s not forget, Black Lives Matter got started under a black
president. It’s bigger than Obama. It’s a system, a racist system.

*JB: Please talk about the Black Panther Party’s mutual-aid programming in
Portland.*

*KF:* Our survival programs were the core of our daily activities. By 1970
we had two health clinics running strong. At the Malcolm X Dental Clinic,
volunteer dentists saw patients on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings.
The Fred Hampton Memorial People’s Health Clinic had more than two dozen
volunteer doctors, around 50 nurses, and was open five nights a week, from
7 to 10 pm. The clinics offered free care to everyone—it didn’t matter what
your race was. I can tell you that the community needed this. The clinics
were bustling, man.

The free breakfast program was one of the Black Panther Party’s signature
programs. In Portland, our free breakfast program served up to 125 children
a day. We were getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning, and we were loading
up the trunk with weapons of mass destruction: bacon, eggs, pancake mix.
And that was one of the biggest and baddest things that we did. We were
often shorthanded, but by the grace of God we got it done. Kids will come
up to me today and say, “Mr. Ford, you used to feed us at the church when
we were kids.” It’s just beautiful. The city had completely written off
this area of Portland. It was a no-man’s land. The people in the area loved
us. They knew we had their backs, and they had ours.

*JB: And you had political education programming, too.*

*KF:* Yes, we were big into political education, or “PE” as we called it
back in the day. We had a requirement for each party member to read for two
hours a day. We also had a reading group where we discussed the writings of
Kwame Nkrumah, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Harold Cruse, Mao.
Frantz Fanon’s *The Wretched of the Earth* was like a Bible for us. We held
political education classes every Wednesday and Sunday night to talk about
what was going on at the local, national, and international levels. Our
readings focused on three evils of the empire: militarism, capitalism, and
racism. Sometimes we would have lawyers come to the PE classes to explain
the law to us—the basics about demonstrations, about minor driving
infractions that police would use against us to keep a cap on the political
situation.

*JB: And you remain an avid reader today.*

*KF:* You can go a long way in understanding politics if you read Arundhati
Roy, Malcolm X, and then fill in the details with Cornel West, Angela
Davis, Assata Shakur, and Gary Younge. Gary Younge is one of the top minds
in the world—I would put him up there with Malcolm. There’s also Michelle
Alexander’s book *The New Jim Crow*. There’s *The Holocaust and the Nakba:
A New Grammar of Trauma and History, *edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos
Goldberg. There’s *A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and
Misuses of Civil Rights History*, by Jeanne Theoharis. You read it, you
process it, you take it into your heart, and then you take it to the
streets.

*JB: In the media we’ve been seeing a lot of good protester/bad protester
coverage. What are your thoughts on that?*

*KF:* I know better than to fall for that shit. Back in the day, we *were*
the “bad protesters” in the local newspapers
<https://ohs.org/research-and-library/oregon-historical-quarterly/upload/OHQ_111_3-Gies-and-Boykoff_BPP.pdf>.
We are all out there for the same thing: to fight against police brutality
and the harassment of people of color, of black folks. We are all cut from
the same cloth. The ideas that these guys are bad, and these guys are good
is meant to be a wedge that divides us. Look how long they’ve been telling
us to just be peaceful—remember, Malcolm and Martin met the same fate.
Trump talks about big bad antifa as some kind of terrorists, but I want to
thank antifa for saving Dr. Cornel West’s life
<https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/14/cornel_west_rev_toni_blackmon_clergy>
in Charlottesville. I want to tell antifa that they are welcome at our
rallies—let’s get our heads together. And don’t come at me about looting.
The United States has been looting black communities forever.

*JB: Portland is known as a white city, in part because the Oregon State
Constitution made it illegal
<https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-white-history-racist-foundations-black-exclusion-laws/>
until the mid-1920s for black people to settle in Oregon. What has it been
like working with white allies in a predominantly white city?*

*KF:* That’s what we had to work with, and so we went with it. We made
alliances with Students for a Democratic Society, the Peace and Freedom
Party, the Communist Party, and the Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom. We always had the support of a bunch of anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist groups. Even Bill Walton from the Portland Trail Blazers
would show up for activist events and protests now and then. Many of these
allies provided bail money when we needed it. They even set up a bail fund
for us, no questions asked. When I was held on riot charges and had $80,000
bail, white people paid it
<https://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/winter2009/features/radical_treatment/index.html>.
A radiologist named Morris Malbin paid half and Penny Sabin, the heiress of
Blue Bell Potato Chips, put up potato-chip stocks for the other half.
Malbin held fundraisers for us. All the doctors in the clinics were white.
I have seen people come together—black people, white people, Native
people—and that keeps me in the struggle.

*JB: Gary Younge recently said
<https://www.doubledown.news/watch/2020/5/june/black-lives-matter-george-floyd-the-question-of-violence-gary-young>,
“When people refer to the destructive nature of the riots and rebellions,
they first have to contemplate the destructive nature of what went before
but also the possibilities that are generally opened up by these moments.”*

*KF:* Exactly. People running the protests in Portland are powerful, they
have big hearts. They are bringing the right messages to the people. They
tell people about their legal rights. I was talking to a couple of them on
the phone the other day, and I told them to keep taking it to the streets.
That’s where it’s going to be solved. They are going to get pressure to
start making concessions. We can’t be duped by petty reforms. We have an
opportunity to think big: to decrease police budgets, to end homelessness,
to get full employment.

Right now we’re seeing the spirit in the streets all over the United
States, even in the small cities and towns. Here in Oregon, there are
protests in towns that don’t usually see protest, places like Klamath Falls
<https://www.heraldandnews.com/news/local_news/protesters-march-in-klamath-falls-sunday/article_1113fb09-49f9-5189-ad29-2467c7069bab.html>.
This is the real rainbow coalition that Fred Hampton was talking about back
in the 1960s before the police dusted him and Mark Clark [*a Black Panther
member killed by police alongside Hampton*]. We are on the move now. We
have a real chance to make things better for our grandbabies. It’s a shame
that we had to see that horrible eight minutes and 46 seconds to wake
people to the reality of the situation. We have to watch each other’s back,
look out for each other. I’m 77 years old now, and who knows, I might not
be here today, tomorrow, or the next day. But I can rest assure one thing:
So long as people are out on the streets struggling against the murder of
black people, I’ll be there. I’m on the back nine, but I feel like I’m just
starting the front nine. We’ve been here before, but this time let’s take
it to its conclusion. Let’s start over and get it right.
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