This book explores the soul of the black power movement. It puts faces to the revolution and seeks to humanize the black revolutionaries of the day. This book is for anyone who recognizes the transformative soul power of James Brown but still can’t find his name in their civil rights history book. It is for anyone who was fascinated by the fearless vision of change put forth by the leaders of the black power era and has wondered how those ideas came about.
This idea has been in the works for many years. One event, perhaps, sparked the basis for this study. In 1988 my mother took me to a memorial for a local activist, Alameda County Supervisor John George, a stalwart community organizer and one of the most respected black politicians in the Bay Area. The humble, spectacled man was a tireless advocate for the working class, and he had died suddenly at the age of sixty. At the memorial, his daughter rose and spoke eloquently of George, reminding us that “he was a revolutionary that could dance.”
That phrase stuck with me. A revolutionary that could dance? What did that mean? I always figured that revolutionaries were warriors for the people. Was this to mean that, for the most part, they could not groove with the people? Growing up in the Bay Area, revolutionaries were not hard to find. Militants, hippies, artists, communists: “revolution was in the air” in Berkeley in the 1960s. But there was always a mythology around the black revolutionaries, especially the Black Panthers. Unlike Michael Jackson, they were seen as fighters, not lovers.
A dancing revolutionary? This was not simply about cutting up the floor after a political victory. The implication was, of course, that John George, the tireless public servant, had soul. Whether he could really make the moves was not the point. He could empathize, he could relate, he could feel the people’s pain and still stand up and fight the power. His visceral connection to the people is what made him a great leader.
My mother, Toni Vincent, was a Panther, and she knew many of the prominent early Party members. One of my earliest memories is of taking a trip to visit Huey P. Newton in the Alameda County courthouse jail and straining to peep through a tiny window to see him. I’ve always seen my mom as a revolutionary. As a child she overcame polio, and while she could walk, travel the world, and join the revolution, she did not move with the freedom of a dancer. She was a revolutionary who did not dance.
My late father, Ted Vincent, was an accomplished white historian of black radical politics. His first teaching job at Merritt College in 1964 was energized by the presence of a young, talkative student named Huey P. Newton. He was a fierce counterculture radical and would always get down and funky in his own way, but we all knew that Ted operated just a bit outside the box. So the mythos of the steely eyed black militant remained.
Could one be funky and a revolutionary at the same time? I wrestled with this notion as I wrote my first book, Funk: The Music, the People and the Rhythm of The One. The great funk bands and musicians of the 1970s were to me expressions of the freedom that the black power movement fought so hard to establish. These were the dancing revolutionaries I thought I was looking for. For me, Don Cornelius’s Soul Train was one big black power dance party. But the volumes of history I read gave the impression that the movement people and the entertainers inhabited opposite banks of that river to freedom. How were black power and soul music connected?
Certainly the entertainer and the militant do not typically occupy the same space. At some level it is an absurdity to compare the courage of a militant activist who stares down the barrel of a police rifle to the efforts of an entertainer who might pen some verses of indignation in the comfort of a hotel room. Yet somehow these people are connected. Somehow, the fighters and the lovers inspire one another and force us to consider that we all possess elements of both.
The spark for this discussion of black power and soul music came from a small, short-lived rhythm and blues band that operated out of Oakland, California, in 1970. The group performed for less than a year, but in that short window of time they represented all that was revolutionary about black politics and black culture in that era. The band was the Lumpen, and this book tells their story, and the story of the Black Panther Party, and of the revolution that created them.
I was made aware of the Lumpen in 2002 through conversations with Boots Riley, leader of the rap group the Coup. The title of this book is borrowed from the name of one of Boots Riley’s albums. The Coup’s fourth album, Party Music, released in late 2001, garnered its own controversy before the record was even distributed, as the cover artwork depicting the destruction of the World Trade Center (a few months hence) was seen at the time as all too prophetic. The artwork was withdrawn before the CD hit the stores, and the new art featured a photo of a filled martini glass, as if a party were taking place, with a gasoline can in the background. This image fused the idea of a party with the symbol of rebellion implied in a Molotov cocktail. With songs like “5 Million Ways to Kill a C.E.O,” “Pork and Beef,” and “Get Up,” Riley and DJ Pam “the Funkstress” Warren used humor, irony, verbal acrobatics, and wicked grooves to promote their message of radical social change. Showered in praise by critics, the Coup’s Party Music effectively used the funk to bring about an urgent call to action, as well as a call to the dance floor.
In one discussion in 2002 about the “party music” theme, Riley told me that he had heard that the Black Panthers had a funk band. For both of us the proposition seemed remote and absurd, almost comical, but Riley suggested I investigate further. I asked my associate at KPFA radio, Walter Turner, a journalist and former Party member, and he confirmed to me that the Party had a band. Turner said the group was called the Lumpen, and that he owned a copy of their music.
He showed me a seven-inch, 45 rpm single with the titles “Free Bobby Now” and “No More” printed on each side. It was credited as a Seize the Time production, and the artist was listed as the Lumpen. The single is one of the most sought after oldies records by music collectors. Through Walter Turner, I was able to digitize the single as well as other cultural productions of the black radical movement, including the two music albums recorded by former Panther Party leader Elaine Brown.
In the fall of 2002, Riley put me in contact with Greg Morozumi, a local organizer at the Oakland-based East Side Arts Alliance. Morozumi informed me that a remnant of the Black Panther Party (BPP), then represented by former BPP chief of staff David Hilliard, had recently released a rap album, and that one of the members of the rap group was the son of an original Lumpen member. I invited the Panther-oriented rap group—the Fugitives—and David Hilliard onto my KPFA radio program. Through Jamil Calhoun of the Fugitives, I was able to contact William Calhoun, founder and former leader of the Lumpen. When William Calhoun gave me a brief telephone interview during a break from his workplace at an at-risk youth facility in Sacramento, everything I had been working on fell into place.
Calhoun put me in touch with Billy “X” Jennings, organizer of the It’s About Time Committee, a Sacramento-based organization of former rank-and-file BPP members dedicated to maintaining the legacy of the BPP through a range of community, educational, and cultural activities. Jennings provided a great deal of archival information on the Lumpen as well as access to the remaining Lumpen members. With the help of Jennings, and occasional support from David Hilliard, I was able to contact and interview a cross-section of former Party members and supporters who had affiliations with the Lumpen.
In the fall of 2003, I obtained a tape of a live performance of the Lumpen from the Huey P. Newton Archives housed at Stanford University. The recording was a grainy dub (apparently from a cassette) of a performance at Merritt College in North Oakland (located just a few blocks from the original BPP central headquarters), recorded on a Tuesday night, November 10, 1970. With the assistance of engineer Deverol Ross at KPFA radio, I was able to upgrade the sound quality to create a digital CD recording and carefully analyze each selection in the forty-minute, seven-song set.
Despite the grainy sound, the songs exploded out of the speakers with high-quality singing, skilled musical support from the band, and the presence of an energized, interactive audience. This live performance represented the essence of what was at the core of the activist-artist aesthetic within the black power and Black Arts movements. Artists were increasingly political, and political leaders were eminently soulful. Members of the two movements fed off each other and inspired the actions that we remember today as the black revolution.
As a radio host and DJ, for me a playlist or a musical group’s set list can be seen as a work of art in its own right. I was captivated by the song choices made by the group—all classic soul songs parodied and reworked to fit the party line of the Black Panther Party. This live recording of the Lumpen told a story that demanded to be told, a story about a superior soul music performance, a story about a band of performers unlike any other, and a story about a revolutionary time and a revolutionary Party that led to this entity coming into being.
The research on the Lumpen, and the circumstances that created a band such as this, would become my 2008 doctoral dissertation, “The Lumpen: Music on the Front Lines of the Black Revolution.” Publication of the work proved problematic, and it was through Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio that I sent a copy of the dissertation to Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia enjoyed the dissertation, gave it his endorsement, and facilitated my relationship with the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, which led to the placement of Party Music with Lawrence Hill Books.
It is important to note that the Lumpen singers, all full-time Panthers, were each adamant that any discussion of their work be placed in context of the movement they were a part of and the organization they were working in. They did not want to be placed in front of the larger movement story, because they were not the movement leadership; they were rank-and-file Panther Party members and are proud of that fact. Their story is a part of a revolutionary moment that inspired musicians and activists to take things to the extreme because this was the tenor of the times. Years later, generations raised on the rhythms of revolution, in music and in spoken word, see the black power era through a different lens. A new breed is yearning to know the story of the black revolution, as told through the music. This is it.