Tales of The Town E3: Merritt College & Black Student Organizing

Hella Black Podcast

Hella Black Podcast by Abbas Muntaqim and Delency Parham

Society & Culture

5 • 939 Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Episode 3 of Tales Of The Town covers the student organizing history of the Black Panther Party’s co-founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, at Oakland City College in the early 1960’s. The Soul Students Advisory, the first iteration of a Black Student Union, paved the way for Black Student organizing across the world, and its impact is still felt today! This episode also looks at the Afrikan Black Coalitions fight to force the UC school system to divest from private prisons! Guests: Dar: Former BPP member, student at Merritt College during time of the Panthers Judy Juanita: Former BPP member, editor of Black Panther Party newspaper. Author. Professor at Laney College in Oakland. Anthony Williams: former organizer at UC Berkeley, PhD student at UCLA.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Delency Parham and I'm a boss of a team and this is Tales of the Town a podcast about Black Oakland. throughout the Black radical tradition, Black students have played an essential role in helping create
0:38.6	liberatory organizations.
0:41.2	Organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee played a major role in the civil rights movement,
0:45.0	and some of its members, like Jamil Al-Amine and Kwameau-Tirey, eventually became Black Panthers.
0:51.0	And the Black Panthers. And the Black Panther Party started at a junior college, right in the heart of North
0:58.2	Oakland, called Oakland City College, whose name later changed to Mary College.
1:03.0	We're not a self-defense group in the limited fashion that you usually think of self-defense groups.
1:09.0	We think that this educational process is necessary and it's the people that will cause a revolution and it's the people that will cause the change in the country
1:18.0	The Black Panther Party is simply the vanguard of the revolution and we are
1:22.0	Oakland City College was formed in 1954.
1:25.0	And a couple years after this, in 1960, the California Master Plan was born,
1:29.0	which was a plan for reorganizing the system of California.
1:32.0	This plan, at the time, it allowed for the top
1:34.8	one eighth of graduating high school seniors to attend a California community college tuition
1:39.1	free.
1:40.1	We did actually in one of the largest state in the union in the 1960s up through a portion of the 70s have free higher education.
1:47.0	No tuition.
1:48.0	That's Donna Murch. She's a historian we heard from in our previous episodes.
1:52.0	Now back to the California
1:53.6	master plan. One of its defining factors is that at one point it allowed for
1:58.0	free tuition at community colleges. This changed the demographics of the
2:01.6	schools.
	...

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