The San Diego chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) celebrated its 55el anniversary with a two-day event at the WorldBeat Cultural Center in Balboa Park that included speeches on the history of the party, a keynote address from City Councilwoman Monica Montgomery-Steppe, awards dinner, and the signing of a reconciliation agreement between the chapter and Organization US.

BPP and Organization US are both Black empowerment organizations founded in the ‘60s with chapters in Los Angeles and San Diego. After an incident at UCLA that left two Panthers dead, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover exploited the situation to pit the organizations against each other using counter-intelligence methods like having agents impersonate group members to send taunts and issue threats. It escalated into a deadly feud between the two organization egged on by an FBI that viewed the Panthers, and the civil rights movement as a whole, as a national threat.

After years of efforts to find peace between the two groups with similar goals, San Diego Original Black Panther Party for Community Empowerment chair Henry Wallace V and Organization US head Maulana Karenga signed an historic reconciliation agreement at the event that forgave past violence and promised a future of peace.

Wallace and his family are founding members of the local BPP chapter.

The Wallace family moved to San Diego after fleeing Richmond, Calif. where Henry and his bandmates, then young teenagers, hid on coffins at a funeral home after police shot into a crowd during a social uprising that followed the police killing of a teen boy. However, riots also occurred in San Diego soon after the family relocated.

Wallace is a longtime member of the BPP, after his sister and her boyfriend started a San Diego chapter while attending San Diego State College. His parents also joined the party and began a free breakfast program in Downtown San Diego. The Panthers still run feeding programs to this day.

“I became a Black Panther because the Black Panthers stood for empowerment. They made you understand that you have human rights… that you don’t have to bow down for somebody and become inferior for these people because at that time, you couldn’t even look at a white person without them feeling as though you’re doing something wrong,” Wallace said.

Coming out of the Jim Crow era, Wallace described how dehumanizing it was going into stores and being watched constantly, Black history not being taught in schools and African culture being ripped away for generations through the trans-continental slave trade.

“They treat you as though you was some kind of ‘it’ – an animal to eradicate,” the Panther leader said. “Everything that we were ever taught in this system of San Diego was all made to have a negative impact on us as a people.”

BPP taught him African and African-American history as well as the vocabulary to use in police interactions to assert his civil rights. The dignity afforded him by this new education was “attractive.”

Nationally, the Panthers stood for self-reliance in a way that did not promote American individualism, but rather created radical communal care, self defense and justice programs that benefitted Black Americans outside the strictures of government bureaucracy. School meal programs, public health efforts, and traffic safety measures have all been influenced by the pioneering work of the Panthers to meet community needs.

“Don’t keep asking the government to do it for you because the government has been slanted because it’s controlled by the corporations to make you feel as though that the only thing you could do is work for a check all your life,” Wallace said. “You should be able to have a pleasant life, a good life based on your hard labor, your actions. So we want to empower people to do more for themselves and not depend on the system to help them because the system ain’t designed to help the average person.”

After joining as a teenager, Wallace has never quit his community advocacy. He helps the local Black Panther Party run three food programs, register voters, and connect people in need to health and housing resources. Even now, he has plans to expand the Panthers’ work to tutor elementary students feeling stressed and isolated.

“It’s in your spirit and your soul, to teach this to people over here in the United States and the world: That you are valuable. That we are valuable,” Wallace said about his lifetime of service.

Over the decades he has seen improvements as well as setbacks when it comes to racial justice. He noted that more than just white people can get hired in the government sector now even if more managers in the business world should be people of color. He has observed that “Driving while Black,” i.e. Black drivers being pulled over and interrogated by law enforcement is less common now as well as police killing citizens with impunity decreasing.

“Our law enforcement is starting to learn that people is not to be executed,” he said. “Just because a person looks a certain way don’t mean that they’re guilty.”

One area in which the Panthers’ efforts backfired was surrounding gun control. BPP advocated for self defense and that Black people should have the same access to Second Amendment rights that other Americans do without being beaten or jailed for carrying weapons. However, in response to these efforts, then-Governor Ronald Reagan pushed through strong gun control measures that barred open carry and kept certain segments of the population from owning weapons – the opposite of what the Panthers wanted.

Through Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, and other movements, a new generation of racial justice advocates have emerged. Wallace’s advice to them is to not start assuming they know the problems and solutions, but instead to study what’s going on and talk to people.

“You need to be a student first. You can’t be all experts on what’s going on… [People] don’t need a person to dictate to them. [Activists] need to listen to what the needs of the people are and then maybe work a program around that,” he said. “I’m hopeful… One thing I can say about America: America do learn from its mistakes.”