Imagine young radicals running military drills in Madrona Park, or listening to an impassioned speech about liberation and justice in a friend’s living room; peeking out from behind a wall of sandbags as law enforcement surround their office, or serving pancakes and sausage to local elementary school students. It’s the late 1960s and revolution is in the air.
Soon, Seattle residents may be able to step into this history.
Decades after the Seattle Black Panther Party chapter — the first one established outside of California — shuttered, a group of former members and supporters hopes to preserve the legacy of the revolutionary group and bring to life its storied history.
Organizers of the Seattle Black Panther Party Legacy Committee plan to open an interpretive center by early next year at the Metropole Building in Pioneer Square, which is currently under redevelopment by the Satterberg Foundation. The display will include historical artifacts, posters, photos, party newspapers and more, organizers said, to help visitors learn from and build on the lessons and values of the Black Panther Party.
The revolutionary organization was founded in 1966, espousing socialist teachings and a firm belief in armed self-defense. The group was initially created to protect marginalized communities against police brutality, and called for radical change in American society. Chapters would go on to operate local survival programs meant to address residents’ basic needs — meals, health care, education.
The new effort in Seattle emerges as a nationwide push to grapple with and immortalize the legacy and work of the Black Panther Party takes hold.
Preservationists in Chicago recently succeeded in updating the status of sites listed under the National Register of Historic Places to note their connections to the party, with more locations slated to be added. The National Park Service is considering incorporating sites with ties to the party into its network, as part of a potential National Historical Park.
For Aaron Dixon, captain of the original Seattle chapter, the best time to establish an interpretive center was 50 years ago. The second best time is now.
“There’s a history we need to preserve,” he said.
Safeguarding “historical memories”
The Metropole Building location is meant to serve as a proof of concept for a larger interpretive center and research space in the future, said Aaron’s brother Elmer Dixon, a founding member of the local chapter and co-director of the Legacy Committee. Organizers hope the initial downtown location will also help jump-start a fundraising campaign to open that primary center in the Central District, the birthplace of the local chapter.
Unlike a traditional accredited museum that primarily focuses on collecting and conserving artifacts, the interpretive center is envisioned as a place where visitors experience history with multimedia programming, walking tours and live performances, Elmer Dixon said.
“You’re talking about a place where people can question and learn,” said Ruby Love, co-director of the committee. She foresees visitors “learning the principles of resistance and learning the way that the Panthers really built up the confidence of the Black community, [and how] the ways in which they were living were unacceptable and did not have to continue.”
Organizers imagine the primary interpretive center would anchor a walking tour of historical sites across the Central District and Madrona, during which students and residents could visit notable locations where Panthers lived and worked.
Visitors could head to the corner of 20th Avenue and East Spruce Street to see “The People’s Wall,” where a mural dedicated to fallen members marks the retaining wall of the chapter’s second office, the original building long since torn down. They could then make their way northeast toward Garfield Playfield, where members held demonstrations in the summer of 1968 in support of their arrested comrades. Tours could end in Madrona, stopping by Madrona Grace Presbyterian Church, where the chapter hosted its first Free Breakfast Program.
“It is hard for a child to learn that two apples plus three apples makes five apples when he hasn’t had any apples to eat,” Elmer Dixon told The Seattle Times in April 1969 when the program launched.
As the years go by and the party’s founding members age and pass away, there is a gravity to the goal of safeguarding the chapter’s teachings and memories. For decades, the party was vilified by the media and persecuted by law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and CIA, Aaron Dixon noted.
In an era “where history is being changed before our eyes” with recent Republican-led book bans targeting content about race, LGBTQ+ identities and American history, the fight to open a Black Panther Party research center and interpretive space feels like a crusade to defend truth and progress, said Elmer Dixon.
“It’s important to control our narrative, but also preserve our history and legacy.”
But it’s not just aging party members and recent U.S. political crusades that have lit a fire under organizers to put down roots.
Cascading crises — gentrification, displacement, poverty, crime, drug addiction — have heavily impacted the makeup of the neighborhood. The Central District, a historically ethnically mixed community, was more than 70% Black in the 1960s. Today, just over 16% of residents are Black, according to 2020 U.S. Census Bureau data.
Some sites that would otherwise merit historic preservation have already been torn down or altered, said Stephanie Johnson-Toliver, president of the Black Heritage Society of Washington State, such as the Liberty Bank Building, which was redeveloped by Africatown into affordable housing.
Today, less than 2% of designated landmarks in Seattle reflect history tied to the African American community, she estimated. That’s because nominations for preservation are often tied to a building’s aesthetics or architect, Johnson-Toliver said, rather than the historical importance or emotional attachment marginalized communities have toward a space or location.
History is fragile.
“It’s been very hurtful to see some of the spaces go. … What do you do after the train has left the station?” she said. “So what can you do to ensure the memories, the historical memories, are remembered?”
Launching Seattle’s chapter
The original Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in Oakland, Calif., in October 1966, in the wake of Malcom X’s assassination. It would be a couple of years before a chapter took hold in Seattle.
Young Black activists and allies in the city, many of whom had grown up attending civil rights marches and had watched Martin Luther King Jr. speak at Garfield High School a few years prior in 1961, were familiar with the party.
Among them were Aaron and Elmer Dixon, brothers raised in Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood, a historically Jewish and Italian immigrant community that had transformed after World War II into a racially diverse working class area increasingly inhabited by Black, Japanese, Chinese and Filipino residents.
By 1968, Aaron Dixon and Elmer Dixon had co-founded Black Student Unions at the University of Washington and Garfield, respectively.
The assassination of King on April 4, 1968, led Aaron Dixon and others to begin “searching for an organization that would help us express a lot of the anger that we were all carrying,” he said.
“It was one of the most important times in modern history, a time period where young white, Black, Latino, Asian people were rising up and challenging this imperialistic nature of America,” he said.
That month, Aaron, then 19, and Elmer, then 18, drove down to San Francisco State University with other Black Student Union members to a BSU conference. While there, they learned of the killing of Black Panther Party member Bobby Hutton, 17, and attended his funeral. Later that same day, party co-founder Bobby Seale gave the conference keynote speech, calling out the racist power structure that prioritized protecting the interests of businessmen over Black teens like Hutton. All oppressed people, he told the crowd, have a right to live decently.
The Dixon brothers and their fellow BSU members were deeply moved — radicalized.
As soon as Seale ended his speech, they made a beeline to him and told him they wanted to start a Seattle chapter. About a week later, Seale and a couple of fellow members would fly up to Washington.
Settling in at the Dixon home, Seale and his comrades offered wisdom and guidance to the roughly 20 young men and women who would eventually become the founding members of the Seattle chapter. He shared the principles and duties of the Black Panther Party over the course of several hours, emphasizing the importance of being armed not just with weapons and ammunition, but also with knowledge from books written by anti-colonial activists, political theorists, philosophers and historians.
Frances Dixon, the brothers’ mother, recalled returning home to see the gaggle of young activists crowded in her living room and up the stairs. That’s how she found out her children were joining the party. Ultimately, it became a family affair — their father dug a barbecue pit in the backyard and sold dinners to raise money for the Free Breakfast Program, while Frances Dixon volunteered to pass meals out to children.
Despite the risk her children would face joining the party, “We had no fear,” the 99-year-old said in a recent interview. They knew the cause was righteous.
The Legacy Committee hopes the Dixon home will eventually be a key part of the interpretive center’s footprint in the area.
“The launching pad really was in my parents’ home,” said Elmer Dixon.
Hungry for knowledge
The party existed for about 16 years before dissolving, “but there’s a lot of history in that,” said Xavier Buck, executive director of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, which runs the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland. The museum is currently the only such institution in the nation fully dedicated to highlighting the organization’s work.
A recently opened exhibit, focused on the education program Panther members operated, has been well attended by community organizers and teachers, he said.
“It’s making people ask questions and take this information back to their communities and ask, ‘How do we get better?’” Buck said. With activists looking to elders for inspiration and mentorship, “People are hungry for this information.”
Among the ideals stated in the party’s “Ten-Point Program”: Full employment and decent housing for all; the end of police brutality and the killing of people of color and poor residents; free health care for all Black and oppressed people.
“We don’t have to re-create the wheel,” Buck said. “The same thing they lobbied for then we can fight for now.”
At times, the actions of some members in the group would steer toward more violent means. In the summer of 1968, the Seattle chapter sent out teams of firebombers and snipers to close down businesses like Lake Washington Realty, which refused to work with Black and Asian homebuyers, Aaron Dixon said. It was an intense time in America, he said, with deep-seated anger boiling over in riots and protests across the country.
But within a year, much of the chapter’s work was rooted in serving the social needs of the community, he said.
The legacy of the chapter remains visible in the Central District, perhaps most notably with the Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center, founded in December 1969 by the Seattle Black Panther Party with the help of volunteer nurses and doctors from the University of Washington.
The clinic — known then as the Sydney Miller Free Medical Clinic — offered prenatal care and vitamins to pregnant women and tested incarcerated Black people in Washington jails for sickle cell disease, a group of inherited red blood cell disorders that disproportionately affects the Black community. The clinic was later renamed to honor a Panther member who helped find a new building for the clinic and died from cervical cancer at 25.
Of the 13 original Black Panther Party-founded health care clinics in the United States, it is the only one still in operation.
Some key local historical sites are at risk of being lost, Elmer Dixon said, such as their family home.
A few years ago, Frances Dixon took out a reverse mortgage on the home when she hit financial trouble, Elmer Dixon said. Now, the committee hopes to raise about $500,000 to repay the reverse mortgage and put ownership of the building under a trust operated by the committee.
Elmer Dixon said the committee plans to open the home to the public as a place organizers can rent out for community events, or even put on reenactments of Bobby Seale’s 1968 lecture.
“It’s important for us to make sure not only to preserve our legacy [but] inspire people into activism,” Elmer Dixon said. “To learn not only from the successes of the Black Panther Party but also our mistakes. … A place where they can be off the streets and come into a place where they can learn and organize.”
“We deserve better”
So when will Seattleites be able to immerse themselves in this history? That’s still unclear.
The group is in an early phase of development. Organizers say they are calculating the full estimated cost of opening the initial Metropole Building location and potential primary center. So far, they’ve secured a $50,000 grant from the city to begin planning, and anticipate applying for funding from regional and national groups. Layered with the possibility of political pushback, organizers acknowledge it will be a long, tough road.
Love, the committee co-director, said organizers feel a strong moral duty to establish the interpretive center and its auxiliary elements — like a formal walking tour and a reclaimed Dixon home — within the next three to five years.
“One of the things that often happens in the Black community is, people’s hopes get raised and then get dashed [when projects] don’t materialize in a reasonable time,” Love said. “We don’t want to wait five, six years to get the property identified and permitting to build something new or buy existing property.”
Part of the motivation comes from a lingering sadness some founding members have over the dissolution of the party, and that many of its ultimate goals have not yet been realized, Aaron Dixon said. Wealth inequality has only worsened, cavernous disparities in health, education and housing still exist across racial and income lines, and Black residents and people of color continue to experience disproportionate levels of police violence.
For living Seattle Black Panthers, enshrining the legacy of the local chapter feels like one of the most important and worthwhile ways to help inform people that a hopeful future can and must exist.
“We deserve better than what we have now,” Aaron Dixon said. “The struggle is more important now than ever before, so it’s important for the people involved in the struggle [of the past] to leave something for young people in the struggle for human rights today.”
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