By Genoa Barrow | OBSERVER Senior Staff Writer

Long before “woke” was a catchphrase, the Black Panther Party For Self Defense formed in Oakland and chapters soon sprung up around the country, with young revolutionaries unapologetically letting folks know that Black lives did in fact matter. They called for screenings for sickle cell disease and conducted free neighborhood testing. They fed Black children so they’d be ready to learn and advance in school. They called out police brutality and racist officers who patrolled the Black community.Black Panther members were targeted, imprisoned and even killed for their efforts. Many of those who are still around remain engaged in community organizing and working toward equity and equality. Among them is Madalynn Rucker, founder of ONTRACK Program Resources, a major provider of mental health services for the region’s Black community.

The OBSERVER recently sat down with Rucker to discuss her efforts to provide mental health resources and learn more about the roots of her action and activism.

“I had parents that were very involved and knowledgeable and kept us educated about what was going on in the world,” says Rucker, who was born in New York in 1950.

“My parents, my father’s side of the family particularly, was very political, of course got shipped off to World War II, but was also involved in the Communist Party, very political about the racial issues and then the whole Red Scare thing and chased folks out of doing that work in New York and I finally ended up in California.”

It wasn’t until she was a bit older that Rucker began to “put it all together.”

“I was in high school and when I went to L.A. High, everything broke loose,” she recalls. “We had everything from the Watts Riots to all the killings that were happening during that time. I was coming of age in high school during Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, the Kennedys, all the folks that represented the most progressive and the most hope for what we were going through at that time. There were just blatant, outright killing in the neighborhoods every day.

“The highly acceptable and distinct disparities between the haves and have-nots and the poverty issues were crazy. All the schools were segregated. That was kind of the backdrop. I just grew up mad at the whole thing.”

To stay active, a young Rucker volunteered with Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Kennedy’s older brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.

“The Vietnam War was going on and all our classmates were getting drafted and coming back missing limbs. We were disproportionately going to the frontlines and coming back in body bags and not well. Many folks were coming back with drug addictions and issues with self-love and mental health. Our brothers were coming back in bad shape after Vietnam and no one even understood what we were fighting for and why we were over there fighting folks that looked more like us than most people here,” Rucker says.

Kennedy announced his candidacy in March 1968. Dr. King, the civil rights icon, was assassinated April 4 and Kennedy was shot and killed June 6.

Rucker appreciated the work of Dr. King, but identified more with the “By any means necessary” stance of Malcolm X, who was assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965.

“You can’t pray this stuff away. We can pray, but when it just keeps happening, it’s not enough,” she says.

Rucker remembers being on the way to school in May 1967 and seeing the cover of the Los Angeles Times with the Black Panthers photographed with guns on the steps of the State Capitol, protesting the Mulford Act, which sought to prohibit the carrying of a loaded firearm in public without a permit. To protect their communities, the Panthers regularly conducted armed patrols.

Rucker started reading about the Panthers and was “blown away” by what they were doing. While there was fervor from the Watts uprising and the assassination of Black leaders in Los Angeles, the Bay Area had a different political vibe, one Rucker was determined to be a part of.

“I was still in my last year of high school and all I knew was that ‘that’s where I’m going,’” she says.

Fully embracing the revolutionary spirit, Rucker began to grow her hair out into an Afro, much to her family’s chagrin.

“I was the only one in my high school. My sister looked at me like I was crazy, but I just went all-in. Within the next couple of years, all of them were wearing Afros. It was just the breakout moment for me. I physically felt in pain about what was happening. I just did not tolerate it. I could not understand it.”

A Change Is Gonna Come

The dismantling of the Black Panthers, particularly its Black male leaders, was by design. The FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, aka COINTELPRO, sought to neutralize them, and their efforts to empower the community, by flooding drugs into neighborhoods and paying or threatening informants to give false testimony in trumped up criminal cases. FBI documents show that the FBI originally planned to target Dr. King, but turned its focus on Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton after King was killed.

A picture of Rucker and Newton at the 1971 funeral of Sam Napier – who distributed the Black Panthers’ newspaper – is featured in the 2022 book “Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party.”

“He had a lot of special qualities,” Rucker says of Newton, who was killed by a Black gang member in 1989.

Newton was incarcerated several times while leading the Panthers and often was isolated from other prisoners. In “The Shadow of the Soul Breaker: Solitary Confinement, Cocaine, and the Decline of Huey P. Newton,” a 2015 article in the Pacific Historical Review, a scholarly journal published by Portland State University, Joe Street writes about the late leader’s drug addiction, how COINTELPRO “took advantage of his fragility to compound his psychological stress,” and the impact that prison had on him and his ability to lead.

“He was really brilliant, but was self-medicating too,” Rucker adds. “Getting it to that level, though, that was part of the whole plan and then it spread to the whole community. They were like, ‘OK, this works.’”

Black communities are still dealing with some of the same issues that the Black Panthers were calling out back in the day: poverty and lack of opportunities, poor health outcomes, overpolicing in communities of color and the resulting mass incarceration. ONTRACK is helping to right some of those wrongs through its Community Reinvestment Grants to formerly incarcerated individuals.

“CRG is geared more towards transition from incarceration from jail and prison and mostly impacting folks that were incarcerated due to the impact of substance use regulation that has changed and disproportionately impacted people of color, particularly Black folks,” Rucker says. “Everything from receiving extraordinary sentences disproportionately to what other folks were getting for the same kind of offense, like spending quite a bit of time in jail due to marijuana use or possession, which is now legal. It’s compensating for folks that lost a lot of their time and destroyed their families for something that is now totally legal.

“It has a focus on substance use and giving back to the community for the disproportionate effect on mostly Black and brown communities.”

Last year was the first time Rucker openly discussed her Black Panther roots in “mixed company.” Upon helping the county establish its health and racial equity unit, she was asked to make a presentation to the public health department and talked about it. Doing so, she says, made her realize that progress, albeit slow, is happening.

“This would never have happened when I was in the Black Panther Party. I’m actually in a public building, talking to state employees about health and racial equity and systems change. We’re not developing programs, we’re talking about changing the system that serves our population,” she says. “It was just so liberating to say it out loud, to own that I lived through that experience. Seeing what’s going on now I never, ever would have imagined we’d have even gotten to this point.

“If I were on the steps of the Capitol building back in the ’60s and early ’70s, talking about systems change as openly as I feel comfortable doing it now, I probably would have been arrested multiple times.”

Times are changing, she says. They went from getting arrested for “inciting riots,” to being invited into spaces to share knowledge and help with the process.

“We’re a pretty long way from being fixed, but we’re big steps from where we came,” Rucker says.