Bobby Hutton

Robert James Hutton was born on the twenty-first of April 1950 at Jefferson County, Arkansas, the youngest of three children of John Hutton — a sharecropper — and Dolly Hutton, a domestic worker. The Hutton family had been driven from their small Arkansas farm in early 1953 by white supremacist threats and migrated west to West Oakland the same year. He attended the West Oakland public schools through grade eight and McClymonds High School from 1964 to 1966 before withdrawing to work as a porter at the Oakland Boys Club. He met Bobby Seale at the Oakland Boys Club in early 1966.

He joined the Black Panther Party at sixteen on the fifteenth of October 1966 — the day of the Party's founding — making him the first member after Huey Newton (placed in this archive) and Bobby Seale. He was appointed treasurer of the founding chapter, the youngest officer of the Party. He was the principal driver of the Party's first armed-patrol vehicle and at sixteen years and seven months old was placed by Newton and Seale on the early Oakland Police Department traffic-stop monitoring patrols of late 1966.

He drafted with Newton in the autumn of 1966 the Ten-Point Program of the founding charter of the Black Panther Party.

On the sixth of April 1968 — two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) at Memphis — Hutton, Eldridge Cleaver (placed in this archive) and five other Panthers exchanged fire with an Oakland Police Department patrol unit at the corner of Twenty-Eighth and Magnolia in West Oakland. The Panthers retreated into a small basement room of a nearby house. Tear gas was deployed; the building caught fire. Cleaver — wounded by gunfire to the leg — surrendered first. Hutton, in his underwear and following Cleaver out of the burning building at the police's order with his hands raised above his head, was shot at least twelve times by responding officers.

He was seventeen years old.

His funeral on the eleventh of April 1968 at the Episcopal Church of Saint Augustine in West Oakland drew an estimated fifteen hundred mourners — including the actor Marlon Brando, who delivered one of the eulogies. James Baldwin (placed in this archive) wrote the closing tribute published in the August 1968 issue of Ramparts. The DeFremery Park in West Oakland was renamed Lil' Bobby Hutton Memorial Park by Black community petition the following year.

He is honored here as the first member to join the Black Panther Party.