Bobby Hutton - Death

Death

On the night of April 6, 1968, Bobby was killed by Oakland Police officers after Eldridge Cleaver led him and twelve other Panthers in an ambush of the Oakland Police, during which two officers were seriously wounded by multiple gunshot wounds. The impetus for the police ambush was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4. The ambush, which Cleaver admitted he led, turned into a shoot out between the Panthers and the Oakland police at a house in West Oakland. About 90 minutes later Hutton and Cleaver surrendered after the police tear gassed the building.

Eldridge Cleaver stated that police shot Bobby more than a dozen times after he had surrendered and had stripped down to his underwear to prove that he was unarmed. The police maintained that Hutton attempted to run away and ignored orders to stop. According to Eldridge Cleaver, one Oakland police officer who witnessed the shoot out later told him that, "What they did was first degree murder." Cleaver and two police officers were also wounded.

Hutton's funeral was held on April 12 at the Ephesians Church of God in Berkeley, California. About 1,500 people attended the funeral and a rally held afterwards in West Oakland was attended by over 2,000 people, including actor Marlon Brando and author James Baldwin. He was buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, but did not have a gravestone until 2003, 35 years after his death.

Bobby Hutton's death at the hands of the Oakland police was, especially for those sympathetic to the Black Panther Party, yet another example of police brutality against blacks. At the time, Cleaver falsely claimed that the Oakland police had attacked the Panthers; he did not publicly admit to having ambushed the police and seriously wounding two officers until 1980. Hutton was the first Panther to die and "immediately became a martyr for the cause of black power."