Beyonce's decision to invoke the Black Panther Party during her electrifying Super Bowl halftime performance has divided people, with some praising her nod to "Black Power" and others criticizing the singer for politicizing the event.

On the Internet, people continue to debate whether Beyonce and her dancers cheapened the militant party's history and the struggles of African Americans by appropriating the black-leather-and-beret look for an entertainment spectacle.

But Kent Ford, one of the founding members of the Portland Black Panther movement, was proud of the cultural moment.

Beyonce and her husband, Jay Z, also recently pledged $1.5 million to the Black Lives Matter movement.

"She wasn't appropriating," Ford, 72, said, "she was passing the image on from one generation to the next. Just like the image of Malcolm X, W.E.B. Due Bois or Martin Luther King Jr., it's an image that needs to stay alive as long as there is a struggle for equality."

Here's Ford's story, according to author Martha Gies' essay for the Oregon Historical Society's Oregon Encyclopedia:

In April 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, blacks across the nation took to the streets in grief and anger. In Portland, where the public disturbance was minor compared to the riots in Chicago and other cities, a group of about twenty disillusioned young blacks began meeting to study the writings of Malcolm X and the Little Red Book of quotations from China's chairman Mao Tse-Tung.

In June 1969, one of the members of the study group was beaten and jailed. Upon his release on bail, Kent Ford held a press conference on the steps of the Portland police station at Southwest Third and Oak. "If they keep coming in with these fascist tactics," he announced, "we're going to defend ourselves." With this public pronouncement, members of the original group, now down to about half a dozen, retooled themselves as a chapter of the BPP. Technically, no chapter could be founded without the blessing of Huey Newton, and Ford traveled to California later that year to secure official approval. The chapter opened an office on the southeast corner of Northeast Cook Street and Union Avenue (present-day Martin Luther King Boulevard), the first of four locations.

Within months, the Portland Panthers were feeding up to 125 poor children every morning with a breakfast program at Highland United Church of Christ. The group also set up free medical care for anyone of any race at the Fred Hampton Memorial People's Health Clinic at 109 N. Russell Ave.

A dental clinic and community policing, including Panther-imposed curfews after street shootings in the Albina District, followed. (Unlike Black Panthers in other urban areas at the time, the Portland Panthers preferred to keep the guns they carried under their jackets rather than in the open).

Yes, Ford said, the Portland Panthers were militant, but that included radical love. "We were trying to help our people survive," he said.

Membership to the Portland Panthers never grew beyond 50 members, about a third of whom were women, Gies wrote. Still, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover declared the local group a threat to national security. Meanwhile, the local media, including The Oregonian, framed the party as a wholly violent criminal entity in a series of stories featuring a police-blotter tone.

According to a recent Oregon Historical Quarterly essay "We're Going to Defend Ourselves" by Gies and Jules Boykoff, four contentious episodes involving the Black Panther Party dominated the local media coverage:

"Kent Ford's arrest and beating at the hands of Portland police in 1969; the police shooting of Albert Williams at Panther headquarters in February 1970; Black Panther Party picketing of McDonald's in summer 1970; and the imbroglio over whether to issue the Fred Hampton People's Health Clinic a fund solicitation permit in the winter of 1970-1971."

In reality, The Oregonian's coverage of the party "did more damage to the Black Panthers than anything Beyonce could do," Gies said in a brief conversation with The Oregonian/OregonLive on Monday morning.

In 1971, Oregonian reporter Bill Keller, who would later become the editor of The New York Times, journeyed into the heart of the movement and returned with a story about how the breakfast and clinic program "belie militant Panther image."

Keller wrote: "Black Panthers. To most white Portlanders, the name means menacing warlord figures, militant slogans, shootouts and subversive politics. But to another grup of Portland residents, the name means children with full stomachs, free dental care, or help to cure venereal disease."

At the time, the Black Panther Party was arguably the nation's most important movements, mixing politics, pride and prophecy. The Oregonian, however, buried Keller's story on page 23.

Ford said he was told by an aide to former Gov. Tom McCall that the Portland Panthers' program inspired the governor's call for free breakfast at Portland Public Schools.

Beyonce's nod to the Black Panthers comes during the same week that PBS is set to air the documentary "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution."

Ford said he saw the film two months ago at the Hollywood Theatre. It gets the Black Panthers' nuanced history right, he said.

"Of course, what we were doing wasn't for the publicity," Ford said. "We were just doing it because it was right. It's as right today as it was then. The party will be needed for as long as you have racism and you have imperialism."

-- Joseph Rose

503-221-8029

jrose@oregonian.com

@josephjrose