By Tresean Osgood / San Diego City Times / April 23, 2025
As I stood outside the Elk’s Lodge at around 10:30 a.m., waiting to interview Jeffery Jennings, Co-Founder of the California Black Panther Party, I reflected on how Jennings and other Black Panthers were at City College just two weeks ago to speak about social justice. They were at the lodge to give out food to local families and the homeless.
The line of people waiting for the lodge to open grew, and more volunteers gathered, waiting for Jennings to arrive. I finally spotted him around 11 a.m. After he greeted the volunteers and people, they began to unload the food. At 11:38 a.m., recipients were able to enter. “It feels good, man, you know that you’re helping somebody who needs it,” said 51-year-old veteran Antojuan Scott, who recently started volunteering. “Everybody needs a little blessing every now and then.”
Born in 1949, Jennings grew up in southeast San Diego under the Jim Crow laws that had existed since 1865. These segregation laws prohibited Black people from using White-only buses, restrooms and water fountains. Jennings shared his experience of when, as a four-year-old with his mother at a Greyhound bus stop, he “rubbed shoulders” with Jim Crow laws.
“I break away from her, and I run into the white men’s bathroom, and I didn’t notice it until the whole thing was over. She was in a hysterical state,” Jennings said. “There was an old white man kind enough to go in there and bring my ass up out of there. When I came out and looked at my mother, it was so much relief… they don’t give a damn whether you’re a kid or an adult.”
That encounter spurred his rebellious nature against the pre-imposed system he was born into. In 1967, just three years after the end of Jim Crow laws, Jennings joined the San Diego Black Panthers chapter with his childhood friend Walter Wallace. He spoke about how Kenny Denman, one of the other founders, approached them with the idea and how the climate at the time played a part in his decision.
“We running around guns all day every day. You had riots all over the country. So everybody was fed up,” Jennings said. “He (Denman) asked us and we jumped right on it, that’s how I became co-founder. It was me, Captain Walter Wallace, Kenny Denman and Chairman Lisa Cheryl.” Jennings was the lieutenant of security for the Panthers, protecting speakers at the Black Panther rallies. He escorted Civil Rights icons including Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis, to name a few.
While at the Elk’s Lodge, I interviewed 73-year-old Henry Lee Wallace V on the events that led him to join the Black Panthers. “I was a band leader at 15 years old,” Wallace said. “Riot broke out in Richmond, California, where the police was up on the roof shooting at us. We had to run over to a black funeral home and hide up under an old lady’s casket.” Wallace’s mother moved him to Richmond to avoid the 1965 riots in Watts. After the incident in Richmond, they moved back to Southern California.
“I left performing,” Wallace said. “I stopped doing my music and everything to join the Black Panthers at 15 years old. My parents became some of the cooks for the Black Panther Party.”
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See Rag interview with Henry Lee Wallace from 2019 here.
