Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
While I highlighted far more from Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party than the below, I decided to limit myself to posting here issues related to changing perceptions of the Panthers following the dismantling of Jim Crow, issues linked to Marxism issues, and international relations.
(121)
But by 1968, even in “Bloody Lowndes,” the political dynamic had changed. As the Civil Rights Movement dismantled Jim Crow through the mid-1960s, it ironically undercut its own viability as an insurgent movement. Whereas activists could sit in at lunch counters or sit black and white together on a bus or insist on registering to vote where they had traditionally been excluded, they were often uncertain how to nonviolently disrupt black unemployment, substandard housing, poor medical care, or police brutality. And when activists did succeed in disrupting these social processes nonviolently, they often found themselves facing very different enemies and lacking the broad allied support that civil rights activists had attained when challenging formal segregation. By 1968, the civil rights practice of nonviolent civil disobedience against racial exclusion had few obvious targets and could no longer generate massive and widespread participation.
(122)
In this environment, Lil’ Bobby Hutton became a very different kind of martyr from King. He was virtually unknown and ignored by the establishment. Hutton had died standing up to the brutal Oakland police; he died for black self-determination; he died defying American empire like Lumumba and Che and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese had before him. Unlike King in 1968, Lil’ Bobby Hutton represented a coherent insurgent alternative to political participation in the United States—armed self-defense against the police and commitment to the revolutionary politics of the Black Panther Party.
(123)
A Panther press statement said that in addition to support for the “Free Huey!” campaign and the black plebiscite, the Panthers were calling upon “the member nations of the United Nations to authorize the stationing of UN Observer Teams throughout the cities of America wherein black people are cooped up and concentrated in wretched ghettos.” After meeting with several U.N. delegations and talking with the press, the Black Panthers filed for status as an official “nongoverning organization” of the United Nations. While the notion of the black plebiscite was intriguing to many, it failed to gain traction.
(130)
At SNCC’s invitation, student antiwar activists came to see themselves as fighting for their own liberation from the American empire. The imperial machinery of war that was inflicting havoc abroad was forcing America’s young to kill and die for a cause many did not believe in. Young activists came to see the draft as an imposition of empire on themselves just as the war was an imposition of empire on the Vietnamese.59
SDS leader Greg Calvert encapsulated this emerging view in the idea of “revolutionary consciousness” in a widely influential speech at Princeton University that February. Arguing that students them- selves were revolutionary subjects, Calvert sought to distinguish radicals from liberals, and he advanced “revolutionary consciousness” as the basis for a distinct and superior morality: “Radical or revolutionary consciousness . . . is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed— and finally it is the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed who must unite to transform the objective conditions of their existence in order to resolve the contradiction between potentiality and actuality. Revolutionary consciousness leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression.”
The speech marked a watershed in the New Left’s self-conception. Coming to see itself as part of the global struggle of the Vietnamese against American imperialism and the black struggle against racist oppression, the New Left rejected the status quo as fundamentally immoral and embraced the morality of revolutionary challenge. From this vantage point, the Vietnam War was illegitimate, and draft resistance was an act of revolutionary heroism.
(300)
In their move to take greater leadership in organizing a revolutionary movement across race, the Black Panthers sought to make their class and cross-race anti-imperialist politics more explicit. They began featuring nonblack liberation movements on the cover of their news- paper, starting with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese. They began widely using the word fascism to describe the policies of the U.S. government. Then in July 1969, two weeks before the United Front Against Fascism Conference, the Panthers changed point 3 of their Ten Point Program from “We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community” to “We want an end to the robbery by the CAPITALIST of our Black Community”
The Black Panther Party held the United Front Against Fascism Conference in Oakland from July 18 to 21.
At least four thousand young radicals from around the country attended the conference. The delegates included Latinos, Asian Americans, and other people of color, but the majority of delegates were white. More than three hundred organizations attended, representing a broad cross-section of the New Left. In addition to the Young Lords, Red Guard, Los Siete de la Raza, Young Patriots, and Third World Liberation Front, attendees included the Peace and Freedom Party, the International Socialist Club, Progressive Labor, Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Socialist Alliance, and various groups within the Women’s Liberation Movement.
Bobby Seale set the tone for the conference, reiterating his oft-stated challenge against black separatism: “Black racism is just as bad and dangerous as White racism.” He more explicitly emphasized the importance of class to revolution, declaring simply, “It is a class struggle.” Seale spoke against the ideological divisiveness among leftist organizations, arguing that such divisiveness would go nowhere. What was needed, he said, was a shared practical program. He called for the creation of a united “American Liberation Front” in which all communities and organizations struggling for self-determination in America could unite across race and ideology, demand community control of police, and secure legal support for political prisoners.
(301)
The main outcome of the conference was that the Panthers decided to organize National Committees to Combat Fascism (NCCFs) around the country. The NCCFs would operate under the Panther umbrella, but unlike official Black Panther Party chapters, they would allow membership of nonblacks. In this way, the Black Panther Party could maintain the integrity of its racial politics yet step into more formal
(311)
The Black Panther Party’s anti-imperialist politics were deeply inflected with Marxist thought.
The Party’s embrace of Marxism was never rigid, sectarian, or dogmatic. Motivated by a vision of a universal and radically democratic struggle against oppression, ideology seldom got in the way of the Party’s alliance building and practical politics.
he asserted that unemployed blacks were a legitimate revolution- ary group and that the Black Panther Party’s version of Marxism transcended the idea that an industrial working class was the sole agent of revolution.
(312)
Nondogmatic throughout its history, the Black Panther Party worked with a range of leftist organizations with very different political ideologies—a highlight being its hosting of the United Front Against Fascism Conference in July 1969.10 The unchanging core of the Black Panther Party’s political ideology was black anti-imperialism. The Party always saw its core constituency as “the black community,” but it also made common cause between the struggle of the black community and the struggles of other peoples against oppression. Marxism and class analysis helped the Black Panthers understand the oppression of others and to make the analogy between the struggle for black liberation and other struggles for self-determination. While the Marxist content deepened and shifted over the Party’s history, this basic idea held constant.
(313)
. One of the Panthers’ early sources of solidarity and support was the left-wing movements in Scandinavia. The lead organizer of this support was Connie Matthews, an energetic and articulate young Jamaican woman employed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Copenhagen, Den- mark. In early 1969, Matthews organized a tour for Bobby Seale and Masai Hewitt throughout Scandinavia to raise money and support for the “Free Huey!” campaign. She and Panther Skip Malone worked out the logistics of the trip with various left-wing Scandinavian organizations, enlisting their support by highlighting the class politics of the Black Panther Party.
(342)
In noninsurgent organizations, established laws and customs are assumed and largely respected. Maintaining organizational coherence may be challenging, but transgressions of law and custom are generally outside of organizational responsibility. Within insurgent organizations like the Black Panther Party, law and custom are viewed as oppressive and illegitimate. Insurgents view their movement as above the law and custom, the embodiment of a greater morality. As a result, defining acceptable types of transgression of law and custom, and maintaining discipline within these constraints, often poses a serious challenge for insurgent organizations like the Black Panther Party. What sorts of violation of law and custom are consistent with the vision and aims of the insurgency?
(343)
By the fall of 1968, as the Party became a national organization, it had to manage the political ramifications of actions taken by loosely organized affiliates across the country. The Central Committee in Oak- land codified ten Rules of the Black Panther Party and began publishing them in each issue of the Black Panther. These rules established basic disciplinary expectations, warning especially against haphazard violence that might be destabilizing or politically embarrassing. They prohibited the use of narcotics, alcohol, or marijuana while conducting Party activities or bearing arms. The Party insisted that Panthers use weapons only against “the enemy” and prohibited theft from other “Black people.” But they permitted disciplined revolutionary violence and specifically allowed participation in the underground insurrectionary “Black Liberation Army.”
(344)
The Black Panther Party derived its power largely from the insurgent threat it posed to the established order—its ability to attract members who were prepared to physically challenge the authority of the state. But this power also depended on the capacity to organize and discipline these members. When Panthers defied the authority of the Party, acted against its ideological position, or engaged in apolitical criminal activity, their actions undermined the Party, not least in the eyes of potential allies. The Panthers could not raise funds, garner legal aid, mobilize political support, or even sell newspapers to many of their allies if they were perceived as criminals, separatists, or aggressive and undisciplined incompetents. The survival of the Party depended on its political coherence and organizational discipline.
As the Party grew nationally and increasingly came into conflict with the state in 1969, maintaining discipline and a coherent political image became more challenging. The tension between the anti- authoritarianism of members in disparate chapters and the need for the Party to advance a coherent political vision grew. One of the principal tools for maintaining discipline—both of individual members and of local chapters expected to conform to directives from the Central Committee—was the threat of expulsion.
(345)
Hilliard explained the importance of the purge for maintaining Party discipline: “We relate to what Lenin said, ‘that a party that purges itself grows to become stronger.’ The purging is very good. You recognize that there is a diffusion within the rank and file of the party, within the internal structure of the party.
As the Party continued to expand in 1969 and 1970, so did conflicts between the actions of members in local chapters across the country and the political identity of the Party—carefully groomed by the Central Committee.
(346)
The resilience of the Black Panthers’ politics depended heavily on sup- port from three broad constituencies: blacks, opponents of the Vietnam War, and revolutionary governments internationally. Without the sup- port of these allies, the Black Panther Party could not withstand repressive actions against them by the state. But beginning in 1969, and steadily increasing through 1970, political transformations undercut the self-interests that motivated these constituencies to support the Panthers’ politics.
(351)
Cuban support for the Black Panthers also shifted during the late 1960s. When Eldridge Cleaver fled to Cuba as a political exile in late
1968, Cuba not only provided safe passage and security but promised to create a military training facility for the Party on an abandoned farm out- side Havana. This promise was consistent with the more active role Cuba had played in supporting the Black Liberation Struggle in the United States in the early 1960s, when it sponsored the broadcast of Robert Williams’s insurrectionary radio program “Radio Free Dixie,” as well as publication of his newspaper, the Crusader, and his book Negroes with Guns. But, as the tide of revolution shifted globally toward the end of the decade, security concerns took on higher priority in Cuban policy. Eager to avoid provoking retaliation from the United States, Cuba distanced itself from the Black Liberation Struggle, continuing to allow exiles but refraining from active support of black insurrection. The government never opened a military training ground for the Panthers, instead placing constraints on the political activities of Panther exiles.34
As the United States scaled back the war in Vietnam; reduced the military draft; improved political, educational, and employment access for blacks; and improved relations with former revolutionary governments around the world, the Black Panthers had difficulty maintaining support for politics involving armed confrontation with the state.
More comfortable and secure with the ability of mainstream political institutions to redress their concerns—especially the draft—liberals went on the attack, challenging the revolutionary politics of the Black Panther Party.
(352)
Many Panthers hoped that Huey would resolve the challenges the Party faced and lead them successfully to revolution. But his release had the opposite effect, exacerbating the tensions within the Party. Some rank-and-file Panthers took Huey’s long-awaited release as a pre- lude to victory and a license to violence, and their aggressive militarism became harder to contain. Organizationally, the Party had grown exponentially in Newton’s name but was actually under the direction of other leaders. His release forced a reconfiguration of power in the Party.
Paradoxically, Newton’s release also made it harder for the Party to maintain support from more moderate allies. It sent a strong message to many moderates that—contrary to Kingman Brewster’s famous statement three months earlier—a black revolutionary could receive a fair trial in the United States. The radical Left saw revolutionary progress in winning Huey’s freedom, but many moderate allies saw less cause for revolution.
(359)
The Panther 21 asserted that the Black Panther Party was not the true revolutionary vanguard in the United States and hailed the Weather Underground as one of, if not “the true vanguard.” In line with the vanguardist ideology of the Weather Underground, the Panther 21 argued that it was now time for all-out revolutionary violence that they believed would attract a broad following and eventually topple the capitalist economy and the state
(361)
Dhoruba Bin Wahad explained his decision to desert the Black Panther Party as a response to the increasing moderation of Newton, Hilliard, and the Central Committee and their efforts to appease wealthy donors. In a public statement in May 1971, Dhoruba wrote,
We were aware of the Plots emanating from the co-opted Fearful minds of Huey Newton and the Arch Revisionist, David Hilliard… . Obsession with fund raising leads to dependency upon the very class enemies of our People. . . . These internal contradictions have naturally developed to the Point where those within the Party found themselves in an organization fastly approaching the likes of the N.A.A.C.P.—dedicated to modified slavery instead of putting an end to all forms of slavery.67
(391)
To this day, small cadres in the United States dedicate their lives to a revolutionary vision. Not unlike the tenets of a religion, a secular revolutionary vision provides these communities with purpose and a moral compass. Some of these revolutionary communities publish periodicals, maintain websites, collectively feed and school their children, and share housing. But none wields the power to disrupt the status quo on a national scale. None is viewed as a serious threat by the federal government. And none today compares in scope or political influence to the Black Panther Party during its heyday.
The power the Black Panthers achieved grew out of their politics of armed self-defense. While they had little economic capital or institutionalized political power, they were able to forcibly assert their politi- cal agenda through their armed confrontations with the state.
The Black Panther Party did not spring onto the historical stage fully formed; it grew in stages. Newton and Seale wove together their revolutionary vision from disparate strands.
(392)
Nixon won the White House on his Law and Order platform, inaugurating the year of the most intense direct repression of the Panthers. But the Party continued to grow in scope and influence. By 1970, it had opened offices in sixty-eight cities. That year, the New York Times published 1,217 articles on the Party, more than twice as many as in any other year. The Party’s annual budget reached about $1.2 million (in 1970 dollars). And circulation of the Party’s newspaper, the Black Panther, reached 150,000.3
The resonance of Panther practices was specific to the times. Many blacks believed conventional methods were insufficient to redress persistent exclusion from municipal hiring, decent education, and political power.
(395)
The vast literature on the Black Liberation Struggle in the postwar decades concentrates largely on the southern Civil Rights Movement. Our analysis is indebted to that literature as well as to more recent historical scholarship that enlarges both the geographic and temporal scope of analysis.5 Thomas Sugrue in particular makes important advances, calling attention to the black insurgent mobilizations in the North and West, and to their longue durée.This work, however, fails to analyze these mobilizations on their own terms, instead seeking to assimilate these black insurgencies to a civil rights perspective by presenting the range of black insurgent mobilizations as claims for black citizenship, appeals to the state—for full and equal participation. This perspective obscures the revolutionary character and radical economic focus of the Black Panther Party.
(398-399)
The broader question is why no revolutionary movement of any kind exists in the United States today. To untangle this question, we need to consider what makes a movement revolutionary. Here, the writings of the Italian theorist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci are instructive: “A theory is ‘revolutionary’ precisely to the extent that it is an element of conscious separation and distinction into two camps and is a peak inaccessible to the enemy camp.”17 In other words, a revolutionary theory splits the world in two. It says that the people in power and the institutions they manage are the cause of oppression and injustice. A revolutionary theory purports to explain how to overcome those iniquities. It claims that oppression is inherent in the dominant social institutions. Further, it asserts that nothing can be done from within the dominant social institutions to rectify the problem—that the dominant social institutions must be overthrown. In this sense, any revolutionary theory consciously separates the world into two camps: those who seek to reproduce the existing social arrangements and those who seek to overthrow them.
In this first, ideational sense, many insurgent revolutionary movements do exist in the United States today, albeit on a very small scale. From sectarian socialist groups to nationalist separatists, these revolutionary minimovements have two things in common: a theory that calls for destroying the existing social world and advances an alternative trajectory; and cadres of members who have dedicated their lives to advance this alternative, see the revolutionary community as their moral reference point, and see themselves as categorically different from everyone who does not.
More broadly, in Gramsci’s view, a movement is revolutionary politically to the extent that it poses an effective challenge. He suggests that such a revolutionary movement must first be creative rather than arbitrary. It must seize the political imagination and offer credible proposals to address the grievances of large segments of the population, creating a “concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will.”18 But when a movement succeeds in this task, the dominant political coalition usually defeats the challenge through the twin means of repression and con- cession. The ruling alliance does not simply crush political challenges directly through the coercive power of the state but makes concessions that reconsolidate its political power without undermining its basic interests.19 A revolutionary movement becomes significant politically only when it is able to win the loyalty of allies, articulating a broader insurgency.20
In this second, political sense, there are no revolutionary movements in the United States today. The country has seen moments of large-scale popular mobilization, and some of these recent movements, such as the mass mobilizations for immigrant rights in 2006, have been “creative,” seizing the imagination of large segments of the population. One would think that the 2008 housing collapse, economic recession, subsequent insolvency of local governments, and bailout of the wealthy institutions and individuals most responsible for creating the financial crisis at the expense of almost everyone else provide fertile conditions for a broad insurgent politics. But as of this writing, it is an open question whether a broad, let alone revolutionary, challenge will develop. Recent movements have not sustained insurgency, advanced a revolutionary vision, or articulated a broader alliance to challenge established political power.
In our assessment, for the years 1968 to 1970, the Black Panther Party was revolutionary in Gramsci’s sense, both ideationally and politically. Ideationally, young Panthers dedicated their lives to the revolution because—as part of a global revolution against empire—they believed that they could transform the world. The revolutionary vision of the Party became the moral center of the Panther community.
(401)
While minimovements with revolutionary ideologies abound, there is no politically significant revolutionary movement in the United States today because no cadre of revolutionaries has developed ideas and practices that credibly advance the interests of a large segment of the people. Members of revolutionary sects can hawk their newspapers and proselytize on college campuses until they are blue in the face, but they remain politically irrelevant. Islamist insurgencies, with deep political roots abroad, are politically significant, but they lack potential constituencies in the United States.
No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foot-hold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease. This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party and may not happen again for a very long time.