Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  But by the time of Newton’s trip to China, the Black Panther Party had begun to unravel. In the early 1970s, the Party rapidly declined. By mid-1972, it was basically a local Oakland community organization once again. An award-winning elementary school and a brief local renaissance in the mid-1970s notwithstanding, the Party suffered a long and painful demise, formally closing its last office in 1982.

  Not since the Civil War almost a hundred and fifty years ago have so many people taken up arms in revolutionary struggle in the United States. Of course, the number of people who took up arms for the Union and Confederate causes and the number of people killed in the Civil War are orders of magnitude larger than the numbers who have engaged in any armed political struggle in the United States since. Some political organizations that embraced revolutionary ideologies yet eschewed armed confrontation with the state may have garnered larger followings than the Black Panther Party did. But in the general absence of armed revolution in the United States since 1865, the thousands of Black Panthers—who dedicated their lives to a political program involving armed resistance to state authority—stand alone.

  Why in the late 1960s—in contrast to the Civil Rights Movement’s nonviolent action and demands for African Americans’ full participation in U.S. society and despite severe personal risks—did so many young people dedicate their lives to the Black Panther Party and embrace armed revolution? Why, after a few years of explosive growth, did the Party so quickly unravel? And why has no similar movement developed since?

  Most obvious explanations do not stand up to the evidence. Some believe the Party was a creation of the media. But most of the media attention came after the Party’s rapid spread. Some assert that the Party’s success was just a product of the times. But many other black political organizations, some with similar ideologies, sought to mobilize people at the same time, and none succeeded like the Panthers. Others contend that this or that Panther leader was an unrivaled organizer and that by the force of his or her efforts, the Party was able to recruit its vast following. But most of the new recruits to the Black Panthers came to the Party asking to join, not the other way around. One common view is that the Party collapsed because it could not withstand the government’s repression, but the year of greatest repression, 1969, was also the year of the Party’s greatest growth.13

  While much has been written on aspects of the Black Panther Party, none of the accounts to date have offered a rigorous overarching analysis of the Party’s evolution and impact. Most writers have looked at a small slice of the Party’s temporal and geographic scope, providing limited historical context. Party sympathizers are as guilty of such reduction as its detractors are. Commentators reduce the Party to its community service programs or to armed confrontation with the police. They claim the Panthers espoused narrowly Marxist or black nationalist ideology. They maintain that Huey Newton was a genius or that he was overly philosophical, or that he was a criminal. They say the Party’s power came from organizing young blacks from the urban ghettos or that its influence stemmed from its ability to draw broad support from a range of allies. To some people, the Party was a locus of cutting-edge debate on gender politics, and they applaud its embrace of women’s and gay liberation; to others, it was sexist and patriarchal.

  Occasionally, commentators have even suggested that the Black Panther Party was all of these things. But no one has made sense of the relationship among the parts, situated the varying practices of the Party in time and place, and adequately traced the evolution of the Party’s politics. As Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Garrow recently pointed out in an extensive review of historical works on the Panthers, no one has yet offered a serious analysis of how the political practices of the Black Panther Party changed during its history or why people were drawn to participate at each juncture of its evolution. “Panther scholarship,” Garrow observes, “would benefit immensely from a detailed and comprehensive narrative history that gives special care to how rapidly the [Black Panther Party] evolved through a succession of extremely fundamental changes. . . . Far too much of what has been written about the [Party] fails to specify expressly which period of Panther history is being addressed or characterized, and interpretive clarity, and accuracy, will benefit greatly from a far more explicit appreciation and identification of the major turning points in the [Black Panther Party’s] eventually tragic evolution.”14

  Writing in the New York Times in 1994, sociologist Robert Blauner commented, “Because of the political mine fields,” the “complex and textured social history that the Panthers deserve” has not yet been written and “may be 10 or 15 years in the future.”15 More than forty years have passed since the heyday of the Black Panther Party, and almost twenty years have passed since Blauner’s writing, but to date, despite comment by a diversity of writers, no one has presented an adequate or comprehensive history.16

  As a popular adage suggests, “History is written by the victors.”17 Writing a history that transcends preconceptions is challenging. It takes time and perspective and endless sifting through often-contradictory evidence to test competing explanations and weigh the importance of divergent forces. But the lack of an overarching history of the Panthers and their politics, despite the abundance of writing on various aspects of the Party, is unusual. We suspect that the long absence of an adequate history is due, in part, to the character of state repression of the Party. Aimed specifically at vilifying the Black Panther Party, state repression powerfully shaped public understandings and blurred the outlines of the history.

  The federal government and local police forces across the nation responded to the Panthers with an unparalleled campaign of repression and vilification. They fed defamatory stories to the press. They wire-tapped Panther offices around the country. They hired dozens of informants to infiltrate Panther chapters. Often, they put aside all pretense and simply raided Panther establishments, guns blazing. In one case, in Chicago in December 1969, equipped with an informant’s map of the apartment, police and federal agents assassinated a prominent Panther leader in his bed while he slept, shooting him in the head at point-blank range.18

  In attacking the Black Panthers as enemies of the state, federal agents sought to repress not just the Party as an organization but the political possibility it represented. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) sought to vilify the Black Panthers and “prevent [the Party and similar] black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability by discrediting them.”19

  FBI director J. Edgar Hoover emphasized time and again, in different ways, that “one of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the BPP is to keep this group isolated from the moderate black and white community which may support it.”20 Federal agents sought “to create factionalism” among Party leaders and between the Panthers and other black political organizations.21 FBI operatives forged documents and paid provocateurs to promote violent conflicts between Black Panther leaders—as well as between the Party and other black nationalist organizations—and congratulated themselves when these conflicts yielded the killing of Panthers. And COINTELPRO sought to lead the Party into unsupportable action, “creating opposition to the BPP on the part of the majority of the residents of the ghetto areas.”22 For example, agent provocateurs on the government payroll supplied explosives to Panther members and sought to incite them to blow up public buildings, and they promoted kangaroo courts encouraging Panther members to torture suspected informants.23

  One school of commentators simply took up Hoover’s program of vilification, portraying the Party as criminals and obscuring and minimizing its politics. In an influential article in 1978, Kate Coleman and Paul Avery made a series of allegations about personal misdeeds and criminal actions by Panthers in the 1970s, after the Party had lost influence as a national and international political organization: “Black Panthers have committed a series of violent crimes over the last several years. . . . There appears to be no political explanation for it; the Pa
rty is no longer under siege by the police, and this is not self-defense. It seems to be nothing but senseless criminality, directed in most cases at other blacks.”24

  David Horowitz wrote a series of essays in 1994 building on these allegations, treating them as the totality of what was important or interesting about the Panthers and describing the Black Panthers as “an organized street gang.”25 Hugh Pearson, in consultation with Horowitz, then wrote The Shadow of the Panther, a full-length book version of the story Horowitz had developed, telling the history of the Black Panther Party through the alleged crimes and personal misdeeds of Huey Newton.26 The major newspapers celebrated the book as a respectable history of the Party and its politics. The New York Times called the book “a richly detailed portrait of a movement” and named it one of its Notable Books of the Year 1994.27

  The storm of criminal allegations touted as movement history effectively advanced J. Edgar Hoover’s program of vilifying the Party and shrouding its politics. While many of the criminal allegations that Horowitz and his colleagues made about Huey Newton and other Panther leaders were thinly supported and almost none were verified in court, these treatments also omit and obscure the thousands of people who dedicated their lives to the Panther revolution, their reasons for doing so, and the political dynamics of their participation, their actions, and the consequences.

  Hoover’s program aimed to drive a wedge between the Party and its nonblack allies. Today, the popular misconception persists that the Black Panther Party was separatist, or antiwhite. Many current internet postings mischaracterize the Party in this way.28 In fact, the Party was deeply antiracist and strongly committed to interracial coalitions. Even some newspapers got the basic story wrong, such as the Providence Journal-Bulletin, whose editorial board characterized the Party as an “organization based on racial hostility . . . a mirror image of the Ku Klux Klan.”29 Such misconceptions have also taken root among some of today’s young activists seeking to emulate the historical example of the Black Panthers, such as the so-called New Black Panther Party, darling of Fox News, which while claiming to carry on the legacy of the original Black Panthers, preaches separatism and racial hate.

  Another influential line of attack—the argument that the Panthers primarily advanced “black macho” rather than a broader liberation politics—has also done more to obscure than to illuminate the history of the Party. Michelle Wallace first popularized this argument in her influential 1978 book Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman, in which she denigrates the role of Angela Davis and other revolutionary black women as “do-it-for-your-man” selfless subservience to misogyny in the name of black liberation.30 As June Jordan commented in a 1979 review, Black Macho is “a divisive, fractious tract devoid of hope and dream, devoid even of competent scholarship for the subject so glibly undertaken.”31 Yet the argument gained traction, perhaps in part because it built upon a kernel of truth. Stewarding a predominantly male organization in the beginning, some Black Panthers indeed asserted an aggressive black masculinity. But by misrepresenting this black masculinism as the totality of the Party’s politics, Wallace and her ilk distorted and defamed the Party. They erased the women who soon constituted a majority of the Panther membership and devalued the considerable struggles Panther women and men undertook to advance gender and sexual liberation within and through the Party, often progressing well in advance of the wider society.

  If J. Edgar Hoover were alive today, he would undoubtedly take great pride in the persistence of the factionalism he sought to create among the Panthers. Fights that erupted between Panther factions as the Party lost its national and international political influence in the 1970s have long outlived the organization. Decades later, former Black Panther leaders continue to condemn each other virulently in public. These disputes distract from the politics of the Black Panthers in their heyday and sustain the Party’s public vilification.

  But in recent decades, the history of the Black Panther Party has proven irrepressible. Memoirs by former Black Panthers, as well as scholarly books, edited collections, articles, doctoral dissertations, and master’s theses, have chipped away at public fallacies, clearing obscurity and uncovering the history of the Party piece by piece. Memoirs by, and biographies of, Black Panther activists who served in various parts of the country, and some who were national leaders—including David Hilliard, Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Assata Shakur, Geronimo Pratt, Elaine Brown, Safiya Bukhari, Stokely Carmichael, Marshall “Eddie” Conway, Flores Forbes, Evans Hopkins, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Steve McCutchen, Robert Hillary King, Huey P. Newton, Afeni Shakur, and Johnny Spain—provide personal perspectives and rich accounts of life in the Party. Edited collections by Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, Judson Jeffries, Charles Jones, Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow, and countless journal articles, fill out the story of local chapters in cities across the country and develop thematic insights across them. Books on the Panthers by Paul Alkebulan, Curtis Austin, Christian Davenport, Donna Murch, Jane Rhodes, as well as more general recent books that contain significant discussions of the Panthers, build analytic perspective.32 A new generation of scholars has provided rigorous treatments of myriad facets of the Party’s history, producing the extraordinary number of ninety dissertations and master’s theses—most written in the last decade—analyzing specific aspects of the Party’s history, such as the sickle-cell-anemia programs, the multiracial alliances of the Chicago Panthers, or the artwork of Black Panther minister of culture Emory Douglas.33

  These previous treatments are invaluable, and the depth of our analysis is much richer for them. But despite the strength of many of these contributions, none has presented a complete picture of the Black Panther Party, or an adequate analysis of its politics. Pinning down history is always complex. The vociferous efforts of the federal government to vilify the Panthers, and the legacy of factional dispute, made the history of the Black Panther Party nearly impenetrable.

  HOW WE WROTE THIS BOOK

  What is unique and historically important about the Black Panther Party is specifically its politics. So in seeking to uncover the history of the Black Panther Party, we have sought to analyze the Party’s political history. In an early proposal for the book in 2000, we elaborated a method of “strategic genealogy” to conduct this analysis. Rather than center our analysis on particular individuals or on dissection of the Party’s organization, we uncovered the political dynamics of the Party by studying the evolution of its political practices.34

  We could not have written this book without the insight we gained talking with former Panthers, especially David Hilliard, former Black Panther chief of staff, and Kathleen Cleaver, former Black Panther communications secretary. We also benefited from getting to know almost all of the other living former leaders of the Black Panther Party, and together with our students, we spoke with many regional leaders, rank-and-file members of the Party, and important Party allies, including Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins, Angela Davis, Emory Douglas, Billy X Jennings, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), Richard Aoki, Kumasi Aguila, Alex Papillon, Melvin Newton, John Seale, Tom Hayden, and dozens of others. The hundreds of hours we spent talking about the Party and working with former members on related historical projects provided invaluable insight into life inside the Party and the crucial concerns of the leadership at various junctures.

  When we began the project in the late 1990s, we conducted formal interviews with Bobby Seale and a range of others, expecting that these conversations would be the main source of data for the project. But the more interviews we conducted, the clearer the limits of that medium became. Retrospective accounts decades after the fact—with memories shaped by intervening events, interests, and hearsay—are highly contradictory. So although we did rely extensively on conversations with historical actors to test our analysis and push our understanding, we have avoided using retrospective interviews as a principal source of evidence, preferring to consult documentary or recorded evidence that was temporal
ly proximate to the events. In the end, what made it possible to uncover this history was a vast wealth of primary sources, including many thousands of firsthand accounts of historical events offered by participants shortly after they occurred.

  We conducted much of the research through the Social Movements Project at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley, which we codirected from 2000 to 2005. We benefited greatly from the assistance of dozens of graduate and undergraduate research assistants. Several of our graduate research assistants and advisees have gone on to complete dissertations and publish their own books on aspects of the Party history (see our acknowledgments). We early consulted the range of primary sources on the Party already available in archives at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, Howard University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New Haven Museum and Historical Society, and the Oakland Public Library; in articles in the black press, underground press, and mainstream press; and in government documents. In addition, we developed two new archival sources in the course of producing this book.

  In our first major archival project, we assembled the only near-complete collection of the Party’s own newspaper, the Black Panther. This collection includes every issue published during the Party’s heyday from 1967 to 1971, and 520 of the 537 issues published overall. Chockfull of Party members’ firsthand accounts of unfolding events and programmatic statements by Party leaders, the Black Panther offers the most comprehensive documentation of the ideas, actions, and projections of the Party day to day, week to week. Under our editorial direction, the Alexander Street Press digitized this collection, made the text searchable, and published the documents online as part of its Black Thought and Culture collection, in collaboration with Huey Newton’s widow, Fredrika Newton, and the Huey P. Newton Foundation.35