Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  In our second major archival project, we collaborated with the H. K. Yuen family to recover, preserve, and index (a good portion of) the H. K. Yuen collection, which contains thousands of fliers and pamphlets and over thirty thousand hours of audio recordings on the Panthers and other social movements in the Bay Area from the 1960s and 1970s. As a doctoral student at Berkeley, in 1964, H. K. Yuen began collecting every movement flier and pamphlet circulated on the Berkeley campus, and he recorded every meeting and rally in the Bay Area that he could. Yuen dropped out of school and made a career of this collection for almost two decades. He also set up an apparatus to record almost all shows about social movements broadcast on Bay Area radio stations. Working with his son, Eddie Yuen, we recovered this extensive collection from boxes overflowing the Yuen family basement and then preserved and indexed the contents and facilitated donation of the collection, which auditors value at several million dollars, to the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

  This collaborative work thus resulted from a series of joint scholarly projects led by Bloom. As first author, Bloom did the lion’s share of the research, writing, and analysis. As coauthor, Martin contributed substantially to the research, writing, and analysis. In the end, each author contributed crucially to all phases of the making of this book.

  BLACK AGAINST EMPIRE

  Civil rights activists nonviolently defied Jim Crow, demanding full citizenship rights. Their insurgent Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s dismantled legal segregation and expanded black enfranchisement in the United States. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act codified their inspiring victories. But once there was little legal segregation left to defy, the insurgent Civil Rights Movement fell apart.36

  In the late 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Congress of Racial Equality, two organizations that led much of the nonviolent civil disobedience, imploded. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference declined. But the broader vision of black liberation that had motivated civil rights activists remained salient. Many black people, having won a measure of political incorporation, organized to win electoral political power. Many sought economic advancement. Moderate civil rights organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, turned their attention to the hard work of civil rights enforcement. Countless activists continued to chip away at racial discrimination in jobs, education, and housing.

  For many blacks, the Civil Rights Movement’s victories proved limited, even illusory. Especially for young urban blacks in the North and West, little improved. The wartime jobs that drew the black migration had ended, much remaining industry fled to the suburbs along with white residents, and many blacks lived isolated in poor urban ghettos with little access to decent employment or higher education and with minimal political influence. Municipal police and fire departments in cities with large black populations employed few if any blacks. And many cities developed containment policing practices—designed to isolate violence in black ghettos rather than to keep ghetto residents safe. Although black people were formally full citizens, most remained ghettoized, impoverished, and politically subordinated, with few channels for redress.

  Starting in 1966, young blacks in cities across the country took up the call for “Black Power!” The Black Power ferment posed a question: how would black people in America win not only formal citizenship rights but actual economic and political power? Dozens of organizations sprang up seeking to attain Black Power in different ways. More a question than an answer, Black Power meant widely different things to different people. Despite the belief among many young blacks that their mobilization as black people was the key, no one knew how to mobilize effectively.37

  Into this vacuum, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale advanced a black anti-imperialist politics that powerfully challenged the status quo yet was difficult to repress. Drawing on the nationalist ideas of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale declared the Black Panther Party steward of the black community—its legitimate political representative—standing in revolutionary opposition to the oppressive “power structure.” But unlike many black nationalists, the Panthers made common cause with the domestic antiwar movement and anti-imperialist movements abroad. The Panthers argued that black people constituted a “colony in the mother country.” With an unpopular imperial war under way in Vietnam, popular anti-imperialist movements agitating internationally, and a crisis of legitimacy brewing in the Democratic Party, they posited a single worldwide struggle against imperialism encompassing Vietnamese resistance against the United States, draft resistance against military service, and their own struggle to liberate the black community. In the face of brutal repression, the Black Panther Party forged powerful alliances, drawing widespread support not only from moderate blacks but also from many nonblacks, as well as from anti-imperialist governments and movements around the globe.

  The Black Panthers’ crucial political innovation was not only ideational but practical. At the center of their politics was the practice of armed self-defense against the police. While revolutionary ideas could be easily ignored, widespread confrontations between young armed black people and the police could not. The Panthers’ politics of armed self-defense gave them political leverage, forcibly contesting the legitimacy of the American political regime. In late 1968, Bobby Seale and David Hilliard shifted the Party’s focus to organizing community programs such as free breakfasts for children. In 1969, every Panther chapter organized community services, and these programs soon became the staple activity for Party members nationwide. By that summer, the Party estimated it was feeding ten thousand children free breakfast every day. The Black Panther Party’s community programs gave members meaningful daily activities, strengthened black community support, burnished Party credibility in the eyes of allies, and vividly exposed the inadequacy of the federal government’s concurrent War on Poverty. Community programs concretely advanced the politics the Panthers stood for: they were feeding hungry children when the vastly wealthier and more powerful U.S. government was allowing children to starve. The more the state sought to repress the Panthers, the more the Party’s allies mobilized in its defense. The Black Panther Party quickly became a major national and international political force.

  Individuals created the Black Panther Party. Without their specific efforts and actions, the Party would not have come about, and there is little reason to believe that a powerful black anti-imperialist movement would have developed in the late 1960s. Yet the Black Panther Party was also specific to its times. The times did not make the Black Panther Party, but the specific practices of the Black Panthers became influential precisely because of the political context. Without the success of the insurgent Civil Rights Movement, and without its limitations, the Black Power ferment from which the Black Panther Party emerged would not have existed. Without widespread exclusion of black people from political representation, good jobs, government employment, quality education, and the middle class, most black people would have opposed the Panthers’ politics. Without the Vietnam War draft and the crisis of legitimacy in the Democratic Party, few nonblack allies would have mobilized resistance to state repression of the Party. Without powerful anti-imperialist allies abroad, the Panthers would have been deprived of both resources and credibility.

  It was not simply what the Black Panthers did—but what they did in the conditions in which they found themselves—that proved so consequential. They created a movement with the power to challenge established social relations and yet—given the political context—very difficult to repress. Once the Black Panther Party developed, until the conditions under which it thrived abated, some form of revolutionary anti-imperialism would necessarily persist. Had government hiring and university enrollment remained inaccessible to blacks, had black electoral representation not expanded, had affirmative action programs never proliferated, had the military draft not been scaled back and then repealed, and had revolutionary government
s abroad not normalized relations with the United States, revolutionary black anti-imperialism would still be a powerful force in the United States today. While the Black Panther Party might have been repressible as an organization, the politics the Panthers created were irrepressible so long as the conditions in which they thrived persisted.

  From 1968 through 1970, the Black Panther Party made it impossible for the U.S. government to maintain business as usual, and it helped create a far-reaching crisis in U.S. society. The state responded to the destabilizing crisis with social concessions such as municipal hiring of blacks and the repeal of the military draft. Because history is so complex, we cannot isolate all influences and precisely predict what would have happened if Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and many others had not created the Black Panther Party. But we do know that without the Black Panther Party, we would now live in a very different world.

  The parts of this book analyze in turn the major phases of the political development of the Black Panther Party. Part 1, “Organizing Rage,” analyzes the period through May of 1967, tracing the Party’s development of its ideology of black anti-imperialism and its preliminary tactic of policing the police. Part 2, “Baptism in Blood,” analyzes the Party’s rise to national influence through 1968, during which time it reinvented the politics of armed self-defense, championed black community self-determination, and promoted armed resistance to the state.

  Part 3, “Resilience,” and part 4, “Revolution Has Come!” analyze the period through 1969 and 1970 when the Party was at the height of its power, proliferating community service programs and continuing to expand armed resistance in the face of the state’s intensified repression. We unpack the dynamics of repression and response in three cities—Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Haven—showing how the Panthers attracted support from multiracial allies at home and from revolutionary movements and governments abroad and explaining why Black Panther insurgent practices were irrepressible.

  Part 5, “Concessions and Unraveling,” analyzes the demise of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s, showing how state concessions and broad political transformations undercut the Party’s resilience. During this period, the Black Panthers divided along ideological lines, with neither side able to sustain the politics that had driven the Party’s development.

  The concluding chapter sums up our findings and explores their implications for three broader contemporary debates about the history of the Black Liberation Struggle and about social movements generally. Finally, we consider the history of the Black Panther Party in light of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of revolution, illuminating the political dynamics by which social movements become revolutionary and explaining why there is no revolutionary movement in the United States today.

  PART ONE

  Organizing Rage

  This is the genius of Huey Newton, of being able to TAP this VAST RESERVOIR of revolutionary potential. I mean, street niggers, you dig it? Niggers who been BAD, niggers who weren’t scared, because they ain’t never knew what to be scared was, because they been down in these ghettos and they knew to live they had to fight; and so they been able to do that. But I mean to really TAP it, to really TAP IT, to ORGANIZE it, and to direct it into an onslaught, a sortie against the power structure, this is the genius of Huey Newton, this is what Huey Newton did. Huey Newton was able to go down, and to take the nigger on the street and relate to him, understand what was going on inside of him, what he was thinking, and then implement that into an organization, into a PROGRAM and a PLATFORM, you dig it? Into the BLACK PANTHER PARTY—and then let it spread like wildfire across this country.

  —Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, leader of the Slauson gang and founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party

  1

  Huey and Bobby

  On February 17, 1942, in Monroe, Louisiana, Huey P. Newton was born, the seventh and youngest child of Walter and Armelia Newton. Walter Newton was a paragon of responsibility. He held down two jobs at any given time, working in the gravel pit, the carbon plant, sugarcane mills, sawmills, and eventually as a brakeman for the Union Saw Mill Company. On Sundays, he served as the minister at the Bethel Baptist Church in Monroe, where he and his family lived. He preached as the spirit moved him, often promising to address his parishioners on a particular topic, then improvising an inspirational sermon salient to the moment. The rest of the time he spent with his family, the joy and purpose of his life.1

  Armelia Johnson liked to say that she married young and finished growing up with her children. She was only seventeen when she gave birth to her first child. The others soon followed. Unlike most black women in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, Armelia stayed at home, raising her children, seeing them through life’s challenges, and relishing life’s humor.2 The Newton family saw Armelia’s not working as a domestic servant for whites as an act of rebellion.

  Walter Newton often used to say, “You can take a killing but you can’t take a beating.” On one occasion, Walter Newton got into an argument with a younger white man for whom he worked about a detail of the job. The white man told him that when a “colored” disputed his word, he whipped him. Walter Newton replied that no man whipped him unless he was a better man, and he doubted that the white man qualified. The man was shocked at this uncharacteristic response and backed down.3

  This was just one of many times that Walter Newton defied whites in ways that often got blacks in the South lynched. He developed a reputation for being “crazy,” so whites steered clear of him, gaining him powerful respect among blacks. Newton’s ability to challenge whites and stay alive is something of a mystery. One factor, according to Huey Newton, may have been his mixed race. Walter Newton’s father was a white man who had raped his black mother. Thus, local whites knew his father, cousins, aunts, and blood relatives, and while they might not have hesitated to kill a black person, they may have been reluctant to shed his white family’s blood.4

  The Newtons moved to Oakland in 1945, following the path of many black families migrating from the South to the cities of the North and West to fill the jobs in the shipyards and industries that opened up with the onset of World War II. When the war ended, many blacks were laid off as wartime industry waned, and soldiers returning from the war created a labor surplus. Both new and expanded black communities in cities across the country rapidly sank into poverty. While the Newtons were better off than many of the black families they knew, they were poor, with seven children to feed, and often ate cush, a dish made of fried cornbread, several times a day. Making payments on the family’s bills became Walter Newton’s constant preoccupation.

  The Newton family was on the edge, and Huey looked to his older brothers for survival strategies. Each coped with ghetto life in a different way. Walter Newton Jr., the oldest, became a hustler, working outside legal channels to keep poverty at bay. He always dressed sharp, and he drove a nice car. Everyone in the neighborhood called him “Sonny Man.” Lee Edward gained a reputation as a street fighter before joining the military. He knew how “to persist in the face of bad odds, always to look an adversary straight in the eye, and to keep moving forward.”5 Melvin Newton took a different path. He became a bookworm, went to college, and eventually taught sociology at Oakland’s Merritt College.

  Huey P. Newton became all of these things—hustler, fighter, and scholar. From his oldest brothers, Lee Edward and “Sonny Man,” he mastered the ways of the street and learned how to fight. Through his teen years, Huey fought constantly.6 Unlike Melvin, Huey was not a bookworm. For years he rebelled at school. By the time he entered the eleventh grade, he still could not read, and his teachers often told him he was unintelligent. But outside of school, he had been learning how to think. With Melvin, he memorized and analyzed poetry. When a counselor in his high school told him he was “not college material,” Huey decided to prove him wrong. Over the next two years, through intense focus and will, he taught himself to read, graduated high school, and in 1959, enrolled in Merritt College.7

>   By the time Huey Newton became involved in the Afro-American Association at Merritt, he could debate theory as well as any of his peers. Yet he had a side that most of the budding intellectuals around him lacked; he knew the street. He could understand and relate to the plight of the swelling ranks of unemployed, the “brothers on the block” who lived outside the law. Newton’s street knowledge helped put him through college, as he covered his bills through theft and fraud. But when Newton was caught, he used his book knowledge to study the law and defend himself in court, impressing the jury and defeating several misdemeanor charges.

  In 1962, at a rally at Merritt College opposing the U.S. blockade of Cuba, Newton’s political life took a leap forward: there, he met fellow student Bobby Seale, with whom he would eventually found the Black Panther Party. The rally featured Donald Warden, leader of the Afro-American Association. Warden praised Cuba’s Fidel Castro and voiced opposition to domestic civil rights organizations. After the speeches, an informal debate began among the students, during which Newton convinced Seale that the U.S. policy in Cuba was wrong and also made him question mainstream civil rights organizations. Newton impressed Seale with his command of the argument presented by E. Franklin Frazier in Black Bourgeoisie, a scathing critique of the black middle class that he had read with Warden. Seale soon joined Warden’s group.8