Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  With the group now released and his companions again with their guns again in tow, Seale read the statement to the press several times. The members of the Party delegation then walked down the capitol steps, across the lawn, and back to their cars. But as they walked across the lawn, they passed a picnicking group of thirty youngsters from the Valley View Intermediate School in Pleasant Hill who were receiving a visit from Governor Ronald Reagan. News of the Panthers had not reached Reagan yet, and the sight of these armed black men ambling by the picnic unnerved him. He hastily deserted the youngsters from Valley View and hightailed it to the security of his offices. Shortly after the Panthers got in their cars and headed back toward Oakland, a contingent of police armed with riot guns and pistols appeared on their tail, accompanied by reporters.39

  As soon as the Panthers pulled into a service station, the police surrounded them. A couple of officers came up behind Panther Sherman Forte and grabbed his hands, forcing them behind his back. When Seale asked if Forte was under arrest, the officers answered that he was, and Seale told Forte to take the arrest. With cameramen capturing the scene for national TV, the police then searched and arrested the remainder of the group on what appeared to be makeshift charges. Seale was originally arrested for carrying a concealed pistol, when in fact he openly displayed the pistol in a holster on his hip. Television footage caught officers looking for illegal weapons and comparing the length of Panther shotguns to their own. To one officer’s charge, a Panther explained, “That ain’t no sawed off, that’s a riot gun, just like yours.” Officers booked several of the Panthers on an obscure Fish and Game Code violation that prohibited loaded guns in a vehicle.40

  Nineteen young adults and five juveniles were arrested. But this group included not only armed Panthers but also Eldridge Cleaver, covering the event for Ramparts and carrying only a camera, as well as an anonymous black woman from Sacramento, unknown to the Panthers, who happened to be buying gas at the time. At the police station, officials changed the charges to conspiracy to invade the assembly chambers, a felony.41 Seale and Comfort were bailed out that evening and returned with Newton for a court hearing and press conference the following day.42

  Extensive press coverage boosted the party’s profile exponentially. The San Francisco Chronicle alone printed at least twelve stories on the Panther “invasion” of the state capitol that week.43 The event and its aftermath received extensive coverage in the country’s major dailies in early May, from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune, as well as widespread television coverage. The Party soon became the topic of discussion in innumerable political circles. In particular, it became a hot topic in the left alternative press, garnering extensive coverage in Ramparts and the Movement. The event also prompted more thorough investigative coverage, including a massive story in the New York Times Magazine.44

  The Panthers graphically introduced the public to a new vision of black politics. Like the leaders of the earlier Civil Rights Movement, the Panthers continued to focus on black liberation. Yet, rather than appeal for a fair share of the American pie, the Panthers portrayed the black community as a colony within America and the police as an “army of occupation” from which blacks sought liberation.45 In their view, the racist power structure was the common enemy of all those engaged in freedom struggles.

  Newton and Seale were not deeply concerned when the Mulford Act passed. They believed that their Sacramento action would loudly proclaim the power of their vision to the world and that many young blacks would join them. And they were right.46

  The Sacramento protest attracted a wider movement audience and established the Black Panther Party as a new model for political struggle. Soon students at San Francisco State College and the University of California, Berkeley flocked to Panther rallies by the thousands. Countless numbers of young blacks—looking for a way to join the “Movement,” or just to channel their anger at the oppressive conditions in which they lived—now had a political organization they could call their own. Twenty-two-year-old Billy John Carr, once a star athlete at Berkeley High School who now constantly struggled to support his wife and child, joined the Party immediately after the Sacramento protest. He explained his decision to the New York Times: “As far as I’m concerned it’s beautiful that we finally got an organization that don’t walk around singing. I’m not for all this talking stuff. When things start happening I’ll be ready to die if that’s necessary and it’s important that we have somebody around to organize us.”47

  The Panthers knew that they were on to something historically significant. They could feel themselves becoming a viable model for black liberation. Emory Douglas recalled, “It was like being a part of a movement you had seen on TV, and now being able to share and participate in that movement . . . it brought a sense of pride.”48 George Dowell, who had joined in the Sacramento action, explained later to a reporter:

  We are tired of police brutality. We want something done about it. If they won’t do something we will. I know going to the Capitol was a big step and the Panthers made the first step. If we hadn’t done that first step our people would still be wishing. The Panthers took the first [step] in my brother’s investigation and [were] the first to show the world that black people need protection and that we never had it. That’s why we are arming to protect ourselves. We are just tired of living like this. We want freedom now. I hope it won’t come to bloodshed but if it does and if I die, I’ll know I did my part. That’s a good feeling because up till now there haven’t been too many men or women that could say that.49

  By the end of May, the Black Panther Party had a burgeoning membership dedicated to a revolutionary program. And yet the tactic Newton and Seale used to build the organization had been outlawed.

  PART TWO

  Baptism in Blood

  The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lighted, and the master was there, very calm . . . and our people stopped dead . . . it was the master . . . I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm. It was I, even I, and I told him so, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave of slaves, and suddenly his eyes were like two cockroaches, frightened in the rainy season . . . I struck, and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today.

  —Aimé Césaire excerpted in Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Black Panther Party booklist

  3

  The Correct Handling of a Revolution

  The Black Panther leadership found itself in a most ironic situation after Sacramento. On the strength of their tactic of policing the police, the Panthers had thrust themselves into the center of the movement debate about how to define Black Power and what direction the Black Liberation Struggle should take now that the civil rights insurgency had run its course. At the same time, the tactics so key to the Panther’s effectiveness had been taken from them. How would the Black Panthers continue to mobilize the “brothers on the block” without the legal option of publicly arming themselves? And how would they pay for their mounting legal costs, such as the bail payments and lawyers’ fees stemming from the Sacramento incident?

  In the summer of 1967, this problem kept Newton up at night, posing both a political puzzle and a personal dilemma. How would he respond if a police officer attempted to abuse or brutalize him? Before California enacted the Mulford Act and restricted the Black Panther Party’s right to bear arms in public, the response had been clear. On countless occasions, Newton had pulled out his law book and insisted, by section and point, that he be accorded his full legal rights under the law. When an officer refused to accord him these rights, he made it clear that he would accept an arrest peacefully but that he would take the officer to court for false arrest. But if an officer attempted to go outside the law and abuse or brutalize him in any way, Newton was armed, as was his legal right, and he made it clear that he would not hesitate to use his weapon in self-defense.

  In all of the Black Panther Party’s confrontations with police, not a single shot
had been fired. But now that this tactic had been outlawed, what would Newton do—what would a Panther do?

  THE LEGITIMATE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY

  In the summer months of 1967 following the Sacramento action, Huey Newton published a series of essays in the Black Panther newspaper in which he explored ways to transcend the tactic of legally armed patrols of police. In “Fear and Doubt,” “The Functional Definition of Politics,” “In Defense of Self-Defense” (a two-part essay), and “The Correct Handling of a Revolution,” he articulates a new politics. Drawing upon the writings of Malcolm X, Mao Zedong, and the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who participated in the Algerian revolution, Newton expands on the Revolutionary Action Movement’s identification of the black community as a colony within the American empire. He links both the conditions and the struggle for liberation in the black community to anticolonial struggles around the world, not only in Africa but also in Vietnam and elsewhere.

  From there, Newton departs from RAM, seeking to define a politics that, like the tactic of legally armed patrols of police, would speak to and mobilize the “brothers on the block.” He develops his argument in four parts, first applying Frantz Fanon’s theory of the psychology of colonization and liberation struggle to the ghettos of the United States, then extending the analogy to identify the police as an occupying force, interpreting U.S urban riots as protopolitical resistance to this occupation, and asserting the role of the Black Panther Party as the legitimate representative of the black community—the vanguard party—in the struggle for Black Power.

  Newton lays out the first part of his argument in “Fear and Doubt,” where he analyzes the psychological dimensions of ghettoization, specifically on black men. He applies the theory developed by Fanon during the Algerian Revolution to the concrete and particular experience of blackness in the American ghetto in the mid-1960s, analyzing how black men experience ghetto life.1 The essay describes the way in which society denies black men their humanity. Yet, Newton writes, the black man blames himself for his inferior position in society, finding himself in a double bind. On the one hand, he believes he is inherently inferior, that he lacks the “innate ability” to advance himself. On the other hand, he wants to believe that he is not innately inferior but then blames himself for being lethargic and not trying hard enough. “Society responds to him as a thing, beast, nonentity, something to be ignored or stepped on. He is asked to respect laws that do not respect him. He is asked to digest a code of ethics that act upon him but not for him. He is confused and in a constant state of rage, of shame and doubt. This psychological set permeates all his interpersonal relationships.” This dynamic permeates all aspects of black men’s lives in America, Newton says, from processing their hair to pursuing fancy cars, from attending ghetto schools to being unemployed and fathering illegitimate children in an attempt to demonstrate masculinity.

  While a number of Black Power organizations at the time were reading Fanon and interpreting the psychological dimensions of racial oppression in the United States, Newton’s innovation is to focus on the police as a brutal and illegitimate occupying force, the immediate barrier to self-determination. In this second part of his argument, presented in “The Functional Definition of Politics,” Newton writes, “Because black people desire to determine their own destiny, they are constantly inflicted with brutality from the occupying army, embodied in the police department. There is a great similarity between the occupying army in Southeast Asia and the occupation of our communities by the racist police. The armies are there not to protect the people of South Vietnam, but to brutalize and oppress them for the interests of the selfish imperial power.”2

  By this time, the Panthers were no longer using the law to monitor the police and bear arms in self-defense; these tactics had been outlawed. Now, Newton seeks to take the issue of police abuse of power to a broader political level. He identifies the police as representatives of the oppressive imperial power, an occupying force with no legitimate role in the black community.

  In the third part of his argument for a new politics, Newton identifies the urban riots, such as the rebellion in Watts, as protopolitical resistance to this occupation and proposes that by arming and organizing the ghetto, black people can obtain power, channeling these protopolitics into an organized military force. In “In Defense of Self-Defense,” he writes,

  We are continuing to function in petty, futile ways, divided, confused, fighting among ourselves, we are still in the elementary stage of throwing rocks, sticks, empty wine bottles and beer cans at racist cops who lie in wait for a chance to murder unarmed Black people. The racist cops have worked out a system for suppressing these spontaneous rebellions that flare up from the anger, frustration, and desperation of the masses of black people. We can no longer afford the dubious luxury of the terrible casualties wantonly inflicted upon us by the cops during these spontaneous rebellions. . . . We must organize and unite to combat by long resistance the brutal force used against us daily, the power structure depends upon the use of force without retaliation. . . . There is a world of difference between 30 million unarmed, submissive black people and 30 million black people armed with freedom and defense guns and the strategic methods of liberation.3

  This argument marks a critical step in Newton’s thinking. Here he does not simply pinpoint the juncture of conflict between the police and the ghettos, but he identifies the riots as a protopolitical resistance to, and rebellion against, this colonial relationship. Yet unlike many Black Power advocates, Newton does not celebrate the riots. He argues that they represent an infantile approach, an unsophisticated spontaneous reaction incapable of meeting the interests and needs from which they arise. In his essay, Newton elaborates on this rebellious protopolitics. No longer able to pursue the tactic of policing the police legally, he argues for expressing these riotous tendencies of political resistance by arming and organizing Black America into a coherent military force.

  Newton points out that military and political power are inextricably linked: without military power, there can be no political power. “Politics is war without bloodshed,” and “war is politics with bloodshed.” He criticizes black politics as toothless and thus powerless. Only by developing a force with real destructive capacity can black people obtain political power:

  When black people send a representative, he is somewhat absurd because he represents no political power. He does not represent land power because we do not own any land. He does not represent economic or industrial power because black people do not own the means of production. The only way he can become political is to represent what is commonly called a military power—which the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls Self-Defense Power. Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community, throughout the nation. Then we will choose a political representative and he will state to the power structure the desires of the black masses. If the desires are not met, the power structure will receive a political consequence. We will make it economically nonprofitable for the power structure to go on with its oppressive ways. We will then negotiate as equals. There will be a balance between the people who are economically powerful and the people who are potentially economically destructive.4

  Finally, in an essay written in late July, less than three months after the Black Panther action in Sacramento, Newton asserts the role of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense as a vanguard party, the legitimate representative of the black community in its struggle for Black Power. He adapts this idea from RAM and, indirectly, from Mao and the Chinese revolution. But RAM had tried to assume this key role as an underground organization and had not succeeded in making its theory the basis for widespread politics. Newton, in exploring how to turn the riotous energy of the ghetto into an organized military—and thus political—force, departs from RAM and articulates a concept of a vanguard party with the practical capacity to build Black Power in the United States. In his seminal
essay “On the Correct Handling of a Revolution,” he writes,

  The Vanguard Party must provide leadership for the people. It must teach the correct strategic methods of prolonged resistance through literature and activities. If the activities of the party are respected by the people, the people will follow the example. This is the primary job of the party. . . . When the people learn that it is no longer advantageous for them to resist by going to the streets in large numbers, and when they see the advantage in the activities of the guerilla warfare method, they will quickly follow this example. But first, they must respect the party which is transmitting this message. . . . The vanguard party is never underground in the beginning of its existence, because this would limit its effectiveness and educational process. How can you teach a people if the people do not know and respect you? 5

  In this way, Newton was able to reinvent the politics of armed self-defense after the passage of the Mulford Act. He believed that black people were ready to fight the police. By organizing this capacity for armed resistance, he sought to build political power and gain leverage to redress the wrongs against black people and meet their needs. At least at the beginning, Newton sought to organize this capacity for armed resistance aboveground—that is, legally.