Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  Newton’s conception of the vanguard party was important because of the way he envisioned the party’s relationship to the people. He did not simply want to educate the people but also saw the importance of winning their respect.6 While approvingly citing Mao Zedong’s dictum that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” Newton understood that the respect and loyalty of the community were about much more than that. He knew that the black community would look to and respect the Black Panther Party only if the people believed that the Party’s main concern was their needs and interests.

  Thus Newton sought not only to organize the rage of the ghetto into a military force but also to assert its role in the vanguard of Black Power by championing solutions to the pressing needs of the black community: decent housing, employment, education, and freedom. Starting with the second issue of the Black Panther, on May 15, 1967 (less than two weeks after the Sacramento incident), every one of the newspaper’s 537 issues contained the Party’s ten-point platform and program, titled “What We Want Now! What We Believe,” which emphasized the Party’s commitment to advancing a revolution that addressed the needs and interests of the black community.

  The platform and program emphasized the nationalist character of the Party as a steward of black people’s interests. The Party was not just about armed action; it was the legitimate voice of black people, and as such, it intended to take care of the broad range of the community’s needs. The platform drew heavily from the ten-point platform that Malcolm X crafted for Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, published in August 1963. However, it emulated Malcolm X’s nationalism without the Islamic flavor. For example, Malcolm X’s ten-point program included the following points under “What the Muslims Want”:

  [1.] We want freedom. We want a full and complete freedom. . . . [4.] We want territory to] establish a separate state. [5.] We want freedom for all Believers of Islam now held in federal prisons. We want freedom for all black men and women now under death sentence in innumerable prisons in the North as well as the South. [6.] We want an immediate end to the police brutality and mob attacks against the so-called Negro throughout the United States. [7.] We demand not only equal justice under the laws of the United States, but equal employment opportunities—NOW! [8.] We want the government of the United States to exempt our people from ALL taxation as long as we are deprived of equal justice under the laws of the land. [9.] We want all black children educated, taught and trained by their own teachers.7

  Using this program as a model, the Black Panthers developed their famous Ten Point Program. Most previous accounts present a version written in October 1968 as the original and claim it was first distributed in October 1966, but that is incorrect. The Black Panther Party’s original Ten Point Program, first publicized in May 1967, read:

  WHAT WE WANT NOW! WHAT WE BELIEVE

  To those poor souls who don’t know Black history, the beliefs and desires of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense may seem unreasonable. To Black people, the ten points covered are absolutely essential to survival. We have listened to the riot producing words “these things take time” for 400 years. The Black Panther Party knows what Black people want and need. Black unity and self defense will make these demands a reality.

  WHAT WE WANT

  We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community.

  We want full employment for our people.

  We want an end to the robbery by the White man of our Black community.

  We want decent housing, fit for shelter [of] human beings.

  We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.

  We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.

  We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.

  We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails.

  We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities. As defined by the constitution of the United States.

  We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

  WHAT WE BELIEVE

  We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

  We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American business men will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the business men and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

  We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as retribution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities: the Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered 6,000,000 Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50,000,000 Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

  We believe that if the White landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

  We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

  We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

  We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States gives us a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self defense.

  We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

  We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all White juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.

  When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of people to alter or to abolish it, and
to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.8

  Above the Ten Point Program, under the headline “Minister of Defense,” the Black Panther carried a photo of Huey that serves to announce to the world that the vanguard of Black Power had arrived. In the photo, Huey is seated and facing the camera. His forehead, nose, and left cheekbone are well illuminated, whereas the right side of his face is obscured in shadow, capped by the trademark black beret tilted at a precise angle to cover the top of his right ear. His slacks, shoes, and leather jacket are also black, his pressed shirt light colored—the standard Black Panther uniform. He sits comfortably but alert, his feet positioned, ready to stand. Behind him is the ornate fan of the wicker throne in which he sits. A handful of live ammunition sits in a small pile on the ground near the butt of the rifle he holds in his right hand. Like the zebra-skin rugs on the floor and the two shields behind him, the tall black spear in his left hand suggests Africa. The photo announces Huey as leader and defender of the black colony in the white motherland America.

  ENGAGING THE LEFT

  Beyond rethinking the political ideology of the Party, during the summer of 1967, the Black Panthers forged important new relations with the broader Left. Newton was both an intellectual and a man of action. He could analyze the precise emotional dynamics in a confrontation with the police and know just how to push and how far. He could see the implications of his actions in the moment while considering their potential for broad political resonance. But he was not much of a public relations man. He had a high-pitched voice and hated public speaking. And he was too intensely focused on the crux of the issue to worry about advertising. Newton could envision and take exemplary action, but he was not particularly talented at broadcasting these actions to the world. Bobby Seale was a much more skillful public speaker, and a true organizational craftsman, keeping the Party running day to day. Seale proved time and again, as he had in Sacramento, that he had great integrity and could stand up without wavering in the face of intense pressure. But he was not much of a public relations man either. Newton’s vanguard politics called for putting the Party front and center in the public eye. In the summer of 1967, Eldridge Cleaver turned out to have just the flamboyant edge the Party needed.

  After Sacramento, the Panthers faced the legal challenges of raising bail and hiring lawyers. Such challenges had been an important part of the daily work of the earlier insurgent Civil Rights Movement and were not unfamiliar to the Panthers. But until this point, legal challenges had been only a peripheral concern of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Now, facing the courts became central. Although it was perfectly legal for the Panthers to enter the state capitol bearing arms, a fact that the state police acknowledged at the time, officials later charged members of the Black Panther delegation with “conspiracy to disrupt the assembly,” a felony.

  Eldridge and Beverly

  Eldridge Cleaver was among those arrested with the Black Panther entourage in Sacramento. In the months following the Sacramento action, the Panthers’ newfound fame allowed Cleaver to draw upon his connections with Ramparts and the broader Left to raise money to help the Party pay its legal bills stemming from Sacramento.

  Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was born on August 31, 1935, in Wabbaseka, Arkansas, the son of Leroy Cleaver, a waiter and nightclub piano player, and Thelma Hattie Robinson Cleaver, an elementary school teacher.9 Like many black families from the South, Cleaver’s family had migrated west for work during World War II. The Cleavers settled in Los Angeles, where Cleaver soon became involved in petty crime. He went to jail several times, and in 1954, at the age of nineteen, was sent to Soledad State Prison as an adult for two and a half years for possession of marijuana. The Civil Rights Movement was heating up then, and Cleaver became politicized, spending an increasing amount of time with a group of black inmates who “were in vociferous rebellion against what we perceived as a continuation of slavery.”10

  Unmarried, Cleaver was denied conjugal visits and soon became lonely and thought often of women. “In prison,” Cleaver later wrote, “those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.” He tore a photo of a woman out of Esquire magazine and pinned it to the wall of his cell, deciding that this was his bride and that he would fall in love and lavish all his affections on her. One day he returned to his cell to find the picture torn from the wall by a guard and the pieces dumped in the toilet. When he confronted the guard, the guard said, “Get yourself a colored girl for a pinup—no white women—and I’ll let her stay up.”11

  Soon after the incident, Cleaver heard the news about the murder of Emmett Till. In 1955, Till, a black fourteen-year-old from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi, whistled at a white woman. That night, local whites kidnapped him from his relatives’ house and beat him brutally. They fastened a large metal fan around his neck with barbed wire, shot him in the head, and dumped his mutilated corpse in the Tallahatchie River. Witnesses identified the murderers, but the accused men were exonerated after only an hour of deliberation by an all-white male jury. After the case was tried (and could not be appealed), the murderers publicly confessed that they had killed Till for flirting with a white woman.12

  Cleaver came across a picture of the white woman that Till had flirted with in a magazine and found her attractive. He saw himself in Till’s shoes, and it distressed him. “It intensified my frustrations,” Cleaver later explained, “to know that I was indoctrinated to see the white woman as more beautiful and desirable than my own black woman.” Cleaver’s emotional turmoil about his attraction to white women was not unusual. While white men often took liberties with black women, a black man who flirted even mildly with a white woman was considered to be making the gravest violation of white supremacy, one that was all too often punished by death. In this context, it is not surprising that many black men associated a sexual desire for white women with a desire to be recognized as human and free.

  Fanon graphically described the psychological dimensions of this type of desire:

  Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now . . . who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. Her love takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization. . . . I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.13

  Cleaver’s confrontation with the guard and his attraction to the white woman in the Till case shook him to the core and sent him in search of answers. He had many conversations with other inmates and studied books such as Richard Wright’s Native Son. Through further studies, Cleaver earned his high school diploma—reading Karl Marx, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, W. E. B. Du Bois, Bakunin, Lenin, and Machiavelli—before his release in 1957.14

  But Cleaver was still in turmoil, and within less than a year, he was arrested again, this time for assault with intent to kill. He was sentenced to two to fourteen years in prison. At this point, he turned to the Nation of Islam and also began to write.15 Eight years later, he was still in prison, and still writing, but the mood of the country had changed. The Civil Rights Movement had fought Jim Crow and won. The antiwar mo
vement was building. When Cleaver’s hero Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, he swore to take up Malcolm X’s fight. He committed himself to the struggle for the liberation of black people and to the strengthening of the association that Malcolm X had founded shortly before his death—the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

  From prison, Cleaver began writing letters to progressive lawyers he saw mentioned in the newspaper in hopes of finding legal support. In an issue of the Sun Reporter, a black community newspaper in San Francisco, Cleaver came across a story about Beverly Axelrod, a young white civil rights lawyer. The story featured a photo of Axelrod with one of her clients, a large black man who participated in 1964 protests on Cadillac Row to win black employment. Cleaver learned everything he could about Axelrod and then wrote her a letter calculated to win her support. It did.16 Axelrod visited Cleaver several times, and the two began to exchange letters. Soon their letters became romantic.17

  In his letters to Beverly, Eldridge wrote of the sense of hope and humanity that he found in her affection. But he also expressed a rawness, a lack of apology. As he wrote, he seemed to take off the mask obscuring his true identity. Finding legitimate love and support from a white woman seemed to confirm his humanity. He no longer had to play at being timid or to make himself appear insignificant in the world:

  I was 22 when I came to prison and of course I have changed tremendously over the years. But I always had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt I was losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that eluded me, as though I could not exactly locate its site. . . . since encountering you, I feel life strength flowing back into that spot. . . . I may even swagger a little, and, as I read in a book somewhere, “push myself forward like a train.”