Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  On January 16, 1968, at 3:30 A.M., police knocked down the door to Kathleen and Eldridge’s apartment without a warrant. Armed with shotguns and pistols, cursing and yelling at the Cleavers, they threw around papers and furniture as they searched the apartment; when nothing of interest turned up, they left.26 In response, from prison Huey Newton issued Executive Mandate No. 3, ordering all members of the Black Panther Party to keep guns in their homes and to defend themselves against any police officers or others who attempted to invade their homes without a warrant.27 Accompanying the mandate was a bold photo of Kathleen, dressed in a long black leather jacket standing in the doorway to her apartment. In her arms she bore a large shotgun, pointed toward the camera, and the heading read “Shoot Your Shot!” With such actions, the Party sought to solidify the ethic it had established at the outset: both women and men bore responsibility for armed self-defense.28

  PEACE AND FREEDOM PARTY

  After Huey’s arrest and imprisonment, Eldridge’s role became “increasingly important, especially in the Party’s collaboration with the white radicals in the Free Huey movement,” Kathleen later recalled.29 The most important early alliance was with the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), founded by Ramparts editor Robert Scheer and other leaders of the Community for New Politics on June 23, 1967. The initial idea for the party, part of a national network of antiwar political organizations, picked up momentum as the black rebellions spread across the country that summer. After Martin Luther King Jr. gave the keynote address to 125,000 people at an antiwar rally in New York that April, many urged King to run for president of the United States. The Peace and Freedom Party sought to promote a strong antiwar and antiracist politics in opposition to the establishment Democratic Party, which was resolutely prowar and had distanced itself from the insurgent Black Liberation Struggle. The party garnered support from a range of progressive and left-wing organizations in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, including the Independent Socialist Club and the Communist Party. Yet from the start, party members had conflicting ideas about how to advance the party’s “ideological support for racial equality.”30

  On July 12, 1967, the membership of the Peace and Freedom Party voted to seek official registration of a candidate on the November 1968 ballot. To do so in California, the party needed to obtain sixty-seven thousand signatures. But a lack of consensus on the politics of race made achievement of this goal a major challenge. About twenty-five hundred activists, predominantly white and affiliated with a range of leftist organizations, gathered for the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago in early September. King spoke at the convention but declined to run as a peace candidate for president. Serious conflict arose when the three hundred black delegates formed a Black Caucus and proposed that half the posts on all conference committees be filled by members of their caucus. The conference leadership, needing black participation to legitimate their politics, voted in favor of the proposal—but important organizations opposed, notably members of the California Peace and Freedom Party such as Bob Avakian.31 Two weeks later, the California Peace and Freedom Party held its statewide conference to rally support for the California registration drive. Of the hundred fifty delegates who attended, about 10 percent were black. Again the black delegates formed a caucus and proposed that they be given 50 percent of voting rights. This time the proposal was defeated, and the entire Black Caucus walked out. The Communist Party representatives and others followed them.32

  Now almost exclusively white and desperate to salvage its antiracist and antiwar alliance in time for the registration deadline on January 3, leaders of the Peace and Freedom Party approached black organizations for support. SNCC and other black groups, however, rebuffed them.33 The results were disastrous. As December arrived, with less than a month to go before the registration deadline, the PFP had collected only about twenty-five thousand of the required sixty-seven thousand signatures. On December 18, with less than two weeks remaining, the California Supreme Court rejected the Peace and Freedom Party’s suit to extend the registration deadline and reduce the number of signatures required.34

  By this time, the October 28 shooting and the “Free Huey!” campaign had thrown the Black Panther Party into the national spotlight. Through Avakian, Scheer, and others, the Peace and Freedom Party approached the Panthers to propose a coalition. As Peace and Freedom organizing committee member Mike Parker recalled,

  We started out as a predominantly White group based on the anti-war movement, and from the very beginning we had the position that there could be no peace unless it was a peace among free men—that you did not have a true peace just because there was no war if people were oppressed. And so we made our slogan “Peace and Freedom” just to make it clear that we stood not only for ending the war in Vietnam and other wars but also for ending oppression. We were looking for groups in the Black community to work with and we found that the only group in the Black community that was even willing to talk with us about these kinds of questions in a serious way . . . was the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.35

  The coalition was announced on December 22, 1967. The white Left in Northern California, so troubled by the question of how to relate to Black Power, was surprised and enthralled. The Berkeley Barb, a weekly underground newspaper, called the coalition an “unprecedented combination of Black and white activists . . . the first such militant alliance since the ‘Black Power’ concept was outlined by Stokely Carmichael last year.”36 The coalition initially sought to ensure that Huey Newton received a fair trial but later demanded that Huey be set free unconditionally. The Peace and Freedom Party contributed $3,000 and use of its sound equipment to the “Free Huey!” campaign.37

  The Black Panther Party offered much needed legitimacy to the Peace and Freedom Party’s racial politics. With the Black Panthers at the table, many of the high-profile supporters who had walked out over the Peace and Freedom Party’s racial politics in September returned to endorse the registration drive, including James Vann of the Oakland Congress of Racial Equality, Si Casady of the California Democratic Council, and representatives of the Communist Party. The day after the announcement of the coalition, new registrations in Berkeley alone jumped to more than 500—reaching 1,200 per day by the end of the week. By the deadline on January 3, over 105,000 signatures had been gathered: the Peace and Freedom Party would be on the November ballot in California.38

  The coalition proved to be mutually beneficial. As a Black Panther editorial explained, “What we wanted and needed were people who were willing to work. . . . The Peace and Freedom Party was willing to work. In return, we were willing to hold rallies with them, to share platforms with them, and to recommend them to Black people who had their minds set on participating in electoral politics. . . . The Peace and Freedom Party acknowledges that we were helpful to them in gaining enough signatures to get on the ballot. We are glad that they made it and that we were instrumental in the success.”39

  The Party also keenly understood that the Black Liberation Struggle needed nonblack allies, particularly progressive white allies. An editorial in the Black Panther explained why this alliance was important: “The increasing isolation of the black radical movement from the white radical movement was a dangerous thing, playing into the power structure’s game of divide and conquer. We feel that in taking the step of making the coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party, we have altered the course of history on a minor, but important level.”40

  From its inception, the Black Panther Party had embraced both an uncompromising commitment to black liberation and a principled rejection of a separatist black politics. The coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party, which a number of black nationalists criticized, illustrated both. Explaining the Party’s position to its expanding black base was critical. “Because our Party has the image of an uncompromising stand against the oppression of the white power structure on Black people, we could take this step without getting shot down with the charge of selling out.”41

  As
the Black Panther Party promoted the “Free Huey!” campaign, it built on emerging alliances with students and white antiwar activists, advancing an anti-imperialist political ideology that linked the oppression of antiwar protestors to the oppression of blacks and Vietnamese. Bobby Seale elaborated this position at a January 28, 1968, rally at UC Berkeley supporting students who had been arrested during Stop the Draft Week. Citing Newton’s article “On the Functional Definition of Politics,” Seale spoke to the crowd about self-defense power and the parallels between the Vietnamese and the black American liberation struggles. He pointed out that the antidraft students were locked up right alongside Huey Newton in the Alameda County jail. He made common cause with the students, arguing that the antiwar demonstrators faced a plight like that of the black community:

  Black people have protested police brutality. And many of you thought we were jiving, thought we didn’t know what we were talking about, because many Black people in the community probably couldn’t answer your questions articulately. But now you are experiencing this same thing. When you go down in front of the draft [board], when you go over and you demonstrate in front of Dean Rusk, those pig cops will come down and brutalize your heads just like they brutalized the heads of black people in the black community. We are saying now that you can draw a direct relationship that is for real and that is not abstract anymore: you don’t have to abstract what police brutality is like when a club is there to crush your skull; you don’t have to abstract what police brutality is like when there is a vicious service revolver there to tear your flesh; you can see in fact that the real power of the power structure maintaining its racist regime is manifested in its occupying troops, and is manifested in its police department—with guns and force.42

  Antiwar activists eagerly took up the analogy. Free Speech Movement veteran and Communist Party member Bettina Aptheker spoke after Seale and emphasized the escalating repression of the antiwar movement and its common cause with both the Black Liberation Struggle and the “Free Huey!” campaign. “The ghettos have become occupied territories in the United States. This peace movement should have called for the immediate withdrawal of troops in July from Newark and Detroit. It failed to do that and it should have done that just as it calls for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Vietnam,” she exhorted. “For a long time the ghetto communities in this country have borne the brunt of the assault on the democratic rights of all of us, and it is now perhaps first coming home to us that to defend the rights in the ghetto is to defend our own rights.”43 Bob Avakian also spoke, noting that Huey’s case and that of the draft resisters were “interrelated” and together posed a fundamental challenge to “power in this society.” He explained, “The Black Liberation Movement poses that challenge. The Antiwar Movement and the Antidraft Movement as it moves towards resistance is beginning to pose that challenge. And they are responding the way all blind tyrants respond when their power is challenged. By brute force and by attempting to mitigate that brute force through the veneer of a court apparatus which we all know is rigged.”44

  A few weeks later, the Black Panther carried a cartoon by Emory Douglas titled “It’s All the Same” that graphically illustrated the three-part anti-imperialist analogy. The cartoon featured three identical drawings of a filthy pig in uniform surrounded by flies and carrying a machine gun, napalm, mace, and a pistol. The first panel identified the pig as the local police. The second panel identified the pig as the National Guard. The third panel identified the pig as the Marines. The Peace and Freedom Party picked up and distributed the graphic, citing the Black Panthers, to bolster its argument that the oppression that antiwar activists faced for opposing the war was part and parcel not only of the struggle for black liberation but also of the international struggle against imperialism.45

  COMING OF AGE

  On February 17, 1968, Huey Newton’s twenty-sixth birthday, the Black Panther Party came of age. In a massive, predominantly black rally in the Oakland Auditorium, while Newton sat in jail, the Black Panthers announced a merger with SNCC. The terms of the merger were ambiguous; SNCC itself was in crisis, and the merger did not last long. But for the Black Panther Party, an organization that only a year earlier had barely been known outside of Oakland, the event marked an important step in the maturation of its politics and its emergence on the national political stage.

  In the center of the auditorium stage sat Huey’s wicker throne from the famous photograph, empty of course. In addition to Eldridge Cleaver, who served as master of ceremonies, and Bobby Seale, the day’s speakers included three of the most famous leaders of SNCC: James Forman, H. Rap Brown, and Stokely Carmichael. Bob Avakian from the Peace and Freedom Party and Berkeley Councilman Ron Dellums were also on stage, as was Armelia Newton, Huey Newton’s mother.

  Seale focused most of his speech on the need to stand up to police brutality and organize to free Huey. He also spelled out a fuller view of the Panthers’ politics. Summarizing the Panthers’ Ten Point Program, he emphasized the need to serve the community, describing a Panther campaign to erect a stoplight at 55th and Market Streets in Oakland, where speeding cars had killed several children. He then delved into the Party’s position on whites:

  When the Man walks up and says we are anti-white, I scratch my head, I say, “. . . what does he mean by that?” He says, “Well, I mean, you hate white people.” I say, “Me? Hate a white person?” I say, “Wait a minute, man, let’s back up a little bit. That’s your game. That’s the Ku Klux Klan’s game.” I say, “That is the Ku Klux Klan’s game to hate me and murder me because of the color of my skin.” I say, “I wouldn’t murder a person or brutalize him because of the color of his skin.” I say, “Yeah, we hate something, alright! We hate the oppression that we live in! We hate cops beating black people over the heads and murdering them. That’s what we hate!” If you’ve got enough energy to sit down and hate a white person just because of the color of his skin, you’re wasting a lot of energy. You’d better take that same energy and put it in some motion out there, and start dealing with those oppressive conditions, and you’re going to find out just what you hate, and what you’re going to stop.46

  H. Rap Brown then spoke eloquently about the importance of freeing Huey. But in contrast to Bobby, he framed this question in terms of generic opposition to whites:

  Huey Newton is the only living revolutionary in this country today. He has paid his dues! He paid his dues! How many white folks you kill today? . . . Yes, politics IS war without bloodshed; and war is an extension of those politics. But there is no politics in this country that is relevant to us . . . to black people.47

  Stokely Carmichael extended the point:

  The major enemy is the honky . . . THAT’s the major enemy! THAT is the major enemy! And whenever anybody prepares for revolutionary warfare, you concentrate on the major enemy. We’re not strong enough to fight each other and also fight him. We WILL not fight each other today! We WILL not fight each other. There will BE no fights in the black community among black people. There will just be people who will be offed. There will be no fights, there will be no disruptions. We are going to be united! . . . Now then, some people may not understand brother Rap when he talked about whom we ally with. He said we have to ally with Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and the dispossessed people of the earth; he did not mention poor whites. . . . Who do you think has more hatred pent up in them, white people for black people, or black people for white people? White people for black people, obviously. The hatred has been more. What have we done to them for them to build up this hatred? Absolutely nothing. Yet . . . we don’t even want to have the chance to hate them for what they’ve done to us, and if hate should be justified we have the best justification in the world for hating the honkys! We have it! We have it! We have it!48

  SNCC, as much as any organization, had given birth to the idea of forming a Black Panther Party. SNCC was born in the South out of the early 1960s fight against Jim Crow. Perhaps more than any other organizati
on, it was responsible for mobilizing the nonviolent civil disobedience that brought de jure racial segregation to its knees. From 1965 through 1967, SNCC had nurtured the shift of a militant younger generation toward black nationalism and the call for Black Power. As SNCC chairman, Stokely Carmichael had initiated several Black Panther organizations in various cities in 1967. Yet even as SNCC spread the powerful message of Black Power, the organization had never developed a practical strategy to sustain these Black Panther organizations or the broader movement politically. SNCC had no real constituency, no effective tactics, no institutional framework for advancing Black Power politics. By Huey’s birthday on February 17, 1968, SNCC was starting to collapse.

  The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense filled the vacuum left by SNCC. Among black nationalists and the Left, Newton was now widely viewed as a political prisoner: a radical activist being railroaded to prison for his politics. Using the political framework it had developed following Sacramento, the Black Panther Party could now turn all its energies toward freeing him. If SNCC was the mother and the Black Panther Party the child, then on the very stage that SNCC and the Black Panther Party had announced their merger to the world, the Panthers, as every child must, now left its mother behind to strike out on its own.

  The SNCC leaders criticized the Panthers’ politics of aligning with white leftists, including their decisions to hire a white lawyer and raise money from whites to defend Huey. More broadly, SNCC leaders suggested that the Black Panther Party was good at particular tactics but not a fully effective political entity. SNCC, its leadership suggested, was the senior partner in the SNNC–Black Panther Party alliance, the partner with the stronger overarching political view. In his February 17 speech, Carmichael implied that the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was principally concerned with self-defense activities, or at least ought to be.