Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  Fourth, these programs not only kept the Party alive in the face of awesome state repression, they also initially enabled it to grow during these trying times. Party members’ arduous work with very little formal remuneration—particularly in the breakfast programs and free medical clinics—won the Panthers’ strong support in black communities and contributed substantially to the Party’s “street credibility.” This vital work likewise had strong support from liberal and progressive blacks and whites.

  The Party’s emphasis on direct community service as a means of advancing black community self-determination and ameliorating the ills besetting them linked it to the historic organizing tradition of the Black Liberation Struggle. Just as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s extraordinary organizing work helped galvanize the Southern Civil Rights Movement, the Panthers’ organizing efforts were vital to galvanizing the national Black Liberation Struggle.61 The social service programs linked the Party’s organizing work to a long tradition, including the work of organizations like the postwar Nation of Islam, with its successful rehabilitation programs for black male prisoners, exemplified by the rehabilitation of Malcolm X.62 These kinds of formal programs constituted concrete steps to advance the best interests of the black nation within the American nation. Black Panthers saw their own community-based programs as part of their commitment to a black nation-building project, an expression of the Party’s revolutionary nationalism.

  Even as the state wrenched into overdrive to decimate the Party in 1969 and 1970, the community service programs attracted innumerable new Party members and supporters and enabled the Party to keep growing. Jimmy Slater explained that he joined the Cleveland chapter because of “the many different positive programs sponsored by the party.”63 Flores A. Forbes noted that “the work I most enjoyed” was the community service programs, particularly the free breakfast programs for children in the four main Watts housing projects.64

  The state marshaled its vast and enormous powers and labored overtime to destroy the Party. In late August 1970, a series of Gestapo-like raids of several Panther headquarters by the notorious Philadelphia police proved disastrous for the Party, causing extensive property loss and damage and subjecting arrested Party members to humiliating public strip searches in front of the media and the community. Still, the community did not abandon the Party. Instead, in early September, ignoring police orders, community members labored to return the North Philadelphia office to a habitable state. Clarence Peterson remembered, “It was the most beautiful experience I’ve ever had in my whole life. I really cried because the people opened up our offices again. . . . We did not think our office would open again. The people in the community put everything back in the office. They put furniture back . . . they fed us for about a week . . . they kept our kids. It was something that I have never seen or heard of before. It was really something . . . it was out of sight . . . they told the cops that these are our Panthers, so leave them alone.”65 Precisely because the Panthers responded as best they could to the pressing concerns of their home communities, these communities embraced their Panthers, and the ties between local Panthers and local communities deepened. This deepening support came just in time.

  8

  Law and Order

  On Sunday night September 8, 1968, Newton was convicted of manslaughter in the killing of Officer Frey and sentenced to two to fifteen years in prison. He was acquitted of wounding the other officer. Many Panthers and their supporters were disappointed that their efforts had not saved Huey. Newton’s lawyer, Charles Garry, promised to appeal the decision. According to the New York Times, many police saw the sentence differently and wanted Newton executed for the killing of Frey. About thirty hours after Newton’s conviction, at 1:30 in the morning on September 10, two white on-duty uniformed police officers shot up the windows and office of the Black Panther headquarters at 4421 Grove Street in Oakland.

  Residents of the area awoke to the sound of gunfire. Witnesses who saw the shooting said that the police shot at the office from inside their parked car, across four lanes of Grove Street. According to police sources, the officers fired more than a dozen bullets. The pattern of the bullet holes left by the shooting suggested that the officers were aiming at a poster of Newton in the wicker throne in the office front window.1

  Insurgency destabilizes traditional political arrangements, forcing various constituencies to take sides on contentious issues and leading to realignments. Such realignments are often accompanied by brutal attempts by traditional authorities to repress insurgents. In the United States in 1968, just such a political realignment took place. By 1968, the broad insurgency of which the Panthers were part—encompassing the ghetto rebellions and draft resistance—made status quo political arrangements ungovernable.

  The governing Democratic coalition split along two axes—race and the Vietnam War. In the 1968 presidential election, Republican Richard Nixon seized the day with a “Law and Order” platform that attacked the Democrats by attacking the insurgents. Nixon’s victory that year brought increasingly virulent state repression of the Black Panthers alongside broad alienation of blacks and liberals.

  COINTELPRO

  Even before Nixon’s election, as the Black Panther Party mobilized young blacks in cities across the country, the federal government had targeted the Party for concerted repressive action. From the inception of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1908, the agency had targeted both leftists and black political organizations for covert investigation and at times disruption. Prime targets included Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Communist Party, the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.2 In 1956, the FBI formalized and consolidated its disruptive (rather than intelligence-gathering) activities into the first counterintelligence program, or COINTELPRO, specifically targeting the Communist Party USA.3

  During the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, the FBI assiduously monitored the activities of civil rights activists but did little to protect them from illegal violence and sometimes zealously prosecuted movement leaders. Yet through 1963, the FBI did little to actively and directly repress the Civil Rights Movement.4 However, by the end of 1963, as the movement attained international coverage and support, the FBI had undertaken extensive efforts to hound and discredit Martin Luther King Jr., and it continued this activity until his death five years later. The agency disseminated damning information—some obtained through spying and some fabricated—to political leaders, funders, allies, churches, and journalists, alleging, for example, that King was under Communist influence or that he was having extramarital affairs. Sometimes the FBI alleged misappropriation of funds or various forms of hypocrisy. Though the FBI persisted in its efforts to discredit King, the campaign against him waned from December 1964 until 1967, when he came out against the Vietnam War.5

  In the summer of 1967, the FBI dramatically shifted the direction and intensity of its repression of black political organizations. In the summer of 1966, Stokely Carmichael first called for Black Power, and the Black Liberation Struggle entered a new phase. Organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Revolutionary Action Movement declared common cause with the Vietnamese in opposing the American empire. By the following year, the tenor of the movement had become more nationalist and more confrontational. Urban rebellions raged in ghettos throughout the country. In Newark and Detroit, participants in the rebellions proclaimed black nationalist goals and called for armed resistance against the state. Thousands of young blacks rebelled. On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. joined the younger generation of black movement leaders in publicly denouncing U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.6

  Many in the federal government believed the growing black rebellion constituted a threat to the internal security of the country. On August 25, 1967, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to twenty-three FBI field offices around the country instructing
agents to initiate counterintelligence activities against black nationalist organizations:

  Offices receiving copies of this letter are instructed to immediately establish a control file . . . and to assign responsibility for following and coordinating this new counterintelligence program to an experienced and imaginative Special Agent well versed in investigations relating to black nationalist, hate-type organizations. . . . The purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters. . . . Efforts of various groups to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents must be frustrated.7

  The memo targeted six “black nationalist hate-type” organizations. Most revealing was the inclusion of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference on the list. This was noteworthy because King and the other Christian ministers in the SCLC continued to call for nonviolence and rejected black nationalism outright, advocating instead for reforms within the political framework of the United States that would address the plight of blacks and other poor and dispossessed Americans. After the defeat of Jim Crow in the mid-1960s, King and the SCLC redirected their efforts and sought to heed the concerns of young blacks, calling for redress of the problems of poverty and for an end to the Vietnam War. In Hoover’s view, these political positions qualified the SCLC as a leading “black nationalist, hate-type” organization and a dire threat to national security.8 The Black Panther Party, at the time still a local organization in the Oakland Bay Area, was not mentioned.

  On March 4, 1968, J. Edgar Hoover expanded the COINTELPRO against black nationalists to forty-one field offices, and in a new memo established the following five long-term goals for the program:

  Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups. In unity there is strength; a truism that is no less valid for all its triteness. An effective coalition of black nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real “Mau Mau” in America, the beginning of a true black revolution.

  Prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a “messiah;” he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammad is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed “obedience” to “white, liberal doctrines” (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.

  Prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups. This is of primary importance, and is, of course, a goal of our investigative activity; it should also be a goal of the Counterintelligence Program. Through counterintelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.

  Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability, by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community. The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically in three ways. You must discredit these groups and individuals to, first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to “liberals” who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalists simply because they are Negroes. Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement. This last area requires entirely different tactics from the first two. Publicity about violent tendencies and radical statements merely enhances black nationalists to the last group; it adds “respectability” in a different way.

  A final goal should be to prevent the long-range growth of militant black nationalist organizations, especially among youth. Specific tactics to prevent these groups from converting young people must be developed.9

  One month later to the day, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

  Following the assassinations of King and Bobby Hutton, the Black Panther Party quickly spread across the country and attained tremendous influence. By the fall of 1968, the Party had clearly emerged as the nation’s leading black movement organization. The party’s rhetoric and ideology did not change significantly in this period, nor did its tactics. The Party was no more militant in action or rhetoric in September 1968 than it had been in March. What changed was the party’s influence, its growing national scope, and the political challenge it now posed to the status quo. While the FBI did not mention the Black Panther Party in earlier COINTELPRO memos targeting black nationalist organizations, the agency now began to focus its attention on the Panthers. According to an FBI internal memo in September 1968:

  The extremist [Black Panther Party] of Oakland, California, is rapidly expanding . . . [It] is essential that we not only accelerate our investigations of this organization, and increase our informants in the organization but that we take action under the counterintelligence program to disrupt the group. . . . The attached letter will instruct the field to submit positive suggestions as to actions to be taken to thwart and disrupt the [Party]. . . . These suggestions are to create factionalism between not only the national leaders but also local leaders, steps to neutralize all organizational efforts of the [Black Panther Party], as well as create suspicion amongst the leaders as to each other’s sources of finances, suspicion concerning their respective spouses and suspicion as to who may be cooperating with law enforcement. In addition, suspicion should be developed as to who may be attempting to gain control of the organization for their own private betterment, as well as suggestions as to the best method of exploiting the foreign visits made by [Party] members. We are also soliciting recommendations as to the best method of creating opposition to the [Black Panther Party] on the part of the majority of the residents of the ghetto areas.10

  THE HAWK IS DEAD

  Even as the federal government targeted the Black Panther Party for intensive repression in 1968, deepening cleavages in the ruling Democratic Party coalition increased the salience of the Panthers’ politics. The divide in the Democratic coalition over the politics of race was not new. In the early 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement had forced the national Democratic Party’s hand on the question of civil rights for blacks. President Lyndon Johnson’s support of civil rights won broad support but alienated many southern Democrats. Johnson had won the presidency in a landslide in 1964, winning every state but five in the Deep South and Arizona. The ongoing Black Liberation Struggle in the mid-1960s deepened the divisions over race in the Democratic coalition. Liberals in the Democratic Party supported full equal civil rights for blacks but could not support calls for black self-determination by the younger generation of Black Power activists. Conversely, many traditional southern Democrats assailed liberals for “encouraging rebellion” and called for uncompromising repression of black activists.

  The mid-1960s also brought a new divide over the Vietnam War. The public came to oppose the war, with one Gallup poll showing that 58 percent believed the war was a mistake by October 1968.11 President Johnson’s difficulty appeasing opponents of the war had first become serious in 1967 with the spread of draft resistance. Johnson could not simply ignore the draft resistance as he had earlier shrugged off more passive protests against the war; the card burning and induction refusals challenged his leadership. Consequently, the president sought to discredit the antiwar movement. He repeatedly pressed the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency to investigate links between the antiwar movement and foreign governments. His administration leaked allegations to the press about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “communist” aides and the Communist affiliations of other leading antiwar organizers in order to discredit the protest among liberals. But these efforts failed. While many Americans said they opposed the militancy of the draft resisters, the draft resistance movement ate away at Johnson’s credibility.12 />
  The draft resistance movement challenged the legitimacy of the war. The anti-imperialist idea that the Vietnamese were fighting for their liberation contradicted the administration’s assertion that the North Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF), or Vietcong, was unpopular and would be rapidly defeated. Like the Civil Rights Movement, the militancy of the draft resistance forced the federal government to intervene to maintain social order. Also like the Civil Rights Movement, the protests increasingly resonated with popular sympathies. By December 1967, support for the war was declining; some 45 percent of people polled thought the Vietnam War was a mistake.13 But unlike the Civil Rights Movement, draft resistance specifically violated federal rather than local policies.

  After the Pentagon protests, with graphic challenges to Johnson’s leadership and no end of the war in sight, support for Johnson’s handling of the war fell to a low of 28 percent. A week later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told Johnson that he strongly disapproved of the president’s Vietnam policy and resigned. Criticism in the press ballooned, and challenges in Congress became bolder. In November 1967, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy defied political convention and announced that he would seek the Democratic Party nomination for the 1968 presidential election, thereby challenging the incumbent president from his own party. McCarthy framed his campaign almost entirely as a crusade against the war in Vietnam.14