by Joshua Bloom
The SDS resolution called Newton the most important “political prisoner” in the United States and urged SDS members to form Newton-Cleaver defense committees to raise money for the legal defense of Newton and other Panthers facing charges. These committees would also serve an educational role, teaching people about the case and about the structural roots of racist oppression.
The resolution declared SDS’s “total commitment to the fight for liberation in the colony and revolution in the mother country” and named the Black Panther Party the vanguard of all revolutionary struggle in the United States:
The sharpest struggles in the world today are those of the oppressed nations against imperialism and for national liberation. Within this country the sharpest struggle is that of the black colony for its liberation; it is a struggle which by its very nature is anti-imperialist and increasingly anti-capitalist. . . . Within the black liberation movement the vanguard force is the Black Panther Party. . . . We must keep in mind that the Black Panther Party is not fighting black people’s struggles only but is in fact the vanguard in our common struggles against capitalism and imperialism.27
UNITED FRONT AGAINST FASCISM
By the summer of 1969, the Black Panthers recognized that the broader New Left was turning toward their party for leadership. They seized the opportunity. In the May 31, 1969, issue of the Black Panther, the Party called for a “Revolutionary Conference for a United Front Against Fascism” (UFAF) to take place in Oakland in July. The issue featured a photo of nonblack New Left protestors on the cover next to a photo of Ericka Huggins with the caption “wife of the late John Jerome Huggins.” The headline read “Fascism in America.” Seven pages of the issue featured photos of crowds of nonblack New Leftists confronting bayonet-wielding National Guardsmen, a military helicopter gassing protestors, and graphic close-ups of wounded activists shot down by police. One photo caption featured Newton’s dictum “Politics is war without bloodshed . . . War is politics with bloodshed.” The centerfold, featuring a photo of a mob of police with shotguns and riot gear shutting down a street, declared, “The Black Panther Party Comes Forth. We Must Develop a United Front Against Fascism.” The text called for a broad people’s revolutionary alliance.28
The Panthers’ conference announcement in late May linked the police killing of white Berkeley activist James Rector to the incarceration of Huey Newton. The conference would help develop a political program for all “poor, black, oppressed workers and people of America.” It would also seek ways to advance community control of the police, free all political prisoners, expel the military from campus, and promote community self-defense. “People! Organizations! Groups! Yippies!” the flier announcing the conference beckoned, “Political Parties! Workers! Students! Peasant-Farmers! You the Lumpen! Poor People, Black People, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chinese . . . We Must Develop a United Front Against Fascism.”29
In their move to take greater leadership in organizing a revolutionary movement across race, the Black Panthers sought to make their class and cross-race anti-imperialist politics more explicit. They began featuring nonblack liberation movements on the cover of their newspaper, starting with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese. They began widely using the word fascism to describe the policies of the U.S. government. Then in July 1969, two weeks before the United Front Against Fascism Conference, the Panthers changed point 3 of their Ten Point Program from “We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community” to “We want an end to the robbery by the CAPITALIST of our Black Community” [emphasis in original].30
The Black Panther Party held the United Front Against Fascism Conference in Oakland from July 18 to 21. Some events took place outdoors in west Oakland at “Bobby Hutton Park” (officially DeFremery Park); others took place in the Oakland Auditorium. At least four thousand young radicals from around the country attended the conference. The delegates included Latinos, Asian Americans, and other people of color, but the majority of delegates were white. More than three hundred organizations attended, representing a broad cross-section of the New Left. In addition to the Young Lords, Red Guard, Los Siete de la Raza, Young Patriots, and Third World Liberation Front, attendees included the Peace and Freedom Party, the International Socialist Club, Progressive Labor, Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Socialist Alliance, and various groups within the Women’s Liberation Movement.31
Bobby Seale set the tone for the conference, reiterating his oft-stated challenge against black separatism: “Black racism is just as bad and dangerous as White racism.” He more explicitly emphasized the importance of class to revolution, declaring simply, “It is a class struggle.” Seale spoke against the ideological divisiveness among leftist organizations, arguing that such divisiveness would go nowhere. What was needed, he said, was a shared practical program. He called for the creation of a united “American Liberation Front” in which all communities and organizations struggling for self-determination in America could unite across race and ideology, demand community control of police, and secure legal support for political prisoners.32
Panther field marshal Don Cox talked about the necessity of armed self-defense. Elaine Brown, communications secretary for the Panthers from Southern California, presented a letter from Ericka Huggins, who at that time was in jail in New Haven, Connecticut, on conspiracy charges. Key Panther allies also spoke. Berkeley city councilman and future congressman Ron Dellums spoke about racism and politics. Father Earl Neil, pastor at St. Augustine Church, who had helped start the Panther’s first breakfast program, gave a liberation theology perspective on revolution. Jeff Jones of Students for a Democratic Society spoke about the McClellan Committee in Congress that was seeking to impose harsher sentencing on student activists and undermine SDS’s fight against fascism. Jones pointedly identified the Black Panther Party as the vanguard of revolution in the United States. William Kunstler spoke about community self-defense, pointing to the urban rebellions in Plainfield, New Jersey.33
A number of speakers drew parallels between their communities and the black community, seeking to show the applicability of various Black Panther political strategies across race. Roger Alvarado of the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State spoke about Los Siete de la Raza, as did Oscar Rios. The Parents of Adolfo Martinez, a member of Los Siete de la Raza, discussed the importance of the support of the Black Panthers and Third World alliance in furthering the struggle of Los Siete de la Raza. Penny Nakatsu from San Francisco State’s Third World Liberation Front spoke about Japanese internment during World War II. Preacher Man, the field secretary of the white Young Patriot Party in Chicago, spoke about the need for armed self-defense against the police in the poor white neighborhoods of Chicago. At one point, a group of rank-and-file Black Panthers and Young Patriots, all in uniform, lined up on stage, alternating black and white to demonstrate their united stand against fascism.34
NATIONAL COMMITTEES TO COMBAT FASCISM
The main outcome of the conference was that the Panthers decided to organize National Committees to Combat Fascism (NCCFs) around the country. The NCCFs would operate under the Panther umbrella, but unlike official Black Panther Party chapters, they would allow membership of nonblacks. In this way, the Black Panther Party could maintain the integrity of its racial politics yet step into more formal leadership of a broader revolutionary movement across race. Initially, the NCCFs focused on two issues: local campaigns for community control of police and the development of legal teams to defend political prisoners.
One of the main issues facing the organizations at the conference was how to obtain adequate legal defense for charges stemming from radical political activities. Charles R. Garry of San Francisco and William M. Kunstler of New York, both prominent lawyers who worked with the Panthers, along with Bay Area lawyers Peter Frank and Robert Truehaft, put out a call to lawyers, legal secretaries, and law students to meet to develop a plan. The National Lawyers Guild agreed to help. When Garry had spoken at the
UFAF conference, he had explained that the Nixon administration was seeking “more oppressive” measures against political radicals such as the Panthers. He said that Nixon was recommending that bail be eliminated in many political cases, and that in other cases, such as that of the New York 21—Black Panther activists facing dubious conspiracy charges—bail was being set impossibly high. He described wiretapping and other surveillance measures designed to repress radical politics and outlined a program to present seminars around the country over the next sixty days to enlist “a thousand lawyers to fight this fight against racism.” The lawyers would work with the NCCFs on two hundred to three hundred test cases to defend Panthers and other “political prisoners” arrested for their radical political activities.35
Soon after the United Front Against Fascism Conference, leftist organizations around the world—including the Coordinating Committee of the Mexican Student Movement, the Tokyo Communist League, the Young Left League of Sweden, and the Left Wing Socialist Party of Denmark—sent the Panthers declarations of support for the UFAF.36 The Black Panther Party was flooded with requests to open NCCFs throughout the country.37 By April 1970, in addition to official Black Panther chapters, NCCFs were opened and operating in at least eighteen cities around the country.38
GENDER REVOLUTION
As the race and class insurgency in the United States broadened in 1969, young women and some men also sought to revolutionize gender relations. At the Panthers’ United Front Against Fascism Conference, gender emerged as the most contentious issue. By that summer, the Women’s Liberation Movement was growing rapidly, and questions of gender were being seriously discussed nationally, especially in the New Left.
Women in the Black Panther Party organized a panel to discuss gender issues as part of the UFAF conference. Controversy erupted when the conference keynote speaker, renowned Communist historian Herbert Aptheker, spoke at great length. Some worried that the gender panel would not have an opportunity to present. One small group repeatedly interrupted Aptheker’s speech and eventually stormed out of the conference.
Nonetheless, the gender panel did convene. Black Panther Roberta Alexander spoke at length about the problem of gender politics in the Party. She acknowledged that sexism in the Party was a problem. In particular, women had been denied equal access to power in the Party. She distinguished gender oppression from race and class oppression but pointed out that it compounded these problems. In conclusion, she chastised the people who had walked out of the conference because Aptheker’s speech had dragged on. She said that men and women in the Party needed to address such problems collaboratively and find better ways of working together rather than tolerate male chauvinism and let it cause rifts.
Alexander first placed the issue of male chauvinism in its larger context, within the environment that had shaped the Party. Male supremacy, she explained, was “a true problem in our society and reflects capitalist society.” In turn, she argued, it was important to acknowledge the persistence and depth of struggles over gender and sexuality within the Party: male supremacist culture demanded stalwart resistance. She spoke of the daily struggles within the Party over issues such as women’s leadership within a male-dominated organization and the arming of women—namely, women’s engagement in what some saw as the “male practice” of armed self-defense. The most explosive daily struggle, she explained, was the mistaken notion that one of women’s revolutionary duties was to have sex with revolutionary men. She condemned some Panther men for seeking to use Party authority to demand sexual favors.39
Alexander argued, “Black women, interestingly enough, are oppressed as a class, part of the super-oppressed class of workers and unemployed in this country. Black women are oppressed because they are black, and then on top of that, black women are oppressed by black men. And that’s got to go [applause]. Not only has it got to go, but it is going [applause].” Finally, she urged men and women in the Party to stay unified as they struggled over issues of gender and sexuality because “one of the most destructive aspects of male supremacy is how it divides people who should be united. . . . When we struggle against male supremacy, we struggle with the brothers in the party and the brothers struggle too. Cause it ain’t the sisters that are doing all the struggle.”40
All three members of the panel emphasized the centrality of gender and sexuality in the revolutionary struggle. Marlene Dixon, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, criticized “bad faith” white male promises of equality. Black Panther Carol Henry lamented and urged resistance to a society wherein black women were victims of both mental and physical exploitation based “on the color of their skin and the shape of their breasts. . . . There cannot be a successful struggle against Fascism unless there is a broad front and women are drawn into it.”41
Although the Black Panther Party started as a male organization, its expansion brought many female members, and by 1968, women permeated all levels of the organization. Beyond the famous Panther women leaders, like Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, and Elaine Brown, and in addition to the thousands of rank-and-file women Panthers responsible for much of the daily work of the organization, numerous women played a key role in building and leading local Party chapters around the country. According to David Hilliard, unsung heroines like Lynn French in Chicago and Audrea Dunham in Boston were some of the Party’s most influential and inspirational local leaders, commanding loyalty and respect from Panther men and women alike. Dunham, who organized the Boston chapter of the Black Panther Party, provided such effective leadership that the Party enlisted a number of the Panthers she had recruited and trained to lead high-priority campaigns around the country. For example, one of her recruits was Doug Miranda, the star organizer sent to New Haven to lead the Party’s campaign in support of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins.42
Women’s agitation for gender equality within the Party pushed the national Black Panther leadership to take a stand. Eldridge Cleaver in particular had to respond to criticism of the explicit misogyny and sexism in Soul on Ice. Two weeks before the UFAF conference, while women Panthers were organizing the gender panel, Cleaver released his first public statement from exile. In a statement dedicated to the revolutionary example set by Erika Huggins, the apparently reformed Eldridge Cleaver urged his fellow male Panthers to champion gender equality.
We must purge our ranks and our hearts, and our minds, and our understanding of any chauvinism, chauvinistic behavior of disrespectful behavior toward women. . . . We must too recognize that a woman can be just as revolutionary as a man and that she has equal stature, along with men, and that we cannot prejudice her in any manner, that we cannot relegate her to an inferior position. . . . The liberation of women is one of the most important issues facing the world today. Great efforts have been made in various parts of the world to do something about this, but I know from my own experience that the smoldering and the burning of the flame for liberation of women in Babylon is the issue that is going to explode, and if we’re not careful its going to destroy our ranks, destroy our organization, because women want to be liberated just as all oppressed people want to be liberated. So if we go around and call ourselves a vanguard organization, then we’ve got to be the vanguard in all our behavior, and to be the vanguard also in the area of women’s liberation and set an example in that area.43
Initially, Panther leadership rooted its calls for gender equality in a normative heterosexuality. In his statement, Cleaver wrote, “Women are our other half, they’re not our weaker half, they’re not our stronger half, but they are our other half.”44 This reliance on patriarchal social norms was common in the Party, and in black revolutionary circles more broadly. One focus, for example, was the idea of revolutionary motherhood: having babies for the revolution. Akua Njeri (Deborah Johnson), Fred Hampton’s widow, remarked, “When you find your half that’s for real, right on, go on and make those revolutionary babies, cause the youth make the revolution.”45 Panther Candi Robinson offered a similar ar
gument: “Our men need, want and will love the beautiful children, that come from our fruitful wombs. . . . We are mothers of revolutionaries, with us is the future of our people.” Indeed, “we are sisters, are mothers of revolution, and within our wombs is the army of the people.. . . . We my sisters are revolutionary women of revolutionary men! We are mothers of revolution!”46 In this formulation of revolutionary motherhood, the revolutionary woman made babies not just for the revolutionary nation but for her revolutionary man. Revolutionary love, then, supported patriarchy, confirming conventional heterosexual gender norms. Malika Adams remembered, “I had three babies because I thought that it was my revolutionary duty to do that. I . . . wasn’t thinking of what I wanted for me.”47
In practice, such notions of revolutionary motherhood put severe burdens on some Panther women. The strains of state repression exacerbated these burdens, such as in the case of Akua Njeri, who lost the father of her child when the state assassinated Fred Hampton. Njeri later recalled the lack of support from the Party for her as a mother:
I was in the first group of women to become pregnant and have babies within the context of the Black Panther Party. There was nothing set up after the birth of Fred Hampton, Jr. that spoke to the issue of childcare, of how we would continue to function in the structure of the Party and continue to provide for our children. Before, when you were in the Party, you were by yourself, you could really sleep anywhere and you could work all night. But when you have the responsibility of children, you can’t do that. . . . There was no structure set up to work within the Party, to continue to work in the breakfast program, to continue to sell the newspaper. It was the demand to do it all or nothing. You would have to explain why you had to go take your child to the doctor, go through some struggle with that.48
