Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  In practice, through its heyday in the late 1960s, the Party often provided no more support for Panther mothers in handling the demands of child care and motherhood than most employers did at the time for their women employees.

  As the Women’s Liberation Movement and Gay Liberation Movement gained steam, the Black Panther Party leadership sought to deepen its commitment to gender and sexual liberation. A year after the UFAF conference, Huey Newton issued a formal Party position about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements, challenging the heterosexual normativity and patriarchy in the Party. With Newton’s public stance, the Black Panther Party became the first major national black organization to embrace gay rights. Newton identified “homosexuals and women as oppressed groups,” noting that “homosexuals . . . might be the most oppressed people in the society” and arguing that a homosexual man “should have freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants to.”49

  The Black Panther Party saw black liberation as part of a global struggle against oppression, and Newton now identified women’s and gay liberation as integral axes in that global struggle. He noted the importance of building alliances with women’s liberation and gay liberation organizations: “When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women’s liberation movement.”50

  Finally, Newton acknowledged the need to confront ingrained gender and sexual values and language. In particular, he called for an end to Panthers’ use of derogatory terms for homosexuals to disparage political enemies: “The terms ‘faggot’ and ‘punk’ should be deleted from our vocabulary, and especially we should not attach names normally designed for homosexuals to men who are enemies of the people, such as Nixon or Mitchell. Homosexuals are not enemies of the people.”51 Newton recognized that such language reflected basic social values, acknowledged that mere recognition of the problem of gender and sexual oppression was not enough to solve it, and suggested the need for a more complete transformation of social values: “We haven’t established a revolutionary value system; we’re only in the process of establishing it.”52

  Despite the Party’s ideology, which at times reflected quite advanced thinking about gender and sexual liberation, deeply rooted sexism made the struggle for gender and sexual equality difficult. As with men in the broader world, changing Panther men’s chauvinist attitudes and practices was a major challenge. Nationalism has historically been a gendered project, centered on patriarchy and male privilege.53 The revolutionary black nationalism of the Black Panther Party began as part of that traditional project. Panther women and some Panther men fought heroically to break the Party out of that historical mold.

  A critical element of the struggle was the development of feminist consciousness among Black Panther women. Looking back on her experiences as a Party member, Malika Adams noted, “Our consciousness about ourselves as women was very underdeveloped for the most part. . . . We didn’t see ourselves as separate from the brothers. . . . I don’t know that we really saw ourselves as women. . . . I think we saw ourselves in the eyes of men. The men defined pretty much what we were.”54

  The history of activism by revolutionary and radical women was relatively unknown at the time, which left women struggling with male interpretations of their role. As Angela Davis recalled, “Even those of us who were women did not know how to develop ways of being revolutionaries that were not informed by masculine definitions of the revolutionary. The revolutionaries were male. The women who became revolutionaries had to make themselves in those images.”55

  Given this masculinist context, women had to define for themselves their identities as women and revolutionaries. Rosemari Mealy later commented, “If you were . . . so male-identified, it was impossible for you to separate yourself as a woman and really internalize who you are as a woman and commit yourself as a woman to the struggle.”56

  Endemic and often intense Party struggles over issues of gender and sexuality yielded a richly varied, evolving, and at times highly contested gender and sexual consciousness within and beyond the Party. As Janet Cyril observed, this complex and uneven consciousness “developed by . . . fits and starts.” “It grew out of . . . daily living and an evolving necessity in changing relationships . . . over a period of time.”57

  Given that the Black Panther Party’s principal battle was against white supremacy and capitalist exploitation, male-female relationships and issues of gender and sexuality often took a back seat. Cyril remembered, “It was considered traitorous to deal with issues of gender in the context of the Black Revolution. I mean, people felt that strongly. . . . A lot of women felt like that also. . . . There was a lot of back and forth debate over that.” As a result, innumerable women thought that “you were betraying brothers if you criticized what was going on with sisters in a general way.” Tackling issues of gender and sexuality, especially from women’s points of view, was to undermine race unity and thus impede the Black Liberation Struggle.58

  The extreme repression the Party endured further intensified the common belief and feeling that the racial and class components of the struggle had to take priority. Elaine Brown recalled, “We clung to each other fiercely. We forgot cliques and chauvinism and any bit of internal strife.”59 Ericka Huggins expressed a similar feeling:

  In those days [we fought to] get rid of racism so we could stay alive. We didn’t even think about sexism except when it reared its head. We didn’t spend our time looking at what men and women did or didn’t do because we didn’t have time to think about it. We were too busy living so we didn’t die. . . . A lot of people don’t understand what that means in a day-to-day interaction. We were constantly looking over our shoulders. All I wanted to know about the person next to me, be it a man or woman, was would they back me up. If I needed to put my life in this person’s hands, would it be all right. I didn’t care whether they were man or woman, gay or straight, or any of that.60

  Championing liberation struggle against all forms of oppression, the irrepressible Black Panther Party drove an ever-widening cycle of insurgency. How far would the revolutionary movement spread?

  14

  International Alliance

  On Friday November 29, 1968, fifteen hundred delegates from throughout the Americas gathered in Montreal for the Hemispheric Conference to End the War in Vietnam. The delegates were political leaders from throughout the Americas who opposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam, including Salvador Allende, at that time president of the Chilean Senate (and later president of Chile); antiwar activists from a range of organizations; Quebeçois secessionists; and a delegation from North Vietnam led by the North Vietnamese minister of culture, M. Hoang Minh Giam. The Black Panther Party sent a delegation led by Bobby Seale and David Hilliard and including a dozen rank-and-file Panthers from various chapters.1

  At the opening plenary at St. James Church in downtown Montreal, Seale argued that peace could not be achieved without justice. He said that the Vietnam War was a criminal act of U.S. aggression and called for a worldwide struggle against imperialism. On behalf of the Black Panther delegation, he put forth a long resolution stating in part, “Our purpose in attending this conference was a reaffirmation of our commitment to concrete support of the heroic struggles of the Vietnamese people and of all People’s Liberation Struggles—it was not to hear vague resolutions passed in support of world peace.” The conference focus, he said, “should be changed from supporting world peace to supporting Third-World Liberation Struggles and the title of this conference changed from Hemispheric Conference to End the War in Vietnam to Hemispheric Conference to Defeat American Imperialism.” The conference delegates gave him a standing ovation. Brother Zeke, a Black Panther from the Baltimore chapter, was elected chairman of the conference, and the program for the weekend was revised in keeping with the Panthers’ proposed anti-imperialist theme. The French newspaper Le Monde reported that in speaking out about the fight against “imperialism in a
ll its forms,” the Panthers had captured the imagination of the international delegates and set the tone of the conference.2

  Throughout the conference, various Black Panther speakers drew an analogy between their struggle and that of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. They compared the rapid expansion of police departments and the brutalization of blacks in American ghettos with the occupation of Vietnam by the U.S. military. They asserted their right to self-defense and challenged the legitimacy of American authority in the ghettos. “We say that the oppressor has no laws and no rights that the oppressed are bound to respect. We cannot respect it.” Further, they proclaimed the universal “right to self-determination.” The Panthers said that they and the other delegates shared a common struggle to end the wars of repression being waged against those seeking self-determination throughout Latin America and the Third World and among the communities in the United States, “even against the white hippies and the leftists and those who are looking for much individual freedom.”3

  At the end of the conference, American delegates handed their draft cards to the Vietnamese representatives. Taking to the stage, the Vietnamese delegation built a small fire and burned the draft cards as the audience cheered. In solidarity with the Panthers, delegates in the audience raised their fists in the Black Panther salute and joined in the chant, “Panther Power to the Vanguard!” Their voices resonated throughout the church. Then, in front of the fifteen hundred delegates, the Minister M. Hoang Minh Giam turned toward David Hilliard and proclaimed, “You are Black Panthers, We are Yellow Panthers!”4

  MARXISM AND ANTI-IMPERIALISM

  The Black Panther Party’s anti-imperialist politics were deeply inflected with Marxist thought. Evolving Marxist thinking underwrote the Panthers’ class politics and helped them articulate alliances with a broad range of international as well as domestic actors. Primarily committed to advancing the interests of black people in the United States as part of a global struggle against imperialism, the Panthers’ Marxist class analysis helped build common ground with other constituencies in the United States and internationally. The Party’s embrace of Marxism was never rigid, sectarian, or dogmatic. Motivated by a vision of a universal and radically democratic struggle against oppression, ideology seldom got in the way of the Party’s alliance building and practical politics.

  In 1971, Huey Newton explained that the Black Panthers were “dialectical materialists,” thereby drawing a dynamic and evolving method of political analysis from Marx rather than any stagnant set of ideas. He argued, “Marx himself said, ‘I am not a Marxist’. . . . If you are a dialectical materialist . . . you do not believe in the conclusions of one person but in the validity of a mode of thought; and we in the Party, as dialectical materialists, recognize Karl Marx as one of the great contributors to that mode of thought.”5 Eldridge Cleaver made a similar point. Writing in the fall of 1969, Cleaver argued that independence struggles in Asia demonstrated that a foreign ideology should not be adopted wholesale. Specifically, any Marxist dogma notwithstanding, he asserted that unemployed blacks were a legitimate revolutionary group and that the Black Panther Party’s version of Marxism transcended the idea that an industrial working class was the sole agent of revolution.6

  From the start, the Black Panther Party drew upon Marxist thought, and Marxist theory imbued its political statements and actions. The Party’s original Ten Point Program and Newton’s essay “The Functional Definition of Politics,” both published in the second issue of the Black Panther, on May 15, 1967, employed the foundational Marxist concept of “means of production.”7 However, the Party’s use and incorporation of Marxist theory evolved greatly over time. Different Panther leaders used Marxist theory in different ways, to different degrees, and at different times. One important turning point in Marxist influence on Black Panther political theory was the rise of Ray “Masai” Hewitt to Party leadership. Coming into the Party from Los Angeles, Hewitt had read deeply in Mao and Marx. He proved to be a supreme educator and was soon brought to serve in the Party’s national headquarters in Oakland.8

  With Masai Hewitt’s involvement, the cover of the Black Panther began featuring international nonblack liberation struggles. Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese were the first such revolutionaries to be featured on the cover, appearing in the paper in March 1969. Such coverage was frequent thereafter. Hewitt visited Chicago, and soon the Party chapter there was teaching members to read Mao and Marx as well as Malcolm X. In July, Hewitt was appointed minister of education, and the Party’s engagement with Marxist thought continued to deepen. That month, the Party further integrated race and class analysis into its Ten Point Program, changing point 3 from “We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community” to the Marx-inflected point “We want an end to the robbery by the CAPITALIST of our Black Community.”9

  Nondogmatic throughout its history, the Black Panther Party worked with a range of leftist organizations with very different political ideologies—a highlight being its hosting of the United Front Against Fascism Conference in July 1969.10 The unchanging core of the Black Panther Party’s political ideology was black anti-imperialism. The Party always saw its core constituency as “the black community,” but it also made common cause between the struggle of the black community and the struggles of other peoples against oppression. Marxism and class analysis helped the Black Panthers understand the oppression of others and to make the analogy between the struggle for black liberation and other struggles for self-determination. While the Marxist content deepened and shifted over the Party’s history, this basic idea held constant. The Black Panther Party saw itself as the revolutionary vanguard advancing the interests of the black community for self-determination within a larger global struggle against imperialism. Huey Newton sought to more fully articulate this theory as a theory of “revolutionary intercommunalism” in 1971.11

  The Panthers’ line of Marx-inflected anti-imperialist thinking drew on a long line of black anticolonialist thinkers going back at least to W. E. B. Du Bois.12 This anti-imperialist perspective drove the world-changing Bandung Conference in 1955, was taken up by Malcolm X, and underwrote the Non-Aligned Movement, in which such international Panther allies as the postcolonial government of Algeria played important roles. The nondogmatic, Marx-inflected anti-imperialism of the Black Panthers allowed them to find common cause with many other movements around the world. It underwrote their practical political alliances with a wide range of international movements.

  SCANDINAVIA

  Drawn to the Black Panthers’ synthesis of race and class politics, anti-imperialist movements from around the world came to see the Party as part of their own global cause. One of the Panthers’ early sources of solidarity and support was the left-wing movements in Scandinavia. The lead organizer of this support was Connie Matthews, an energetic and articulate young Jamaican woman employed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Copenhagen, Denmark. In early 1969, Matthews organized a tour for Bobby Seale and Masai Hewitt throughout Scandinavia to raise money and support for the “Free Huey!” campaign. She and Panther Skip Malone worked out the logistics of the trip with various left-wing Scandinavian organizations, enlisting their support by highlighting the class politics of the Black Panther Party. “I am only too willing time and time again to repeat to European audiences,” Matthews told a reporter from Land and Folk, the Communist newspaper in Copenhagen, “that the BPP is speaking about a world proletarian revolution and recognize themselves as part of this. It is a question of the oppressor against the oppressed regardless of race.”13

  The tour took Bobby Seale and Masai Hewitt to Stockholm, Sweden; Oslo, Norway; Helsinki, Finland; and Copenhagen (with a brief stop in Germany), where they talked at each stop about the Black Panther program, the global anticolonial struggle, and the injustice of Newton’s incarceration. In each city, the Panthers formed a solidarity committee. Seale and Hewitt’s Scandinavia trip brought funding, the
prestige of formal endorsements from European organizations, and a network of support for the “Free Huey!” campaign. After the Panthers returned to the United States, Chief of Staff David Hilliard and the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party commended Connie Matthews and Skip Malone for the work they were doing for the “Free Huey!” campaign, featuring their activities prominently in the Black Panther newspaper.

  Matthews continued working with the solidarity committees in Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki, organizing contingents to join the May Day workers’ demonstrations on May 1, where they passed out literature in support of the Black Panther Party and carried “Free Huey!” signs. In Copenhagen, the Left Wing Socialist Party was particularly active, organizing an independent march of more than six hundred people that broke off from the main May Day protest and rallied at the U.S. embassy to call for Huey Newton’s release from prison. These Scandinavian solidarity committees also held a series of rallies linking the Black Panther cause to the Vietnam War, disrupting speeches by Hubert Humphrey in Copenhagen and calling for an end to Scandinavian complicity with American imperialism through membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

  ALGIERS FESTIVAL

  After Eldridge Cleaver went underground in the late fall of 1968, he clandestinely traveled to Cuba, arriving on Christmas day. Bay Area radical allies who had been involved in the “Free Huey!” campaign obtained a commitment from the Cuban mission at the United Nations in New York to help bring Cleaver back into the country and provide him with political asylum.14

  The week of the United Front Against Fascism Conference in Oakland in July 1969, Eldridge Cleaver returned to public view at the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, Algeria. There the Black Panthers’ anti-imperialist politics found fertile international ground. The Party posited, as had the venerable W. E. B. Du Bois twenty-five years earlier, that blacks in America were subjugated and oppressed and denied self-determination much like those in the colonies in Africa. By 1969, much of Africa had won independence from European colonialism. Yet important areas, such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique were still engaged in bloody struggles for independence.