Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  Bobby Seale forced a runoff election in the mayoral election, and Elaine Brown came in a close second for city council, but both lost their political bids in April 1973.37

  UNRAVELING

  A few Party chapters did persist. But for most practical purposes, the Black Panther Party ceased to be a national organization and once again became a local Oakland organization. Rather than move to Oakland, many Panthers simply left the Party. Bobby Rush, who inherited leadership of the Chicago chapter when Fred Hampton was murdered, later recalled the response of Chicago Panthers: “Most people in Chicago didn’t want to go [to Oakland] because they were pretty practical folks. . . . They began to resent things: I remember when I sent our bus and the printing press we had acquired out to Oakland. . . . People just wanted to move on, wanted to do something. So they said, ‘Rather than go out to Oakland, we’re just gonna disband. We’re just gonna leave.’ One by one they began to peter out.”38

  No longer able to sustain allied support for insurgent politics and lacking other sources of political leverage, the Party unraveled. Once Newton closed the Party chapters across the nation and called members back to Oakland, the Panthers no longer advanced effective and replicable politics. The greatest strengths of the Party after 1971 were its notoriety and its concentration of relationships and resources in Oakland. It continued to draw members, donations, and support on a local scale because of its past actions. But despite the best aspirations of its leadership, the Panthers never again were able to advance insurgent practices that others could emulate. Now drawing power from reputation rather than from the ability to mobilize insurgency, the Oakland Black Panther Party became increasingly cultish, resembling a social service organization, motivated by revolutionary ideology, with a mafioso bent.

  In late 1971, Newton told David Hilliard that “the Party is over.” Hilliard recalls that Newton was surrounded by loyalists who applauded Newton’s every action, challenged nothing, and would do anything to win his approval.39 As the Party unraveled, so did Newton’s mental health. According to those closest to him, in the years that followed, Newton was governed by despair, untreated bipolar disorder, and clinical depression. Newton became severely addicted to cocaine.40

  Accusations abound about Newton’s alleged criminal activities during this period. Few people agree on the specifics, and few of the accusations have been verified: Newton eventually defeated every one of the major criminal charges in court. Some of the most widely touted accusations come from right-wing activists such as David Horowitz and Kate Coleman, who seek to vilify the Black Panther Party. Yet retrospective accounts from a range of sources add some credence to these accusations.

  According to these stories, for much of the 1970s, Newton ruled the Party through force and fear and began behaving like a strung-out gangster. According to Elaine Brown, “Huey and his entourage of restless gunmen were prowling the after-hours clubs nightly.”41 According to Kate Coleman, Newton had various after-hours-club operators, drug dealers, and pimps beaten, shot, and killed in his zeal to enforce an extortion scheme and control Oakland’s underworld.42 Coleman writes that Newton pistol-whipped Preston Callins, a “tailor” who came to his apartment to “measure him for a suit,” fracturing his skull four times.43 Elaine Brown recounts the same story and testifies that she personally cleaned up the blood.44 The Alameda County District Attorney’s office attempted to prosecute Newton for the 1974 murder of Kathleen Smith, a seventeen-year-old prostitute, claiming that Newton shot her in the head because of a perceived slight as she worked the street corner.45 Flores Forbes, who was a member of the Black Panther Central Committee in the mid-1970s, testifies in his autobiography that he attempted to assassinate the star witness against Newton in Smith’s murder trial in 1977.46 Elaine Brown, who had been chairwoman of the Party at the time of this attempted assassination, prominently endorsed Forbes’s book, writing, “This is our story . . . an unadulterated truth, told in a pure voice.”47 Newton was eventually killed on August 23, 1989, by a petty crack dealer from whom he was likely trying to steal drugs.48

  Lore about Newton and the Party’s criminality, widely broadcast in the media, eroded the Black Panther legacy. To what extent federal counterintelligence measures may have contributed to the unraveling of Newton and the Oakland Party in the 1970s is difficult to determine. But the spirit of J. Edgar Hoover would have been proud of the results. Hoover had recognized by 1969 that criminalization was the best way to diminish public support for the Black Panthers and the political challenge they posed. Nothing did more to criminalize the Party in the public imagination than the allegations about Newton’s actions in the years following the ideological split.49

  THE LIMITS OF HEROISM: SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

  By 1971, the Black Panther Party was quickly unraveling, but even as the Party’s national influence declined, a new leadership emerged that struggled to advance revolutionary aims through a social democratic politics. Under the leadership of Elaine Brown, the Party showed impressive development of this brand of politics.

  Following her trip to China, North Vietnam, and North Korea with the Black Panther delegation in the summer of 1970, Elaine Brown had quickly risen to national leadership in the Party. Upon her return to the United States, she was greeted at the airport by Huey Newton—newly released from prison—and that evening became his lover and soon his close collaborator. Following the split in early 1971, Brown became editor of the Black Panther, the Party’s main voice. In October that year, she became minister of information, replacing Eldridge Cleaver. In late 1972 and early 1973, Brown was at the center of Black Panther activities, running for political office with Bobby Seale in Oakland. And later in 1973, when Newton expelled Seale from the Party, he appointed Elaine Brown chairwoman—the number two position in the Party after his. When Newton fled to Cuba following his indictment for charges that he killed Kathleen Smith and pistol-whipped Preston Callins, Brown took charge of the Black Panther Party operations.50

  Under Elaine Brown’s leadership from August 1974 through June 1977, the Party experienced something of a local renaissance as a social democratic organization.51 Elaine Brown supported the candidacy of Democrat Jerry Brown for governor of California that year and helped bring in strong support from Oakland’s black voters, which helped Jerry Brown win the election. Governor Brown appointed his longtime friend and former Panther lawyer and ally J. Anthony Kline to an important post in his administration, cementing Elaine Brown’s access to the governor’s office. Despite long electoral dominance by white Republicans in Oakland, Elaine Brown ran a formidable campaign for Oakland City Council in 1975. She developed strong ties to black political networks, including Congressman Ron Dellums’s political machine. These ties brought endorsements from every local Democrat and many black businesses, including Cal-Pak. She garnered wide support from organized labor, including endorsements from the Alameda County Central Labor Council, the United Auto Workers, the United Farm Workers, and the Teamsters. She won 44 percent of the vote against the Republican candidate.52

  Under Brown’s leadership, the Oakland Panthers took community service to new heights. The cornerstone of the Party’s program was the Oakland Community School, an elementary school directed by Ericka Huggins with the help of Panther Regina Davis. Through their efforts, the school eventually offered a top-notch education, enrolling about two hundred kids, with twice that many on the waiting list. The Party began competing for and winning public funding to run service programs, such as crime prevention for Oakland teenagers.53

  In the 1976 Democratic presidential primaries, Jimmy Carter benefited from the backlash against the Republican Party after Nixon’s impeachment for the Watergate scandal and emerged as an early favorite for the Democratic Party nomination. Late in the game, when Governor Brown entered the race to challenge Carter, Elaine Brown helped him win the black vote in Baltimore, which in turn was the key to winning the state of Maryland. Her efforts also contributed to his sweeping victory in the California
primary. Jerry Brown went to the Democratic Convention in July with the second-highest number of delegates of any candidate, but he was handily defeated by Carter in the first round of voting.

  Leveraging her support, Elaine Brown elicited Governor Brown’s approval of $33 million to extend the freeway in Oakland in exchange for a commitment from Clorox, Hyatt, Wells Fargo, Sears, and other multinational corporations to develop Oakland City Center—bringing ten thousand new jobs to Oakland. The companies wanted to develop Oakland and had proposed the freeway extension when Reagan was governor, but the project had been blocked. Brown used her influence with the governor to move the deal forward with the idea that the political prestige garnered could help Lionel Wilson, a black Oakland judge and Panther ally, become mayor. In return, the Black Panthers would gain significant influence over the distribution of the new jobs.54

  Astonishingly, the strategy worked. The Black Panther Party did its best to keep its relationship with Lionel Wilson out of the public eye. But according to Elaine Brown’s account, the Black Panthers played a crucial role behind the scenes. Not only did she get the governor to agree to the freeway extension, unblocking plans for Oakland development and greatly expanding her cachet in Oakland politics, but she also obtained his endorsement, and that of much of the state Democratic machine, for Lionel Wilson for mayor of Oakland. The Black Panther Party fielded its entire membership to work on Wilson’s mayoral campaign, registering ninety thousand new black voters. When Wilson became the first black elected mayor of Oakland in May 1977, he owed much of his success to the efforts of Elaine Brown and the Black Panther Party.55

  Elaine Brown endured great personal costs to advance the Black Panther revolution through social democratic politics. She was also very effective in developing conventional political power for blacks in Oakland. Yet her hard work did little to advance the Black Panther Party as a radical movement organization. The politics of armed self-defense was no longer viable, and the Panthers had no alternate insurgent strategy for building power.

  The month after Lionel Wilson’s election as mayor, with Oakland safely in the hands of friends, Newton returned from Cuba.56 Brown had considered her efforts to be preparing Oakland for his return all along. However, it soon became clear that his leadership and Brown’s continued management of the Black Panther Party were incompatible. Brown soon left the Party, and the foothold the Panthers had gained in conventional Oakland politics was lost.57

  The limits of Elaine Brown’s heroism went well beyond the problems with Newton and the particularities of Oakland politics. The source of the Party’s power under her leadership was conventional political savvy coupled with community service—an approach to grassroots politics adopted by thousands of community activists in hundreds of cities throughout the country. These political actors made inroads into political power and reform well before the Black Panther Party began and continue to do so today. Black electoral representation, in particular, mushroomed in the 1970s during the period Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party. But conventional political savvy and community service alone have never been able to mobilize a serious radical challenge to status quo arrangements of power. For insurgent social movements to expand and proliferate, they must offer activists a set of insurgent practices that disrupt established social relations in ways that are difficult to repress.58

  The Panthers’ stated objective in using Oakland as a ”base of operations” was to create a revolutionary stronghold—and a model of revolutionary practice—that could eventually be expanded throughout the United States and the world. But despite the revolutionary rhetoric, the political practices of the social democratic Panthers were very similar to the conventional politics that engaged black people nationwide in the 1970s. Unlike the Black Panther Party before the ideological split, the Oakland Black Panthers in the 1970s never provided a model for disrupting established relations of domination. They never provided political leverage or a replicable source of political power. And so, despite Elaine Brown’s savvy and exceptional talent, the social democratic Black Panther Party never proliferated.

  THE LIMITS OF HEROISM: GUERILLA WARFARE

  Many treatments—both mainstream and radical—of the insurrectionary practices of revolutionary black nationalists seek to evaluate insurgents in ethical terms, judging them by who they hurt and whether their actions are good or bad. Unfortunately, most accounts fail to analyze the crucial political questions. How do insurgents see themselves? Who is attracted to participate, and why? What political leverage do the practices create for insurgents in a particular historical context?

  From this vantage, it is clear that the armed, insurrectionary practices of the Black Panther Party were critical to its power and growth between 1968 and 1970. Huey Newton theorized in “The Functional Definition of Politics” in 1967 that poor and politically marginalized blacks could tap a source of power through armed insurrection. By taking up arms and organizing, they could create the capacity to deliver a violent consequence and thereby gain political influence.59 The Black Panther Party did in fact garner extensive political leverage through its armed challenges to state authority.

  But key to the success of the Panther’s politics of armed self-defense was Newton’s insistence that the Party—while advocating armed resistance—stay aboveground as long as possible, avoiding direct and explicit organization of insurrection. As a result, the Panthers had to navigate a narrow boundary between legal participation in U.S. politics and full-out war. The Party’s capacity to sustain an insurgent challenge depended on its ability to stay largely within the law despite the armed resistance mounted by members. Most Party activities were incompatible with armed insurrection. Panthers who explicitly participated in armed insurrection could not participate in community programs, produce or distribute the Party newspaper, engage overtly in local organizing, work aboveground with allies, raise funds legally, live or work in known locations, or organize street mobilizations. Had the Party explicitly organized and directed armed insurrection, rather than simply advocating it, the state would have readily crushed it.

  From 1971 on, as the political context shifted and the Black Panther Party stopped advocating insurrectionary activity, a significant number of former members sought to take armed politics to a “higher” level and engage the United States in guerilla warfare. Asserting that the imperialist domination of black people in the United States persisted, these dissidents believed that guerilla warfare was the best route to free black communities from oppression and that committing their lives to overthrowing the imperialist system through violence was the most heroic contribution they could make to freedom. Many of these guerilla warriors identified themselves as part of the revolutionary underground network called the Black Liberation Army (BLA).

  Assata Shakur, a member of the BLA who had been convicted of killing a New Jersey State Police officer in 1972 and escaped to Cuba with comrades’ help in 1979, described the BLA as follows:

  The Black Liberation Army is not an organization: it goes beyond that. It is a concept, a people’s movement, an idea. Many different people have said and done many different things in the name of the Black Liberation Army. The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in Black communities: conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massive unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education. The idea came about because Black people are not free or equal in this country. Because ninety percent of the men and women in this country’s prisons are Black and Third World. Because ten-year-old children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustration of our children. The concept of the BLA arose because of the political, social, and economic oppression of Black people in this country. And where there is oppression, there will be resistance.60

  According to BLA member Sundiata Acoli, the purpose of the Black Liberation Army was to “defend Black people, and to organize Black people militarily, so they can defend themselves t
hrough a people’s army and people’s war.”61 Writing from prison in 1979, BLA member Jalil Muntaqim described the BLA as “a politico-military organization, whose primary objective is to fight for the independence and self-determination of Afrikan people in the United States. The . . . BLA evolved out of the now defunct Black Panther Party.”62

  A more theoretical statement by the Coordinating Committee of the Black Liberation Army in 1975 argued that for colonized and oppressed blacks, American law was unfair and thus illegitimate:

  The BLA has undertaken armed struggle as a means by which the social psychosis of fear, awe, and love of everything white people define as being of value, is purged from our peoples’ minds. . . . We must clarify revolutionary violence in relationship to our actual condition, because many of our people believe in the “law”. . . . In a society such as exists here today, law is never impartial, never divorced from the economic relationships that brought it about. History clearly shows that in the course of the development of modern western society, the code of law is the code of the dominant and most powerful class, made into laws for everyone. It is implemented by establishing “special” armed organs, that are obliged to enforce the prevailing class laws.63

  Members of the Black Liberation Army participated in a range of insurrectionary actions, mostly against police, through the early 1970s. In a 1979 pamphlet, Jalil Muntaqim listed at least sixty violent confrontations with police for which he claimed BLA members were either responsible or under suspicion. A few from 1971 alone included ambushing and killing two police officers and attacking another group of police officers with a hand grenade in New York; robbing a bank and killing a policeman in Atlanta; firing on a police car with a machine gun and killing a police sergeant in an attack on a police station in San Francisco; and robbing a bank, shooting a police officer in his patrol car, and breaking three BLA members out of prison in Atlanta.64