by Joshua Bloom
In principle, these guerilla activities were not so different from the kinds of armed resistance to the police that the Black Panther Party had advocated all along. Most members of the Party agreed that the U.S. government was imperialist and oppressive and should be overthrown through violence. They sought to liberate black communities to govern themselves without intervention. They saw police, government officials, and capitalists alike as “pigs” and agents of oppression. Many Panthers were prepared to kill the “pigs” for their freedom.
But politically, direct organization of guerilla warfare was a world apart from the politics of armed self-defense upon which the Black Panther Party had thrived. Unlike the practices of the Black Panther Party of the late 1960s, guerilla warfare in the United States never attracted broad allied support. Most moderate blacks and antiwar activists viewed such activity as criminal. Guerillas were highly isolated, and they could not easily avoid capture and sometimes fatal encounters with police; when arrested, they received little legal or political support from allies in court. They had difficulty obtaining financial support for their activities, let alone for their basic survival. They had little means of communicating their perspective to a broad public other than through acts of violence.
Thus, while in principle many Panthers and former Panthers saw the BLA guerillas as heroic, most recognized that guerilla warfare was a doomed political strategy. Most stayed away. The few that did go underground and attempt to wage guerilla warfare were heavily repressed with intensive, direct state violence that most U.S. observers believed to be warranted. “By 1974–75,” Muntaqim acknowledged, “the fighting capacity of the Black Liberation Army had been destroyed.”65
Some black revolutionary nationalist guerilla activity persisted on a small scale after the demise of the BLA, and it continues even to this day. Despite the heroism of its proponents in the eyes of its adherents, the impact of this activity has remained negligible at best. Contrary to the experiences of revolutionary African anticolonial struggles, in which a black majority sought to overcome political domination by a white minority, in the United States, guerilla warfare by revolutionary black nationalists has never achieved broad participation or significant political support.66
Despite the heroism of members of both the social democratic and guerilla warfare wings, the Black Panther Party no longer offered a viable pathway to political power. As a result, the organization suffered a long and painful demise, finally closing its last office in 1982.
Conclusion
When Civil Rights practices proved incapable of redressing the grievances of young urban blacks in the late 1960s, the Black Panthers armed themselves and promised to overcome poverty and oppression through revolution. They organized the rage of ghetto youth by confronting the police and resisted repression by winning the support of moderate black, antiwar, and international allies. These allies, like the Party, recognized the limited recourse available for real change through traditional political channels. But as blacks won greater electoral representation, government employment, affirmative action opportunities, as well as elite college and university access; the Vietnam War and military draft wound down; and the United States normalized relations with revolutionary governments abroad, it became impossible for the Panthers to continue advocating armed confrontation with the state and still maintain allied support. The Party, racked by external repression and internal fissures, quickly and disastrously unraveled.
There can be no doubt that individual and organizational contingencies—not least the personal flaws of Newton and Cleaver and the power struggle between them—contributed to the demise of the Black Panthers. But the Black Panther Party was not the only group to die out in the 1970s. All revolutionary black organizations in the United States declined at the same time.
These revolutionary nationalist organizations drew on deep roots. Without the Universal Negro Improvement Association of the 1920s, the Nation of Islam, or the Communist Party, it is hard to imagine the emergence of the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Republic of New Afrika, or the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, let alone the Black Panther Party. And yet widespread mobilization along revolutionary black nationalist lines was unique to the late 1960s. In every city with a significant black population, hundreds of young blacks took up arms and committed their lives to revolutionary struggle. That had never happened in the United States before. And it has not happened since.
To this day, small cadres in the United States dedicate their lives to a revolutionary vision. Not unlike the tenets of a religion, a secular revolutionary vision provides these communities with purpose and a moral compass. Some of these revolutionary communities publish periodicals, maintain websites, collectively feed and school their children, and share housing. But none wields the power to disrupt the status quo on a national scale. None is viewed as a serious threat by the federal government. And none today compares in scope or political influence to the Black Panther Party during its heyday.
The power the Black Panthers achieved grew out of their politics of armed self-defense. While they had little economic capital or institutionalized political power, they were able to forcibly assert their political agenda through their armed confrontations with the state. They obstructed the customary (and brutal) policing of black ghettos, creating a social crisis. Drawing broad legal, political, and financial support from allies, the Party was difficult to repress. The Black Panthers’ capacity to sustain disruption legitimized their revolutionary vision and attracted members looking to make a real impact.
The Black Panther Party did not spring onto the historical stage fully formed; it grew in stages. Newton and Seale wove together their revolutionary vision from disparate strands. By standing up to police, they found they could organize the rage of young blacks fueled by brutal containment policing and persistent ghettoization. Through their tactic of deploying armed patrols of the police, they generated a local base of support in the Bay Area by May 1967. When the California Assembly outlawed these tactics, the Panthers reconceived themselves as a vanguard party and began advocating violent confrontation with the state. The Detroit and Newark rebellions revealed the depth of rage at ghetto conditions and showed that many young blacks were ready to pick up arms against the state to redress them. The Panthers had the pulse of the streets. When Newton was arrested on charges of killing a police officer in a late-night confrontation in October 1967, the call to Free Huey! became a national and eventually international cause. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the following spring, young people from around the country flooded the Black Panther Party with requests to open new chapters.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Justice Department, and the House Committee on Internal Security all saw the Black Panther Party as a serious threat to “internal security.” Starting in late 1968, the federal government, in coordination with local police departments throughout the country, waged a campaign of brutal repression against the Party.
In 1969, the Panthers made social service, notably feeding free breakfasts to children, the focus of their activities nationally. The Party’s programs met real needs, strengthened community support, and gave members meaningful work. They exposed the failures of the federal War on Poverty and burnished the public image of the Party. In the face of repression, allied support for the Panthers increased.
Nixon won the White House on his Law and Order platform, inaugurating the year of the most intense direct repression of the Panthers. But the Party continued to grow in scope and influence. By 1970, it had opened offices in sixty-eight cities. That year, the New York Times published 1,217 articles on the Party, more than twice as many as in any other year.1 The Party’s annual budget reached about $1.2 million (in 1970 dollars).2 And circulation of the Party’s newspaper, the Black Panther, reached 150,000.3
The resonance of Panther practices was specific to the times. Many blacks believed conventional methods were insufficient to redress persi
stent exclusion from municipal hiring, decent education, and political power. Inspired by civil rights victories, young blacks wanted to extend the Black Liberation Struggle to challenge black poverty and ghettoization. As Panthers, they could stand up to police brutality, economic exploitation, and political exclusion. As Panthers, they extended the struggle to break continuing patterns of racial submissiveness. Panthers would not kowtow to anyone, not even police. As a result, they inspired blacks’ self-esteem. In an impressive show of racial unity and pride, most black political organizations fiercely opposed the brutal repression of the Panthers. Even mainstream organizations like the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People mobilized against state repression of the Panthers.
Young men of every race, drafted to fight an unpopular war in Vietnam, found common purpose in the Panthers’ global anti-imperialism. The Panthers drew a line dividing the world in two. They argued that the oppression of draft resisters by the National Guard was the same as oppression of blacks by the police and the same as the oppression of the Vietnamese by the marines. Forced to choose sides by the state, many young draftees chose the side of the oppressed. Alienated from the mainstream political leadership that had pursued the war despite popular opposition, many of their friends and family members supported their choice.
The Panthers helped foment a widespread radical challenge in the late 1960s. From riots in the streets to the closing of campuses, the questioning of traditional gender and sexual roles, and widespread defiance of the draft, radicals destabilized established rule. The Democratic Party responded by seeking to reconsolidate its liberal base by pushing initiatives advocating an end to the war and championing black electoral representation. The Nixon administration responded by attempting to repress the radicals, on the one hand, and making broad concessions to moderates, on the other. Nixon was the one who rolled back the draft, wound down the war, and advanced affirmative action. In the 1970s, black electoral representation and government hiring ballooned. As a result of these changes, the Panthers had difficulty sustaining broad support among blacks and antiwar activists.
By 1970, the Panthers had reached the pinnacle of their influence. The national headquarters worked hard to maintain the flow of allied support. What was once a scrappy local organization was now a major international political force, constantly in the news, with chapters in almost every major city. The thousands of recruits who flocked to the Party in 1968 and 1969 did not all share the national leadership’s concern with Party discipline. The federal government infiltrated the Party with agent provocateurs, attempting to undermine Party discipline and alienate allies whenever it could. The countervailing pressures became ever more difficult for the national Party leadership to manage as the Party grew in influence. The eroding bases of allied support made managing these pressures untenable.
The hard-core right wing was not the main threat to the Party. Rather concessions to blacks and opponents of the war reestablished the credibility of liberalism to key constituencies.4 It was much easier for the parents of young adults to find Tom Wolfe’s parody of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Panther fund-raiser funny when they believed their children would not be drafted to die in Vietnam. When the government had pursued the war irrespective of the public will, killing countless young Americans, the Panthers’ concerns were not so far afield. But when the Democratic Party began fighting to end the war, the Nixon administration rolled back the draft and created affirmative action programs, the United States normalized relations with revolutionary governments abroad, and black electoral representation ballooned, the Party had to work harder to maintain allied support. Eventually, the politics of armed self-defense became impossible to sustain.
Without the politics of armed self-defense that had driven the explosive growth of the Black Panther Party for three short years, from 1968 to 1970, dedicated revolutionaries in the Party were left with a creed and mission—to overthrow capitalism and advance self-governance in communities throughout the world—but they had no practical avenue to pursue these ends. Despite the heroism of their advocates, neither guerilla warfare nor social democratic practices provided a viable foundation for insurgent politics in the United States of the 1970s.
On the one hand, those who attempted to wage guerilla warfare were unrealistic politically. Unlike the Black Panther Party leadership during the peak years, they did not hold a coherent grasp of the political realities and possibilities of the times, nor practical means to build power. It is not difficult to see why some turned to guerilla warfare in the 1970s. The Panthers had built power and organization by standing up to the state and challenging the legitimacy of police violence. While the Party stopped advocating armed challenge of the police in 1971, most Panthers still considered the state and police to be brutal, unjust, and illegitimate oppressors. Many of them were still ready to die fighting for their liberation. As allies deserted the Panthers, the guerilla faction naively sought to advance its cause through armed struggle despite the slim chance of success. After several years of losses, most were either dead or in prison.
The social democratic practices of Elaine Brown and others were more realistic and more attuned to the political possibilities. In Oakland, the Panthers did succeed in using the political clout they had garnered in the Party’s heyday to build local electoral power. But the Party no longer had any practical basis for building a broad insurgent movement. Unlike the viable insurgent politics of the Party’s earlier days, the social democratic Panthers could deliver no consequence. They had limited institutionalized power and no longer wielded the capacity to disrupt on a large scale, so they advanced no practical basis for a national movement.
The vast literature on the Black Liberation Struggle in the postwar decades concentrates largely on the southern Civil Rights Movement. Our analysis is indebted to that literature as well as to more recent historical scholarship that enlarges both the geographic and temporal scope of analysis.5 Thomas Sugrue in particular makes important advances, calling attention to the black insurgent mobilizations in the North and West, and to their longue durée.6 This work, however, fails to analyze these mobilizations on their own terms, instead seeking to assimilate these black insurgencies to a civil rights perspective by presenting the range of black insurgent mobilizations as claims for black citizenship, appeals to the state—for full and equal participation. This perspective obscures the revolutionary character and radical economic focus of the Black Panther Party.
A newer generation of Black Power scholars, most compellingly Peniel Joseph, challenges this conflation by distinguishing Black Power activism and thought from civil rights activism and thought.7 Joseph argues that the Black Power movement, perhaps epitomized by the Black Panther Party, was distinct in crucial ways from, ran parallel to, and at times intersected with the Civil Rights Movement throughout the twentieth century.8 We agree that Black Power—and the revolutionary black politics of the Panthers in particular—followed a distinct and coherent logic and in fundamental ways is best understood as separate from the Civil Rights Movement. Ideologically and practically, revolutionary black nationalism has long ties to previous mobilizations.
Ultimately, however, both of these perspectives fail to answer important political questions. Why did revolutionary black nationalism—and Black Power mobilization generally—become so influential in the late 1960s, and why did it unravel so disastrously in the 1970s? The Sugrue approach bypasses this question by conflating radical Black Power mobilization with the Civil Rights Movement. While Joseph’s important corrective acknowledges that Black Power was different in significant ways from civil rights activism, by emphasizing the roots and longue durée of Black Power, his approach obscures and does not adequately explain why Black Power as exemplified by the Black Panther Party became the center of black politics in the late 1960s, influencing the world around it in ways it never had before and hasn’t since.
Our analysis shows that, even as Jim Crow was defe
ated and civil rights practices lost their political salience, the revolutionary practices of the Black Panther Party tapped into the rage of young blacks. The Panthers provided an insurgent channel for influence, drawing broad support from blacks, opponents of the war, and international revolutionary movements. The ideological and practical roots of Black Power politics had long been present on the political stage. But to the extent that Panther-like practices may have appealed to young blacks throughout the twentieth century, Panther politics were impractical both before and after the late 1960s. Panther practices could receive broad political support only while the majority of Americans opposed to the Vietnam War and draft had no recourse through institutionalized political channels and while most blacks continued to face economic and political exclusion.
The history of the Black Panther Party holds important implications for two more general theoretical debates. First, this history suggests a way out of dead-end debates about how the severity of repression affects social movement mobilization. One common perspective, supported by a rich scholarly literature covering various times and places, is that “repression breeds resistance”: When authorities repress insurgency, the repression encourages further resistance.9 But others pose the opposite argument, with equally rich scholarly support, suggesting that repression discourages and diminishes insurgency.10 A classic sociological position that seeks to reconcile this apparent contradiction is that the relationship between repression and insurgency is shaped like an “inverse U”: When repression is light, people tend to cooperate with established political authorities and take less disruptive action; when repression is heavy, the costs of insurgency are too large, causing people to shy away from radical acts. But, according to this view, it is when authorities are moderately repressive—too repressive to steer dissenters toward institutional channels of political participation but not repressive enough to quell dissent—that people widely mobilize disruptive challenges to authority.11
