by Joshua Bloom
The history of the Panthers defies the basic premise of this debate: that the level of repression independently explains the level of resistance. The Black Panther Party faced heavy federally coordinated state repression at least from 1968 through 1971. Our analysis shows that for the first two years, from 1968 through 1969, brutal state repression helped legitimate the Panthers in the eyes of many supporters and fostered increased mobilization.12 Taken alone, this finding would appear to support the idea that repression breeds resistance. But during the second two years, 1970 and 1971, the dynamic gradually shifted. The Panthers maintained the same types of practices they had embraced in the previous two years, and the state maintained a similar level and type of repressive practices. But in this later period, as the political context shifted—increasing the difficulty of winning support for the Panthers’ revolutionary position—repression made the core Panther practices difficult to sustain and quickly led to the Party’s demise.
The level of repression did not independently affect the level of mobilization in a consistent way across the four years. Instead, the level of repression interacted with the political reception of insurgent practices to affect the level of mobilization. In other words, potential allies’ political reception of Panther insurgent practices determined the effects of repression on mobilization. During the time that Panther practices were well received by potential allies, in 1968 and 1969, repressive measures fostered further mobilization. But as these allies became less open to the Panthers’ revolutionary position in 1970 and 1971, repressive actions by the state became increasingly effective.13
Our analysis also suggests a way forward in stalled debates of the political opportunity thesis that broad structural opportunities, by conferring political advantage on a social group, generate mobilization. The political opportunity thesis has made a crucial contribution to the sociological study of social movements in recent decades by emphasizing the importance of political context for explaining mobilization.14 But attention to political context in isolation does not provide much explanatory power in the case of the Black Panther Party. From the classic political opportunity perspective, the late 1960s were the period in which the civil rights movement declined and thus a period of contracting political opportunities for blacks generally. That perspective makes it hard to understand why, even as the insurgent Civil Rights Movement fell apart, revolutionary black nationalism developed and thrived.
Recovering lost insights from early political process writings by Doug McAdam and Aldon Morris about the importance of tactical innovation for explaining mobilization, we designed this study to focus on the development of Panther political practice and influence.15 We have found that political context, rather than independently determining the extent of mobilization, determines the efficacy of particular insurgent practices. The stepwise history of the Black Panther Party’s mobilization and influence demonstrates that the relative effectiveness of its practices depended on the political context. Panther insurgent practices—specifically armed self-defense—generated both influence and following when they were both disruptive and difficult to repress. But the Panthers became much more repressible when the political context shifted, making it harder for the Party to practice armed self-defense and sustain allied support. This history suggests that insurgent movements proliferate when activists develop practices that simultaneously garner leverage by threatening the interests of powerful authorities and draw allied support in resistance to repression. Conversely, when concessions undermine the support of potential allies for those practices, the insurgency dies out.16
There is no movement like the Panthers in the United States today because the political context is so different from that in the late 1960s. This is not to say that the core grievances around which the Panthers mobilized have disappeared. To the contrary, large segments of the black population continue to live impoverished in ghettos, subject to containment policing, and send more sons to prison than to college. Many young people in these neighborhoods might well embrace a revolutionary political practice today if it could be sustained. But crucially, the conditions for rallying potential allies have changed.
The black middle class has greatly expanded since the Panthers’ heyday. Its sons and daughters have access to the nation’s elite colleges and universities. Black public sector employment has expanded dramatically: city governments and municipal police and fire departments hire many blacks. Blacks have won and institutionalized electoral power both locally and nationally. Most blacks in the United States today, especially the black middle class, believe their grievances can be redressed through traditional political and economic channels. Most view insurgency as no longer necessary and do not feel threatened by state repression of insurgent challengers.
No less important, the United States has no military draft today, and no draft resistance. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may be unpopular, but few people will risk years in jail to oppose them. No New Left exists today to embrace a Black Panther Party as its vanguard. Internationally, the struggles for national independence have almost all been won: the vast majority of the world’s population is no longer colonized, if not yet truly free. Today, with few potential allies for a revolutionary black organization, the state could easily repress any Panther-like organization, no matter how disciplined and organized.
The broader question is why no revolutionary movement of any kind exists in the United States today. To untangle this question, we need to consider what makes a movement revolutionary. Here, the writings of the Italian theorist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci are instructive: “A theory is ‘revolutionary’ precisely to the extent that it is an element of conscious separation and distinction into two camps and is a peak inaccessible to the enemy camp.”17 In other words, a revolutionary theory splits the world in two. It says that the people in power and the institutions they manage are the cause of oppression and injustice. A revolutionary theory purports to explain how to overcome those iniquities. It claims that oppression is inherent in the dominant social institutions. Further, it asserts that nothing can be done from within the dominant social institutions to rectify the problem—that the dominant social institutions must be overthrown. In this sense, any revolutionary theory consciously separates the world into two camps: those who seek to reproduce the existing social arrangements and those who seek to overthrow them.
In this first, ideational sense, many insurgent revolutionary movements do exist in the United States today, albeit on a very small scale. From sectarian socialist groups to nationalist separatists, these revolutionary minimovements have two things in common: a theory that calls for destroying the existing social world and advances an alternative trajectory; and cadres of members who have dedicated their lives to advance this alternative, see the revolutionary community as their moral reference point, and see themselves as categorically different from everyone who does not.
More broadly, in Gramsci’s view, a movement is revolutionary politically to the extent that it poses an effective challenge. He suggests that such a revolutionary movement must first be creative rather than arbitrary. It must seize the political imagination and offer credible proposals to address the grievances of large segments of the population, creating a “concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will.”18 But when a movement succeeds in this task, the dominant political coalition usually defeats the challenge through the twin means of repression and concession. The ruling alliance does not simply crush political challenges directly through the coercive power of the state but makes concessions that reconsolidate its political power without undermining its basic interests.19 A revolutionary movement becomes significant politically only when it is able to win the loyalty of allies, articulating a broader insurgency.20
In this second, political sense, there are no revolutionary movements in the United States today. The country has seen moments of large-scale popular mobilization, and some of these recent
movements, such as the mass mobilizations for immigrant rights in 2006, have been “creative,” seizing the imagination of large segments of the population. One would think that the 2008 housing collapse, economic recession, subsequent insolvency of local governments, and bailout of the wealthy institutions and individuals most responsible for creating the financial crisis at the expense of almost everyone else provide fertile conditions for a broad insurgent politics. But as of this writing, it is an open question whether a broad, let alone revolutionary, challenge will develop. Recent movements have not sustained insurgency, advanced a revolutionary vision, or articulated a broader alliance to challenge established political power.
In our assessment, for the years 1968 to 1970, the Black Panther Party was revolutionary in Gramsci’s sense, both ideationally and politically. Ideationally, young Panthers dedicated their lives to the revolution because—as part of a global revolution against empire—they believed that they could transform the world. The revolutionary vision of the Party became the moral center of the Panther community. To stand on the sidelines or die an enemy of the Panther revolution was to be “lighter than a feather”—to be on the wrong side of history. To die for the Panther revolution was to be “heavier than a mountain”—to be the vanguard of the future.21 The Black Panther Party stood out from countless politically insignificant revolutionary cadres because it was creative politically. For a few years, the Party seized the political imagination of a large constituency of young black people. Even more, it articulated this revolutionary movement of young blacks to a broader oppositional movement, drawing allied support from more moderate blacks and opponents of the Vietnam War of every race.
When expanding political and economic opportunities for blacks and the growing consensus among mainstream politicians to wind down the Vietnam War opened institutionalized channels for redressing the interests of key Panther supporters, Panther practices lost their political salience. When the political foundation of the Black Panther Party collapsed in early 1971, the practices that had won the Panthers so much influence became futile. No Panther faction was able to effectively reinvent itself.
Even as concessions siphoned off allied support, the state sought to vilify the Party, driving a wedge between Panthers and their allies. Ultimately, nothing did more to vilify the Panthers than the widely publicized evidence of intraorganizational violence and corruption as the Party unraveled. Any attempt to replicate the earlier Panther revolutionary nationalism was now vulnerable to provocation and vilification. The political “system” had been inoculated against the Panthers’ politics.22
While minimovements with revolutionary ideologies abound, there is no politically significant revolutionary movement in the United States today because no cadre of revolutionaries has developed ideas and practices that credibly advance the interests of a large segment of the people. Members of revolutionary sects can hawk their newspapers and proselytize on college campuses until they are blue in the face, but they remain politically irrelevant. Islamist insurgencies, with deep political roots abroad, are politically significant, but they lack potential constituencies in the United States. And ironically, at least in the terrorist variant, they tend to reinforce rather than challenge state power domestically because their practices threaten—rather than build common cause with—alienated constituencies within the United States.
No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foothold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease. This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party and may not happen again for a very long time.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Albin Krebs, “Newton Visits China,” New York Times, September 29, 1971, 30; “Huey Newton in Peking,” New York Times, September 30, 1971, 6; Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Writers and Readers, 1995), 324–26. One of Newton’s companions on the trip was Elaine Brown, his lover and the future chairwoman of the Black Panther Party. The other was Robert Bay, his bodyguard.
2. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 324; Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 295–96.
3. The petition is reproduced in a supplement to the October 16, 1971, issue of the Black Panther, and a photo of the meeting appears on the front page of this issue. Brown, A Taste of Power, 303; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 325; “Huey Newton Returns from China,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1971, 3.
4. Agence France-Presse, “Chou and Other Officials Attend National Day Rites,” New York Times, October 2, 1971, 1.
5. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 326.
6. “Revisit to Peking,” editorial, New York Times, October 6, 1971, 46.
7. Huey P. Newton, “The Functional Definition of Politics,” Black Panther, May 15, 1967, 4.
8. For the approximate date when the Black Panther Party opened offices in various cities, see House Committee on Internal Security, Gun-Barrel Politics: The Black Panther Party, 1966–1971, part 470, 92d Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 88–89.
9. We follow Gramsci in our conception of revolutionary movements and further discuss the Panthers in this context in our final chapter. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
10. Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc), Special Report [Huston Report], June 25, 1970, 9–10.
11. Students for a Democratic Society resolution at the Austin National Council, “The Black Panther Party: Toward the Liberation of the Colony,” New Left Notes, April 4, 1969, 1, 3. The best collection of surviving copies of New Left Notes resides in the Wisconsin State Historical Society Archives in Madison.
12. J. Edgar Hoover quoted in “FBI Director Blacks Black Panthers,” Oakland Tribune, July 15, 1969, 17.
13. We measured the degree of repression by the annual number of Panthers killed in direct confrontations with the state.
14. David Garrow, “Picking Up the Books: The New Historiography of the Black Panther Party,” Reviews in American History 35, no. 4 (2007): 650.
15. Robert Blauner, “The Outlaw Huey Newton: A Former Admirer Paints an Unromantic Portrait of the Black Panther Leader,” New York Times, July 10, 1994, BR1.
16. Garrow, “Picking Up the Books”; Judson L. Jeffries and Ryan Nissim-Sabat, introduction to On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities Across America, ed. Judson Jeffries (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Elaine Brown, foreword to To Die for the People, by Huey Newton (San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2009); Charles E. Jones, introduction to The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], ed. Charles E, Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998).
17. This quote is variously attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli, Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, and others.
18. For an overview of the FBI counterintelligence program against the Panthers, see Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities [Church Committee], Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, book 3, Final Report, S. Doc. No. 94–755 (April 1976). For details on raids and the assassination of Fred Hampton, see chapter 10, “Hampton and Clark.”
19. Airtel [a high-priority FBI memo sent via airmail], FBI Director [J. Edgar Hoover] to SAC [Special Agent in Charge], Sacramento [and FBI field offices throughout the country], March 4, 1968, “Counterintelligence Program—Black Nationalist-Hate Groups—Racial Intelligence.” This and all other FBI memos cited in this chapter are available in the FBI Reading Room, FBI Headquarters, Washington, DC. As of May 2, 2012, many of the COIN-TELPRO documents cited in this book became available online at http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/cointel-pro-black-extremists. See also memo, G. C. Moore to W
. C. Sullivan, February 29, 1968, “Counterintelligence Program—Black Nationalist-Hate Groups—Racial Intelligence.”
20. Airtel, FBI Director [J. Edgar Hoover], to Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco, May 27, 1969.
21. Memo, G. C. Moore to W. C. Sullivan, September 27, 1968.
22. Ibid.
23. Provocateur actions such as the case of the New York 21 are well documented and known; see Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans. For promotion of kangaroo courts and torture by a documented agent provocateur, see William O’Neal, Captain of Security, “FBI Informer,” Black Panther, February 17, 1969, 9.
24. Kate Coleman and Paul Avery, “The Party’s Over,” New Times, July 10, 1978, 1.
25. David Horowitz, “Vicious Criminals,” San Jose Mercury News, October 5, 1994. See also Peter Collier and David Horowitz, “Baddest,” in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties (New York: Summit Books, 1989); and David Horowitz in Doris Tourmarkine, “‘Panther’ Labeled a ‘Lie’,” Hollywood Reporter, April 29, 1995.
26. Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1994).
27. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “On the Rise and Fall of Huey Newton,” New York Times, June 30, 1994, C18. “Notable Books of the Year 1994,” New York Times, December 4, 1994, BR65.
28. See, for example, a comment on the original Black Panther Party posted on Yahoo Answers on May 12, 2011: “It was a black version of the KKK.”
