Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  29. “Envoy from the ’60s,” editorial, Providence Journal-Bulletin, September 20, 2000, 6B.

  30. Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial Press, 1978), 73, 160, 167.

  31. June Jordan, “To Be Black and Female,” review of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, by Michele Wallace, New York Times Book Review, March 18, 1979, BR4.

  32. Among the authors who discuss the Black Panthers within broader histories are Nikhil Pal Singh, Robin D. G. Kelley, Rod Bush, Laura Pulido, Robert Self, Chris Rhomberg, and Jeffrey Ogbar.

  33. As of May 23, 2011, ProQuest Digital Dissertations listed ninety abstracts of dissertations and master’s theses that contain the phrase Black Panther Party; www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/pqdt.shtml.

  34. One of our guiding theoretical propositions is that as people find effective ways of struggling for political power, others join them. As social movements develop in this way, they tend to leave a “strategic trace.” In other words, a history of the genesis of movement strategy ought to reveal increased adoption (and evolution) of demands and tactics of struggle as these demands and tactics meet with success. For a more extended discussion of strategic genealogy, see the original book proposal, Joshua Bloom, “Power of the Panther: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party,” unpublished manuscript, 2000, in possession of the author.

  35. Joshua Bloom, collection editor, Black Panther Newspaper Collection, Black Thought and Culture database, Alexander Street Press, 2009; http://solomon.bltc.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/bltc/bltc.bpp.pl?year=1967. With some twelve thousand pages, this collection of the Black Panther contains more than twice as many issues as the next most complete collection.

  36. We are, of course, fully aware that some Civil Rights Movement scholars will disagree with this characterization. Our analysis here, and throughout this book, is guided by a conception and theory of social movements that is not yet standard among historians or sociologists. We conceptualize an insurgent social movement as the proliferation of a set of practices—including a relatively consistent set of targets, frames, and repertoires—that are immediately disruptive to established social practices. Our main theoretical argument is that when, given a particular political context, a set of insurgent practices draws broad allied support in resistance to repression by authorities, it provides insurgents with a sustainable source of political leverage, and the insurgency proliferates. We argue that insurgent social movements can best be understood in these terms.

  So in this sense, the Civil Rights Movement can best be understood as the wide proliferation of a particular set of insurgent practices. The bus boycotts, the sit-ins, the freedom rides, the community campaigns, and the voting rights campaigns all entailed similar practices: nonviolent civil disobedience that disrupted legal segregation and de facto disenfranchisement, coupled with claims for full citizenship rights and equal participation in American society. Following closely upon the heels of its extraordinary victories in the mid-1960s, the Civil Rights Movement did not just shift gears, it ended as an insurgent movement. Some of the organizations and individuals continued to pursue similar goals. And the broader Black Liberation Struggle continued in the sense of a multimovement amalgam of many waves of activists seeking liberation from racial oppression in different ways. But nonviolent civil disobedience against legal segregation was no longer a source of powerful political leverage, its practice ebbed, and the insurgent Civil Rights Movement ended. For further discussion see the conclusion, and especially Joshua Bloom, “Pathways of Insurgency: Black Liberation Struggle and the Second Reconstruction, 1945–1975,” unpublished manuscript.

  37. In this sense, there are many parallels with the immigrant rights campaigns today. A wide spectrum of organizations and forms of activism share the basic premise that undocumented immigrants are economically exploited and politically oppressed. But they have no movement that provides a coherent and powerful practical avenue for redress.

  1. HUEY AND BOBBY

  Epigraph, part 1: Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, Black Panther, March 3, 1969.

  1. The description of Huey Newton’s family and childhood is drawn from Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Writers and Readers, 1995), and David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panthers (New York: Little, Brown, 1993).

  2. Armelia Johnson paraphrased by Newton in Revolutionary Suicide, 12.

  3. Walter Newton quoted by Melvin Newton in Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 71; Walter Newton paraphrased in Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 30.

  4. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 11, 32.

  5. Ibid., 24.

  6. Ibid., 33–44.

  7. Ibid., 45–55, 60.

  8. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (1971; repr. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990), 13–21; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 105–6.

  9. This account of Bobby Seale’s early life draws from four sources: Bobby Seale, Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale (New York: Times Books, 1978); Seale, Seize the Time; Bobby Seale, interview by Joshua Bloom, April 25, 1999; Joshua Bloom, “Bobby Seale,” in Civil Rights in the United States, vol. 2, ed. Waldo E. Martin Jr. and Patricia Sullivan (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 677.

  10. Seale, Lonely Rage, 19.

  11. Ibid., 26.

  12. Ibid., part 3.

  13. Ibid., 91 and part 4.

  14. Seale, Seize the Time, 13–21; Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 74–77. For detailed treatment of Warden at Berkeley, see especially Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 75–95.

  15. Thomas Barry, “Soul Brother No.1,” New Dawn, November 1970, 3. See chapter 6 for more on Karenga.

  16. Spence Conley, “Clay Here—‘Ugly Bear to Fall,’” Oakland Tribune, September 28, 1963, B-11; “Rally Will End Rights Meet Here,” Oakland Tribune, September 28, 1963, 1; George Draper, “The World’s Greatest: Cassius Clay in East Bay,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 28, 1963, 9; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 63, 71; Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 74–77; Murch, Living for the City, 90–92; Donald Warden interview by James M. Mosby Jr., July 22, 1970, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, item 426, Moorland-Springarn Library, Howard University. Some sources mistakenly claim that Malcolm X spoke at this conference and that Clay was already publicly a Muslim. But none of the press accounts support these claims. These accounts list many speakers who participated in the conference but not the famous Malcolm X, and they make no mention of Clay’s participation in the Nation of Islam (NOI), which would have been big and highly controversial news. Clay’s championship fight with Liston in February 1964 was almost canceled over rumors that he was associated with Malcolm X, and Clay only announced his membership in the NOI and his relationship with Malcolm X after beating Liston for the championship in February of 1964. Moreover, a second association conference at McClymonds could not have taken place involving both Malcolm X and Newton because Newton left the Afro-American Association not long after the 1963 conference. Any such appearance would have been big news, and we could find no news reports of such a conference. There were only about four weeks in February and March of 1964 when Ali was publicly associated with Malcolm X before Malcolm X was expelled from the NOI.

  17. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 64–65.

  18. Seale, Lonely Rage, 133–36; Seale, Seize the Time, 3.

  19. The account of the MFDP and Atlantic City Convention draws from seven sources: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 121–28; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb Jr., Radical Equations (Boston: Beacon Pres
s, 2001), 78–83; James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Washington, DC: Open Hand Publishing, 1985), 371–407; Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003); Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 456–76; John Dittmer, “Politics of the Mississippi Movement, 1954–1964,” in The Civil Rights Era in America, ed. Charles W. Eagles (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986).

  20. Hamer quoted in Carson, In Struggle, 125.

  21. Humphrey quoted in Moses and Cobb, Radical Equations, 82.

  22. Moses and Cobb, Radical Equations, 82.

  23. Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 106.

  24. Ibid., 35. See also William W. Sales Jr., From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (Boston: South End Press, 1994).

  25. Malcolm X Speaks, 31–32.

  26. William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2.

  27. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 35.

  28. Ibid.

  29. McCone Commission Report in Anthony M. Platt, The Politics of Riot Commissions (New York: Collier Books, 1971), 279.

  30. Parker quoted in Tracy Tullis, “A Vietnam at Home: Policing the Ghettos in the Counterinsurgency Era” (PhD diss., New York University, 1999), 208.

  31. Tullis, “A Vietnam at Home,” 208–9.

  32. Horne, Fire This Time, 68.

  33. Ibid., 54–55.

  34. Ibid., 58, 66.

  35. Jack McCurdy and Art Berman, “New Rioting: Stores Looted, Cars Destroyed, Many Fires Started; 75 Reported Injured in 2nd Violent Night,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1965, 1.

  36. Horne, Fire This Time, 64, 67.

  37. Ibid., 36–38.

  38. McCone Commission Report in Platt, The Politics of Riot Commissions, 264–71.

  39. Horne, Fire This Time, 183–84.

  40. Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals: A Report with Documents (New York: Random House, 1966), 26.

  41. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide.

  42. Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

  43. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 75–76.

  44. Soulbook, nos. 4–7 (Winter 1965–66 through Summer/Fall 1967), a publication of the AfroAmerican Research Institution, Berkeley, CA; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 108; Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 76.

  45. Seale, Seize the Time, 24–27; Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 108. See Murch, Living for the City, chapter 4 for more on SSAC.

  46. For Newton’s introduction to Fanon, see Seale, Seize the Time, 25. Newton discusses reading Fanon, Mao, and Che during this period in Revolutionary Suicide, 111. Explicit references to Fanon, Mao, and Che are common in the earliest issues of the Black Panther.

  47. See Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

  48. Max Stanford, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afroamerican Student,” in Liberator, January 1965, 15. These ideas permeate the writings of RAM during this period. For example, see also Revolutionary Action Movement, “In Summary: A New Philosophy,” Black America, Summer–Fall 1965, 20; Revolutionary Action Movement, “The Relationship of Revolutionary Afro-American Movement to the Bandung Revolution,” Black America, Summer–Fall 1965, 11;

  49. Revolutionary Action Movement letter, “Greetings to Our Militant Vietnamese Brothers,” July 4, 1965, reel 6, frame 0228, Black Power Movement collection, Part 3: Papers of the Revolutionary Action Movement, 1962–1966, UC Santa Barbara Library.

  50. “Message from RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement), the Black Liberation Front of the U.S.A. to Afro-Americans in the United States Racist Imperialist Army,” July 4, 1965, reel 6, frame 0229, Black Power Movement collection, Part 3, Papers of the Revolutionary Action Movement, 1962–1966, UC Santa Barbara Library.

  51. Rally to Oppose the Drafting of Black Men, flier 313–660426–000, H. K. Yuen Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter Yuen Collection).

  52. Timothy B. Tyson. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

  53. Mao Zedong, “Statement calling on the people of the world to unite to oppose racial discrimination in the U.S. and support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination,” August 8, 1963, RAM archive, reel 6, frame 0195. The statement read in part,

  The speedy development of the struggle of the American Negroes is a manifestation of the sharpening of class struggle and national struggle within the United States; it has been causing increasing anxiety to U.S. ruling circles. The Kennedy Administration has resorted to cunning two-faced tactics. On the one hand, it continues to connive at and take part in the discrimination against Negroes and their persecution; it even sends troops to suppress them. On the other hand, in its attempt to lull the fighting will of the Negro people and deceive the masses throughout the country, the Kennedy Administration is parading as an advocate of the “defense of human rights” and “the protection of the civil rights of Negroes,” is calling upon the Negro people to exercise “restraint,” and is proposing the “civil rights legislation” to Congress. But more and more Negroes are seeing through these tactics of the Kennedy Administration. The fascist atrocities committed by the U.S. imperialists against the Negro people have laid bare the true nature of the so-called democracy and freedom of the United States and revealed the inner link between the reactionary policies pursued by the U.S. government at home and its policies of aggression abroad.

  I call on the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoisies and other enlightened persons of all colours in the world, whether white, black, yellow or brown, to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practiced by U.S. imperialism and support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination. In the final analysis, a national struggle is a question of class struggle. In the United States, it is only the reactionary ruling circles among the whites who oppress the Negro people. They can in no way represent the workers, farmers, revolutionary intellectuals and other enlightened persons who comprise the overwhelming majority of the white people. At present, it is the handful of imperialists headed by the United States, and their supporters, the reactionaries in different countries, who are inflicting oppression, aggression and intimidation on the overwhelming majority of the nations and peoples of the world. We are in the majority and they are in the minority. At most, they make up less than 10 percent of the 3,000 million population of the world. I am firmly convinced that, with the support of more than 90 per cent of the people of the world, the American Negroes will be victorious in their just struggle. The evil system of colonialism and imperialism grew up along with enslavement of Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the thorough emancipation of the black people.

  54. Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1962).

  55. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 108–12.

  56. For example, RAM members allegedly conspired to blow up the Statue of Liberty, Chicago Sun Times, February 17, 1965.

  57. Amory Bradford, Oakland’s Not for Burning (New York: D. McKay Co., 1968), 6; and Daniel Edward Crowe, “The Origins of the Black Revolution: The Transformation of San Francisco Bay Area Black Communities, 1945–1969” (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 1998), 199–202. Curtis Lee Baker served as the director of the West End Help Center in west Oakland and helped found Justice on Bay Area Rapid Transit, an effort to win employment for blacks on BART. Mark Comfort organized protests in 1964 with the Congress of Racial Equa
lity to challenge discriminatory hiring practices at the Oakland Tribune and went on to form the Oakland Direct Action Committee.

  58. “Oakland Mayor’s Angry Orders on Racial Crisis,” Oakland Tribune, April 22, 1966, 1; Crowe, “Origins of the Black Revolution,” 199–200; Bradford, Oakland’s Not for Burning, 6, 19. In 1966, Comfort and Baker collaborated to bring Chicago-based radical community organizer and writer Saul Alinsky to Oakland for a series of talks and attempted to get the Oakland Council of Churches to bring Alinsky to Oakland for an extended stay.

  59. “Youths Protest ‘Police Brutality,’” San Francisco Chronicle, February 20, 1965, 4.

  60. “Negro Area Cops Blasted in Oakland,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 26, 1965, 6.

  61. “Conditions in the Oakland Ghetto: Mark Comfort interviewed by Elsa Knight Thompson,” 1967, cassette E2BB1309, Pacifica Radio Archive, North Hollywood, CA, cited in Crowe, “Origins of the Black Revolution,” 202.

  62. Seale, Seize the Time, 27–28.

  63. The People of the State of California v. Bobby Seale, case #38842; Seale, Seize the Time, 27–28. Megan Miladinov, “Former Black Panther Leader,” Athens News, February 12, 2004.

  64. Seale, Seize the Time, 28–29, 33.

  65. Ibid., 29.

  66. Seale, Lonely Rage, 151.

  67. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 108–9; Seale, Seize the Time, 30–34.

  68. Seale, Seize the Time, 33.

  69. Ibid., 35–56.

  70. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper, 1958), 27–37.

  71. Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945–1982 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 94.

  72. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted in Carson, In Struggle, 210.

  73. “Oakland Mayor’s Angry Orders on Racial Crisis,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1966, 1.

  74. Bradford, Oakland’s Not for Burning, 2.