Black Against Empire

by Joshua Bloom

  32. “Chou [Zhou Enlai] Tells Americans Mao Made Decision to Invite U.S. Table Tennis Team,” New York Times, October 7, 1971, 4.

  33. Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969–1972),” in The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 227, 253n; on the U.S.-Algerian diplomatic status, see U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Historical Documents: Foreign Relations of the United States; Sanche de Gramont, “Our Other Man in Algiers,” New York Times Magazine, November 1, 1970.

  34. Ruth Reitan, “Cuba, the Black Panther Party, and the U.S. Black Movement in the 1960s: Issues of Security,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, ed. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001); Ruth Reitan, The Rise and Decline of an Alliance: Cuba and African American Leaders in the 1960s (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999). Reitan makes an interesting argument that ascendance of a pro-Soviet faction in the Castro government caused the Cubans to elevate concerns about Cuban security over interest in supporting the black insurgency in the United States.

  35. Charlotte Curtis, “Black Panther Philosophy Is Debated at the Bernsteins,” New York Times, January 15, 1971, 48. By this time, a liberal reverie was setting in. But the hypocrisy of Nixon’s Cambodia campaign remobilized many student activists. The killings of students at Kent State and Jackson State in early May shattered the passivity that had been settling in among antiwar activists, and anti-imperialist mobilizations shut down college campuses throughout the country. In June, as the student mobilizations subsided, liberals sought to press their critique.

  36. Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” New York, June 8, 1970; Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970).

  37. Edward Jay Epstein, “The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide?” New Yorker, February 13, 1971, 6.

  38. See, for example, Paul L. Montgomery, “Panthers’ Allegation of Killings by Police Disputed in Magazine,” New York Times, February 14, 1971, 51.

  39. See Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 285.

  40. In 1970, the New York Times published 1,217 articles containing the words Black Panther or Black Panthers, more than three per day on average and more than twice the number published any other year, according to a search on ProQuest Historical Newspapers, October 27, 2010. The second-highest number of mentions was in 1971, with 553 stories, and then 1969, with 488 stories. Detailed reading of a systematic sampling of these articles shows that they contain little noise: almost all do discuss the Black Panther Party. But many mention the Party only in passing. A more conservative estimate of coverage, based on a narrower search for articles in which Black Panther or Black Panther Party appear in the citation or abstract, yielded 421 articles for 1970. Using either measure, the numbers are robust. In 1970, the Panthers received more than double the coverage they received in any other year. Moreover, this level of coverage is as high as the level of coverage devoted to leading civil rights organizations during their height, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality. On the level of financial support the Panthers received, see Martin Kenner in Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 281.

  41. “Huey Freed,” Newsweek, August 17, 1970; photos in Black Panther, August 15, 1970, 14. In November, the Party set Newton up in a fancy, high-security, $650 per month penthouse overlooking Lake Merritt in Oakland and the Alameda County jail where he had been held in solitary confinement. Prompted by the FBI, the San Francisco Examiner published a smear article reporting the move and emphasizing the contrast between Newton’s living conditions and those of many Panther members. As the FBI intended, the article generated outrage among some Panthers and supporters, who resented that Newton was living so lushly while they struggled. On the Party’s acquisition of the penthouse, see Alex Hoffmann interview with Lewis Cole, transcript, 79, Black Thought and Culture collection, Alexander Street Press, http://solomon.bltc.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/bltc/getdoc.pl?S15873-D001.

  42. Alex Papillon described this rank-and-file reaction to Newton’s release in a conversation with Joshua Bloom, November 18, 2005, Berkeley, California.

  43. Huey P. Newton, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” transcript, Black Panther, January 16, 1971, 10. Carlos Marighella (1911–1969) was a Brazilian Marxist revolutionary best known for his Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla (Berkeley: Berkeley Tribe, 1970, English edition).

  44. “Let Us Hold High the Banner of Intercommunalism and the Invincible Thoughts of Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense and Supreme Commander of the Black Panther Party,” transcript of Newton speech at Boston College, Black Panther, January 23, 1971, supplement, B (emphasis ours). A January 9, 1971, article in the Black Panther by Gwen V. Hodges of Central Headquarters may be the first time the Party advanced the phrase “survival pending revolution”: “The overthrow of one class by another must be carried out by revolutionary violence. Until this stage is achieved, we must concentrate on the immediate needs of the people in order to build a unified political force, based on the ideology of the Black Panther Party. Survival pending revolution is our immediate task and to do this we must meet the needs of the people. We have been doing this through our liberation schools, free breakfast programs, child care centers, bussing programs (people are able to visit members of their family in prison) and clothing programs. We will also move forward to institute a shoe shop” (3).

  45. “Let Us Hold High the Banner,” supplement, B (emphasis ours). Newton gave his first major speech after his release on September 5, 1970, in Philadelphia, at the plenary session of the People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention. The speech was highly abstract and, by many secondary accounts, uninspiring. But in the speech, Newton did not take a clear position on immediate guerilla warfare. Raids and strip searches of Philadelphia Panthers by the police in the days before the convention also raised tensions. “Huey’s Message to the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention Plenary Session September 5, 1970,” transcript, Black Panther, September 12, 1970, 10. See photo on cover, Black Panther, September 5, 1970, 1, and coverage within. See also subsequent coverage in Rosemarie, “The People and the People Alone Were the Motive Force in the Making of History of the People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention Plenary Session!” Black Panther, September 12, 1970, 3.

  46. Martin Kenner, interview by Lewis Cole, transcript, 59–62, Black Thought and Culture collection, Alexander Street Press, http://solomon.bltc.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/bltc/getdoc.pl?S15877-D001.

  47. Ibid., 61.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid., 63, 92, 96.

  50. “Metropolitan,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1970, 2; “Mrs. Sirhan Sues U.S. in Bid for Trip to Jordan,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1970, 3.

  51. Gaidi Faraj writes that Geronimo’s focus while living underground from August to December 1970 was “on building guerilla cadres”; see Faraj, “Unearthing the Underground: A Study of Radical Activism in the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007), 148. Faraj provides the most thorough treatment available on the Black Panther underground.

  52. “Shuns Court,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1970, C5; “Southland,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1970, B2.

  53. “Press Statement to the Press on Elmer Pratt, Deputy Minister of Defense Southern California Chapter Black Panther Party,” Black Panther, October 3, 1970, 5. See also Craig Williams, Southern California Chapter, “Reflections of Geronimo . . . The Essence of a Panther,” Black Panther, August 29, 1970, 14.

  54. Committee to Defend Abandoned Panthers, “Free Geronimo—The Urban Guerilla,” Right On! April 3, 1971, 6.

  55. “Metropolitan,” Los Angeles Times, December 10
, 1970, A2; “Metropolitan,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1971, A2; Robert Finklea, “FBI Arrest Four Men Wanted in California,” Dallas Morning News, December 9, 1970, 1.

  56. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 318.

  57. Various authors claim that “Cotton” Smith was working as an agent provocateur. See Jo Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson? (New York: Knopf, 1976), 125–57; Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1990), 84–87; Louis Tackwood, Glass House Tapes (New York: Avon, 1973).

  58. Don Cox, “Organizing Self-Defense Groups,” Black Panther, January 16, 1971, 8. Cox dedicated the article to Jonathan Jackson and Carlos Marighella, for whom he named his son, Jonathan Carlos Cox.

  59. Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 284.

  60. Panther 21, “Open Letter to Weatherman Underground from Panther 21,” East Village Other, January 19, 1971, 3.

  61. Ibid. More pointedly, the New York Panthers also challenged Huey Newton’s program of armed “self-defense” upon which the Party was founded and his idea of “revolutionary suicide”: “We have had too many martyrs. We desperately need more revolutionists who are completely willing and ready at all times to KILL to change conditions. Just to be ready to die does not make a revolutionist—it just makes a martyr—‘revolutionary suicide’ and ‘only those who die are proven revolutionaries’—are bullshit—a revolutionist accepts death as a natural phenomenon, but MUST be ready to KILL to change conditions.”

  62. “Metropolitan,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1971, A2, records that Geronimo was still fighting extradition from Dallas to face charges in Los Angeles. In Freedom, Humanity, Peace, a pamphlet containing transcripts of interviews from prison, published by the Revolutionary Peoples Communication Network circa 1971, Geronimo Pratt asserted he was being closed out by Huey and the Central Committee (13). Pamphlet available in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

  63. Huey P. Newton, “On the Purge of Geronimo from the Black Panther Party,” Black Panther, January 23, 1971, 7.

  64. Pratt in Freedom, Humanity, Peace, 13. Once in court in Los Angeles on charges relating to the December 8, 1969, shoot-out at the L.A. Panther headquarters, Geronimo was also charged with the murder of a schoolteacher at a tennis court in Santa Monica in 1968. He had been secretly indicted for the crime on December 4, 1970, while he was in prison in Dallas fighting extradition. See Ron Einstoss, “Former Black Panther Aide Held for Murder,” Los Angeles Times, February 17, 1971, D5. After many years in prison, Geronimo was released when it was proven that Julius Butler, whose testimony had led to Geronimo’s conviction, was a paid FBI informant and thus not credible.

  65. Rod Such, “Newton Expels 12 Panthers,” Guardian, February 20, 1971, 4; Newton statement quoted in United Press International, “Panthers Oust Eleven,” Chicago Daily Defender, February 11, 1971, 10; Edith Evans Asbury, “Newton Denounces 2 Missing Panthers,” New York Times, February 10, 1971, 1.

  66. Ibid. Newton statement quoted in UPI, “Panthers Oust Eleven,” 10; Asbury, “Newton Denounces 2 Missing Panthers,” 1. Through COINTELPRO, the FBI sent provocative letters in Matthews’s name. Some have speculated that Matthews was working with the FBI, but we have not seen strong evidence to this effect. Matthews was an older and well-educated woman from the Caribbean who had proven quite capable. She organized early international support in Scandinavia, worked with Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, and then was Newton’s personal secretary. She absconded to Algiers just before the Cleavers’ denunciation of Newton and Hilliard.

  67. Richard Moore [Dhoruba Bin Wahad], “A Black Panther Speaks,” New York Times, May 12, 1971, 43.

  68. Asbury, “Newton Denounces 2 Missing Panthers,” 1; Newton statement quoted in UPI, “Panthers Oust Eleven,” 10; Such, “Newton Expels 12 Panthers,” 4.

  69. Central Committee, “Enemies of the People,” Black Panther, February 13, 1971, 12.

  70. Ibid.; Such, “Newton Expels 12 Panthers,” 4.

  71. “Black Panther Dispute,” Sun Reporter, March 13, 1971, 2; Thomas A. Johnson, “Panthers Fear Growing Intraparty Strife,” New York Times, April 10, 1971, 24.

  72. Huey Newton quoted in Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 323. Hilliard provides extensive quotations from the discussion, which we believe are transcribed from a recording of the conversation. Hilliard once played the cassette for Joshua Bloom. He said that Cleaver secretly recorded the conversation and acted very cool while provoking Newton to anger. According to Hilliard, Cleaver then released the recording to a local Bay Area radio station, which is how the cassette eventually came into Hilliard’s possession. We do not have a copy of the tape, or a full transcript, but Bloom believed the recoding to be genuine when he heard it, and the partial transcript reported in Hilliard’s book appears consistent with the tenor of the conversation he heard.

  73. “Black Panther Dispute,” 2; see also Johnson, “Panthers Fear Growing Intraparty Strife,” 24, which dates the release almost two weeks later: March 11, 1971. The Sun Reporter article is more proximate, so the dating is likely more credible. Also, by March 11, the Black Panther had published a lead article with a call to “Free Kathleen Cleaver” (March 6, 1971) and Robert Webb had been killed. The statements reported from the video appear to have been made before these events.

  74. Elaine Brown, “Free Kathleen Cleaver,” Black Panther, March 6, 1971, 1 and supplement; see also Johnson, “Panthers Fear Growing Intraparty Strife,” 24; “Black Panther Dispute,” 2.

  75. Michael Knight, “Death Here Tied to Panther Feud,” New York Times, March 10, 1971, 29.

  76. United Press International, “Say N.Y. Panthers Balk in Death Probe,” Chicago Daily Defender, March 13, 1971, 2.

  77. “Black Panther Dispute,” 2.

  78. Curtis J. Austin, Up against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 314.

  79. Knight, “Death Here Tied to Panther Feud,” 29; “Black Panther Dispute,” 2; UPI, “Say N.Y. Panthers Balk in Death Probe,” 2; Johnson, “Panthers Fear Growing Intraparty Strife,” 24.

  80. Michael Knight, “A Black Panther Found Slain Here,” New York Times, April 18, 1971, 1; “Murdered. . . . Sam Napier, Black Panther Party, Intercommunal News Service, Circulation Manager Murdered by Fascists, Revolutionary Service Scheduled for April 24,” flier, April 17, 1971,” copy in Joshua Bloom’s possession; Robert D. McFadden, “4 Panthers Admit Guilt in Slaying,” New York Times, May 22, 1973, 1.

  81. People close to these events describe the organizational rupture in very different terms. Three influential groups of Black Panthers—the Cleavers and their comrades, most of the New York 21, and Geronimo Pratt and his comrades—publicly broke from Huey Newton and the national leadership of the Black Panther Party. The large majority of Black Panther chapters and members at that time did not. Huey Newton called the organizational rupture a “defection,” implying that those who broke from his leadership willfully joined forces with the U.S. government as counterrevolutionaries. Most did not. Conversely, some have argued that the Cleavers and comrades did not voluntarily leave the Party but were expelled from it. But this position obscures the basic organizational dynamic: Until early 1971, despite any underlying organizational tension, the Cleaver faction accepted the leadership of Huey Newton and the national Party and generally sought to maintain a unified public face. By March 1971, the Cleavers, Geronimo Pratt, and key members of the New York 21 had all publicly challenged the leadership of Huey Newton and the Central Committee in Oakland. We use the term mutiny to describe this organizational rebellion of smaller factions against the leadership of the national Party organization, and the term split to describe the eventual crystallization of two distinct ideological positions, one advocated by the national Party organization and the other advocated by the mutinous faction.

  82. Central Committee, Black Panther Party, “Intercommunal Section Defects,”
Black Panther, March 20, 1971, 16. The announcement lists Eldridge, Kathleen, Donald Cox, “and all other members of the Intercommunal Section” as having “defected.”

  83. Emory Douglas, Masai Hewitt, “Big Man” Howard, Bob Rush, and Doug Miranda, “We Stand Rock Firm behind Our Beloved and Courageous Central Committee and Our Leader, Minister of Defense and Supreme Servant of the People, Huey P. Newton,” Black Panther, March 20, 1971, 12.

  84. Bobby Seale, “I Am the Chairman of Only One Party,” Black Panther, April 3, 1971, 2.

  85. San Quentin Branch, Black Panther Party, “TO Eldridge Cleaver and His Conspirators, FROM the San Quentin Branch of the Black Panther Party,” Black Panther, March 20, 1971, 1; for Eldridge Cleaver on Jonathan Jackson, see Eldridge Cleaver, “On the Case of Angela Davis,” Black Panther, January 23, 1971, 5.

  86. “Survival Pending Revolution,” Black Panther, March 20, 1971, back cover. Newton more fully articulated this position in June. In “Black Capitalism Re-Analyzed,” Black Panther, June 5, 1971, A, Newton wrote, “All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but they are not solutions to our problems. That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution. . . . We say that the survival program of the Black Panther Party is like the survival kit of a sailor stranded on a raft. . . . The survival programs are not answers or solutions, but they will help us to organize the community.”

  87. Black Panther, March 27, 1971, 1, supplement, and throughout.

  88. This tally includes both drawings and photographs. If a graphic image included depictions of multiple weapons, we counted it only once. The specific tally of images depicting weapons, by date of issue, is as follows: January 2, 13 images; January 9, 22; January 16, 20; January 23, 14; January 30, 27; February 6, 21; February 13, 16; February 20, 24; February 27, 27; March 6, 11; March 13, 11; March 20, 19; March 27, 0; April 3, 0; April 10, 1; April 17, 0; May 1, 1; May 8, 0; May 15, 1; May 22, 1; May 29, 0; June 5, 0; June 12, 1; June 19, 0. Note that of the twelve issues through March 20, the issue with the least number of images of weapons contained 11 of them. Conversely, in the next twelve issues, the maximum number of images per issue was 1.