by Joshua Bloom
89. The last issue featuring the photos of Huey armed and the machine gun was March 6, 1971, 14. The following week, March 13, the photos were removed, but a cartoon of a machine gun retained. The week after, the cartoon of the machine gun disappeared, but the issue still bore the large-font bold caption “Survival Pending Revolution.” The following week, the caption changed to “Serving the People Body and Soul,” and that layout remained in subsequent issues.
90. Charles W. Hopkins, “The Deradicalization of the Black Panther Party: 1967–1973” (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1978), ch. 4.
91. Right On! April 3, 1971, quoted in Sun Reporter, April 24, 1971, 6.
92. Jack A. Smith, “Panther Rift Aired in Algiers,” Guardian, April 17, 1971, 3. Kathleen Cleaver does not mention the fact, but Bobby Seale was also free until August 1969, and Huey Newton was released in August 1970.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party and Servant of the People, “On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Panther Party and the Defection of the Black Panther Party from the Black Community,” Black Panther, April 17, 1971, 1 and supplement.
16. THE LIMITS OF HEROISM
1. “State to Open Its Case Today in Seale’s Trial at New Haven,” New York Times, March 18, 1971, 33; Earl Caldwell, “Newton Is on Trial Again for Slaying of a Policeman,” New York Times, June 29, 1971, 14. In June, an Oakland jury found Hilliard guilty of two counts of assault on a police officer and sentenced him to two years to life in jail; see “Panther Chief of Staff Found Guilty,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1971, B.
2. “Jersey City Police Seize 5 at Panther Offices,” New York Times, April 3, 1971, 58.
3. “Black Panthers Jailed in Commune Slaying,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 19, 1971, 4.
4. “Charred Remains of a Man Thought to Be Panther Found,” New York Times, April 21, 1971, 36.
5. “3 Policemen Shot; 4 Held in Chicago: Panther Literature Is Found at South Side Building,” New York Times, May 14, 1971, 21.
6. Martin Arnold, “Key Suspect Held in 2 Police Deaths,” New York Times, May 25, 1971, 1.
7. “N.Y. Panthers Held in Police Shooting: Submachine Gun Used in Holdup Linked to Attack,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1971, 1.
8. Roy Haynes, “Ex-Panther Tells of Plan to Blow Up L.A. Police Station,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1971, A1; Roy Haynes, “Witness Says Gun Seized in Panther Raid Killed Three,” Los Angeles Times, July 29, 1971, 3.
9. See, for example, 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).
10. John Darnton, “7 Panthers Indicted in Slaying of a Party Official in Corona,” New York Times, July 20, 1971, 30.
11. Earl Caldwell, “The Panthers: Dead or Regrouping,” New York Times, March 1, 1971, 1.
12. Bobby Seale, interview by Ollie A. Johnson III, cited in Ollie A. Johnson III, “Explaining the Demise of the Black Panther Party,” in The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 402.
13. Committee on Internal Security of the House of Representatives, Gun-Barrel Politics: The Black Panther Party, 1966–1971, 92d Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 143.
14. Wallace Turner, “Two Desperate Hours: How George Jackson Died,” New York Times, September 3, 1971, 1.
15. George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970).
16. For a biography by an ardent supporter, see Eric Mann, Comrade George (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
17. “Political Assassination,” Black Panther, January 25, 1969, 1.
18. Black Panther, January 25, 1969, graphics on 3, 24, 11, 16, 18, 9, 8, 6.
19. Randy, “Fred Hampton Murdered by Fascist Pigs,” Black Panther, December 13, 1969, 2.
20. Black Panther, December 13, 1969, 1, 9–12, 16, 18–20.
21. Folsom Cadre of the Black Panther Party, “Open Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Jackson,” excerpts, Black Panther, September 4, 1971, supplement, 1.
22. “Statement by Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, at the Revolutionary Memorial Service for George Jackson,” Black Panther, September 4, 1971, supplement, F.
23. Black Panther, September 4, 1971, supplement, A.
24. Jean Genet, Black Panther, September 4, 1971, supplement, L.
25. Tom Wicker, “4 Days of Attica Talks End in Failure,” New York Times, September 14, 1971, 1.
26. Joseph Lelyveld, “A Hostage Says Threats Left Him ‘Scared Silly’” New York Times, September 14, 1971, 1.
27. “Massacre at Attica,” editorial, New York Times, September 14, 1971, 40.
28. Fred Ferretti, “Autopsies Show Shots Killed 9 Attica Hostages, Not Knives; State Official Admits Mistake,” New York Times, September 15, 1971, 1.
29. James Clarity, “Observers Lay Killings to ‘Official Intransigence,’” New York Times, September 19, 1971, 60.
30. Black Panther, September 18, 1971.
31. Clarity, “Observers Lay Killings to ‘Official Intransigence,’” 60.
32. See Black Panther, January 22, 1972, 1.
33. The Black Panther featured statements of support by Chisholm and Dellums on the front covers of three issues in late April and early May—April 15, May 6, and May 13.
34. “Chairman Bobby Seale for Mayor!” Black Panther, May 20, 1972, 1.
35. See Huey P. Newton, “Oakland—A Base of Operation!” Black Panther, July 29, 1972, supplement, and long series of columns titled “Oakland—A Base of Operation!” which were published weekly thereafter.
36. Elaine Brown, October 26, 1972, quoted in “We’re Talking about Winning in Oakland,” Black Panther, November 9, 1972, 4.
37. Earl Caldwell, “Seale Puts Oakland Race into Runoff,” New York Times, April 19, 1973, 27.
38. Bobby Rush, quoted in Hilliard and Cole, This Side of Glory, 327.
39. Huey Newton telephone conversation with David Hilliard in prison as recalled by David Hilliard. Joshua Bloom telephone conversation and email exchanges with David Hilliard, May 14 and May 28, 2012.
40. According to Newton’s widow Fredrika Newton, and best friend David Hilliard. See David Hilliard with Keith and Kent Zimmerman, Huey: Spirit of the Panther, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press 2006, chapters 19 and 20. See also ibid., prologue, 6.
41. Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 439.
42. Kate Coleman with Paul Avery, “The Party’s Over,” New Times, July 11, 1978.
43. Ibid., 34. A friend of Newton’s who did not want to be named told us that Newton had beaten Callins but that Callins was actually a cocaine dealer and that the violence resulted from a drug deal gone sour.
44. Brown, A Taste of Power, 356.
45. “The Odyssey Of Huey Newton: Violence is never far from the Black Panthers’ leader,” Time Magazine, November 13, 1978, 38.
46. Flores A. Forbes, Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (New York: Atria Books, 2006).
47. Elaine Brown, foreword to Forbes, Will You Die With Me?
48. See Hilliard and Cole, “Prologue,” in This Side of Glory for likely scenario of death. See “Huey Newton Killed; Was a Co-Founder of Black Panthers,” New York Times, August 23, 1989, 1, for date of death.
49. Detractors such as David Horowitz, Peter Collier, and Kate Coleman, who made careers of vilifying the Panthers, advanced the public criminalization of the Party’s entire history. These authors wrote extensively about the criminal activities of the miniscule and dying Black Panther Party and its leadership in the 1970s, and they retrospectively read the entire history of the national organization through this criminal lens, strippin
g the Party of its politics. Most large cities contain numerous organizations that engage in the kinds of criminal activities that some Panthers apparently did in the 1970s. The Panthers are interesting historically not because they were just like these others but because they were a world apart from these petty criminal organizations in purpose and influence between 1968 and 1970. The detractors’ accounts obscure rather than illuminate the historical import of the Black Panther Party. It is ironic that Horowitz took over Ramparts magazine, pushing out Robert Scheer, the leftist editor who helped the Black Panthers get their start, even as the Black Panther Party was unraveling. Horowitz established his credentials at Ramparts through collaboration with Newton, raising more than $100,000 and providing strong institutional support for Newton, turning a blind eye to his alleged criminality when many of his friends pointed it out. See Peter Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (New York: New Press, 2009), 187. Then, in the most cynical of personal politics, he made himself famous by denouncing Newton and by projecting the allegations about his criminal activities onto the entire legacy of the Black Panther Party.
50. See Brown, A Taste of Power, chs. 12–16.
51. For the dating of Elaine Brown’s leadership, see “Leader of Panthers Booked in Assaults,” New York Times, August 18, 1974, 31; and Robert Trumbull, “Newton Plans to Resume Control of Black Panthers,” New York Times, June 28, 1977, 17.
52. See Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 309–11; and Brown, A Taste of Power, ch. 17.
53. See Douglas Corbin, “The Oakland Black Panther Party School” (senior honors thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2004); Daniel Willis, “A Critical Analysis of Mass Political Education and Community Organization as Utilized by the Black Panther Party” (EdD diss., University of Massachusetts, 1976); Brown, A Taste of Power, 391, 395.
54. William Endicott, “Black Panthers—Stalking on a Tamer Path,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 1977; Brown, A Taste of Power, ch. 20.
55. Brown, A Taste of Power, ch. 20; Self, American Babylon, 309–16; “Oakland Elects Judge as City’s First Black Mayor,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1977, A3.
56. Lionel Martin, “Newton Plans Return to U.S.,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1977, 1.
57. Brown, A Taste of Power, ch. 21.
58. See Joshua Bloom, “Pathways of Insurgency: Black Liberation Struggle and the Second Reconstruction in the United States, 1945–1975,” unpublished manuscript.
59. Huey P. Newton, “The Functional Definition of Politics,” Black Panther, May 15, 1967, 4.
60. Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987), 169.
61. Acoli in Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, ed. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), 12.
62. Jalil Muntaqim, On the Black Liberation Army, pamphlet (1979; repr. Oakland, CA: Abraham Gullien Press, 2002), 3.
63. Coordinating Committee, Black Liberation Army, Message to the Black Movement: A Political Statement from the Black Underground, pamphlet (1975; repr. Oakland, CA: Abraham Gullien Press, 2002), 10–11.
64. Muntaqim, On the Black Liberation Army, 5–9.
65. Ibid., 12.
66. For the best overviews of the Black Liberation Army, see Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance”; Gaidi 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).
CONCLUSION
1. In 1970, the New York Times published 1,217 articles containing the text “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, yields 421 articles for 1970. Using either measure, the proportions 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.
2. This budget figure is a conservative estimate based on data in the House Committee on Internal Security report Gun-Barrel Politics: The Black Panther Party, 1966–1971, part 470, 92d Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 84–87.
3. Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc), Special Report [Huston Report], June 1970, 9–10.
4. Some have suggested that revolution was “in the air” in the United States during the late 1960s and that it ceased to hold sway in the 1970s.While we generally agree, we do not especially favor the subtler implications of this formulation. Much like the “structuralism” of the political opportunity thesis, this view treats the question of whether revolution was “in the air” as exogenous to movement dynamics. In our view, the advent of effective revolutionary political practices itself makes revolutionary ideology more broadly appealing, putting revolution “in the air.” Thus, while the broad political climate has a strong effect on the reception of a movement’s political practices, it is itself contingent, and highly susceptible to change, often driven by the practices of movement activists themselves.
5. See, for example, the work of Martha Biondi, Jack Dougherty, Douglas Flamming, Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Patrick Jones, Matthew Lassiter, Annelise Orleck, Brian Purnell, and Clarence Taylor.
6. Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).
7. Among these scholars of Black Power are Matthew Countryman, Judson Jeffries, Jeffery Ogbar, Kimberly Springer, Noliwe Rooks, Rhonda Williams, Yohuru Williams, and Komozi Woodard.
8. Peniel Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
9. See Harry Eckstein, “On the Etiology of Internal Wars,” History and Theory 4, no. 2 (1965): 133–63; Ted Robert Gurr, “A Comparative Study of Civil Strife,” The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hugh D. Graham and Ted R. Gurr (New York: F. A. Praeger,1969), 572–632; or for a literary perspective, John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath.
10. See, for example, Douglas A. Hibbs, Mass Political Violence: A Cross-National Causal Analysis (New York: Wiley, 1973); Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).
11. Ted Gurr writes, “The threat and severity of coercive violence used by a regime increases the anger of dissidents, thereby intensifying their opposition, up to some high threshold of government violence beyond which anger gives way to fear”; Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 238. See also Douglas P. Bwy, “Political Instability in Latin America: The Cross-Cultural Test of a Causal Model,” Latin American Research Review 3, no. 2 (Summer 1968): 17–66.
12. The periodization is, of course, necessarily imprecise. The state’s repressive actions did not all fail through December 1969 and then suddenly all work in January 1970. The political context shifted gradually during the period. The student mobilizations in May 1970 are a clear example of the limits of defining 1970 and 1971 as years in which the Panthers’ anti-imperialist politics lost resilience, yet they ar
e consistent with the general analysis. The student antiwar movement had been gradually moderating by the fall of 1969, and it continued to do so into 1970. But the hypocrisy of Nixon’s Cambodia invasion after his promises of Vietnamization and the killing of students at Kent State in early May shattered the liberal reverie. The broad national student mobilization in insurgent anti-imperialist terms showed how fragile the moderation of the antiwar movement was and how important the full repeal of the draft and ending of the war would be to put the war protests to rest.
13. More recent scholarship has also sought to transcend the narrow debate about the relationship between repression and mobilization. Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol McClurg Mueller, eds., Repression and Mobilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005) seek to further explore the divergence of outcomes, building on the classic works, introducing new variables such as the quality of repression, and accounting for lag effects. In a still-influential article, Mark Irving Lichbach argues that a rational actor model that accounts for the relative return to dissent can explain when repression deters mobilization and when it encourages it. See Lichbach, “Deterrence or Escalation?: The Puzzle of Aggregate Studies of Repression and Dissent,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 31, no. 2 (June 1987): 266–97. We agree with the general point that activists’ perceptions of the efficacy of a particular set of practices affects the level of mobilization. But Lichbach’s model makes a number of simplifying assumptions that limit its ability to account for the Panther case. Most importantly, Lichbach does not account for the effects of the broader political context on efficacy. In our view, the receptivity of potential allies to a particular set of insurgent practices is crucial in determining the effects of repression.
