Last night’s “feature” was a fascinating documentary on the Black Panthers, originally made by director Stanley Nelson for theatrical release in 2015 and shown last night on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Rather awkwardly titled The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, Nelson’s two-hour documentary manages to make the Panthers’ story relevant to 2016 precisely by not pushing the historical parallels in our face, but allowing us to make the connections for ourselves. The famous Black Panthers — the movement that started in Oakland, California in 1966 and quickly spread nationwide — weren’t the first African-American civil rights organization to use the black panther as a symbol (that was the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Lowndes County, Alabama in 1965; they were a group that thought the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had failed because they hadn’t mounted an aggressive enough challenge to the racist Democratic Party establishment in the South, and though they did many of the same things — including registering African-Americans to vote in defiance of the intimidation and sometimes outright violence unleashed upon them by white law enforcement — they did them with an attitude and swagger that the later, more famous Black Panthers learned from and copied), but the Oakland Black Panthers of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were the ones who became a nationwide sensation and attracted both huge support from the Black community and the full-scale wrath of the white establishment in general and FBI head J. Edgar Hoover in particular. Like the current Black Lives Matter movement, the Panthers formed in direct response to police violence aimed at African-Americans, who in major cities like Oakland and Los Angeles routinely stopped Blacks for minor violations — sometimes for no reason at all in a sort of informal version of the “stop-and-frisk” policy actually enacted as official police practice in New York during former Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. What’s more, the cops in these cities (belying California’s largely unearned reputation as a bastion of racial tolerance) were frequently whites who had relocated from the South and brought their good-ol’-boy racial prejudices with them, and of course those prejudices directly affected how they did their jobs.
The Black Panthers were also the product of a ferment in the African-American community over the slow pace of change; they were rebels not only against the white establishment but against the Black establishment, the network of church-based organizations that had founded the civil rights movement of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and had won pro forma legal equality with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. What the civil rights activists hadn’t been able to do was make much of a dent in the overall oppression of African-Americans, particularly their relegation to low-paying jobs (or no jobs at all) and slum neighborhoods. Nor had they been able to do much about the constant persecution of African-Americans by white police officers, fully supported by the people who ran police departments — including the notoriously open racist William Parker of L.A., a hero in the white community for having rooted out the open corruption that had plagued the LAPD for decades and a villain in the Black community for policing it as if his forces were an occupying army. (Surviving documents in the FBI archives show that even J. Edgar Hoover — who emerges early on as the principal villain in The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution — thought Parker was crazy.) The Black Panthers organized in Oakland in 1966 after having researched the gun laws in California and found out that it was perfectly legal to carry weapons in public places as long as they were in plain sight (i.e., not concealed), and their first project was to send out their members in cars to patrol the streets and watch for police that looked like they might be abusing African-American civilians. If they saw an incident in progress, they would pull up, park, watch the alleged abuse in process and be close enough to witness it but not so close that they could be accused of being in the way in case what was going on was legitimate law enforcement. Indeed, the group’s original name was “Black Panther Party for Self-Defense,” though they quickly dropped the last three words because they wanted to emphasize that they were a full-fledged political party with a program and a vision for how to achieve it. The Black Panthers eventually adopted the following 10-point program:
- We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community.
We believe
that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
- We Want Full Employment For Our People.
We believe
that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man
employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American
businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of
production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in
the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all
of its people and give a high standard of living.
- We Want An End To The Robbery By The Capitalists Of Our Black Community.
We believe
that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue
debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100
years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We
will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many
communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of
the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist
has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore,
we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
- We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings.
We believe
that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black
community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so
that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for
its people.
- We Want Education For Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.
We believe
in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a
man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the
world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
- We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service.
We believe
that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to
defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill
other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized
by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the
force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever
means necessary.
- We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People.
We believe
we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black
self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from
racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore
believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self- defense.
- We Want Freedom For All Black Men Held In Federal, State, County And City Prisons And Jails.
We believe
that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons
because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
- We Want All Black People When Brought To Trial To Be Tried In Court By A Jury Of Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black Communities, As Defined By The Constitution Of The United States.
We believe
that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black
people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a
person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental,
historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select
a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have
been, and are being, tried by all-White juries that have no understanding of
the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.
- We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.
When, in the
course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the
political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among
the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of
nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect of the opinions of
mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the
separation.
We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish
it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such
principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate
that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient
causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more
disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of
abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design
to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty,
to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future
security.
If you know much about American history you’ll recognize the
last two paragraphs as coming from the Declaration of Independence; one
fascinating difference between the American Left in the 1960’s and the American
Left (or what’s left of it) today is that the 1960’s Left was willing to
identify itself with the American Revolution and the trappings of that struggle
— the Boston Tea Party before the actual Revolution and the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution that came after it. The irony that the Black
Panther Party would end its 10-point program with a quote from a document whose
principal author was a slaveowner was less important to the Panthers than the
opportunity quoting Thomas Jefferson gave them to tie their struggle in with
the broader American struggle for equality and self-determination — just as Dr.
Martin Luther King had said in his famous March on Washington speech that his
“dream” was “deeply rooted in the American dream,” and the first modern
movement that used the name “Tea Party” was not a Right-wing movement (like the
current Tea Party) but a Left-wing one
organized in 1970 to encourage people to refuse to pay that portion of their
taxes that would go to fund the Viet Nam war. Today there’d be a lot of pissy
objections from Leftists who obsess about the faults of the Founders and fail
to realize that, for all their failings, they did create a vision of liberation that was seized on and
extended by later generations of activists; instead of seizing the tradition of
resistance to oppression that’s a valid part of American history, we’ve become
a tendency of scolds telling anyone in the U.S. who bothers to listen to us
that the history of their country is one of which they should be deeply ashamed
— whereas the Right tells them that America is the greatest country on earth and
its history is something of which Americans should be proud. The Panthers not
only did police patrols, they also offered what they called “survival programs”
— meaning programs that would help African-American people survive and even
(sort of) prosper while the party was building its resources to fight the
revolution. Among these were not only the famous free breakfasts for children,
but free schools to teach Black people their true history and free clinics to
supply them health care.
Alas, the Panthers’ very existence riled government in
general and the long-standing head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, in particular —
though the first attempt by government to put them out of business was a bill
introduced in the California state legislature by a Republican legislator who
wanted to abolish the right of California citizens to carry open weapons. The
Panthers mobilized a lobbying trip to Sacramento to protest against this
legislation — and, in a dazzling theatrical coup, they brought their guns with them and took them
right onto the floor of the legislature. (They were only planning to sit in the
public gallery but some of them got lost and ended up on the floor.) The only
Panthers who weren’t carrying
weapons that day were the ones who were on parole for criminal convictions, for
whom it would have been illegal. Today the idea of a Left-wing organization
proudly parading its armed members in protest against a gun-control bill being
pushed by the Right to control them seems like the stuff of science fiction, but
in the highly charged atmosphere of the late 1960’s just about anything was possible. The repression of the Black Panthers
spread from local law enforcement and state legislators to the court system and
ultimately the FBI — the documentary shows an excerpt from a memo by J. Edgar
Hoover (who’d been ferociously anti-Left ever since his days as assistant to
Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, when he carried out the
infamous “Palmer Raids” in 1920 to exile all foreign-born U.S. Leftists, citizens
or not, out of the country) saying that among his goals in fighting the
Panthers were preventing the group from building coalition with other
organizations representing oppressed communities and preventing the emergence
of a so-called “Black Messiah” who could galvanize the African-American
community and unite them. The police and the Panthers eventually got into
shooting wars, including one in which 17-year-old Robert Hutton was killed and
another that took the life of Oakland police officer James Frey. The movement’s
founder, Huey P. Newton, was jailed in 1967, convicted of murder and then
acquitted after he won a retrial in 1970 — in the meantime “Free Huey!” became
an international war cry for the Left much the way “Free Mumia!” would a generation
or two later — and in the meantime the FBI’s war against the Panthers,
sometimes abetted by local law enforcement and sometimes not, escalated and
resulted in outright murders of Black Panthers in nighttime or early morning
raids on their headquarters.
The most infamous such incident was the attack on
the Chicago Panther headquarters (many of the Panthers’ offices were live-work
spaces, the Panthers living apart from their wives and children in the belief
that there was safety in numbers and also because being a Panther, especially
one in a leadership role, was so time-consuming it left almost no time for a
normal family life) that killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark — Hampton was a
particularly inviting target for the FBI because he’d been bringing groups like
the Latino Young Lords (a former street gang that had acquired political
consciousness and was attempting to reinvent itself as a sort of Brown
Panthers) and a group of Appalachian-descended people who’d emigrated to
Chicago in search of economic opportunities that never arose. Apparently Hoover
thought of Hampton as the sort of potential “Black Messiah” he was so afraid
of, so he sent what amounted to a death squad into Panther headquarters (aided
from information from Hampton’s bodyguard, an apolitical Black man who’d been
arrested and offered leniency if he agreed to infiltrate the Panthers) and
knocked off Hampton and Clark. Of course, the murders of Hampton and Clark, and
all the other Panther-involved shootings, were accompanied by huge propaganda
campaigns that blamed the Panthers and invariably said the Panthers had fired
the first shots. The Black Panthers had several weaknesses, too, which Nelson’s
film unsparingly points out. First, when they had their initial successes and
the movement stretched nationwide, so many young Black men wanted to join that
they didn’t vet anyone — so not only could police informants join, so could
crazies and thugs, some of whom did stupid things with their guns that got
blamed on the entire movement. Then the party’s founders, Huey P. Newton and
Bobby Seale, recruited Eldridge Cleaver, author of a popular book called Soul
on Ice detailing his 15 years in San
Quentin prison (he had got sent there in the first place for raping white
women, and in another aspect of the Panthers’ story that would be inconceivable
in the Left of today a lot of Leftists actually bought his insane claim that by
raping white women — including, eventually, Beverly Axelrod, the lawyer who got
him out of prison at last — he had been striking a blow for the Revolution).
Newton and Seale obviously thought Cleaver was a “catch,” but he blew up in
their faces, always wanting to do more radical and more dangerous things than
they, and when Cleaver was arrested, instead of going through the legal process
he escaped to Algeria, set up shop as the head of the Panthers’ “International
Section,” and hob-nobbed with diplomats from North Viet Nam, North Korea and
other countries on the U.S. government’s shit list.
Meanwhile, Bobby Seale was
arrested as an alleged conspirator in the demonstrations around the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago in 1968, and the film dramatizes the way he was
treated at the hands of the Right-wing crazy, Julius Hoffman, who was the judge
in the case, shackled and bound when he tried to represent himself at trial.
(He’d wanted his own attorney, who was ill when the trial began, and the judge
refused to postpone it or sever his case from the others.) The state government
of New York decided that instead of massacring the Panthers they’d try to put
them out of business legally, so they indicted 21 top Panther leaders
(including Afeni Shakur, rapper Tupac Shakur’s mother) and put them on trial on
142 separate counts. The trial lasted eight months and ended with the jury
acquitting the Panthers on all counts, but the whole incident not only soaked a
lot of the Panthers’ resources (both financial and volunteer), it led to a
fatal break between the 21 and Huey P. Newton. Newton had come out of prison in
1970 into a world very different than the one he’d left, and he had the
laudable aim of pulling back from the Panthers’ incendiary rhetoric and
concentrating on the social-service “survival” programs. Alas, the Panther 21
in New York accused the central leadership of Newton and David Hilliard of
embezzling some of the funds that had been raised for the 21’s defense, and
instead of settling the matter amicably Newton expelled all 21 from the
organization and declared them “Enemies of the People.” Newton also had to
contend with Cleaver, who from his redoubt in Algeria was declaring that
instead of pulling back from the revolutionary rhetoric, the Panthers ought to
get more confrontational and
fight the police directly. The faction fight got so bad that — a point not
mentioned in the film — both Newton and Cleaver ordered their members not to offer alibi testimony for Panthers from the other
faction who were arrested and put on trial. So the closing credit that at least
20 Black Panthers remain in prison to this day reflects a reality that is at
least partly the fault of the Panthers themselves, and in particular the ban on
members of one faction from offering truthful alibi testimony that could have
led to their acquittals.
The end of the Black Panthers’ story is a sad one —
Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973 and lost, and the Panthers had
made the mistake of closing down what was left of their national organization
to help his campaign in Oakland, and as the film’s narrator rather ruefully
points out, they didn’t have a Plan B. (That’s so typical of radical Leftists who take flyers into
electoral politics; they don’t realize you have to have an ongoing organization to keep people interested in turning
out to the polls until you have built enough support you can actually start winning elections. Apparently the Panthers and the
non-Panther supporters of Seale hadn’t heard the old adage, “You run the first
time to get noticed. You run the second time to get elected.”) Huey P. Newton descended into drug use and
paranoia, running what was left of his wing of the Panthers from a penthouse
apartment (a bizarre image indeed) and leaving people who visited him not
knowing what to expect — the intelligent organizer or the paranoid crazy.
Eldridge Cleaver did a political 180°, becoming a born-again Christian,
endorsing Ronald Reagan and writing a book called Soul on Fire that proclaimed his new beliefs. The legacy of the
Panthers lives on not only in Black Lives Matter (the obvious modern parallel
since that movement also started as a response to police misconduct and
brutality aimed at the African-American community — though arguably things have
got even worse for Black
Americans in their relations with the police, since in the 1960’s and 1970’s
they got hassled and today the cops just shoot them down, secure in the
knowledge that white prosecutors, white courts and, most importantly, white
juries will acquit them) but in movements like the Bundys and their recently
completed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon — a struggle
on the opposite ideological side from the Panthers but which also presented
itself as an armed resistance and made the Second Amendment right to keep and
bear arms a centerpiece of their activism.
