Black Panther Party

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The Black Panther Party was a militant African-American organization that "advocated guerrilla warfare as taught by Mao Tsetung and Che Guevara for achieving revolution in the United States.”

Formation

The Black Panther Party (BPP) was founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. According to the Encyclopedia of the American Left, “Newton was already a black militant activist in 1961 when he met Seale, a fellow student at Oakland's Merritt College. Both joined the Afro-American Association, a black cultural organization led by Donald Warden, but they became dissatisfied with Warden's procapitalist form of black nationalism.”

According to author John Diggins, the BPP was “Inspired by third-world illuminati like Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Tse-tung,” and “adopted a "Marxist-Leninist" amalgam that succeeded in combining nationalism with socialism, preaching self-determination along with class struggle.” Newton and Seale raised funds to buy guns and ammunition in early 1967 by selling copies of Mao’s “little red book” to students at UC Berkley.

Original six Black Panthers (November, 1966) Top left to right: Elbert "Big Man" Howard; Huey P. Newton (Defense Minister), Sherman Forte, Bobby Seale (Chairman). Bottom: Reggie Forte and Little Bobby Hutton (Treasurer).

Easily recognizable for their quasi-military black berets and leather jackets, the Panthers quickly gained national attention in 1967 when some 20 BPP members walked into the California state capitol building brandishing loaded firearms, to protest a bill forbidding such weapons in Oakland, where the BPP was based.

Author David Farber noted that, “In a Ten-Point Program, Newton and Seale articulated a set of radical demands that included the release of all black prison inmates and a massive redistribution of property and wealth from whites to blacks.”

The BPP was credited with coining one of the most offensive slogans of the era: “Off the pig,” which was a crude invitation to kill police officers. Another BPP slogan was “The Revolution has come, it's time to pick up the gun!” It was out of this culture of militant violence, especially towards the police, that radicals like Eldrige Cleaver gained influence and that the Black Liberation Army eventually grew.

Activities

The Political Education Kit for Black Panther Party Members, which was exhibited at hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Government Operations on June 18, 24, and 25 of 1969 stated that the primary objective of the Black Panther Party was to “establish Revolutionary Political Power for Black People.” The document further states that, “The Black Panther is an armed body for carrying out the political tasks of the revolution.”

By and large, the BPP was not interested in legislative or political reform, and was more openly interested in armed revolution against the established government. In October 1967, BPP co-founder Huey Newton demonstrated that his organization fully intended to match action to rhetoric when he went to jail for killing a police officer. “In April 1968, thirteen Panthers ambushed an Oakland police car, hitting it with 157 shots and badly wounding one officer.”

In his book, Covert Cadre, Steven Powell detailed a meeting of seven black militant groups, including the BPP of New York, which took place at the headquarters of the Institute For Policy Studies in December of 1966. “Later, Emory Douglas, BPP minister of culture, said, ‘The only way to make this racist U.S. government administer justice to the people it is oppressing, is... by taking up arms against this government, killing the officials, until the reactionary forces... are dead, and those that are left turn their weapons on their superiors. thereby passing revolutionary judgment against the number one enemy of all mankind, the racist U.S. government.’”

The Panthers didn’t limit their violence to representatives of the government, or to those who wore a badge. The presence of the BPP meant increased violence in the neighborhoods where they lived and operated. For instance, according to one firsthand account, “in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution, and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people.”

Ideology

The Black Panther Party operated in the model of Marxism promoted by murderous totalitarians like Chinese dictator Mao Zedong and Soviet tyrant Vladimir Lenin.

While the BPP only flirted with the concept of fully cooperating with white radical groups in order to achieve their goals, several white radicals and leftist groups offered assistance to the BPP due to their shared anti-American worldview. For example, the eighth national convention of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) in December 1968 met in Chicago and featured Black Panther Party speakers. The YSA fully supported armed black guerrilla warfare. “Both Hillary Clinton and Bill Lanh Lee began their political careers as law students at Yale by organizing demonstrations in 1970 to shut down the university and stop the trial of seven Panther leaders accused of ordering the torture and execution of a black youth named Alex Rackley.”

Eldrige Cleaver believed that the success of the struggle ultimately depended on replicating the communist revolutions that had already taken place in other parts of the world. "If you look around the world," he wrote, "you will see that the only countries which have liberated themselves and managed to withstand the tide of counter-revolution are precisely those countries that have strongly Marxist-Leninist parties."

Author Paul Berman said, “The scary nature of the Panther movement was easy enough to detect. The paramilitary leather uniforms, the titles like 'Minister of Information' and 'Minister of Defense,' the jailhouse tone, the apology for rape in Cleaver's writings, the lapses into anti-Semitism, the assassination campaigns against the police-everything advertised the terror and dictatorship that were bound to spring from Panther power, if the party ever had the bad luck to acquire any.”

References

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