Racism And Resistance: How The Black Panthers Challenged White Supremacy 383763857X, 9783837638578

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Racism And Resistance: How The Black Panthers Challenged White Supremacy
 383763857X,  9783837638578

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Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
Preface......Page 8
Introduction: Playing the Race Card......Page 14
Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon......Page 30
To Expose, Subvert, and Provoke......Page 48
Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy......Page 92
Crucial Role of the Media......Page 124
Where Do We Go From Here?......Page 162
Notes......Page 194
Bibliography......Page 216

Citation preview

Franziska Meister Racism and Resistance

Political Science | Volume 43

Franziska Meister (PhD) is a science and culture editor at Swiss weekly »WOZ – Die Wochenzeitung«.

Franziska Meister

Racism and Resistance How the Black Panthers Challenged White Supremacy

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2017 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3857-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3857-2

Contents Preface  | 7 Introduction: Playing the Race Card  | 13 Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon  | 29 To Expose, Subvert, and Provoke  | 47 Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy  | 91 Crucial Role of the Media  | 123 Where Do We Go From Here?  | 161 Notes  | 193 Bibliography  | 215

Preface

“Can you believe it?”, the professor from the History Department at UC Berkeley shouted across the hallway to his approaching colleague, pointing his thumb towards me, “she wants to write about the Black Panthers!” That was at the end of the 1990s, and I wasn’t sure whether they were amused about me, a female white Ph.D. student from Switzerland, or about the subject of my historical venture. I chose to take both issues seriously – namely, to capitalize on the outsider’s perspective. For what has perplexed me ever since I spent my senior high school year as an exchange student in a practically all-white New England small town was a conception of race so universally shared that I caused profound irritation whenever I addressed it: a professed antiracism that went hand in hand with beliefs reflecting white supremacy. Race, I have since come to understand, is a category that permeates US history and society up to the present. At the same time, it is curiously absent from public discourse and conscience. Or at least it was until Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016. His patented slogan “Make America Great Again” and the buzzword “America First”, decoded, signify one thing above all: whites (or rather: white males) first. One could read this as a rollback of women’s political aspirations,  which were incorporated by Trump’s Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, just as well as one could perceive it as a backlash against Barack Obama, the first black man who had ever become President of the United States. But that would be too simple of an explanation, and a mistaken one at that. Arguably, Obama was not elected because he is black, but rather in spite of it: what made him eligible for a majority of white citizens in 2008 is the fact that his age and African origin severed any possible ties to what is remembered as the “racial crisis” of the late 1960s. Obama himself deliberately excluded race relations from his campaign and continued to tiptoe around the issue during his tenure. Yet he would never have been able to take the oval office without those who shouted “Black Power” almost 50 years ago. After the election of Donald Trump, the danger of history repeating itself is closer than ever. No longer only because race has been marginalized from

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contemporary discourse with the rise of the ideology of colorblindness, but because it could emerge once more in the factual guise of white supremacy. In view of a newly ascending Ku Klux Klan and overt racism manifesting itself in public again, discussing race from a black perspective becomes ever more urgent. This is what this book sets out to do. In fact, the era of Black Power still has to be captured in its historic significance, as the black historian Peniel E. Joseph points out, and this assessment holds true particularly for the period’s most influential and radical black activists, the Black Panthers. While contemporary interest in the Black Panther Party (BPP) was huge and prompted a variety of accounts and compilations mostly journalistic in style, these accounts catered almost exclusively to the hegemonial narrative of describing the Panthers as a bunch of violence-prone ghetto hoodlums. It was not until the 1990s that a series of rivaling biographies of former West Coast Panthers sought to reanimate interest in the BPP and its history (Anthony 1990; Brown 1992; Hilliard / Cole 1993; Brent 1996; Andrews 1996; Olsen 2000). Two groundbreaking collections of essays from both scholars and former Panthers or New Left activists (Jones 1998c; Cleaver / Katsiaficas 2001) set the stage for serious academic scholarship on the Party. These publications provide insight into different aspects of the BPP and its development. Over the past ten years, a new generation of scholars has added depth and detail to an increasingly multifaceted history of the Black Panther Party. Rhodes (2007), for instance, provides a nuanced account of the BPP’s history in the Bay Area as reflected in the intricate interplay between the Panthers and mass media, the black press, and underground newspapers. The role of women within the Party is comparably well researched, both in terms of their practical everyday contributions and from a gender perspective that explores their difficult search for the position of revolutionary black women caught between struggling against prevailing expressions of machoism within the Party and white-dominated perceptions within the women’s liberation movement (Alkebulan 2007; Witt 2007a; Cleaver 2001; LeBlanc-Ernest 1998; Matthews 1998). A shift of focus from national Party leaders to the rank and file in the various cities across the states – combined with oral history approaches – has opened access to the BPP in its local versions and brought to light the tremendous heterogeneity between individual Party chapters and branches (Arend 2009; Williams / Lazerow 2009; Jeffries 2007a; 2007b; Alkebulan 2007; Witt 2007a; 2007b; Austin 2006). Through these studies, the Panthers’ community service programs and the great efforts that went into establishing them and keeping them running came to the foreground. And while Party ideology has also been scrutinized both in relation to other Black Power concepts and its orientation on class (Alkebulan 2007; Jeffries 2002; Hayes / Kiene 1998; Spichal 1974), a thoroughly classbased analysis of the BPP, particularly with respect to its daily activities, has

Preface

not yet been attempted. Much rather, it seems that Panther historiography has come to a halt with Bloom and Martin’s in-depth monography (2013). The roots of this book go back to my Ph.D., a monography on the Black Panther Party finished before the bulk of the above literature on the BPP was published. It is based on source material collected mainly in the archives of the Bancroft library at UC Berkeley, with additional material coming from the Special Collections and University Archives from Stanford and various private archives from former Panthers and New Left activists. When claiming that an outsider’s perspective guided my research, what I refer to is this: my groping to understand the importance of race in shaping America’s self-conception led me towards embracing the perspective of those growing up in the midst of US society without being recognized as full members of this society – black people. For their marginalized position provides them with what one of the preeminent black intellectuals of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois, labeled Double Consciousness – and thus, for me as a historian, with what I perceive as a privileged approach to understanding race and race relations in the tumultuous 1960s. While contemporary black writers and intellectuals such as Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, or James Baldwin – not to forget Martin Luther King and Malcolm X – have been enlightening my conception regarding the problem of race, it is from the black voices of the ghetto streets that I learned most: from the various testimonials coming from a broad cross section of the black community of Watts in the aftermath of the Los Angeles ghetto revolt in 1965, and, particularly, from The Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper which I systematically dissected from its first issue up to 1972. With respect to the various writings of Party members, which I also included in my analysis, one has to take into account that many of them were written in hindsight and offer a perspective molded accordingly by later events, which is why I have always sought to compare them with sources dating close to the events analyzed, especially The Black Panther. Many other sources I have used – among them government investigations and commission reports as well as articles from various mass media –  have been included in studies on the Black Panther Party published since I finished my Ph.D. None of these studies, however, have rested so profoundly on an indepth scrutiny of The Black Panther, and none of them, to my knowledge, have systematically gathered and analyzed contemporary agitprop and documentary films about the Panthers. What hopefully most distinguishes this book – apart from the inclusion of film sources – from other historical accounts is the approach taken: the attempt to capture the Black Panthers as engaged in a struggle for Black Visibility and to thus convey in what respects this struggle remains of importance until today. Critical Race Theory and particularly the work of the black philosopher Charles W. Mills has been of eminent importance

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to this effect. Particularly his Blackness Visible (1998) was instrumental in putting my findings into a larger perspective. Mills and the sociologist Bob Blauner, whose advice has guided me through the various stages of my tackling with the Panthers and black protest in the 1960s, have been inspiring also in an altogether different way: their works exemplify that even exceedingly complex and abstract matters can be captured in a language that manages to reach out beyond an exclusive circle of experts and make them relevant to people outside academia. I gave my very best to reach this goal. This book would not have been possible without the support of many people –  chief among them the late Bruno Fritzsche, professor of modern history at the University of Zurich, who has continuously supported my research on both an academic and personal level, but unfortunately cannot witness its present materialization. My warmest thanks also go to Jakob Horstmann from the editing house transcript for the enthusiasm with which he accepted my manuscript for publication and Annika Linnemann, also from transcript, for her efficient and entirely unbureaucratic guidance throughout the publication process. I am deeply indebted also to Renata Leimer, who proofread the manuscript thoughtfully and thoroughly. Last but not least, I embrace my main men, Christoph Ringli and our sons Nicolas and Valentin, who never questioned that I spent so many evenings and weekends sitting behind the screen of my laptop and transforming the kitchen table into a writing habitat with piles of books and notes.

Fig. 1: Get Out (Emory Douglas, 1968, © 2017, Pro Litteris, Zurich/Art Resource, NY)

Introduction: Playing the Race Card

Bobby Hutton was unarmed and had his arms raised above his head when he emerged from the basement where he had been hiding from the police. The Oakland police officers riddled the 17-year-old black youth with bullets. Philando Castile, who had been pulled over by the police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, was killed at close range through the open car window by an officer. Alton Sterling was wrestled to the ground of a parking lot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by two policemen who then proceeded to execute him with several gunshots. In 2015 alone, US police killed at least 346 black people. Roughly every third of the victims was unarmed. In all but ten cases, the police officers were not charged with a crime. 1 Almost half a century lies between the latter two police killings of July 2016 and Bobby Hutton’s death in April 1968. Hutton had been among the first recruits of the Black Panther Party, who had started to mobilize the black ghetto community around the issues of police violence and the necessity for black selfdefense in October 1966. Hutton’s death – only days after Martin Luther King, Jr. had been murdered – propelled the Panthers to the vanguard position not only of the Black Movement but the larger New Left and Antiwar Movements. “Revolution has come –  Time to pick up the gun!” the protest resonated in the streets and reverberated on campus rallies, as the term pig for policeman became commonplace and the US government was routinely referred to as a racist, imperialist power structure. The more the government went into overdrive to suppress the Black Panther Party, which by the end of 1968 was active in practically every major US city with a sizable black community, the broader the Panthers’ support base became, reaching both conservative black leaders and intellectuals within the liberal white establishment. It was only when President Richard Nixon started to make concessions to appease both antiwar and black voices by scaling back the military draft and opening up avenues of political, social, and economic ascent for blacks through federal affirmative action programs that the Black Panthers’ support base began to dwindle and fall apart, as did the Party itself in early 1971 (although it continued to be active on a local basis in Oakland until 1982).

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Thus Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin conclude their comprehensive historical account Black Against Empire (2013), which is widely appraised as the ultimate study on the Black Panther Party. “Most blacks in the United States today, especially the black middle class, believe their grievances can be redressed through traditional political and economic channels. Most view insurgency as no longer necessary and do not feel threatened by state repression of insurgent challengers.” (Bloom / Martin 2013: 398) An assessment that must ring odd in the ears of all those who have taken to the streets under the banner of Black Lives Matter in recent years to protest police killings of black people. The loosely knit network first started to organize after the murderer of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida was acquitted in 2013. Black Lives Matter has reverberated in social media channels and from the streets ever since, from the 2014 police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York City to the latest victims of police violence in 2016, among them Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. The slogan itself is worth a pause: to maintain that Black Lives Matter is chilling evidence for the fact that for many blacks, history has not evolved as a series of progress but rather in cycles, if not in an outright downward spiral. Take only the existential fear emanating from every page of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015), a deeply personal reflection addressing his son but aiming at the larger white public at the same time, echoing James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew in The Fire This Time (1963) – minus the seething anger contained in Baldwin’s eloquent prose. And what are black people to make of the slogan “All Lives Matter” that aims at nullifying their claim that Black Lives Matter? The ever so dominant ideology of colorblindness that permeates American society today leaves Americans literally blind to black sufferings because this ideology masks how racism is structurally engrained and continues to reproduce itself even in the absence of overt racist sentiments. The demand for colorblindness quite simply “equates ending racism with eliminating racial reference within juridical discourse and public policy.” (Singh 2004: 10) Thus race has become a taboo. In the late 1960s, in contrast, Americans from across all walks of life and ethnicities had found the courage to debate issues of race and racism “with the kind of urgency that the nation had not witnessed since the debates over slavery and Reconstruction a hundred years earlier,” as the sociologist Bob Blauner (2001: 12) points out. The Black Panthers played a key role in fueling and shaping these debates, as this book aims to show. Moreover, their conception of race and the strategies they chose to fight racism hopefully demonstrate that ending racism is possible only by putting race center stage – by going through race, instead of trying to go around race. The great black writer and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied over 100 years ago that one of the central problems of the twentieth century would be

Introduction: Playing the Race Card

that of the color line. Race, he maintained throughout his many books and essays, is a category that cannot be subordinated to any other categories of social, economic or political analysis – not even class –, for “the problem of race always cuts across and hinders the settlement of other problems” (Singh 2004: 75). Today, no one would contest that race is a social construction. Only few, however, are ready to acknowledge that race, as the black philosopher Charles W. Mills phrases it, is “an assigned category that influences the socialization one receives, the life-world in which one moves, the experiences one has, the worldview one develops – in short […] one’s being and consciousness” (Mills 1998: xv, original emphasis). Historically, race emerged from two parallel, but linked processes: the dissemination of enlightenment ideals on the one hand and European expansionism, with its concomitants of expropriation, colonialism, and settlement, on the other.2 This brought forth the dichotomy between the ‘civilized’ –  the settler, colonizer, expropriator, and slaveholder –  and the ‘savage other’ – the dislocated, colonized, expropriated, and enslaved, with the development of racial stereotypes accompanying this dichotomy. The repertoire of white images vs black stereotypes in the early American colonies typically included industrious vs lazy, intelligent vs unintelligent, moral vs immoral, knowledgeable vs ignorant, enabling culture vs disabling culture, law-abiding vs criminal, responsible vs shiftless, virtuous vs lascivious. (Crenshaw 1997: 127) However, the first intellectual to define race in hierarchical terms was the enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his essay On the Different Races of Man (1775), he classified individuals by linking their physical appearance to their capacity for moral and intellectual development and arranging them in what he perceived as a natural order: whites on top, blacks on the bottom. As a result, the universal ideals of enlightenment, according to which all individuals are treated as persons deserving respect equally, became racially encoded and in reality applied to whites only. Of crucial importance for the foundation of the United States was that whiteness developed into a form of property encompassing both material possessions and individual rights – protected by law, which thus “recognized and codified racial group identity as an instrumentality of exclusion and exploitation” (Harris 1997: 53). Racial oppression and exploitation have subsequently become an integral part of both polity and society, structurally engrained in the form of institutional racism, which reproduces the economic, social, cultural, and political privileges of whites, thereby guaranteeing white supremacy. The crucial aspect to understand is this: this system of white supremacy is able to reproduce itself even in the absence of racist sentiments. “Once certain socioeconomic structures are established, questions of intent and the conscious aim to discriminate become less important than their internal dynamic,” Mills argues. “Whites’ outrage at the term white supremacy misses the point that, whether racist or not, they

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are heirs to a system of consolidated structural advantage that will continue to exist unless active moves are made to dismantle it.” (Mills 1998: 146, original emphasis) From a black perspective, this racial encoding of the world has made blacks strangely invisible. The problem of Black Invisibility emanates from a broad range of autobiographical, philosophical and fictional writings throughout the twentieth century and up to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. The phrase itself was coined by Ralph Ellison in his novel Invisible Man, published in 1952. Its prologue opens with: “I am an invisible man. […] I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. […] it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me. […] That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.” (Ellison 1972: 3, original emphasis)

As the protagonist in Ellison’s novel is a black person living in a white world, Black Invisibility denotes a problem of perception ascribed to whites in relation to blacks. It stands for the physical, psychological, cultural, and social constellation of blacks in a society dominated by whites and thus manifests itself on a structural level as well. That whites have the power to define and determine not only how a black person is perceived by others but also how a black person sees him- or herself, is revealed in W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of Double Consciousness – a concept which can also be read as a metaphor for Black Invisibility: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” (Du Bois 1969: 45) The other, of course, being the white other. Ellison’s prologue further elaborates on the existential dimension of Black Invisibility: “You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.” (Ellison 1972: 4) In a sense, blacks have to justify their continued existence in a white world claiming to be better off without them: “It is when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you.” (Ellison 1972: 4)

Introduction: Playing the Race Card

In his autobiography Dusk of Dawn, published in 1940, Du Bois captured the existential dimension of Black Invisibility in remarkably similar terms: “It is as though one, looking out from a dark cave in a side of an impending mountain, sees the world passing and speaks to it; speaks courteously and persuasively, showing them how these entombed souls are hindered in their natural movement, expression, and development; and how their loosening from prison would be a matter not simply of courtesy, sympathy, and help to them, but aid to all the world. One talks on evenly and logically in this way, but notices that the passing throng does not even turn its head, or if it does, glances curiously and walks on. It gradually penetrates the minds of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear; that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world. […] Then the people within may become hysterical. They may scream and hurl themselves against the barriers, hardly realizing in their bewilderment that they are screaming in a vacuum unheard and that their antics may actually seem funny to those outside looking in. They may even, here and there, break through in blood and disfigurement, and find themselves faced by a horrified, implacable, and quite overwhelming mob of people frightened for their own very existence.” (Du Bois 1940: 130-131)

That the problem of Black Invisibility was addressed with increasing urgency among black writers and intellectuals around the middle of the 20th century is no accident: this reflects the fundamental change black people were experiencing as a result of the Great Black Migration. In 1910, 90 percent of the US black population lived in the Southern states, with three out of four blacks living in a rural area. By 1960, not only were 50 percent of all blacks residing outside the South, three out of four also found themselves concentrated in urban ghettos. (Meier / Rudwick 1993: 232) Du Bois’ cave allegory thus captures how blacks who tried to escape de jure segregation in the South soon found themselves concentrated and isolated again in the de facto segregated world of the black ghetto. The system of white supremacy had merely adapted from overtly racist structures to institutional dynamics less readily detectable as racist. Black Invisibility, from this vantage point, must thus be seen as making up the essence, the internal functioning logic, of white supremacy. For it masks the systematically privileged status of whites and the systematic disadvantaging of blacks –  in other words: it legitimizes the existing social order. Consequentially then, as Charles Mills (1998: 164) points out, whites will – “with complete sincerity” – perceive black agitation for the dismantling of white people’s continuing and systematic privileging in a white supremacy system as a violation of white people’s rights. This becomes evident when taking into account how Du Bois’ cave allegory actually foreshadowed what would happen 25 years later when tens of thousands of blacks took to the streets in Watts, the center of black Los Angeles, in what

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became the first of a series of ghetto revolts that swept across the nation in the second half of the 1960s. For Watts erupted only days after President Lyndon B. Johnson had officially buried the system of de jure segregation in the South by signing the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965 – and progressive whites across the nation perceived the goals of the civil rights movement as realized. They were accordingly outraged (and frightened into buying arms for selfdefense) when blacks in Watts chased the police – who had brutalized a black man and thus triggered the revolt – out of the ghetto and then proceeded to loot and burn. The black ghetto community had indeed broken through the “thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass” – alas “in blood and disfigurement”. The report by the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots (1965) and the genesis of these findings provide an illustrative example of how whites perceived and rationalized black agitation. The collection of testimonies was framed by a clear-cut law and order position from its inception, and the handful of witnesses from the black community were preselected accordingly to include representatives from the hard-working, law-abiding black middle class only – among them the president of the local NAACP, one of the oldest and most conservative civil rights organizations, and a more progressive reverend active in the civil rights movement. The black community at large was deliberately excluded, for fears that its members would use the hearings for “posturing” or “to make a lot of noise” (Jacobs 1966: 255). During the hearings, the commission granted Chief William Parker from the Los Angeles Police Department almost unlimited time and space to present his arguments, while the witnesses from the black community were cut short, interrupted, rebuked or taken aside for a clarification of issues “off the record”.3 Completely dismissing the evidence presented during the hearings, the commission’s chairman John McCone disputed that any racist mechanisms were at work in the housing and real estate market to confine blacks to the ghetto area: “The only obstacle that stood in the way of Negro occupancy was the owner’s choice. There was no legal restriction. It was a man’s option to do what he wished with his property,” McCone declared (Jacobs 1966: 278-279), thus voicing his conviction that white rights, such as the right to property and its protection, were untouchable. Similarly, the report itself culminated in the contention that “the rioters had no legal or moral justification for the wounds they inflicted” (Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots 1965: 6) – wounds in white property destroyed during the revolt. What the commission (and the larger white public) refused to recognize – and what was instantly understood by black ghetto residents across the nation –, was the pattern behind the looting, burning, and defiant posturing opposite the police: the protesters targeted the businesses of white merchants who had been consistently overcharging the local black community, exploiting the customers with unfair credits, and treating them disrespectfully; they

Introduction: Playing the Race Card

targeted those forces of society whose function it was ‘to keep blacks in their place’ – the ghetto – and to make them accustomed to living in an inferior position. By challenging the police, the mostly youthful blacks insisted upon their equality as a person to those who had routinely denied them this status, and by chasing the police away, they claimed control over the ghetto streets. 4 Much rather than a riot, the Watts uprising in August 1965 was a revolt, a revolt against the inferior status ascribed to blacks, a revolt against key symbols and representatives of institutional racism – a revolt against Black Invisibility. During those five days in August 1965, the later founders and early leaders of the Black Panther Party were virtually glued to their TV screens and radio stations, as they all recalled. (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 114-115; Seale 1991: 37; Cleaver 1968: 26-27) What they and their neighborhood friends experienced essentially paralleled what the revolting Watts youth were going through. Burning, setting fire, being set afire and going through fire –  both literally and symbolically – amounted to an act of cleansing and initiation into a different physical and psychological state. Watts signaled the change from Civil Rights to Black Power –  from the hope for integration to the fight for black liberation. “We had seen Watts rise up the previous year. We had seen how the police attacked the Watts community after causing the trouble in the first place. We had seen Martin Luther King come to Watts in an effort to calm the people, and we had seen his philosophy of nonviolence rejected,” Huey P. Newton recalled in his autobiography. “Everything we had seen convinced us that our time had come. Out of this need sprang the Black Panther Party.” (Newton 1995b: 110) When Newton and Bobby Seale started to organize the black community of Oakland around the issues of community control and black self-determination in October 1966, their 10-point program What We Want –  What We Believe fully addressed the complaints voiced during the Watts revolt: police brutality, exploitation through white business owners in the ghetto, unemployment and discrimination in the job market, in housing and in public schools. Both Newton and Seale were enrolled at Merritt College and worked at a local antipoverty center at the time. They had dug deep into the history of black people in the United States and, among others, had devoured the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison.5 Du Bois, as well as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who had been murdered in February 1965, had introduced them to the anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa after World War II and the growing momentum these movements were gaining while progress for blacks in the US still crept along “at horse and buggy pace”, as King formulated in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail. Newton and Seale were thus keenly aware of the historical time and crossroads they were standing at in the fall of 1966: the cry for Black Power had been launched only weeks ago and started to tear the civil rights movement

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apart, while it became ever more clear with the growing opposition to the war in Vietnam that antiracism and anticolonialism were linked struggles that could not be separated – just as Du Bois had remained steadfast in his belief that the problem of race would never be resolved unless it was treated as a global problem. Moreover, just as Du Bois had always endorsed socialism over capitalism when it came to fighting racism, the Panthers exhibited a pronouncedly anticapitalistic stance. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, the Party’s key ideologists, eclectically appropriated Marxist-Leninist theories and quotations from Mao Tse-tung, the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, or the North-Korean leader Kim Il Sung and sought ways to adapt successful socialist revolutions like the one in Cuba to the United States – always with a mindful eye towards the necessity to reshape Party ideology as circumstances changed. Their socialist stance notwithstanding, race always provided the foundation of both the Black Panthers’ theoretical outlook and their principles of practice. In his booklet On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party (Part 1), Cleaver renounced all forms of dogmatism and insisted that the analysis and adaptation of an ideological or theoretical perspective must always be done by blacks themselves, in their own terms and with their own definitions resulting from their black experience and black existence. Among the many reasons why the Panthers found Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth from 1961, which detailed how to struggle against colonialism, to be the most useful guide to revolution inside the United States, the underlying prerequisite was this: “Given the racist history of the United States, it is very difficult for Black people to comfortably call themselves Marxist-Leninists or anything else that takes its name from White people,” Cleaver explained in his booklet. “Not until we reach Fanon do we find a major Marxist-Leninist theoretician who was primarily concerned about the problems of Black people, wherever they may be found.” Fanon’s basic contention being that “what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging or not belonging to a given race.” (Fanon 1966: 32) And while the Panthers had invoked the US Declaration of Independence by adopting its key passages into the appendix of their 10-point program, they were adamant in indicting the US Constitution as the racist foundation on which the United States had been erected as a white supremacy system. As the incarcerated leadership of the New York Panthers captured it in a letter written in March 1970: “[T]he history of this nation has most definitely developed a dual set of social, economic and political realities, as well as dynamics. One white, and the other Black (the Black experience or ghetto reality) […] Color became the crucial variable, and the foundation of the system of Black slavery. […] After much refinement, sophistication and development, it has remained to become embedded in the national character, making itself clear in organized society, its institutions, and the attitudes of the dominant white

Introduction: Playing the Race Card culture to this very day. For us to state that there are two realities (experiences) that exist in this nation, is a statement of fact. When we speak of American traditions, let us not forget the tradition of injustice inflicted again and again upon those whom tradition has been created to exclude, exploit, dehumanize and murder.” (Foner 1970: 196-197)

The crucial aspect of this racial encoding lay, as the Panthers argued, in its rendering black experience and black existence invisible, in order to legitimate white supremacy: “To be sure, the entire country had to share in this denial; to justify the inhuman treatment of other human beings, the American had to conceal from himself and others his oppression of Blacks, but again the white dominant society has long had absolute power, especially over Black people – so it was no difficult matter to ignore them, define them, forget them, and if they persisted, pacify or punish them. […] ‘Traditional American justice’, its very application has created what it claims to remedy, for its eyes are truly covered: it does not see the Black reality, nor does it consider or know of the Black experience, least of all consider it valid.” (Foner 1970: 197)

The centrality the Panthers ascribed to race as a category of analysis guided them in positioning themselves within the black protest movement and vis-àvis the larger New Left movements. Their radical rejection of the civil rights movement and its goal of integration, for instance, was based on the contention that, as Seale formulated, “integration as it is popularly conceived means going to a white school, white neighborhood, white church, etc. This assumes that the only way black people can become equal is to be white. It automatically assumes black inferiority and white superiority.” (TBP, May 25, 1969: 4) Conversely, the Panthers hailed Malcolm X precisely because in speech after speech he had driven home how defining a feature race was in American life. On the one hand, Malcolm X had been educating his black audiences about their condition in relation to the US government and society from both a historical and contemporary political perspective, in order to raise black people’s commitment to oppose white supremacy “by any means necessary”. On the other hand, he had always presented a mirror to whites, confronting them with their attitudes and behavior and the functioning of ‘their system’ from a black perspective. But the Panthers were not the only ones claiming heritage to Malcolm X – more or less the entire Black Power movement did, after Stokely Carmichael from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had first launched the rallying cry of Black Power in the summer of 1966. Originally, the Panthers had also paid tribute to Carmichael and the political concept of Black Power he advanced in his book a year later.6 The Panthers applauded Carmichael primarily because he had arrived at essentially the same conclusions, namely, that the United States were a white supremacy system functioning on the basis

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of Black Invisibility. “Racist assumptions of white superiority have been so deeply engrained into the fiber of the society,” Carmichael wrote, that they “are taken for granted and frequently not even recognized.” (Carmichael / Hamilton 1967: 5) However, what distinguished the Panthers’ conception of race from other Black Power advocates and groups was that they did not make race essential. Much rather, they regarded race as “shaping one’s being without being one’s shape”, to pick up Charles W. Mills’ (1998: xiv) lucid formulation. Limited conceptions of blackness that remained hung-up on skin color were resolutely opposed as mirrored racism unable to challenge Black Invisibility. After first drafting Stokely Carmichael into the Black Panther Party in June 1967 because he had distinguished himself “in the struggle for the total liberation of Black people from oppression in racist white America,” as Newton (1995a: 9-10) reasoned, the BPP formally expelled Carmichael two years later. In his Open Letter to Stokely Carmichael from July 1969, Eldridge Cleaver charged Carmichael with being “unable to distinguish your friends from your enemies because all you could see was the color of the cat’s skin,” in reference to several instances in which Carmichael defended black politicians and policemen –  functionaries of the white supremacy system whose skin color did little to change the racist mechanisms engrained in the institution they served. “You speak about an ‘undying love for black people’. An undying love for black people that denies the humanity of other people is doomed. It was an undying love of white people for each other which led them to deny the humanity of colored people and which has stripped white people of humanity itself.” (Foner 1970: 106-108) Cultural nationalist groups who took pride in their curly hair-do and wore colorful African gowns were particularly scorned for their belief “that there is dignity inherent in wearing naturals; that a baba makes a slave a man; and that a common language, Swahili, makes all of us brothers,” as Panther Linda Harrison put it: “cultural nationalism offers no challenge or offense against the prevailing order.” Much rather, as she and various other Panthers pointed out in 1969, the Nixon administration had already exploited cultural Black Power by commercializing it under the slogan black capitalism. “No black capitalist can function unless he plays the white man’s game,” Newton charged. “The rules of black capitalism, and the limits of black capitalism are set by the white power structure.”7 Essentially, then, the Panthers criticized cultural nationalists for their limited conception of race as being one’s shape and completely ignoring how it shaped one’s being. From their very inception, the Panthers had exhibited an emphatic antiracist stance. As Newton pointed out at the occasion of his very first press conference in May 1967: “we’re not anti-white. I don’t hate a person because of the color of his skin. I hate the oppression that we’re subjected to daily by

Introduction: Playing the Race Card

racist pigs and other racists who attack and murder and brutalize us, those who have been brutalizing us for 400 years.” (Seale 1991: 172) In the years to come, the Panthers would repeat this time and again, as Seale maintained, emphasizing at the same time that what they hated was “what is being done to us and the system that creates what is being done to us” (TBP, March 3, 1969: 10). Repeatedly, they took refuge to Malcolm X, who had turned into a fervent antiracist towards the end of his life, quoting him in the Party newspaper as saying: “We are anti-exploitation, anti-degradation, and anti-oppression – if the white man doesn’t want us to be anti-him then let him stop oppressing, degrading and exploiting us.”8 Just as they saw through the racial encoding of the US system and society, the Panthers were convinced that whites were not born racists, but were turned into racists by the system’s very functioning. “[T]he values taught in this country inevitably result in whites’ having racist attitudes,” Cleaver maintained. “But I think a lot of whites are made racists against their essential humanity and without their conscious knowledge.” (Cleaver 1969: 177) Unlike the majority of Black Power advocates, the Panthers were thus ready to work together with whites –  based on the premise that whites recognize and struggle to overcome their racially-encoded conceptions of black people. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, one of the incarcerated New York BPP leaders, later explained how a well-meaning white individual would typically claim that he was not responsible for the situation of blacks since he wasn’t there during slavery. “But that’s not the point,” Bin Wahad clarified. “The point is that he inherited white-skin privilege, and he doesn’t question or challenge it.” (Fletcher / Jones / Lotringer 1993: 36) The coalitions the BPP formed with whites and groups from other ethnic minorities thus rested on the contention that theirs was a struggle to overcome race – by going through race (and not around it). What further distinguished the Panthers in their coalition politics and their perception of viable strategies to challenge white supremacy was the centrality they ascribed to the common historical roots the United States shared with other countries of the so-called Third World: colonialism and the racial encoding of enlightenment ideals. They recognized, in other words, that white supremacy was a world-wide phenomenon. And this realization led them to repudiate black nationalism, a highly fashionable concept among Black Power advocates in the second half of the 1960s. Trying to establish a separate black nation was futile, Newton argued, because it would only further concentrate and isolate blacks, concluding that “the only way that we are going to be free is to wipe out once and for all the oppressive structure of America.” (Newton1995a: 98) For blacks in the United States shared a common fate with other nonwhite peoples around the globe, the Panthers were convinced, namely, their situation as a colonized people:

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The idea of the ghetto as internal colony and the consequential conception of the police as an occupying army was not entirely unprecedented. Contemporary black writers and intellectuals such as James Baldwin or Kenneth B. Clark had already made fleeting references to the analogy, as had Malcolm X and, at least implicitly, the revolting ghetto youth of Watts in their repeated linking between Watts and Vietnam. 10 And while Stokely Carmichael’s book on Black Power was certainly important in elaborating the colonial analogy, it is primarily the Panthers who must be credited with broadly popularizing it. For they not only founded their analysis of the situation of US ghetto blacks on Frantz Fanon’s seminal study of the Algerian liberation struggle, they were instrumental in turning The Wretched of the Earth into what became the bible for the black revolutionary towards the end of the 1960s. (Cleaver 1998: 214; Singh 1998: 76) In fact, they closely modeled themselves after what Fanon had depicted as the vanguard of the revolution. The organizational features Fanon found indispensable for such a vanguard were all followed – or at least aspired to – within the Black Panther Party: internal hierarchy and structural discipline, organizational presence on the local level across the country, a leadership that is politically and intellectually sophisticated, and a strict orientation to the needs of the people in the black community. 11 Basically, the colonial analogy is reflected already in the BPP’s 10-point program. Its individual points address the racist functioning of major US institutions both public and private – namely, the job, business, and housing market (#2, 3, 4), the educational system (#5) and, clearly with the greatest emphasis, the executive and judicial systems (#6, 7, 8, 9). The colonial analogy was woven into each of these points: on the economic level, property and property rights were identified as white privilege on the one hand and black exploitation on the other, particularly in the area of jobs and employment (#2), but also concerning the exploitation of black labor (#2, 3), the ownership and operation of businesses (#3), and the ownership and conditions of housing (#4). The dehumanization of blacks as expressed in white indifference and disrespect and the humiliating treatment of blacks was pointed out in relation to the housing conditions of blacks (#4), in the educational system (#5), and in executive and judicial institutions such as the police, courts, and the military (#6, 7, 8, 9). On the political level, the various aspects of black oppression were exemplified in the denial of freedom (#1, 7, 8, 9), the denial of justice (#8, 9), and the violence with which this oppression was executed (#6, 7). In sum, the

Introduction: Playing the Race Card

program painted black communities as typical internal colonies, characterized by heteronomy (#1-10), exploitation (#2, 3, 6), oppression (#6, 7, 8, 9), and the relegating of blacks to an inferior status (#4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). (cf. Foner 1970: 2-4) The single most important aspect of Fanon’s study which the Panthers took up was that colonialism was inextricably tied to violence. “The agents of government speak the language of pure force,” Fanon (1966: 31) contended, pointing out how the policeman or soldier was “the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.” A violence of existential dimensions, as its purpose was to dehumanize the natives – “breaking in the native”, as Fanon (1966: 35) put it – in order to exploit them. What constitutes the actual uniqueness of Fanon’s conception of violence is that the system’s violence – and thereby the colonial system itself – can only be overcome through violence, that “it will only yield when confronted with greater violence” (Fanon 1966: 48). Not only did he thus raise violence to the sine qua non of an anticolonial liberation struggle, he morally justified it, arguing that since violence was the language of the white settler, the black native must subvert and instrumentalize this very violence and thus claim it as legitimate. (Fanon 1966: 65) This was a point Malcolm X tirelessly drove home in his speeches: black self-defense was “by any means necessary” – explicitly, as he never failed to state, including violence. In one of his rhetorical drives against ‘the white man’, he told his audience: “[S]ee the language he speaks, the language of a brute, the language of someone who has no sense of morality, who absolutely ignores law […] He’s talking the language of violence […] Let’s learn his language. If his language is with a shotgun, get a shotgun. Yes, I said if he only understands the language of a rifle, get a rifle.” (Breitman 1990: 108) In Fanon’s contention, violence thus employed became a “cleansing force”: “It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction,” the Algerian psychiatrist argued, “it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” (Fanon 1966: 73) On a quite existential level then, Fanon perceived violence as man recreating himself – as part of an initiation ritual through which the native reclaimed his or her status of full personhood and human identity. And this was precisely what countless blacks had witnessed as the Watts revolt unfolded on their TV screens. What’s more, as Fanon argued, violence thus became an “illuminating force”, revolutionizing the natives’ consciousness: “Yesterday they were completely irresponsible; today they mean to understand everything and make all decisions. Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification.” (Fanon 1966: 74) Viewed as metaphor, this illuminating power of violence is the power to create Black Visibility – not only on the physical and psychological, but also on the structural levels. Once achieved, this Black Visibility would spark the actual revolution: “Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence

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organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them.” (Fanon 1966: 117) The Black Panthers now argued on a similarly metaphorical level when claiming heritage to Fanon and Malcolm X with the formula “Frantz Fanon put it on paper, […] Malcolm X put [it] into words, and […] Huey P. Newton put it into action”. 12 Over the course of their existence until the split in 1971, the Panthers would make excessive use of violence – predominantly, however, on the rhetorical and performative levels, and not in the form of actual acts of aggression. (Austin 2006: 112) During all the armed confrontations while patrolling the police between October 1966 and May 1967, for instance, not a single shot was fired. (Bloom / Martin 2013: 66) The Panthers tried to employ violence as an ‘illuminating force’, a force of education towards realizing Black Visibility. The colonial analogy they had developed was absolutely instrumental in this process, for it fundamentally challenged the hegemonial discourse about the black community as a culture of poverty, a notion popularized with the Moynihan Report in 1965. According to this notion, members of the urban black underclass exhibited various forms of disorganizations on the personal and familial level which precluded them from escaping poverty. 13 The colonial analogy as a counter-narrative provided the Black Panthers with a conceptual vantage point from which they launched an all-out attack against Black Invisibility. Put differently, as this book will argue, the Black Panthers were engaged in a struggle for Black Visibility on the physical, psychological, and structural level – a Black Visibility that would, as they hoped, ultimately disrupt the functioning and reproduction of white supremacy and thus revolutionize US government and society. Chapter One will depict how the Panthers pursued to project a radically different image of blacks into the public, an image that would put them on an equal plane with whites and fundamentally question whites’ assumed superiority. Thus propelling themselves onto the public stage was, as Chapter Two will detail, part and parcel of the Panthers’ larger strategy to expose the racist functioning of key US institutions – a strategy that possessed a subversive and provocative undercurrent that profoundly challenged the government’s performance. All the while, the Panthers employed a rhetoric that was both violent and excessive, intending to provoke the government to a point where it would resort to a retaliating response through which it would publicly delegitimize itself. And the government did respond. It retorted, as Chapter Three will demonstrate, precisely to the Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility. In fact, the government’s response can be framed as following a Back-to-Black-Invisibility imperative: local, state, and federal executive agencies launched coordinated attacks on the BPP’s key Black Visibility assets and worked together to deliberately

Introduction: Playing the Race Card

reinforce racial stereotypes and thus reaffirm white supremacy. The mass media played an important, yet highly ambivalent role in all these processes. Chapter Four explores how the Panthers at once capitalized on the media and opposed them, and how they created a highly efficient and sophisticated counter-public sphere through their own media. Placing the Black Panthers’ struggle in the context of the contemporary movements for social change, the final chapter shows how the Panthers were not only rooted in the history of black protest and its fight for racial social justice, but strategically employed their struggle for Black Visibility to thus oblige the New Left movements to unite with them in a common struggle against white supremacy. When deliberating to what respects the Black Panthers were actually successful and why they failed in others, what is ultimately up for discussion is the larger meaning of their struggle in the context of race relations in the United States then and now.

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Fig. 2: We Will Not Hesitate To Either Kill Or Die For Our Freedom (Emory Douglas, 1970, © 2017, Pro Litteris, Zurich/Art Resource, NY)

Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon

On May 2, 1967, a car caravan stopped at the State Capitol in Sacramento, California: piling out of the cars were 24 black men and six women, all uniformly dressed in black leather jackets and berets and ostentatiously carrying shotguns and rifles. They immediately loaded their weapons both visibly and audibly before marching towards the front steps of the Capitol, guns pointed neatly up into the air. A lot of people were watching them, shocked. Ronald Reagan, governor of California at the time and in the proceeds of holding a speech on the Capitol lawn, was scared enough to run for cover. Once inside the Capitol, the group made its way into the State Assembly session, where it caused something close to a panic. Ushered back out by security, the group reassembled on the steps of the Capitol, with its spokesperson reading a message in front of the gathered crowd of media reporters and cameramen. 1 Pictures of this tough-looking cadre of black revolutionaries went all around the world. The Black Panther Party had taken the public stage with a bang. And not by coincidence either. Sacramento was the culmination point of a series of strategically staged actions performed by the Panthers, with the aim of projecting a radically different image of blacks into the public: Sacramento marked the advent of the captive black warrior in Babylon, as white America is often referred to by black people. “All his life,” Huey P. Newton wrote, only days later, about the male ghetto black, “he has been taught (explicitly and implicitly) that he is an inferior approximation of humanity. As a man, he finds himself void of those things that bring respect and a feeling of worthiness,” and ultimately, he is forced to withdraw “into the world of the invisible […] The white man is ‘the man’,” he formulated, whereas the black man “is invisible, a nonentity. Society will not acknowledge him as a man.” (Newton 1995b: 79-81, original emphasis) The metaphor of Black Invisibility consciously employed by Newton refers to a central aspect of black experience and consciousness on a very physical level. It is the black body which functions as visible marker of this invisibility. “In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of

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his bodily schema,” the black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon argued in Black Skin, White Masks, first published in 1952, because “the other, the white man, […] had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.” Thus “assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema.” (Fanon 1968: 110-112) The black body is reduced to its skin, its outside, its “sealed exteriority epidermalized”, as the black existential philosopher Lewis Gordon (1997b: 74) puts it. Cultural history is filled with negative stereotypes of the black body and its portrayal as a grotesque caricature, as a deviation from the white aesthetic norm. While the norm of the white body can be said to be invisibly visible, the deviation of the black body is visibly invisible. Black Invisibility as incorporated in the black body is thus white absence: it is the absence of whiteness and its concomitants of full personhood and full ownership of rights and privileges. It signifies, as Gordon (1997b: 72) concludes, the absence of human presence. Crucially, this also means that a black person is not seen in his or her individuality. To see one black is to see every black. As a consequence, white empathy will refuse to enter black skin. On the societal level, this is manifest in the indifference of whites towards black sufferings and social injustices experienced by blacks. And this, in turn, makes blacks more vulnerable to oppression, exploitation, and violence, as the black philosopher Robert Birt (1997: 208) argues. “Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him,” Fanon concluded in Black Skin, White Masks. “It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend.” (Fanon 1968: 216-217) This is how the Black Panther Party had first become active in October 1966: with the attempt to stop the dehumanizing treatment of ghetto blacks by the police and the ultimate demand to be recognized as human beings. Well aware that all previous efforts to control police behavior in black communities had failed, Newton’s strategy was to raise encounters between black civilians and the police to a higher level by patrolling the police with arms: “With weapons in our hands, we were no longer their subjects, but their equals.” (Newton 1995a: 120) When the Panthers started to patrol the police in Oakland in November 1966, weapons could be legally carried in public as long as they were not concealed. (Holder 1990: 209) Standard equipment of the BPP police patrols, which always proceeded by car, included law books, tape recorders, cameras, and, of course, weapons. The patrols were soon conducted daily, the BPP present with up to five cars in the streets of Oakland, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. (Seale 1991: 85) These patrols would be tailing a police car in order to prevent the police from harassing community residents in the streets. Whenever the Panthers on patrol spotted the police questioning someone, they stopped. “We would walk over with our weapons and observe them from a ‘safe’ distance so that the police could not say we were interfering with the performance of their

Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon

duty,” Newton recounted. “We would ask the community members if they were being abused. Most of the time, when a policeman saw us coming, he slipped his book back into his pocket, got into his car, and left in a hurry.” (Newton 1995a: 120-121) Behind these standard procedures of the BPP police patrols stood carefully planned and calculated efforts to reconstruct and redefine the black body – and to rivet attention upon precisely this act. The Panthers displayed a uniform dress style which conveyed an eye-catching visual imagery that demanded respect: black leather jackets and gloves, black berets, later the dark sunglasses and powder blue shirts with the Panther emblem. This outfit clearly reflected the hip and cool ghetto style. At the same time, the Panther uniform was part of a recognizable revolutionary tradition of resistance fighting. Newton had consciously chosen the beret because of its function as an “international hat for the revolutionary” (Hampton / Fayer 1990: 351). Bobby Seale, cofounder of the BPP, and other early Party members confirmed the Panther uniform to be part of a calculated strategy: it came to represent organization, unity, and black consciousness and pride – and as such, it served as a recruiting and political organizing tool. (The Black Scholar Interviews: Bobby Seale 1972: 13; TBP, June 21, 1969: 16; Newton 1995a: 143) The key role, however, was played by the guns, in themselves impressive and eye-catching, and carried flamboyantly in the open. Newton routinely presented himself with a massive pump-action shotgun and an ammunition belt he carried over his leather jacket and across the chest, while Seale displayed a handgun in a shoulder holster which he also strapped over his leather jacket. “Now, we’re not going out there attacking anybody,” Seale was to remind his audiences in the years to come. “That’s not the point. We’re not teaching hate. We are teaching organization and unity.” (TBP, November 21, 1971: 14) The Panthers aimed at commanding attention by using their weapons to display utmost power and control – through the threat of violence. “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun” was one of the BPP’s favorite slogans, it epitomized the ambivalence contained in the slogan Black Power. The fundamental ambivalence of power in the context of blacks with guns arose out of the double meaning of power as control – in the sense of self-control and discipline, control of a situation and the environment – and power as violence – the threat and fear-instilling aspect of the gun. In encounters with the police, the Panthers behaved in a disciplined way, yet aggressively demonstrated their knowledge of California law codes, 2 particularly when bystanders were gathering. The idea was to thus politically educate members of the black community about their rights as citizens opposite the police. Huey Newton was particularly skillful in turning such encounters into dramatic street performances. “He came out of the car with his M-1,” Bobby Seale described how these confrontations routinely unfolded. “Huey knows his

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law so well that he wouldn’t have the M-1 loaded inside the car. When he came out of the car, he dropped a round off into the chamber right away. Clack, clup.” Positioning himself opposite the policemen, he was “daring them, just daring them!”, with the vociferous support of the gathered black community. (Seale 1991: 89-92) “It was sometimes hilarious to see their reaction,” Newton himself commented: “They had always been cocky and sure of themselves as long as they had weapons to intimidate the unarmed community. When we equalized the situation, their real cowardice was exposed.” (Newton 1995a: 122) Newton’s standoffs amounted to actual initiations into full black personhood when face-to-face with those forces who had always denied this status to blacks. He consciously and calculatedly challenged not only the policemen’s authority, but ultimately their white identity and their naturally assumed superiority. And he quickly acquired a reputation for facing down police officers with a loaded shotgun and for his mastery of the law, as a later female Panther recalled: “The police patrols gained the Party notoriety and respect within the Black community.” (Abron 1998: 180) The Panthers began to establish themselves as new black role models, as the community authority, when it came to fighting the dehumanization and oppression of blacks. All along, the number of Party members was growing. By February 1967, the Black Panthers’ reputation had spread across the bay to San Francisco. They were asked by a conglomeration of predominantly culturally oriented black nationalist groups to provide security for the keynote speaker of the Malcolm X Memorial Day Conference: Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow. Newton and Seale seized the opportunity to present the BPP dramatically on a larger public stage and to establish themselves among other Black Power organizations. Act One was the Panthers’ appearance at the airport where they were to pick up Betty Shabazz. They pulled up in front of the airport in “caravan fashion”, as Seale labeled it: uniformed and visibly armed, they assembled themselves in military drill formation in columns of two, ostentatiously presented their guns and forced their way into the building. (Seale 1991: 119-122) Act Two opened with the Panthers’ arrival at the office of Ramparts magazine, where Betty Shabazz was to be interviewed by Eldridge Cleaver. “The lobby resembled certain photographs coming out of Cuba the day Castro took Havana,” Cleaver recalled: “There were guns everywhere, pointed toward the ceiling like metallic blades of grass growing up out of the sea of black faces beneath the black berets of the Panthers. I found […] Sister Betty surrounded by a knot of Panthers, who looked calm and self-possessed in sharp contrast to the chaotic reactions their appearance had set off.” (Cleaver 1969: 32-33) Act Three unfolded as Betty Shabazz, surrounded by Panther guards, stepped out of the Ramparts building where a host of media representatives – and police – had gathered. After defending Malcolm X’s widow against a

Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon

particularly obnoxious cameraman, Newton and a handful of other Panthers found themselves opposite a crowd of policemen who began to pull the straps off of the hammers of their guns. This prompted Newton to embark upon another dramatic street performance: he told the other Panthers to spread out in front of the policemen and ostentatiously jacked a shell into the chamber of his large shotgun, as one of the policemen had stepped toward him ready to pull his pistol. Newton immediately approached the policeman, daring him to draw his gun, the scene now resembling a western movie showdown with the Panthers couching in Newton’s back and a line of policemen behind the cop, urging their colleague to stay calm. Cleaver’s High Noon description ends with the policeman giving up and Newton laughing to his face before walking off “up the street in a jaunty pace, disappearing in a blaze of dazzling sunlight.”3 After this performance, Party legend began to grow, and as the Panthers became known throughout Northern California, their ranks started to swell, too. But when the conservative Republican state assemblyman Donald Mulford announced his plan to introduce a bill into state legislature to prohibit the carrying of weapons in public, the Panthers were alarmed. Newton and Seale decided to protest the bill by going to the State Capitol in Sacramento the day the bill was to be discussed in the state assembly, May 2, 1967. Their armed ‘invasion’ of the State Capitol left a tremendous public impression – due primarily to the Panthers’ body rhetoric, which combined a visual imagery reminiscent of resistance fighters with dramatically staged paramilitary behavior, in order to reinscribe and reconstruct the black body as captive black warrior in Babylon. Through the implied fusion of body and gun, the Panthers staged the male black body as weapon. By usurping the gun through their body rhetoric and turning it against whites and particularly against representatives of the system – be it the police as possessors of the monopoly of violence or the State Capitol as seat of power –, the Panthers physically visualized the potent ambiguity behind Black Power. The psychological effect they aspired to with this reinscription of the black body was to reconstruct themselves as black subjects possessing full personhood status, demanding to be treated with respect. Again, the message thus conveyed was consciously ambivalent, since it addressed blacks and whites in opposite ways. As Newton phrased the message to blacks: “By showing the people how to defend themselves, we provided a needed example of strength and dignity.” (Moore 1993: xxv) These symbolically charged acts of self-defense confirmed to the Panthers that they were on the right track in directly addressing the “trauma of White racism”, as a female Party member later termed it. In obvious reference to the problem of Black Invisibility, she described this trauma with the example of her first job experience: “I had never been around so many Whites before, and their inhumanity literally drove me towards insanity. […]

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when I spoke to them, they pretended not to see or hear me.” (Jennings 1998: 257-258) Her motive for joining the BPP was directly related to the Panthers’ self-projection as embodiment of physical and psychological Black Visibility: “Their mystique – the black pants, leather jackets, berets, guns, and their talk – aggressive and direct – attracted me and thousands more across America. […] I joined the Black Panthers because it was the only organization that faced White America forthrightly without begging or carrying signs for equality and justice.” As their message to whites, the Panthers subversively employed the traditional negative stereotyping of blacks and their perception as ‘the other’ through posing as the opposite: they behaved in a disciplined, organized, and absolutely no-nonsense manner; they presented themselves with legal sophistication and in careful obedience of the law; and they ostentatiously displayed attributes of power – guns, uniforms – heretofore exclusively reserved to whites. At the same time, they purposely evoked and played with the negative stereotypes attributed to blacks, especially those concerning the black body. Again, the key role was held by the gun, this time as a symbol of potency, and its fusion into the black male body as weapon. Turned against whites, the effect was simply emasculating. The stereotypical fears of whites concerning the supposedly hypersexual black body were thus consciously and subversively nourished by the Panthers. The overall effect strategically sought was not only to evoke white fear of this new black male, but to ultimately challenge white’s perception of themselves as racially superior, and thus subvert their racial identity. In the contention of historian Nikhil Pal Singh (1998: 83), the Panthers “at once resignified Blackness as a positivity, while at the same time drawing upon its threatening powers of nonidentity in the eyes of the state and the normative citizen-subject.” This was the message conveyed on the steps of the California State Capitol in Sacramento. The bill, however, was passed, and the Panthers had to stop their patrols. At the same time, police forces increased their surveillance and encroachment of Party members, with a particular focus on Newton. (Holder 1990) During one of these encounters between Newton and the police, in the night of October 28, 1967, shots were exchanged, leaving one police officer dead and Newton and a second police officer heavily wounded. Newton was subsequently imprisoned and charged with three felonies – one of them was murdering a policeman, for which he could be sentenced to death. 4 For a couple of weeks it looked as if the Black Panther Party might vanish from the scene. (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 3) Then Eldridge Cleaver took the initiative to capitalize on Newton’s dramatic street performances and turn him into the symbol of what Black Power and the black liberation struggle represented first and foremost: a redefinition of blacks on the physical and psychological levels – and the struggle to have this redefinition recognized. Cleaver deliberately

Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon

constructed Newton as impersonator of the captive black warrior and, as such, as the new leader of the black liberation struggle – through a campaign that interpreted Newton’s predicament as exemplary. At the campaign’s beginning stood a photograph of Newton, carefully composed by Cleaver several months before. It showed Newton with a mix of African and American attributes of power – spear in one hand, shotgun in the other, seated in a ‘royal’ wicker chair with a large zebra skin at his feet and African shields to his left and right. According to Seale (1991: 182), “he represented a shield for black people against all the imperialism, the decadence, the aggression, and the racism in this country. That’s what Huey P. Newton symbolized with us. That’s the way we projected it.” With his staging as a mixture of urban guerilla and African prince – a cleverly orchestrated representation of a black warrior, dignified and demanding respect – the photo was to become the embodiment of physical and psychological Black Visibility. “What is being decided in Huey’s case is whether a black man has the right to defend his life against the attacks of the racist dog police who come into our communities all day and all night to brutalize, terrorize, intimidate, harass, and murder black people,” Cleaver had pronounced at the outset of the Free Huey campaign in his Black Panther Party Ministry of Information Bulletin 2. “This savage and systematic attack on the black man’s humanity […] is part and parcel of white supremacy and white power. Huey P. Newton refused to recognize this negation of his humanity, refused to accept this denial of his manhood […] In Oakland alone, the police force has been increased from 350 to 1,000 since the Watts Rebellion and is still recruiting more pigs! The occupying army in the black community is being fortified for all-out war against black people. We will all have to defend our lives against the police, we will all have to act like Huey Newton sooner or later. Huey Newton’s predicament is the black man’s predicament. […] In standing up for Huey’s freedom we stand up for our freedom as a people.”

The idea of the Free Huey campaign was to stage and organize high-profile events around Newton’s trial and possible appeals, which would stretch over months, if not years. The campaign thus provided the Panthers with the opportunity for long-term strategic planning towards establishing themselves on a national basis – and as vanguard in the black liberation struggle: the captive black warrior in Babylon was here to stay. In other words, the Panthers meant to capitalize on the impact of their street performances by expanding their concrete physical presence – both into the streets of other black communities and onto college and university campuses, where the black and New Left protest movements gathered. In turn, the opportunity to perform on these platforms would draw attention and attendance to events organized by the Black Panther Party.

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This strategy is discernible from the very outset of the Free Huey campaign, which was officially launched at the occasion of Newton’s first court appearance in early December 1967. In working towards this day, Cleaver had given various speeches, while the Party in general had been able to secure a growing amount of speaking engagements. In a parallel endeavor, the Panthers had concentrated their efforts on organizing for Newton’s defense through community rallies as well as rallies and forums on college and high school campuses. (Seale 1991: 202-203) Thus, the Panthers had consciously built up their factual presence immediately before the first key event. On the day Newton first appeared in court, the Party organized what turned into mass rallies in front of the Alameda County Court House in Oakland. And the Panthers ostentatiously displayed the presence of a small army of captive black warriors in this highly symbolical public place: fully uniformed, they held drill marches and parades in front of the building and formed daily pickets around the court house. As a result, Party membership rapidly grew to over 200. (Holder 1990: 215) Only weeks later, between 5000 and 7000 people attended the Free Huey Birthday rally on February 17, 1968 in the large Oakland Auditorium, raising around 10.000 $ for Newton’s defense. (Umoja 1998: 418) Again, the Panthers flamboyantly displayed themselves as embodiment of Black Visibility: their paramilitary style, appearance, and comportment was of magnetic attraction, commanding the participants’ attention, as William Lee Brent, who was thus propelled to join the BPP, remembered: “From the minute we arrived I was impressed by the no-nonsense way the young Panthers ran the gathering. Uniformed Panthers patrolled the parking lot in groups of two and three. The Panthers guarding the main entrance wore black berets jauntily cocked over one ear. […] There was no doubt they, rather than the scattering of police, were in complete control of the situation.” (Brent 1996: 89) The whole event was replayed at the Los Angeles Sports Arena the next day, with young blacks selling posters of Newton in the wicker chair, BPP buttons, and sweatshirts – all with the slogan “Free Huey!” – in the surrounding streets. The impression the Panthers themselves left was essentially the same as in Oakland, as Elaine Brown – not yet a Party member at the time – recalled: “Women and men in black leather coats were marching military-style, back and forth outside the huge arena, backed up by the beat of several parade drums, chanting the battle cry […]: Free Huey! Or else! The sky-y-y’s the limit!” (Brown 1992: 126) The weeks following these Free Huey Birthday Celebrations marked the takeoff of the Black Panther Party in terms of organizational growth and factual presence. The untimely death of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968 also strengthened the BPP’s position within the black movement and helped to pave the way for Newton to rise to leadership status. This became obvious with the advent of Newton’s trial in the summer of 1968. For the first day of the trial on July 15, the Panthers had announced a

Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon

huge Free Huey rally in front of the Alameda County Court House in Oakland. At least 5000 to 6000 participants heeded the call. (Umoja 1998: 418-419) The Black Panther commented – both satisfied and with a wink – on the Party’s success in terms of the imposed physical and psychological Black Visibility: “The crowd was so enormous and the chants so thundering that the employees in the building found it difficult to concentrate.” (TBP, January 4, 1969: 14) Demonstrations in front of the court house continued throughout the duration of the trial in the summer of 1968, with the Panthers ostentatiously present, marching in uniform and drill formations, chanting slogans. At least in the beginning, these demonstrations were held daily; later they continued on a regular basis, with participants including both members of the Bay Area black communities and of white student groups. The demonstrations were extremely well-organized, with flyers depicting time, date, and places where carpools to the courthouse would be leaving from.5 In the end, Newton was not freed, but convicted of manslaughter, and the court denied his request to be released on bail while awaiting his appeal. By that time however, the BPP had made sure that the captive black warrior had multiplied and spread his/her presence. Towards this end the Panthers actively pursued to speak before large audiences – with increasing success. Eldridge Cleaver, who had joined the Panthers shortly after their appearance at Ramparts in February 1967, soon built a reputation as particularly subversive public performer, and his wife Kathleen loved to pose as a belligerent female Panther. In a widely distributed BPP photo she was sporting miniskirt, leather jacket, and knee-high boots, wearing dark glasses and carrying a heavy shotgun. Other Panther leaders, too, were careful to turn their speaking engagements into captive black warrior performances. When Seale spoke to the World Peace Conference in Montreal – or Hemispheric Conference to End the War in Vietnam, as it was officially called – in December 1968, he and his small delegation of Panthers completely dominated the large event, as The Black Panther assertively reported: “No caucus – radicals, student Vietnamese, or even Quebequois – made a decision without worrying what the Black Panthers were thinking.” (TBP, December 21, 1968: 5-6, original emphasis; Holder 1990: 228) Possibly, Seale had presented himself as Newton had always done: in the company of Party members posing as bodyguards – not for his protection, but “for the dramatic effect that the gun displays and the military appearances of discipline and rigidity provided,” as an ex-Panther explained Newton’s tactic (US House Committee on Internal Security 1970/1971: 4998).

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C arrying the N e w I conogr aphy of B l ackness I nto E very H ousehold Maximizing physical presence had never been a question of numerical membership strength for the Panthers. In fact, membership in all likelihood never surpassed 5000. (Johnson 1998: 410, fn. 4) The Panthers were interested in a powerful display of strength as disciplined black warriors, commanding attention and demanding respect. When the Oakland-based BPP began to branch out into cities across America along with the takeoff of the Free Huey campaign, this Black Visibility imperative remained intact. The location of Panther offices within the local black community was specifically chosen: ideally, the office was situated in the heart of the ghetto, often meaning the poorest neighborhood where the Party’s declared key constituency dwelled. Within larger black communities, the Panthers often operated from several offices in order to reach all of the city’s black population. New York City, for instance, had at least two offices in Harlem, two in Queens, two in Brooklyn, and one in the Bronx; (US House Committee on Internal Security 1971: 88-89) in South Central Los Angeles, the BPP was present with five offices. Apart from the location, the type of building mattered, too. Initially, the Panthers preferred storefront offices, as they offered direct contact with the street through their communicative windows. Panther posters and signs on outside doors, windows and walls further augmented the visibility. The Chicago office, for instance, expanded over two stories and featured a huge, hand-painted sign “Ill. Chapter Black Panther Party” in capital letters stretching across three large bay windows on the second floor, with the Party logo of the black panther at each side. Underneath, seven posters depicted Panther leaders and idols such as Malcolm X – the office thus marked “a formidable presence in the community”. (Bloom/ Martin 2013: 232-233) Along with BPP-affiliated offices open to non-members –  Community Information Centers and so-called National Committee to Combat Fascism offices that were erected after the summer of 1969 to deepen the ties between the Party and the local community –, BPP offices were not only meant to capture the attention of the neighboring black community, but also to attract community members. Towards that end, the Panthers pursued a general open door policy: people were welcomed and encouraged to drop in spontaneously to find out what the Panthers were doing, to report grievances, and to deposit complaints. At the occasion of a new opening, the local Party branch would advertise itself through open door days with free food and drinks. To further increase the attraction of their offices, the Panthers offered various services for the black community. Some held political education classes for community members. Others operated their community service programs from there, collecting and redistributing clothing or food, serving breakfast to schoolchildren, or turning

Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon

parts of their offices into health centers. Some Community Information Centers were holding actual community meetings on a regular basis.6 While the community was thus invited into the BPP offices, the Party rank and file had to roam the streets and make the Panther presence known. A habitual sight, for instance, were Panthers hawking the Party newspaper in the streets, eager to discuss the latest paper’s subjects. “‘Hey, brother,’ I say, flashing a copy in a stranger’s face, ‘read The Black Panther. Find out what’s really going on in this country. Open up your mind! Stop being one of the living dead. See what’s really happening,’” BPP chief of staff David Hilliard described his approach, explaining: “If the brother takes a copy, I’ve made a potential convert; if he refuses, we get into a conversation that lures other people and ends in a general verbal free-for-all that’s probably the most exciting event on the block in the last ten years.” (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 149) Selling papers in the neighborhoods provided the Panthers with the opportunity to publicly perform as captive black warriors in Babylon, the embodiment of physical and psychological Black Visibility. “Passersby were often confronted and virtually intimidated into buying the paper,” the journalist G. Louis Heath confirmed, with reference to his witnessing a Panther selling The Black Panther on Telegraph Avenue just outside the Berkeley campus: “Purchasing the paper was like a guerilla psychodrama, a white student usually acting opposite the Black Panther, and the latter always aggressive and hostile.” (Heath 1976b: vii) Also, the sight of Panthers picketing stores or announcing demonstrations and rallies was by no means unusual. Local Panthers missed no opportunity to organize large rallies in public parks – be it in the name of Free Huey,7 to the memory of Malcolm X, or as a response to local happenings or developments concerning the BPP. The Baltimore branch, for instance, held three such rallies between May 1 and May 19, 1969 alone. (TBP, May 25, 1969: 8) Public parks and schoolyards were also preferred locations for the Panthers to practice their drill marches and other military style performances, which routinely drew magnetic attention. In Chicago, regional BPP leader Fred Hampton had hundreds of Panthers lined up in a schoolyard each morning, performing their “pledge of allegiance to the black community”. (Brown 1992: 200) Kit Kim Holder recalled from the time he joined the Harlem BPP that “many children would watch as rank and file Panthers practiced drills in local parks. These children would in turn emulate the older Panthers, marching through the streets, chanting Panther slogans.” (Holder 1990: 103) Young blacks were particularly enchanted by and understood the positive valorization of blackness the Panthers physically and psychologically projected into the public. “Some of the youth imitated our dress – black pants, blue sweat shirts fronted with prowling panthers. Although this imitation made us feel rather proud, one had difficulty discerning Oakland youth from Panthers,” as a female Panther from Oakland confirmed. (Jennings 1998: 260-261)

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Along with their physical presence, the Panthers carried the image of the captive black warrior from the streets and parks into local high schools and colleges and into such vital community locations as churches and community centers, where they set up a variety of community service programs. In an attempt to diversify their image to appeal to all the black community members, they furthermore created what amounted to a whole new iconography of blackness: a visual imagery of black men and women as proud, self-assertive, aggressive black persons demanding respect; a visual imagery that positively reinscribed the black body as captive black warrior in Babylon. Emory Douglas, the BPP’s Minister of Culture, was mainly responsible for developing this new iconography that encompassed a variety of different role models for black men, women, and children to emulate. There is, for instance, the widely circulated drawing of a black woman with her small child: her traditional African clothing lends her a dignified appearance, while her carrying a shotgun in a belligerent pose transforms her into a powerful female warrior. (TBP, November 22, 1969: 18) In general, Douglas contextualized and depicted black men and women in scenes that reflected everyday problems the urban black community faced. Many of his drawings, for instance, show confrontations with the police: typically, a policeman is brutalizing a member of the black community, an act for which he is violently attacked by armed blacks coming to the defense of their mistreated brother or sister. Essentially, Emory Douglas’ new iconography of black men and women revolved around Fanon’s conception of violence as “man re-creating himself”, as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre put it in the introduction to Wretched of the Earth. Douglas created an iconography that visually perpetuated what Huey Newton had initiated and Panthers across the United States sought to symbolically reenact daily in the ghetto streets: the highly performative politics of putting one’s body and life on the line. “A man who lives under slavery and any of its extensions rarely regains his dignity,” the Oakland Panther Linda Harrison explained, “except by a confrontation on equal grounds with his enslaver. All men can die, and this is the only thing that equalizes them.” (Foner 1970: 151) The Panthers’ body rhetoric of violence was captured also in the Party’s original name and its symbol – as Bobby Seale explained: “It’s not in the panther’s nature to attack anyone first, but when he is attacked and backed into a corner, he will respond viciously and wipe out the aggressor.” (Allen 1990: 82) The Panther logo was part and parcel of the Party’s new iconography of blackness centered around visual rhetoric and imagery which, in turn, was strategically devised to multiply the Panthers’ physical and psychological Black Visibility. Towards this end, the Panthers embarked upon an incredible publicity campaign that originated in the preparatory stages of the Free Huey campaign and was to transport the Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility into

Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon

every street corner, official place, and private home, ultimately lending the BPP an iconographic status that reached around the globe, as the cultural historian Jane Rhodes (2007) argued. It started with the wicker chair photography of Huey Newton, which the Panthers began to produce and distribute as a large poster. Over the course of the Free Huey campaign, the Newton poster equaled the close-up portrait of Che Guevara. It decorated storefront windows of Panther offices across the United States as well as walls of student dens and ghetto buildings, and was carried along at just about every Panther rally, demonstration, or speaking event. The poster was rivaled only by the Panther logo which accompanied every printed item of the Party and began to appear concurrently with the Free Huey campaign on such BPP paraphernalia as buttons, flags, posters, and greeting cards. Over time, the Panther logo came to be printed on just about every public relations item of the Party: stickers, matchboxes, grocery bags in which the Panthers gave away free food, or buses and trucks that delivered the Panther newspaper or transported friends and family members participating in the Free Bussing to Prison program. Along with Newton, other key BPP leaders like Bobby Seale and both Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver began to have their faces put on buttons and to pose with guns for posters. The buttons that were probably most widely distributed were those which combined the Panther slogan “All Power to the People” with heads of BPP leaders, the Panther logo, or the face of Malcolm X. 8 Panthers routinely displayed their paraphernalia and printing material on vending tables they set up at rallies, picnics, and parties or during their regular programs in the black neighborhood’s community centers or church basements. (Jennings 1998: 260) Even at more private and intimate occasions such as funerals, Panther vending tables could be found. They lent these occasions a decidedly political character. Those who bought the products and wore the buttons in public, put up posters of Panther leaders or Emory Douglas’ artwork both in their apartments and in the streets, sent season’s greeting cards designed by Douglas to their friends, and displayed Panther books and newspapers on their coffee tables or in their bookshelves, were all visible supporters of the Black Panther Party and thus multipliers of the Panthers’ presence and visibility. In his Position Paper #1 from October 1968, Douglas himself advanced what he called a revolutionary art concept, wherein he postulated the strategic public placement of art as a revolutionary act in itself, because it served to create maximum possible physical Black Visibility: “The Ghetto itself is the Gallery for the Revolutionary Artist’s drawings. His work is pasted on the walls of the ghetto, in store front windows, fences, doorways, telephone poles and booths, passing buses, alleyways, gas stations, barber shops, beauty parlors, laundry mats, liquor stores, as well as the huts of the ghettos.” (TBP, October 19, 1968: 5) The black community responded positively to these posters reappearing

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throughout their neighborhood. (TBP, September 19, 1970: 21) Obviously, the Panthers were getting their message across: other black urban artists picked it up and contributed to the Panthers’ attempt to turn the ghetto into a gallery. In ghettos across the US, so-called “walls of dignity” or “walls of respect” – gigantic mural paintings on the sides and facades of buildings in the black community – appeared in the late 1960s. The murals were dedicated to the Black Panthers, depicting them in action: confronting the police and defending the black community. (Doss 2001: 185) In fact, repercussions of Emory Douglas’ artwork stretched far beyond the urban black communities of the United States. As early as autumn 1968, the Howard University in Washington, DC featured a three-day exhibition of Douglas’ artwork. (TBP, November 16, 1968: 24) His drawings and paintings were also exhibited at the First Pan African Cultural Festival in Algiers in July 1969. The Panthers’ transnational perspective in their focus on race was carefully reflected by Douglas, whose depictions of captive black warriors mixed the garb of the urban black underclass with that of the Vietcong and fighters of other liberation movements. “The militant spirit the artwork conveyed transcended the language barrier and evoked enthusiastic reactions among the Algerian onlookers,” as Kathleen Cleaver (1998: 213) reported. Art historian Erika Doss confirmed how successful the Panthers thus were in projecting their new iconography of blackness and what it represented into the public: “Their dramatic redefinition of black identity, and in particular their assault on previously held assumptions on the passivity and powerlessness of black men, garnered the Panthers immediate attention. Their canny attention to visual authority made the Panthers’ mode of self-representation the image of 1960s radicalism.” (Doss 2001: 178, original emphasis) This is why the Panthers greatly welcomed white photographers and filmmakers who would capture them  in real-life action. Two renowned Bay Area photographers, Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, thus documented the Panthers as proud and authoritative captive black warriors over the summer of 1968 and exhibited these pictures in a San Francisco museum around the close of that year. The exhibition “celebrated the manner in which the Panthers had transformed the visual culture of the era,” Jane Rhodes (2007: 242) would write almost forty years later. The same certainly holds for the French filmmaker Agnès Varda’s documentary Black Panthers: A Report (1968), whose camera lingered extensively on the Panthers and inflated them to largerthan-life black warriors on screen. For the Panthers, such visual imagery was a strategic means, rather than an end in itself: keenly aware of the tremendous effect their early street performances had evoked, they sought ways to make such performances accessible to larger audiences. Once black people saw “the Panthers in action –  with their lives on the line,” Eldridge Cleaver was

Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon

convinced, “then they are going to be just like the Panthers.” That’s why he liked the idea of a film about the Panthers, he argued straight into the camera in Off the Pig (1968). Off the Pig, later renamed Black Panther, was the first result of the Panthers’ collaboration with the Newsreel collective – one of the most influential groups of the New Left underground media – and arguably the most important of the series of films produced with and around the BPP, which will be discussed in more detail in chapter four of this book. Fast-paced, highly fomenting, and of significant aesthetic quality, Off the Pig presents the Panthers and their struggle convincingly within 15 minutes. Considerable space is devoted to the Panthers’ appearance and the ways in which they present themselves in action in the public sphere – as an embodiment of physical and psychological Black Visibility. Short interview sequences with the BPP’s key leaders Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale, whose voice reading the Party’s 10-point program is laid over images of a long drive through the ghetto streets of Oakland, are intercut with images of police brutality against blacks. Rhythmic, accelerating drum rolls on the sound track, alternating with direct sound with Panther war-chants, underscore the visual imagery not only of the belligerent and authoritative captive black warrior in Babylon, but also of a violence that gives rise to a deliberate ambiguity of interpretation. Following Newton’s rhetorical argument, the montage sequences mark the police as occupation army oppressing the black colonial subjects. Following Cleaver’s argument about the necessity to put one’s life on the line in defense of the black community and in the struggle for community control, the montage sequences emanate an aura of the urban black ghetto as battlefield, in which the highly visible white policeman is targeted by the guns of the invisible black community – with the drums on the sound track. Off the Pig was perfectly in tune with Newsreel’s own battle footage aesthetics, which expressed itself in grainy pictures and the collective’s ‘signature’ or logo reminiscent of Soviet film theoretician Sergej Eisenstein’s montage of attraction: a black gun before a white background rapidly alternating with its negative image – a white gun before a black background – to evoke a flickering visual counterpart of gunshots that could be heard on the soundtrack.9 The BPP’s national headquarters in Oakland made sure that Off the Pig and other agitprop shorts on the Party reached audiences across the United States both inside and outside the black communities, including all the Panther rank and file, in order to expose them to key Party leaders they had never seen in real life. The films were routinely screened during internal political education classes and shown to the children of the Liberation Schools. (Holder 1990: 102; Heath 1976a: 108; Newton 1995b: 204) Screenings often took place also at community meetings and at special occasions, such as conferences, festivals, and memorial services organized by the Party. 10 At least in Oakland,

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improvised public screenings in the streets took place: “We have trucks that we drive around in the community and show films to people that walk the streets,” as Newton (1995b: 204) explained. And the Baltimore chapter seemed to have started a series of screenings at a local recreation center in the summer of 1969. (TBP, June 21, 1969: 15) The films were also a mainstay at larger (indoor) Panther rallies across the country and carried along whenever the Panthers spoke on campus or co-sponsored a conference. 11 Off the Pig, clearly the most appealing of the agitprop shorts on the Panthers, was most widely circulated by the BPP and shown at virtually every possible occasion. The Panther films were “a major attraction”, as Holder (1990: 102) remembered from his own time as a Party member – and a powerful recruiting device: “Then one day I saw an eloquent Huey P. Newton being interviewed on film,” Regina Jennings recalled, “I saw a marvelous Bobby Seale marching with male and female Panthers with guns at the State Capitol in California. I thought I had finally found my calling.” (Jennings 1998: 258) Without doubt then, the more widely distributed Panther films, presenting the Panthers larger-than-life on movie screens, burnt an image of captive black warriors into the minds of the audience that was never to be erased again. Particularly Off the Pig thus purposely evoked both black cheers and white fears. The film visualized what Black Power stood for: blacks recreating themselves as full human beings on an equal plane with whites in every respect, claiming – or, in most whites’ perception: threatening – to actually seize power from the hands of whites. Bobby Seale’s voice rising angrily at the very end of Off the Pig, in stark contrast to his calm enumeration of the Party’s 10-point program just before, symbolizes this threat with subversive rhetorical brilliance: “We gonna walk on this nation, we’re gonna walk on this racist power structure, and we gonna say to the whole damn’ government: ‘Stick ‘em up, motherfucker, this is a hold-up. We’ve come for what’s ours.’”

Fig. 3: An Unarmed People (Emory Douglas, 1969, © 2017, Pro Litteris, Zurich/ Art Resource, NY)

To Expose, Subvert, and Provoke

“When I gave Bobby his instructions, I impressed upon him that our main purpose was to deliver the message to the people,” Huey Newton (1995a: 149) later pointed out with reference to the Panthers’ going to Sacramento to protest the Mulford bill in May 1967. “If they attempted to arrest him, he was to take the arrest as long as he had delivered the message. The main thing was to deliver the message.” In the midst of turmoil and confusion inside the State Capitol, however, Bobby Seale was unable to do so properly. So the Panthers rearranged on the steps outside. Flanked by a disciplined cadre of captive black warriors, Seale practically dictated into the pens, recording machines and cameras of the gathered crowd of media: “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general, and the Black people in particular, to take careful note of the racist California Legislature now considering legislation aimed at keeping Black people disarmed and powerless while racist police agencies throughout the country intensify the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of Black people. […] Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned and demonstrated, among other things, to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetrated against Black people. All of these efforts have been answered by more repression, deceit, and hypocrisy. As the aggression of the racist American Government escalates in Vietnam, the police agencies of America escalate the repression of Black people throughout the ghettos of America. […] City Hall turns a deaf ear to the pleas of Black people for relief from this increasing terror. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense believes that the time has come for Black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late. The pending Mulford Act brings the hour of doom one step nearer. A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere. We believe that the Black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction.”

Encapsulated in Newton’s Executive Mandate No. 1 (Newton 1995b: 7-8) is what lay at the heart of the Black Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility: to expose the

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US government and society as a white supremacy system, whose institutions function to systematically oppress and exploit black people; to subvert the performance and self-conception of the government in this course; and to provoke it towards escalating its retaliation against blacks and thereby delegitimizing itself. This is what the Panthers strategically set out to achieve from the very onset of the Party. Patrolling the police with arms was a deliberately chosen initial activity, for it served to dramatize the issue – namely, that “the police are specially designated, paid, and authorized with the gun to keep black people in check – for the protection of the racist system of white wealth and white power that systematically brutalizes black people,” as Eldridge Cleaver phrased it in his Black Panther Party Ministry of Information Bulletin 2 from January 1968. The Panthers were well aware that law functioned to legitimize white supremacy by upholding structural Black Invisibility. Law “masks what is chosen as natural; it obscures the consequences of social selection as inevitable,” as Cheryl I. Harris (1997: 69) points out. “The result is that the distortions in social relations are immunized from truly effective intervention, because the existing inequities are obscured and rendered nearly invisible.” This is precisely what the Panthers ultimately aimed at exposing by patrolling the police with arms. As Bobby Seale maintained in hindsight, Huey Newton had worked out the logic behind blacks publicly arming themselves months before the Party’s foundation, by referring to the Second Amendment of the US Constitution which guaranteed every man the right to arm himself. “He sa[id] that we are going to exhaust that, because in the end, the man will say that we don’t have a Second Amendment of the Constitution. That’s very important to understand.” (Seale 1991: 31) Put differently: if blacks claimed a right which whites, at least implicitly, had always perceived to be a white privilege guaranteeing their superior position in society, the legal system’s logical response would be to actively guard whites’ privileged access, thereby publicly confirming its claim to white supremacy. The Panthers had deliberately provoked the introduction of the Mulford bill into the California State legislature towards this end, as Newton (1995a: 146) himself confirmed retrospectively: “Mulford’s call was a logical response of the system. We knew how the system operated. If we used the laws in our own interest and against theirs, then the power structure would simply change the laws,” concluding that “the bill was further evidence of this country’s vicious double standard against Blacks.” The Free Huey campaign provided the Panthers with ample opportunity to expand their drive to expose the racism inherent in the functioning of US legislative, judicial and executive institutions. The first strategic decision the Party made towards this end was to hire – despite much black criticism – a white man of Armenian descent as Newton’s defendant: Charles Garry. Garry developed a defense strategy that prepared the grounds for Newton to use the

To E xpose, Subver t, and Provoke

actual trial as a platform for the creation of structural Black Visibility on a much broader level. “To us, the key point in the trial was police brutality,” Newton (1995a: 188) explained in hindsight, “but we hoped to do more than articulate that. We also wanted to show that the other kinds of violence poor people suffer – unemployment, poor housing, inferior education, lack of public facilities, the inequity of the draft – were part of the same fabric.” From a black perspective, Newton thus argued, structural racism amounted to a bodily experience: the experience of violence. The Panthers had focused their initial activity on the police because they functioned to maintain poverty and ignorance by force, as David Hilliard (1993: 140) pointed out with reference to Fanon. A force – or rather: violence – inextricably tied to the functioning of a colonial system. Exposing institutional racism as violence, then, stood at the very core of the BPP’s struggle for Black Visibility on the structural level. However, it was not before the end of Newton’s first trial in September 1968 that the Panthers found a chance to refocus their daily activities on the issue of institutional racism on a broader level – as Newton and Seale had originally set out to do with their 10-point program. In late 1968, Oakland headquarters called upon all Party branches to establish a set of community service programs. They were designed to meet the most basic human needs for food, clothing, shelter, health, and education – needs which the US government had failed to adequately address in the case of black people – and thereby rupture the vicious cycle of ghetto existence and Black Invisibility perpetuated through institutional racism. The initial program was the so-called Free Breakfast for School Children, which national headquarters had started to implement in Berkeley in October. (TBP, October 12, 1968: 15; TBP, October 19, 1968: 2) Two months later, it called upon all BPP branches to implement breakfast programs in their local communities, detailing how they were to be set up and run. (TBP, December 21, 1968) The call was repeated identically in every issue of The Black Panther for almost half a year – and was instantly heeded. Within roughly 15 months, more than 35 cities across the United States began to operate BPP breakfast programs, with many of them running more than one. 1 By mid-1969, “the free breakfast for schoolchildren has practically covered the country in every chapter and branch of the Black Panther Party,” as The Black Panther (July 5, 1969: 19) proudly declared. The California Bay Area alone was serving breakfast to over 2000 children on a daily basis by then, and on the national level, the Party claimed to feed more than 20.000 children.2 Over the course of 1969, further community service programs – all of them free of charge – sprang up across the United States. By early 1970, at least 18 cities operated Liberation Schools.3 A year later, 14 cities had established Free Clothing programs, and 15 were running Free Health Clinics, both according to reports in The Black Panther. 4 Overall,

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the Party was running at least twelve different community service programs by early 1971. Some of them were small programs responding and catering to specific needs of local black neighborhoods, usually they addressed housing, welfare, and legal problems. By early 1971, these programs had become the central focus of Party activities. (Holder 1990: 243-244) With the onset of the community service programs, most Panthers began to engage full time in Party activities. From then on, being a Panther meant around-the-clock membership that did no longer differentiate between Party and privacy. In turn, the Party sought to provide its members with basic necessities such as food and shelter.5 As a matter of fact, setting up and running these programs was exceedingly time-consuming. The Panthers had to secure suitable locations within the local black community; locations that provided kitchen and eating facilities, for instance, or space to store food, clothes or pharmaceuticals. They needed special equipment as well as continuous donations – both material and financial – to operate the programs. Equally important was finding concrete manpower to staff the programs – particularly where special skills were required. In the case of the breakfast program, securing a location was often the first problem encountered. Some Party chapters and branches ran into difficulties with men of the cloth when trying to obtain access to church facilities. (TBP, June 6, 1969: 16; TBP, June 14, 1969: 3; TBP, October 25, 1969: 8) Other chapters, such as Baltimore or Fair Haven, realized that they had to provide transportation for the schoolchildren, not only to get them to the breakfast site, but also from there on to school. (TBP, June 21, 1969: 15; TBP, January 10, 1970: 4) Cars were also needed to transport large quantities of food, with the logistics sometimes becoming very complex, as the food had to be picked up weekly, sometimes daily from businesses and companies, stored in the local Party office and distributed to the breakfast site(s) from there. (TBP, April 27, 1969: 5; TBP, July 26, 1969: 15; TBP, September 27, 1969: 5) Acquiring and securing contributions – particularly regular food donations – proved to be the greatest obstacle in continuously running the breakfast program. “Several weeks before we started the program, we sent letters to approximately 250–300 retail and wholesale stores in the community, requesting commodities for the program. The response from these letters was nil” (TBP, June 14, 1969: 3), the Los Angeles Panthers complained. Serving breakfast each weekday was another management challenge the Panthers were confronted with, as everything had to be done within the narrow time-slot from around 7 to 8.30 a.m. Although even the Party cadre sometimes helped to serve breakfast, (TBP, June 21, 1969: 15) and the children usually cleaned up and set their place for the next child, the sheer number of children coming in for breakfast each morning required external help from community members. In return, the Panthers also passed out free food to members of the black

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community in the context of other activities and programs that varied from city to city. (TBP, April 6, 1969: 14; TBP, June 21, 1969: 15; TBP, October 24, 1970: 16) Similar to the breakfast program, the Panthers solicited clothes from local department stores and neighborhood cleaners and called upon the black community to donate. The problems thus encountered were alike. However, the Party’s Free Clothing program seems to have been operated much less consistently: some chapters and branches held distribution rallies in local community centers and schools or distributed clothes during street fairs, while others simply stored clothes at their local Party facilities and encouraged the community members to come by and pick them up. (TBP, October 11, 1969: 5; TBP, April 10, 1971: 4; Holder 1990: 109) Local Party facilities or breakfast sites often also hosted the Liberation Schools, which were thus quickly set up in most cases. They were much easier to operate on a daily basis, as only an average of between 17 and 25 children seem to have been enrolled and the Panthers taught the kids themselves.6 The educational curriculum included singing, drawing, reading and writing, physical exercise and other outdoor activities. In Berkeley, each day had a specific topic, featuring a revolutionary history day, a revolutionary culture day, a current events day, a movie day, and a field trip day. (TBP, August 2, 1969: 12) Inspired by the Liberation School program, the Oakland Panthers founded the Intercommunal Youth Institute in January 1971. Set up as an official, yet pointedly alternative elementary school with a community-controlled and -oriented curriculum, the school later was awarded with “having set the standard for the highest level of elementary education in the state” (Abron 1998: 186). There was only one BPP chapter that rivaled national headquarters in terms of scale and efficiency in its community service programs: Chicago. Not only were the Chicago Panthers able to secure regular, large contributions to the breakfast program from meat and milk companies and thus feed around 4000 kids daily at the various breakfast sites: (TBP, May 31, 1969: 4; Alkebulan 2007: 55) they also managed to build health care structures ranging from professionally operated clinics to prevention programs and health cadres reaching out into the community. Ronald ‘Doc’ Satchel was in charge and regularly reported about their progress in The Black Panther; he also helped other BPP branches to erect health clinics. Securing a location turned out to be a minor problem in most cities. But only Chicago was able to set up a second deluxe clinic featuring a reception area, a clerical office, four examining rooms, an X-ray room, a dental room, and a pharmacy. (TBP, January 10, 1970: 7) Acquiring technical and medical equipment – microscopes or X-ray machines, for instance – proved to be a complex and lengthy process for most chapters and branches. The most limiting factor in actually running a health clinic, however, was its professional staff. Where doctors, nurses, and medical technicians did volunteer their services for the Panthers, they usually did so beside their regular work: in the

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evening or for several hours during a specific weekday. As a result, practically all BPP health clinics were open exclusively in the evenings.7 The larger ones like Chicago were thus able to offer treatment to an average of 20 to 30 patients a day from both general practitioners and specialists such as pediatricians, obstetricians, gynecologists, optometrists or dentists. (Foner 1970: 174) In addition, most clinics could rely on outside medical doctors for emergency referral service or even surgery or cancer therapy that was free of charge. (TBP, January 31, 1970: 7) Several Party chapters and branches established so-called health cadres as an alternative to a health clinic. In Chicago, this Preventive Health Care program, as it was called, ran parallel to the two health clinics. The idea was to inform the black community about the existence of various poverty-related chronic diseases: how they manifested themselves, how they were transmitted, and how they could be prevented. In Chicago, the health cadre consisted of teams of two – usually a student of medicine and a Black Panther or Party-related community worker. They visited homes throughout the black community and took urine and stool samples, checked blood pressure and the throat and asked basic screening questions, referring those infected to Panther health clinics or private medical doctors cooperating with the local BPP. (TBP, May 2, 1970: 13; TBP, February 27, 1971: 2) Children received particular attention and were screened for infant and child diseases common in poor black communities, such as strep throat or lead poisoning. As a matter of fact, all the other major community service programs of the Party – the Free Breakfast program, the Free Clothing program, and the Liberation Schools – focused even exclusively on children. And this not by chance or for mere philanthropic reasons. Certainly, children were easier to reach, and easier to impress also. During breakfast and while in Liberation School class, the children were exposed to the Party and its ideas in various forms, prompting allegations of indoctrinating the children, as the following chapters of this book will detail. Assata Shakur (1987: 220) from the Harlem Panthers retrospectively claimed: “We were all dead set against cramming things into their heads or teaching them meaningless rote phrases.” At least the intention to politically educate the children along Party lines during breakfast seems to have been present, however, for the Chicago Panthers reported that “so far, the Party has moved slowly on political work with children and parents. While it is clear to the children who is feeding them, they have not yet been exposed to Panther songs or propaganda talks.” (TBP, May 31, 1969: 4) The Panthers’ frequently voiced credo that children were the future revolutionaries might have nourished the fears of indoctrination. And the fact that the children from the Liberation Schools routinely paraded through the ghetto streets, singing Panther songs “that tell of the pigs running amuck, and the Panthers fighting for the people” (TBP, August 2, 1969: 12), did not do much

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good in dispelling such fears: these children, indeed, looked like the nucleus of a future revolutionary army of captive black warriors. On the other hand, there are many indications that the Panthers functioned as positive black role models for the ghetto youth, as the final chapter will show. Most importantly, the focus on children was part and parcel of the Panthers’ strategy to achieve structural Black Visibility. It served to dramatize the issues of hunger, malnutrition, poor clothing, and bad health prevalent in black communities across the United States. And it focused attention on the vicious cycle of poverty perpetuated by institutional racism: children growing up on welfare, hungry and ill-clothed, receiving only an inadequate education which marginalized or excluded them from the job market and kept them dependent upon welfare.

D edicated C hampions of the P oor and O ppressed A Basic Contradiction in Affluent America: Hunger in the Land of Plenty, the Party newspaper headlined in the spring of 1969, subtitling Black Panthers are Feeding Hungry Children in Ghetto. (TBP, May 4, 1969: 14) This encapsulates the basic strategic thinking that lay behind the Panthers’ community service programs, pressed into the often-used rhetorical formula to “expose the power structure for exactly what it is” – a “racist oppressive system”, as Bobby Seale elaborated in a radio interview (TBP, August 30, 1969: 12-13, 24). The existing public institutions were unfit to meet even the most basic needs of poor urban blacks because of their racist functioning, the BPP argued. Welfare institutions repeatedly stood at the center of criticism. “Many of our children go to school with empty stomachs,” the Seattle Panthers wrote in The Black Panther (May 25, 1969: 8). “This is not the fault of the parents, on the whole it is the fault of the established system. Welfare public assistance is so trivial and menial that it cannot possibly supply the nutrients of many black ghetto dwellers who are blessed with many beautiful black children.” The accusation of “inhuman welfare grants” was repeated with mounting frequency and urgency as several states proceeded to actually further reduce these grants in the late summer and early fall of 1969 (TBP, October 4, 1969: 12; TBP, January 24, 1970: 3). The Harlem branch, for instance, initiated its Free Clothing program by reasoning that “welfare mothers don’t even have enough money to buy clothing and supplies to send their children to school” (TBP, September 6, 1969: 19). Exposing institutional racism as being responsible for the vicious cycle of poverty in the urban black communities thus also meant exposing how the socalled War on Poverty initiated 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson was unfit to address the problems related to poverty in the black ghetto – despite the fact that large portions of the federal money were appropriated to predominantly youth- and education-oriented programs and directed into urban black

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communities. In Watts, the poorest section of the Los Angeles black ghetto, over 43 percent of the entire population lived below the poverty level, yet only 24 percent actually received welfare support. (Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots 1965: 69) Besides the fact that the allotted federal sums were grossly insufficient and were largely swallowed by the administrative system set up to disperse them, the root cause for the Panthers’ opposition to the War on Poverty was the underlying racist conception of ghetto blacks as living in a culture of poverty for which they themselves were essentially to blame. The Panthers adamantly refuted the common stereotype that black children were less intelligent than whites, or that their chronic underachievement in relation to white schoolchildren had its roots in the culture of poverty. It was hunger that led to the inability to learn, they insisted, a hunger that had structural roots, such as the lack of cafeterias in many black schools. Many children in fact entered school already in a frail health condition: In the black ghetto of Los Angeles, for instance, 62 percent of all children below school age suffered from malnutrition and hunger in the mid-sixties. (Jacobs 1966: 178) In their endeavor to highlight that the racist stereotypes regarding black children had structural roots, the Panthers were proud to report how “even the teachers in the schools say that there is a great improvement in the academic skills of the children that do get the breakfast” from the BPP’s program (TBP, April 27, 1969: 3). Usually the Panthers strongly criticized public school teachers for their conceptual Black Invisibility: Bobby Seale (1991: 105-106, 247) scathed teachers particularly for their “misconceptions of the black community”, their “puritanical views” and “absolutist concepts they were trying to drill into the kids’ heads”, and pinpointed these concepts as “very directly related to racism”. Sociologists who had interviewed the Watts community after the revolt and spent time with black youths substantiate this charge and depict how it was structurally engrained. Children were taught with secondhand material that had become obsolete at white schools, and the curriculum taught at a certain grade routinely corresponded to that of a lower level. (Bullock 1969: 194-195) Once in high school, black teenagers were offered industrial training and housekeeping only – academic courses remained reserved for white students exclusively. (Glasgow 1981: 40-41) And black cultural expression, highly valued among the ghetto youth, was not only ignored but systematically negated, devalued, or even negatively sanctioned. (Bullock 1969: 166, 179) Black juveniles were thus forced to learn that they were not recognized by the teachers until they behaved like “carbon copies of the average, white, middle-class child” (Glasgow 1981: 166). This is exactly what the Panthers sought to expose: how the educational system functioned to perpetuate white supremacy by mechanisms that systematically dehumanized black children. The United States have always had “an educational system that subtly taught white supremacy”, they argued; one that “always portray[ed] Black people as inferior” (TBP, September 7, 1968:

To E xpose, Subver t, and Provoke

6). Public schools functioned as “institutions to train Black youth to accept the oppressive conditions we live in”, The Black Panther (April 25, 1970: 12) maintained. The schools corresponded to “mental conditioning centers” which, in the case of blacks, “train […] you to look at the day to day oppression as only a temporary set back caused by our own inborn laziness and inability to work”. Ultimately, public schools thus functioned “to justify the treatment of black people” (TBP, September 7, 1968: 6). “We want an 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 present-day society”, the BPP thus claimed in point #5 of its program. The Party’s Liberation Schools were set up to quite literally liberate black children “from racist misteachings” (TBP, July 11, 1970: 14) and, in doing so, expose black intellectual inferiority for what it was – a racially encoded myth. Improving the children’s reading and writing skills was part of the daily curriculum and served to counter and neutralize “the regular academic deficiencies fostered by the public school system” in the black communities, as the Chicago Panthers pointed out (TBP, July 26, 1969: 20). The Liberation Schools established an alternative, an oppositional curriculum from a black perspective. It emphasized community-oriented values – values that would empower blacks to break the vicious cycle of Black Invisibility and institutional racism. A major focus was placed on black history, or rather, the history of black resistance to an oppressive US system: from the slave rebellions to the teachings of Malcolm X and the activities of the Black Panther Party. The curriculum aimed at instilling black children with a sense of pride because of their black ancestry. Towards this end – and catering primarily to the adult ghetto community –, the Philadelphia Panthers had erected a Peoples Free Library filled with texts by black authors. (Bloom / Martin 2013: 192) “For more than 350 years Black men in this country have been dying with courage and dignity for causes they believe in,” Newton explained. “This aspect of our history has always been known to Black people, but for many the knowledge has been vague. We knew the names of a few of our martyrs and heroes, but often we were not acquainted with the circumstances of the precise context of their lives. White America has seen to it that Black history has been suppressed in schools and in American history books […] White people had good reason to destroy our history. Black men and women who refuse to live under oppression are dangerous to white society because they become symbols of hope to their brothers and sisters, inspiring them to follow their example.” (Newton 1995a: 184-185)

One very concrete example to follow were certainly the Panthers themselves. Accordingly, they carefully presented themselves as a revolutionary organization

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having emerged from this tradition of resistance. (TBP September 13, 1969: 19; TBP, July 11, 1970: 14) To stimulate the children to grasp the complex nature of institutional racism, the Panthers focused their curriculum on the children’s present-day, immediate environment – the everyday life in the black ghetto community to which they could relate. On the weekly field trips, the Panthers usually took the children out into the black community to visualize the various aspects of daily oppression and exploitation through practical examples. This could mean that, as in the case of Brooklyn, the children were shown exposed lead pipes in a dilapidated housing area – both to point out the dangers of getting lead poisoning or TB and to relate these diseases to structural phenomena: to the criminal neglect of slumlords and public housing authorities in the black ghetto. (TBP, September 6, 1969: 12) “One of the major topics of these liberation school classes was the treatment of Panthers by the government, as well as the government institutions within the African American communities,” as the former Party member Kit Kim Holder (1990: 100-101) recalled: “The B.P.P. interpretation of the roles of the police, schools, hospitals, landlords and store owners was discussed and related to specific events surrounding and involving the B.P.P. or the local community.” Store owners, for instance, were chastised for their exploitative business practices such as overcharging for often rotten food, refusing to cash welfare checks or charging fees for cashing them, treating customers in a dehumanizing way and declining to hire members of the local black community. (TBP, January 10, 1970: 8, 16) Point #3 of the BPP program, which demanded “an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community”, provided the Panthers with the basis for their expository campaigns that gravitated around their own breakfast and clothing programs as concrete alternatives. “From the Greedy to the Needy” was the motto of the Milwaukee Panthers for the breakfast program (TBP, July 5, 1969: 15). “This weakens the power structure because the businessmen in the black community are the ones who have to donate to this program,” Bobby Seale explained the functioning principle behind the program to the radical student paper The Movement: “of every dollar a racist capitalist (or any kind of businessman be he black or white) [makes,] a penny of it is going to have to come back to the community.” (Church League 1969: 15) On a rather abstract level, the breakfast program can thus be interpreted as being geared towards exposing property and profit as privileges essentially reserved for whites – and those blacks co-opted by the system through black capitalism. The BPP program was meant to pose a direct challenge to the system’s economic control over the black community. Hence, the Panthers were not asking for donations, but confronted ghetto merchants – most of whom were white and lived outside the black community – with the demand to pay their “overdue debt of 40 acres and two mules”,

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as point #3 of the Party program stated, in reminiscence of what slaves had been promised as reparation – but never received – at the end of the Civil War. The Panthers’ performing as captive black warriors in this process certainly facilitated later complaints of extortion. Business owners who refused to heed the demand were negatively exposed to the local black community. (TBP, June 14, 1969: 8; TBP, August 16, 1969: 18) Often, local Party chapters and branches listed names and addresses of stores that refused to contribute to the breakfast program in the Party newspaper and more or less explicitly called upon the black community to boycott these businesses. (TBP, July 19, 1969: 16; TBP, February 7, 1970: 2; TBP, June 6, 1970: 16) In several cases, the Panthers even launched actual campaigns against obstinate stores, picketing them until they agreed to donate to the BPP’s program. (McCutchen 1998: 120; TBP, May 31, 1969: 17; TBP, June 14, 1969: 3) Exposing the racism immanent in the functioning of public health institutions was also a constant strategic companion to the BPP’s efforts to establish Free Health Clinics. Reports in The Black Panther routinely pointed out how bad conditions were in public hospitals catering to the black community, and what kind of second-class treatment blacks received there. Health Care – Pig Style, the San Francisco Panthers titled an article about the city’s General Hospital (TBP, February 7, 1970: 9, 15). Medical facilities in black communities were always understaffed, the wards overcrowded, the staff undertrained and underequipped, the Boston Panthers argued. (TBP, June 13, 1970: 2) A nurse from Kansas City confirmed this in an open letter to one of the city’s newspapers: “The vast majority of municipal and county general hospitals are badly run, impoverished, long-neglected fleebags,” she wrote – explicitly pointing out their location in the ghetto area – and “suffer from the same things: lack of income, antiquated buildings, inadequate equipment or none, political interference, and bureaucratic red tape. Also overcrowded emergency rooms and fragmented medical care. You may have a 3 to 8 hour wait in an emergency room waiting station in any large city.” (TBP, August 30, 1969: 16) In a spectacular attempt to expose the racist functioning of a public hospital in the Bronx area in March 1969, the Panthers and members of the local black and Puerto Rican communities formed the Lincoln Hospital Mental Health Non-Professional Association and actually took over the administration of the hospital. “The people charge Lincoln Hospital and Lincoln Hospital Service with Institutional Racism,” they stated in The Black Panther (March 31, 1969: 9): 85 percent of the mental health program money appropriated to Lincoln Hospital was disappearing into the administration’s pockets instead of going into concrete community services, they argued. In addition to that, four black workers had recently been fired without having been given a reason, and the hospital had repeatedly authorized the sterilization of black mothers who

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already had given birth to several children. None of these women had been informed or advised about birth control measures. The Black Panther Party erected its own health services to openly challenge the legitimacy of such public health institutions which placed “profit over human value” when it came to blacks, as a Philadelphia Panther remarked in The Black Panther (May 19, 1970: 9). Not only did the poor health conditions in the black community remain unaddressed – in Los Angeles, for instance, tuberculosis continued to exist exclusively in the black ghetto, and the rate of child mortality exceeded the Los Angeles county average by 70 percent. (Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, Vol. XVIII 1966: 16) The charge of institutional racism leveled against the US health care system specifically included its systematic neglect of black-specific health problems. “Doctors can transplant hearts, kidneys and other vital organs; however, there are people dying in the black community from tetanus and other simple, curable diseases,” the Boston Panthers argued (TBP, June 13, 1970: 2). When the Panthers in Chicago opened their first health clinic, they pointed out how they thus intended to “remedy the problem of people suffering from malnutrition, infant mortality, sickle cell anemia, and other health problems found in most oppressed communities” (TBP, October 18, 1969: 3). Parallel to their establishing the first health clinics, the Black Panthers launched an information campaign about sickle cell anemia, a hereditary disease afflicting black people almost exclusively – yet, as they argued, “knowledge and treatment of sickle cell disease has been kept a secret from the masses of black people for many, many years.” (TBP, June 14, 1969: 20) Their charge of Black Invisibility in this particular case aimed at debunking the racist conception of blacks as lazy and less intelligent: typical symptoms of sickle cell anemia include chronic fatigue and feeling fuzzy, as well as severe spasms of pain. Whites’ refusal to recognize these symptoms as related to a disease and their choosing to interpret them as inborn deficiencies, as related to a culture of poverty, were part of a reasoning that served to guarantee the reproduction of white supremacy. The Panthers were indeed the first ones to alert both blacks and the American public in general to the existence of this disease which affected one out of every ten blacks. “Sickle cell anemia is as crippling, as painful, and as deadly as leukemia, muscular distrophy or cystic fibrosis, all of which diseases primarily affect white people. Yet sickle cell anemia has not received the attention or consideration from public agencies that these diseases have. This is a clear indication of the racist and genocidal policies of this government,” they pointed out time and again over the course of their information campaign (TBP, May 22, 1971: 10). In early 1971, the BPP started a nationwide sickle cell testing program and sought to erect a Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation. 8

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By that time, another issue had gained importance in the BPP’s struggle to expose the racist functioning of both public and private institutions in the ghetto: housing. Although the Party program explicitly called for “decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings” in point #4, the BPP had never set up an actual community service program to address housing problems. Much rather, members from the local black communities seem to have approached the Panthers and asked them for help. (Austin 2006: 178) Several chapters and branches responded by organizing tenants to get legal aid, prevent evictions, confront landlords, pressure local agencies for assistance, and start doing repairs by themselves – among them San Francisco, Detroit, Winston-Salem, and the Bronx. (Holder 1990: 237; TBP, May 25, 1969: 8; TBP, July 11, 1970: 3) Others like the Atlantic City, Brooklyn, Milwaukee, and Boston Panthers initiated rent strikes to force slumlords to make necessary repairs. (TBP, June 13, 1970: 3; Monges 1998: 140; TBP, June 21, 1969: 8; TBP, June 20, 1970: 4) In New York City, where housing problems were particularly acute, assisting resident groups in fighting these often inhuman conditions seems to have been part of a Panthers’ daily routine. (Holder 1990: 190-194) And the New Haven chapter even mounted an entire campaign around the issue of lead poisoning in black children stemming from cheap lead-contaminated paint used in most of the ghetto houses. The children had become severely ill because they had licked the sweet-tasting walls or chewed on strips of painted wallpaper that had come peeling off. (TBP, September 20, 1969: 4; TBP, November 8, 1969: 17) After the end of 1969, hardly a week passed without The Black Panther documenting deplorable living conditions and individual cases of mistreatment and criminal neglect. Problems surrounding housing often filled an entire page or even more, with the Panthers taking great care to identify the forces responsible: absentee slumlords, public housing and city planning authorities. The Boston Panthers, for instance, reported about a totally dilapidated housing project, where many apartments had broken windows and were full of cockroaches, incinerators and elevators did not work, the hallways were soaked with urine, the basement was filled with garbage, and mailboxes were either burnt or broken. The city’s housing authorities, however, systematically ignored all complaints submitted by the tenants. (TBP, June 20, 1970: 4) If public housing authorities did respond, they routinely did so in a dehumanizing way that reflected their conceptual Black Invisibility, as the Panthers were careful to point out. When black tenants in New Haven demanded that something be done about the lead-infested paint in their apartments, for instance, the response they got was: “Teach your children not to put things in their mouths.” (TBP, September 20, 1969: 4) The Panthers were particularly adamant in their exposure of the racist functioning of public housing authorities and those institutions working together with them to the systematic disadvantage of blacks: the welfare

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institutions. Those who had to bear the brunt of institutional racism in this context were always the same: families – mostly single mothers – on welfare. If they made an attempt to withhold their rent because public housing authorities had refused to make necessary repairs, the housing authorities simply diverted the welfare check directly to themselves, as the Brooklyn Panthers reported. (TBP, November 29, 1969: 15) In Los Angeles, the Bureau of Public Assistance (BPA) continued its infamous early morning raids in the ghetto – which had been officially banned after the Watts revolt in 1965 – to check whether the husband or another man was present in the apartment of a single mother; he could then be forced to finance the household instead of the BPA. In a case documented by the local Panthers, a detective from the BPA falsely announced himself as a public housing inspector coming to see if everything was satisfactory. As the father of the children was, in fact, present – only passing through on his way to an appointment, as he claimed –, the BPA subsequently stopped all welfare payments to the mother, and the housing authority of Los Angeles threatened to evict her. (TBP, January 23, 1971: 3) In Memphis, in the middle of winter, ten black families were swiftly evicted from an apartment complex declared to be no longer fit for living in, and simply left on the street. The city’s housing authority had never responded to their previous pleas for assistance. In a spectacular move, the local Panthers transferred all ten families into vacant houses of the Memphis Housing Authority – a move for which they were promptly arrested and brought to trial. (TBP, August 14, 1971: 2) This, however, only bolstered their efforts to expose the racist functioning of the Memphis Housing Authority. “And, of course, the MHA also practices discrimination against poor and Black people,” the Memphis Panthers reported in the Party newspaper (TBP, August 14, 1971: 15). “Welfare families wait indefinitely for housing that never comes. Families with a higher income can sometimes get into public housing in a period of months, or even weeks. White people in some areas are given first chance at city housing, according to many in the Black community.” The Panthers charged not only public housing, but also city planning authorities with institutional racism designed to maintain Black Invisibility. Particularly the urban renewal projects so much in favor at the time by city planning authorities across the states supplied the BPP with expository ammunition. Incidentally, as they pointed out, urban renewal in black ghettos was known under another name: “Nigger Removal” – because “Black people are the main victims of this plot to remove poor people from the core of the city in order to make way for the ‘middle class’” (TBP, January 17, 1970: 5). The pattern was exactly the same in all cities that had experienced substantial urban renewal – be it New York City, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, or Saint Louis: advertised as moderately priced housing for low-income families, those who had previously lived in the black community found themselves unable to

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pay these rents. “As a consequence”, the Party newspaper reported, they “were forced, in most cases, to live in even worse conditions than they had prior to their forced displacement.” Another form of urban development en vogue at the time greatly enraged the Black Panthers, as it was to the systematic disadvantage of ghetto blacks: the building of city expressways conceived as part of the national highway and defense systems. In Boston, for instance, roads from the innerbelt highway system were to be directly hooked up with the nearby army base, “making the Black community easily accessible to the military,” which could join the police – the internal occupation army of the black colonies – in case of civil unrest. Just as in other cities – Los Angeles, Nashville, or Washington D.C. –, the Panthers further argued that such a highway system “was used to split the Black community”. In Boston, the planned highway would run through the middle of the black community, cutting off various black neighborhoods from each other – in “a calculated effort to isolate and thus control the Black community”. Cars would be speeding at over 60 miles per hour through former playgrounds and recreation areas. In the heart of the poorest section of Boston’s black community – the housing projects area –, an intersection of 20 lanes rising five levels up into the air was to be erected. Its access ramps would rise higher than the apartment buildings themselves, with parts of the road coming as close as 20 feet to the windows of the projects. And whereas the highway would be elevated throughout the black community, it would run underground in tunnels across – or rather, underneath – white middle class areas. “The system is designed to serve white suburbs at inner city expense,” the Boston Panthers concluded, “while rapid transit, upon which most Roxbury residents depend, steadily deteriorates.” (TBP, August 21,1971: 7, 19) On December 6, 1970, the Black Panthers held a so-called “Housing Crimes Trial” in Harlem, calling upon the black community to come and testify, listen and judge – with obvious success: “The people realize that indecent housing is just one of the many aspects of the perpetuation of fascism, of economic and racial exploitation and oppression,” they reported in The Black Panther (December 26, 1970: 3). An organization calling itself “The People’s Housing Coalition” had been founded, with a charter that essentially mirrored the BPP’s own platform and program. By choosing the form of a public trial, the Panthers strategically nourished and once again emphasized their overall aim to expose the racist functioning of major public and private institutions, thus creating structural Black Visibility by unmasking the US government and society as inherently unjust.

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“W hat is justice , compared to us ?” In an open letter to judge John M. Murtagh in March 1970, the 21 New York Panthers, incarcerated on a host of conspiracy charges, asked precisely this question: “What is justice, compared to us?” Again and again, the Black Panthers evoked the issue of justice – of racial social justice – in their struggle for Black Visibility. Certainly the Party’s community service programs made up the quantitative center of gravity of Party activities from 1969 on. Qualitatively speaking, however, the major drive of the Panthers’ efforts to expose the racist functioning of the US government and society pointed towards its legislatory, judicial, and executive powers. The BPP’s original 10-point program mirrors this clearly. Point #7 demanded an immediate end to “racist police oppression and brutality”, while point #8 declared: “We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails […] because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.” Point # 9 detailed this demand with reference to the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution: black people were to be tried by a jury of their peers – individuals with 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,” the BPP argued, pointing out how black people “are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the ‘average reasoning man’ of the black community.” Only by going through race, by no longer adhering to Black Invisibility but by giving race central importance with respect to due process of law, would Black Visibility be achieved and justice done to blacks. This is why the Panthers had, from the Party’s very inception, so carefully sought to display disciplined behavior in contact with representatives of the law and to demonstrate their knowledge of and compliance with existing laws. After the enactment of the Mulford bill, the Panthers concentrated their efforts on exposing the police by carefully documenting illegal police conduct – be it when dealing with members of the Party or members of the black community. A major focus lay on the police’s use of excessive violence, often without legal justification, towards black youths. In San Francisco, for instance, Bobby Seale and Party lawyer Charles Garry held a press conference in the summer of 1969 when a completely innocent black teenager was shot by the police. The young man himself was present at the press conference to report what had happened and to list other personal experiences of police brutality and the routine denial of due process of law. (TBP, August 16, 1969: 2-3) Among the frequently used formulations to expose illegal police conduct as linked to the racist functioning of the executive institution is the following, taken from The Black Panther (April 6, 1970: 7): “The pigs used an unsigned search warrant to gain entry to Mrs. Thomas’ house and by doing so showed the people that they have no

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rights that the oppressor is bound to respect.” The criticism was even more pronounced in the case of the black state assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, who tried to intervene on behalf of the black community when the Los Angeles police (LAPD) was about to move on a crowd of blacks gathered in front of the BPP headquarters, but was stopped with “a bash in the mouth and a few good whacks on the head”, as The Black Panther (December 20, 1969: 9) reported, concluding wryly: “This senator was shown that the oppressed people(s) have no rights that the oppressor is bound to respect, and all the titles in the world don’t change that. It doesn’t make any difference what you do, you’re still a nigger and you’d better keep that on your mind.” What the Panthers thus sought to document was that excessive and totally unwarranted police violence against blacks was standard police procedure and institutional routine. In November 1968, the Party newspaper published a detailed list of 24 blacks killed by the LAPD, including name, age, date, and circumstances surrounding each death as well as the official reason given by the police, and commented: “Many of our Black brothers have been shot and killed on the charge that they allegedly moved suspiciously. […] They use shot guns and rifles, M1’s, submachine guns, .38’s, .45’s, magnums on Black and Brown people to kill them and it is always justifiable homicide. Black and Brown people are shot and killed quicker on a misdemeanor than whites are on a felony.” (TBP, November 16, 1968: 17)

In its detailing, the list is also exemplary in another respect related to the BPP’s struggle for Black Visibility – it exemplifies the Panthers’ militant insistence upon the recognition of a black individual’s full personhood status, as each killed black is carefully given back his individuality and identity. This approach seems to have had quite an impact. For only a few months later, Newton issued an order to all Party chapters and branches to put together such a list of “racist atrocities” against members of both Party and black community, including personal details and a picture of the victims (TBP, April 20, 1969: 19). All along, a major principle in the struggle to not only expose but eventually overcome the racist functioning of the executive powers was to exhaust all legal means. This included the launching of a petition to decentralize police forces to a point where the local communities would exercise control over them. The petition Control Your Local Police (1968: 1-4) first appeared in the Bay Area in the summer of 1968, but was meant to be circulated nationwide. It detailed how each police department would be administered by a commissioner elected (and removed, if necessary) by a community police control council composed of members of the community and elected by local neighborhood districts. The powers of the police control council included giving policy instructions to the police commissioner and disciplining police officers when breaking department

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policy or violating the law. All officers of the local police department were obliged to live in the community they served. As David Hilliard pointed out in a radio interview, the police petition was “the only legal means that the people still have: They have one more chance to work within the legal framework of the system, and that’s through circulating that petition.” (TBP, August 30, 1969: 7) Thus he again publicly positioned the Black Panthers as law-abiding black revolutionaries – a highly subversive projection, since it was ultimately geared towards garnering support from those segments of the population who would normally shrink from open attempts to radically change the existing system. A year after launching the petition, the Panthers maliciously contended how it had got “the pig power structure” all “uptight”, because it was “threatening an arm of Babylon which is very fundamental to its existence. Without the arm of organized violence and repression, Babylon would cease to exist.” (TBP, August 30, 1969: 15) Indeed, the seemingly reformatory goal of community control of police would have fractured the state’s monopoly of violence along racial and ethnic lines, thus effectively subverting the system’s most vital arm of power, whose central function is to guarantee the system’s stability and reproduction. However, it seems that only the Bay Area Panthers were able to actually get the police petition on the ballot – and it was rejected by voters two to one in the spring of 1971. (Heath 1976a: 98, 113) The BPP’s steadfast insistence upon exhausting all legal means – and documenting these efforts accordingly – also mirrors the fact that both the police and the judicial system increasingly sought to pin down the Panthers as criminals. A deliberate construction, as the Panthers argued. For they were well aware that once the label stuck, the executive and judicial powers of the government could move to crush the BPP completely, and with public sanction. Hence, the official Party doctrine was “to discourage members from escaping the police, and to stand trial, expose the system to the masses and the masses would free the Panthers who were imprisoned” (Holder 1990: 51). Even misdemeanor cases were taken to court and carefully documented. One example is the case of several Los Angeles Panthers who had been arrested while selling the Party newspaper in the streets and charged with violations such as disturbing the peace. (TBP, September 26, 1970: 9) Despite the seeming banality of the matter, the Panthers insisted on contesting these charges, “in our attempt to exhaust all legal means to expose the contradictions in the antiquated laws and the racism inherent in the due process of law syndrome”. As a result, they were not only sentenced to 60 days of imprisonment, but also received a three-year period of probation. “The terms of the probation expose the true intentions of the court not to administer justice,” the BPP promptly declared, “but to repress both physically and politically anyone who attempts to expose the decadence of this corroding society.” Indeed: the probation terms prohibited not only BPP membership but also selling the Party newspaper.

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In hindsight, then, the frequency with which the Panthers both alluded to or literally quoted the infamous verdict of Chief Justice Roger Taney in the famous Dred Scott vs Sanford case in 1857 – namely, that blacks possessed no rights that whites were bound to respect – amounted to an actual tactic to confront the public with the fact that systematic disrespect of blacks’ rights was still a reality and thus proof of the racist functioning of the entire judicial system. For Taney’s aim was to conserve and strengthen the “original intent” of the Constitution with his infamous reasoning that “that unfortunate race, which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world […] when the Constitution of the United States was formed and adopted […] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order […] so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. […] This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portions of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute.” (Mills 1998: 184)

The repeated quoting of Taney’s verdict went hand in hand with another tactic the Party originally developed when confronted with its first major court case, Huey Newton’s being charged with murdering a white policeman in October 1967: the launch of campaigns to free indicted Panthers. Particularly when Party leaders had to stand trial, it became standard procedure to organize large demonstrations and rallies at crucial moments before and during the trial which provided the Party with a platform to document the racist functioning of the courts and the judicial process in general. “Hear the trumped-up charges … see the juries of non-peers … see the fascist judges and their running dog prosecutors railroad the vanguard revolutionaries,” a BPP poster advertised a mock film titled Pig Justice at the culmination point of Panther leader trials in the fall of 1969 (TBP, October 11, 1969: 7): the New York 21, the New Haven 14, and Bobby Seale in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. In the New York 21 trial, the entire leadership of the New York chapter was indicted on a host of charges ranging from conspiracies to bomb department stores, the zoo, subway stations, etc., to committing robberies and murder. In the months preceding the trial, the Panthers and their allies concentrated their efforts on exposing these charges as fabricated by the police department and the district attorney’s office. (TBP, May 4, 1969: 4) In fact, the denial of rights to and the public slandering of the incarcerated Panthers escalated to a point where a group of attorneys filed a Writ of Habeas Corpus on behalf of the New York 21 before the opening of the trial. The document concluded “that it is utterly impossible for [the] petitioners to have a fair trial in this State. Their most fundamental rights have been trampled upon by both the prosecutor, the

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judiciary, and the press.” (TBP, June 14, 1969: 4-5) Most of the 21 accused had to remain in jail because of an excessively high bail of 100.000 $ per person during a period that extended over 26 months altogether. In the end, it took the jury merely two hours to reach a verdict that acquitted all Panthers of all charges – a clear indication that the charges had been insubstantial. Bobby Seale, the cofounder of the BPP, had to stand trial in Chicago for charges in connection with the massive turbulences in that city during the Democratic national convention in 1968, together with seven New Left celebrities, among them Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman. Seale’s being chained to a chair and gagged in the courtroom – a result of his attempts to defend himself because his lawyer was absent – prompted an uproar worldwide. Seale himself publicly insisted that neither could his mistreatment be reduced to the racist behavior of the judge, nor his charge of institutional racism insubstantiated by the fact that black court marshals had been present. “I say that if a black judge was going to use the same fascist, racist tactics as Julius Hoffman, I would have acted no differently. You see an important thing to understand is that the system itself is white.” (Foner 1970: 84) To not only expose, but publicly indict the judicial system for its illegitimate institutional racism, the Panthers set up what they called People’s Tribunals. An early, rather impromptu version unfolded on the occasion of Newton’s first court appearance in January 1968. (Black Panther Party Ministry of Information Bulletin 2) Later tribunals were elaborate constructions aimed at the performance of the police, courts, and prisons. The People’s Tribunal in Chicago in June 1969, for instance, restaged a trial against the famed regional Party leader Fred Hampton. He had originally been indicted for stealing 71 $ worth of ice cream from an ice-cream truck and had been sentenced to two to five years in prison. According to the Panthers’ version, Hampton had besieged the ice-cream truck while neighborhood children were helping themselves. The People’s Tribunal, restaging the original court procedures from a black perspective, featured a jury composed of Hampton’s peers from the local black community. A college president from Chicago presided the tribunal. Prominent blacks and progressive whites appeared to testify to the work and character of Hampton, who had been active in the traditional and well-respected NAACP before joining the BPP. The official witnesses from the trial – now questioned before the People’s Tribunal – were instrumental in helping to expose the racist perceptions of both judge and jury as factors determining the original verdict. A lesson driven home not only to the large crowd gathered in Chicago, but to Americans all over the country: the Panthers had arranged for the entire tribunal to be filmed and broadcasted on Public Broadcasting System affiliates throughout the nation. (TBP, June 14, 1969: 8; Holder 1990: 161) A year later, the Los Angeles Panthers organized a sweeping indictment of national, state, and local legislative, judicial, and military or law-enforcing

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government bodies at their People’s Tribunal. Over the course of six hours of testimony, these institutions were charged with repressive, violent acts against black people in general and the Black Panther Party in particular. In front of over 600 people, the tribunal, presided by Angela Davis, found all indicted guilty on all charges, including the murder of BPP members and black people in general, kidnapping, assault with deadly weapons and more. In accumulation, the verdicts delegitimized the executive and judicial powers of the US government as violently oppressive to black people. In turn, the phrasing of the verdict explicitly legitimized the use of violence to create racial social justice: the accused were “sentenced to be ‘revolutionized to Death’ by the masses of poor and oppressed people throughout racist Babylon” (TBP, June 26, 1970: 12-13). Consequently, the Panthers insisted that all blacks imprisoned – and those affiliated with the BPP in particular – were political prisoners. As Huey Newton (1995a: 260) argued: “Many activities defined by the ruling class as criminal are the acts of poor and exploited people, desperate people, who have no access to the channels of opportunity. And the juries deciding their fate are made up of privileged middle- and upper-class citizens who are threatened by the fact that a man who is shut out of the privileged structure can create his own opportunities. The jury is incompetent to judge the accused; it does not understand the circumstances that brought on his actions. Jurors in America are not peers; they are a part of the system of oppression. As a result, the poor end up in penitentiaries as political prisoners.”

And not only that – the racist oppression continued behind prison bars, as the Panthers insisted. With Newton constructed as the political prisoner from the outset of the Free Huey campaign, the Panthers had created a symbol whose treatment behind prison bars could be taken as exemplary. “Although the State does not admit that Huey is a political prisoner at Los Padres he is certainly treated as one,” The Black Panther (May 4, 1969: 10) reported. Not only was Newton held in solitary confinement and prohibited to see other BPP leaders, the state obviously also sought to silence him: “He is not allowed to buy or receive books, and he is not permitted pen and paper to write. He is explicitly forbidden to make any public pronouncements from his jail cell.” As more and more Panthers found themselves behind prison bars from 1969 on, they simply continued to involve blacks in the struggle for Black Visibility inside the prisons. When New York City jails erupted in the summer of 1970, this was in all likelihood fueled by the New York 21 Panthers incarcerated across these prisons. (Holder 1990: 153) By late 1970, there existed an actual BPP prison branch at San Quentin in California. Its most prominent member was George Jackson, a leading black protest figure in the nascent prison movement

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and soon to become one of the first victims of this development. (Alkebulan 2007: 61-64) The BPP also launched a specific community service program in 1970, the Free Bussing to Prison program, “to give our people an opportunity to observe the notorious conditions that exist in the penal institutions and to expose those institutions for exactly what they are, structures existing for the purpose of containing oppressed people whose growing resentment towards a government that does not serve their interests is propelling them to take positive steps against their oppressor,” as the Illinois Panthers retrospectively claimed (TBP, August 9, 1971: 3). Institutional racism within the penal system manifested itself not only in a dehumanizing treatment of blacks, as the Panthers argued. Blacks were also systematically denied their legal rights and deliberately isolated from the black community. Most penal institutions were indeed located hundreds of miles away from the next black community. The BPP’s bussing program was to fasten contacts between family members and friends with the incarcerated on a weekly basis and to strengthen the ties between the prisoners and the black community – an initiative enthusiastically supported, as the example of Cleveland suggests, where the churches provided buses, local gas stations fueled them for free and community members volunteered as drivers. (Nissim-Sabat 2007: 125) Thus, the Panthers hoped to break the vicious cycle of Black Invisibility as experienced by black inmates and to engage the black community in aiding the BPP to expose the racist functioning of the penal system to a larger public.9 When taken together, the Panthers’ strategic efforts represented an attempt to strike at the very foundation of US government and society. “The modern nation-state that we know as America was not founded on a principle or idea of absolute equality under the law, even man-made law. It was founded on the principle that those who are born into property and privilege are somehow ‘more equal’ than everyone else,” Dhoruba Bin Wahad from the New York 21 formulated retrospectively. “What’s done and just for white people or for European males in American society is not going to be equal to what’s done to me in a racially supremacist society.” (Fletcher / Jones / Lotringer 1993: 33) Time and again, the Panthers pointed out how a black man could be sentenced to serve more time in prison for robbing a bank than a white man for taking a human life, particularly a black man’s life. The legal system, in its daily practice and routine, functioned to uphold the sacredness of white property while at the same time confirming the lesser humanity ascribed to blacks. The colonial analogy proved essential for the Panthers in putting this conception of the United States as a white supremacy system into perspective. It provided them with the justification to raise a moral claim that radical change was necessary, that it was time to revolutionize American society. In the eyes of the historian Nikhil Pal Singh, the colonial analogy possesses a “figurative potential and contestary power”: it enabled the Panthers to launch “an oppositional discourse

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that exposed the hegemony of Americanism as incomplete, challenged its universality, and imagined carving up its spaces differently”. (Singh 1998: 85)

P osing as A lternative G overnment Subversiveness played a crucial role in this respect. For many of the BPP’s activities consciously aimed at establishing a clear-cut alternative to US government and society by subverting not only the government’s performance, but also the cornerstones of national identity. Eldridge Cleaver, the Party’s key strategist and certainly its most subversive public performer, was probably the first black person to explicitly call for the establishment of a black ‘nation’ that was not based on land, but on a government functioning as representative of the internal black colonies – the urban black ghettos – of the United States. “Black Power says to black people that it is possible for them to build a national organization on somebody else’s land,” he formulated around the time of the Party’s national takeoff in April 1968. “The necessity upon Afro-America is to move, now, to begin functioning as a nation, to assume its sovereignty, to demand that that sovereignty be recognized by other nations of the world.” (Cleaver 1969: 66-67) This is precisely what the BPP set out to accomplish over the next years. Only 16 months later, David Hilliard already boasted in an interview: “It is very clear that the Black Panther Party is the only recognized government of black people.” (TBP, August 9, 1969: 12) The idea of the Black Panther Party posing as alternative black government was built into the very foundation and setting up of the Party by Newton and Seale. It is evident in the Party’s organizational double structure with both political and military functions, as expressed in the titles of the Party founders and new members and the growing variety of actual ministries. By April 1968, when the BPP started to branch out rapidly across the nation, this quasi-governmental structure was fully developed. Its governing body was the BPP’s Central Committee situated in the Party office in Oakland, now referred to as national headquarters, the seat of government. It comprised at least twelve national leadership positions – ministries –, occupied by ministers in the military ranks of marshal, colonel, and lieutenant colonel. 10 The four highest ranking leaders shaping Party politics between 1966 and 1971 were Huey Newton, Minister of Defense; Bobby Seale, Chairman; Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information – all in the rank of marshal –; and David Hilliard, Chief of Staff and colonel. The other members of the Central Committee included: the Minister of Education, a position occupied by George Murray until July 1969, thereafter held by Raymond ‘Masai’ Hewitt; the Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas; the Communications Secretary, Kathleen Cleaver; Field Marshal Don

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Cox, who was probably not the only one in this position between 1966 and 1971; the Minister of Finance, Melvin Newton, officially listed in TBP between October 1968 and May 1969. The three SNCC leaders Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and James Forman, who were drafted into the BPP at the first Free Huey rally in February 1968, were accorded with the honorary titles of Prime Minister, Minister of Justice, and Minister of Foreign Affairs respectively, although they were never actually active in the BPP’s Central Committee. Other ministerial positions seem to have been planned, but never occupied: Minister of Economic Development, Minister of Labor, and Minister of Religion (Church League 1969: 24). National headquarters also housed other Party members with nationwide duties, such as the staff of The Black Panther. As strictly hierarchical cadre Party, the BPP exercised its governmental powers accordingly. National headquarters was the political decision-making body where national Party policy was formulated. All Party activities were coordinated and administrated on this level, including financial matters. The growing number of BPP chapters and branches in cities across the United States functioned as regional and local government representations with corresponding administration and “jurisdiction” responsibilities, usually over a state or a city. On the regional level, they were headed by deputy ministers or field secretaries occupying the rank of major. 11 Branch offices coordinated BPP activities on the local level and usually operated within the confines of a city. They were headed by captains, with security matters resting in the hands of lieutenants. 12 Depending on the size of a chapter or branch and the organizing qualities and styles of its membership, the composition of the local BPP leadership and its positions varied. There could even be positions or functions existing on a local level only, such as deputy minister or lieutenant of health, political education instructor, Party spokesman, local circulation manager or head of distribution of TBP, as well as various forms of program coordinators, for instance a Free Breakfast program coordinator. (Abron 1998: 188; Heath 1976b: 11-17.) According to Seale (1991: 397), the idea behind the ranking in general was primarily to define the political work and responsibilities of BPP members. In other words, all Party members functioned as civil servants, as public officials – and, at the same time, as soldiers and officers. The BPP’s organizational structure clearly mirrored contemporary revolutionary movements that had been successful at overthrowing colonial regimes and taking on the role of a governing body themselves, chief among them the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria and the small group of revolutionaries centered around Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba. The subversive threat thus communicated to the “mother country” – the US government as colonial regime – found its most visible expression in the Panthers’ ostentatiously displayed attributes of power: guns and uniforms. The colors black and powder blue, in turn, reappeared

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– with or without the Panther logo – on flags and ribbons that decorated most public events of the BPP, in a subversive mimicry of national identity as commonly displayed in US flags and the colors of red, white, and blue at official events. National headquarters attempted from the very beginning – albeit unsuccessfully in the end – to control the organizational growth of the Party, i.e. making sure new chapters and branches were set up and functioning in compliance with standards set by the Central Committee. This could mean that national headquarters issued charters to cities eager to set up a BPP office, with members of the Central Committee later inspecting them to make sure they conformed to official Party standards. Alternatively, national headquarters authorized high-ranking, trusted regional BPP leaders to set up or reorganize local chapters and branches. At least in the beginning, whoever wanted to organize a BPP chapter was required to travel to Oakland and go through a six-week training program centered on political education, the operation of a chapter, procedures of administration and reporting, and everyday activities. 13 However, when the Free Huey campaign approached its peak in the summer of 1968 and national headquarters concentrated all its efforts on mobilizing protest during Newton’s trial, Party growth proceeded increasingly unchecked. “We did not argue with people if they put on a black leather jacket or black berets, or said that they were Panthers,” Eldridge Cleaver recalled, adding that it must have been during that time that many “undisciplined and non-functional” people found their way into the Party (Foner 1970: 115). Problems with undisciplined Party members existed from the very beginning, as Bobby Seale (1991: 365-375) and David Hilliard (1993: 157, 175177) repeatedly pointed out. Many of these problems were tied to those the Panthers primarily aimed at recruiting – the rebellious black ghetto youth and members of the black underclass, those who had basically nowhere to go and nothing to lose. Some of them just joined the BPP for status reasons vis-à-vis their peers and were hanging around in front of the Party office, showing off their uniform instead of actively engaging in Party activities. Alcohol and drug abuse among Party members seems to have been widespread. Others simply used the Party as a base for their criminal activity. Hilliard recounted incidents of Party members stealing, robbing, ambushing cops or secretly fabricating explosives. “The majority of new members come in here for one reason,” the deputy minister of education of the Illinois BPP chapter claimed in The Black Panther (May 31, 1969: 4): “to kill”. It was this destructive energy the Panthers wanted to channel and organize into a positive force: a cadre of disciplined, politically educated civil servants and paramilitary soldiers. Hence, national headquarters set a rigid standard of conduct for all Party members, fixed in a set of rules considerably expanded after the end of 1968. (Foner 1970: 4-6) The rules stressed personal discipline and demanded respect for and obedience to

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rigid Party hierarchy, as well as knowledge of and conformity to official Party ideology. During active Party work, Panthers were prohibited to possess, let alone consume narcotics, weed or alcohol. Both on and off duty, the handling of weapons – an important part of internal education – had to occur in a strictly law-abiding and defensive manner. Individual rank and file as well as local Party leaders had to write periodical reports in order to keep national headquarters informed about their activities and finances. 14 Maintaining internal discipline and organizational strength – a functioning government, so to speak – was only one reason why the Central Committee of the BPP was adamant in enforcing its rules; sometimes by punishing or suspending, often simply by expelling renitent Party members. 15 If their posing as alternative government was to be effective, it was absolutely crucial for the Panthers to publicly present themselves authentically as the tough and disciplined vanguard able to bring about racial social justice. This is where the ostentatiously displayed captive black warrior fits in, particularly when orchestrated in a collective power play: uniformed Panthers practicing drill marches and war chants in public parks and parading through the ghetto streets. Or even better: doing all of this in front of symbolically charged places, such as the Alameda County court house, where Newton’s trial unfolded during the summer of 1968. In his earlier treaty The Correct Handling of a Revolution from July 1967, Huey Newton (1995b: 16) had already pointed out that the vanguard group of the revolution must consist of disciplined, politically educated people. The Panthers, and this had always been Newton’s key argument, had to function as role models – role models the black community members would be eager to emulate; role models that other ethnic minorities could build upon; role models that even those within the larger student and New Left movements would be propelled to accept. This is why the BPP’s national leadership placed such great emphasis on political education from its very beginning. Party members were to develop a revolutionary black consciousness in order to grasp the long-term objectives of the BPP: to expose the racist functioning of the US government and its institutions, and to present the BPP as the vanguard, building an alternative government based on racial social justice. Newton and Seale started to hold political education classes from the very moment they opened their first Party office in January 1967, introducing blacks to revolutionary and black literature, including particularly the writings of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara, Malcolm X’s autobiography and also Mao’s Red Book. (Seale 1991: 77-79, 365; Newton 1995b: 111; Holder 1990: 210) Emory Douglas remembered how when he started to attend these meetings, “it wasn’t like they just gave you a gun and you went out into the streets and became part of those [police] patrols. You had

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to understand what you were dealing with in these weapons.” (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 150) Towards this end, Newton and Seale had issued a Pocket Lawyer of Legal First Aid that included basic legal and constitutional rights every Panther had to know and adhere to. (Seale 1991: 86) It was periodically reprinted also in The Black Panther – for cutting out and carrying along. In addition, the Party program had to be known by heart. Along with more theoretical writings by Newton and texts published in The Black Panther, it provided a basis for discussing ongoing events during political education classes. During the heyday of mobilizing support for Newton in the summer of 1968, these classes seem to have been largely suspended – a fact that aggravated the problems with new and undisciplined Party members, as Eldridge Cleaver retrospectively suspected. Refusing to attend political education classes subsequently became one of the main reasons for being expelled. And although political education was greatly expanded over the course of 1969, the BPP Central Committee continued to admonish Party members for not adhering enough to official BPP ideology and organizational discipline. 16 All Party members – as role models – were expected to participate daily in creating structural Black Visibility. This is why Party leaders across the states eagerly pursued public speaking engagements and encouraged local rank and file to do the same. 17 Speeches and discussions – especially at local high schools – could be part of a Panther’s daily routine. (Holder 1990: 186188; McCutchen 1998: 124) Such engagements also provided the Party with cash funds that were vital for daily operation both on the national and local levels. Returns from speeches could be substantial. 18 To reach the older and more conservative members of the community, Panthers also organized panel discussions with local political and religious leaders – and they went to church. In autumn 1968, the black reporter Earl Caldwell from The New York Times (September 15, 1968: 70) described how Panthers in the Bay Area “make a point of having representation at most churches each Sunday. They also make a point of attending community meetings where racial issues are discussed and supporting Negro organizations in almost any dispute.” Moreover, Panthers repeatedly held sermons during regular church services. And they offered political education classes for the local black community during which they discussed texts taken from The Black Panther. 19 When it came to politically educate the BPP’s key constituency – the black ghetto community –, such efforts would not do. Huey Newton had always pointed out that the Panthers’ key constituency was a non-reading community which principally learned – and could be educated only – by way of observation and participation. Hence, the Panthers sought to combine political education by word with concrete activities: local branches offered barbecues or free food and drinks at their rallies, held free “soul dinners” or wrapped their political

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education altogether in entertainment, like dance parties organized for the local youth. The Oakland Panthers sported a Party-affiliated group called “The Lumpen” at various rallies, “whose primary purpose”, according to Huey Newton (1995a: 301), “was not entertainment but political education through music and song.” And the San Francisco Panthers organized an entire festival featuring all of the above: free food, drinks, concerts, revolutionary movies and art, and so-called “Off the Pig”-games for children, where cartoon figures of known politicians that were glued on milk cartons could be knocked over with tennis balls. (TBP, April 18, 1970: 12-13) However politically low-key and entertaining on the surface, these events were always designed to get those participating to check out the Black Panther Party further: attend one of the meetings at a BPP-affiliated Community Information Center, drop in at the local Party office, help out at another BPPsponsored event and eventually become actively involved in one of the Party’s key activities, the community service programs. For these programs were the pillars of the alternative government the Panthers proclaimed to build: oppositional institutions functioning “to meet the needs of the people”, as the Central Committee formulated in the national launch of these programs, “so the people can be served by some kind of government representation” (TBP, November 16, 1968: 15). Over time, the BPP’s institutions and institutionalized services became ever more diversified. The alternative quasi-institutions thus erected aimed at subverting official public institutions – they were geared towards breaking the black community’s socio-economic dependence on public institutions, particularly those catering specifically to welfare recipients. Some chapters and branches went as far as institutionalizing such services as “Aid and Loans to Welfare Mothers”.20 Consequently, it was a standing Party policy at least until the split in 1971 that any form of government funding for the BPP’s community service programs was to be refused. (TBP, May 19, 1970: 9; Holder 1990: 91) Particularly children thus got a chance to break out of the vicious cycle of institutional racism. “Breakfast for Children pulls people out of the system and organizes them into an alternative,” Eldridge Cleaver pointed out. “Black children who go to school hungry each morning have been organized into their poverty, and the Panther program liberates them, frees them from that aspect of their poverty.” (TBP, August 16, 1969: 4) No chance was left out to refer to the subversive qualities of the BPP’s oppositional institutions and their impact upon the black community: “The people are beginning to ask ‘How come the Panthers are feeding us when we are hungry and the government didn’t?’ And the answer is becoming ever more clear – the government is not set up to meet the needs of the people, whereas the Black Panther Party is.” (TBP, September 6, 1969: 9)

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Challenging the legitimacy of the US government was part and parcel of this subversive drive. This is particularly evident in the Panthers’ claim to provide security for members of the black community – to offer protection from the representatives of the very public institution officially designated to do just that. In fact, this is how the Panthers started out: by assuming the however short-lived role and function of the police. Later on, the establishment of institutionalized forms of legal services21 and, ultimately, an oppositional administration of justice, was a major focus of the Party’s performance as quasi-government. Particularly important in this respect were the People’s Tribunals – actual oppositional courts labeled as “the only legitimate and just recourse that Black people have to redress their grievances.” (TBP, June 26, 1970: 13) In its mimicry of statehood, the BPP went beyond building oppositional institutions and presenting itself as quasi-government in its organizational structure. Panther leaders such as Eldridge Cleaver also publicly performed as representatives of an oppositional government. In the fall of 1968, California governor Ronald Reagan intervened to prevent Cleaver from lecturing on racism at the University of California in Berkeley. In turn, “Cleaver moved up and down the state from Humboldt to Orange county, ‘roasting Reagan’s tail’ in a series of public addresses,” as Bob Scheer, cofounder of the Peace and Freedom Party, recalled. “The T.V. and newspaper coverage of the duel between the Sanctimonious Reagan and Freeswinging Cleaver was fantastic. […] Cleaver’s every action denied the legitimacy of their [‘the men who run the state’] power.” (Cleaver 1969: xxii-xxiii) The whole affair stood in the context of Eldridge Cleaver officially running for President on the ticket of the Peace and Freedom Party. Cleaver’s performance as official political candidate for the highest public office – along with Newton running for Congress and other Party leaders competing for seats in the California legislature – was properly subversive in many respects. For one thing, it was a mock political race. As the Peace and Freedom Party explained to its white audience: “The fact that Eldridge Cleaver will not be elected permits him an honesty which no Democrat or Republican, who is after votes, can afford. Even if he were elected, he would not serve. He is a convicted felon and two years short of the constitutional age for the Presidency.”22 What the Panthers, in fact, engaged in was a subversion of official processes and rituals in political campaigning. Using traditional platforms, they held mock political rallies. The “Black Panther Candidates’ Night” at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco in October 1968, for instance, featured a soul food dinner and a jazz band besides speeches by all major BPP leaders, including Newton on film and tape. (TBP, October 12, 1968: 6) Thus the Panthers instrumentalized traditional political platforms for their own purposes: to

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launch the nationwide Free Huey campaign and, in this course, to organize and start building Party structures on a national level – in effect, to erect an oppositional government. In accordance with the Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility, this subversive strategic aim was openly declared as such. One of the initial campaign posters displayed Newton behind prison bars, flashing the victory sign. (TBP, October 5, 1968: 7) Listed as “purpose for entering the political race” was freedom for Huey Newton. The next three points then proceeded to deconstruct the legitimacy of the two official parties, particularly as representatives of black people. The culmination point was the call for an United Nations plebiscite for all blacks taken from the Party program – a refusal to recognize the jurisdictional competence of the United States. In a last act of subversion of the government’s authority, Cleaver “abdicated his presidential aspirations in favor of a pig wheeled into the auditorium” (Church League 1969: 27-28). Despite his going underground and choosing exile shortly thereafter, the BPP’s subversive mimicry of statehood rose to new heights once Eldridge Cleaver resurfaced in Algiers in 1969. For there, he began functioning as a counter-diplomat, engaging the BPP into a series of diplomatic ventures. First, he pursued to establish an international BPP office that would function as an actual embassy – “a government in exile”, as he had called for in the spring of 1968 already (Cleaver 1969: 68). By early 1970, this counter-embassy began to take shape: Cleaver was looking for suitable staff – “people with skills in filing systems, typing, printing, shipping and receiving,” as The Black Panther (February 28, 1970: 22) clarified. People speaking French – the official diplomatic language – and Arabic were also sought, as were “people who can function on a diplomatic level in all languages, because at this stage in our struggle we see the need to develop diplomatic machinery for the American revolution.” Clearly, the BPP thus sought to internationalize its struggle for Black Visibility – “to inform the world of the plight of African Americans” (Holder 1990: 165) – by forming coalitions with other nonwhite liberation movements against the United States. Algiers was considered the ideal place for this venture for several reasons. It was the capital of one of the few independent African countries established through a successful liberation from colonial bondage. As such, Algeria and its ruling Party, the FLN, possessed model status for other nonwhite liberation movements in colonial contexts around the world, including ghetto blacks in the United States. And whereas the US government was denied formal representation there, the Black Panthers were “enabled” by the FLN “to display their presence publicly” (Cleaver 1998: 231) and thus to perform as official representatives of an oppositional “American” government – as, in fact, the only legal, recognized American representatives. The Algerian government not only accorded the Black Panther Party with an official status

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equivalent to that of South Africa’s ANC, it also offered the Panthers a mundane villa as a seat for their international office and a budget to put it into operation. (Holder 1990: 164; Cleaver 1998: 235) When the BPP’s international office formally opened in September 1970, the Panthers invited representatives of all liberation movements and socialist states, “inaugurating their official establishment within the revolutionary diplomatic community in Algiers,” as Kathleen Cleaver (1998: 235) phrased it. “The villa became a kind of embassy of the American revolution, receiving visitors from all over the world.” In turn, Panthers from the international office attended conferences and ‘officially’ visited many of these countries at the invitation of the respective governments. Thus, the inherent subversiveness of this oppositional government in exile lay in its building of diplomatic ties with all movements and nations the US government had declared to be its enemies, or at least had refused to recognize because it regarded them as enemies. In fact, the international office of the BPP had started to function as a coordination center for the diplomatic ventures of the Party as a whole long before it was officially opened. In the fall of 1969, for instance, a delegation of Panthers travelled to North Vietnam. As official negotiators with the North Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, they bargained the exchange of US prisoners of war in Vietnam against political prisoners – Panthers – in the United States. (TBP, November 22, 1969: 3; Holder 1990: 167) As the historian Paul Alkebulan (2007: 71-72) writes: “The US government ignored the proposal because it would have legitimized the BPP’s revolutionary credentials as an alternative government.” In the summer of 1970, Eldridge Cleaver was invited by the North Korean government to hold an anti-imperialistic journalists conference in Pyongyang. He was also asked to put together an “American Peoples’ Anti-Imperialist Delegation” of radical organizations from the Unites States – with the BPP clearly recognized as the official representative. This same delegation was also invited to Hanoi by the Vietnamese ambassador in Pyongyang. On August 18, 1970, the Cleaver-led delegation was honored there with a celebration marking the “International Day of Solidarity with the Afro-American People” – in commemoration of the anniversary of the first large ghetto revolt in South Central Los Angeles five years ago. (Cleaver 1998: 231-233) The provocation hit home, as The New York Times headlined the following day on page 13: Cleaver and Black Panther Group Attend Hanoi Observance. In Hanoi, Cleaver was again invited – this time by China – to visit with a Panther delegation.23 As Kathleen Cleaver (1998: 234), Eldridge’s wife at the time and also present in Algiers, later confirmed, all these diplomatic ventures were consciously staged to subvert the US government: “The visit to North Korea, North Vietnam, and China was an exercise in what Cleaver termed ‘people’s diplomacy’, in direct opposition to the official posture of the American government.” In this vein, the BPP’s

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international office also granted asylum to various political fugitives from the US government, among them fellow Panthers, individuals from BPP-allied groups, or black soldiers who had deserted in Vietnam. (Cleaver 1998: 235; Holder 1990: 167; Alkebulan 2007: 72) The Black Panther Party’s subversive mimicry of statehood also extended to the legal-ideological foundations of US society and the cornerstones of national identity. In fact, the Panthers’ subversive wit in challenging the legitimacy of the existing US government and its major institutions was most pronounced when it came to the two absolutely fundamental legal documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In the closure of the Party program, Newton and Seale cited extensively from the Declaration of Independence, cumulating in the following passage, which started out with “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 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 to 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. […] 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.” (Foner 1970: 4)

Newton and Seale ingenuously founded what they already at that time must have – however vaguely – conceived as oppositional government on the same document the United States were founded upon. They, in fact, based their whole struggle for Black Visibility on the legal foundation of America in that they declared it to be their “patriotic duty” to expose the racist functioning of existing US institutions, to expose the exploitation and oppression of blacks inherent in the present US government. But the ultimate act of subversiveness was this: while the Panthers, by instrumentalizing the Declaration of Independence as justification for revolutionizing the existing system, thus proved the ultimate legitimacy of their cause, they at the same time pointed to the paradox that however the system’s reaction, it could only prove its illegitimacy, as its legitimacy depended upon its consent and readiness to be revolutionized and thus destroyed in its existing structure.

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In practice, the Panthers consistently employed the Declaration of Independence to subvert the system argumentatively by its own means. Their line of reasoning in launching the police petition is a case in point: “The basis for community control of police is derived from the political philosophy that espouses that to secure the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, “governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” […] Since governments derive their power from the consent of the governed, it would be unjust for any oppressive force to be applied to a community to force that community to submit to an undesired form of governmental power. […] If the will of the majority is used to suppress the rights of a minority, the resultory order will be unjust. The present system of centralized police administration and control forces an unjust order onto the minorities by forcing the minorities to submit unwillingly to a type of enforcement that is repugnant to them. […] The only means for protecting the dignity and humanity of the just is to subject them only to a just system.” (TBP, January 15, 1969: 6)

One could thus conclude that, for the Panthers’ struggle for racial social justice in America, the Declaration of Independence functioned as the sole mutually accepted basis between them and the United States. With the Constitution, matters were different, since the Party regarded it as the legal origin of the racial encoding of the US government – particularly the judicial system. While the Panthers thus left out no opportunity to publicly discredit the Constitution in this respect, their ultimate act of subversion was the Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention (RPCC) in the fall of 1970: the venture attempted nothing less than the formal institution of the Black Panther Party as oppositional government, and it was organized with the concrete goal of rewriting the US Constitution from a black perspective. (TBP, July 15, 1970: 14) This could mean, for instance, that “the present racist legal system would be replaced by a system of people’s courts where one would be tried by a jury of one’s peers” (TBP, September 12, 1970: 3). The call for participation was not constricted to black people but went out to all radical forces within the United States. For the BPP also meant to demonstrate that their black perspective on a discrimination-free society could serve as a model case for what other minorities aspired to in their respective situation – gender equality, for instance, or freedom of sexual orientation. This basic outlook of the convention was mirrored in the plenary session, the first part of the convention which consisted primarily of workshops on all aspects of the shape of a new society and its institutions. They were to produce position papers on how to realize proportional representation not only of blacks, but also of ethnic minorities, women and other groups without adequate representation in the current system. The BPP’s staging and purpose of the RPCC thus clearly

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aimed at subverting white male heterosexual identity. And not only that: the plenary session in September 1970 was held in Philadelphia – precisely the historical locus of debates out of which the formulation of the US Constitution had originally arisen. The second part, the actual convention, was to be held in Washington DC, seat of the present government, on November 4 – election day –, a date on which national identity was ritually reconfirmed. The Panthers consciously subverted other such symbols of national identity as part of their posing as oppositional government. They created their own memorial sites with reference to places of crucial importance in Party history. Oakland’s DeFremery park, habitual site of local Panther rallies, was renamed Bobby Hutton Memorial Park, to commemorate the BPP’s first victim of police violence. The Party also initiated its own memorial days, the most important one certainly being Huey Newton’s birthday on February 7. Originally a symbolical date for launching the Free Huey campaign on a large scale, Newton’s birthday continued to be publicly celebrated even after he was released from prison. Another powerful symbol of national identity subverted by the Panthers was the US national anthem: composed by Elaine Brown, who was to become the leader of the Oakland-based BPP in 1974, the Party’s oppositional “Black Panther National Anthem” was made popular at large public events, such as the Los Angeles May Day rally in 1969. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 15) An important aspect of the Panthers’ subversion of the authority and legitimacy of the US government was the idea to thus wrench the power of definition from the hands of whites. This is particularly evident in the BPP’s labeling tactic. “We recognize the significance of words in the struggle for liberation, not only in the media and in conversations with people on the block, but in the important area of raising consciousness,” Huey Newton (1995a: 163) pointed out. “Words are another way of defining phenomena, and the definition of any phenomena is the first step to controlling it or being controlled by it.” The label pig, for instance, was originally coined for the police, with the aim of delegitimizing the police by subversively reversing the stereotypical references whites habitually used to designate blacks as inferior, and applying them to the key representatives of the US system. An act that might appear problematic, particularly from a historical perspective, which should however not be likened to what political authorities did to marginalized groups, particularly to Jews, at earlier times. For there is a fundamental difference: the labeling in the case of the Panthers is done not by those who exercise power, but by the powerless. “‘Pig’ was perfect for several reasons,” Newton explained: “First of all, words like ‘swine’, ‘hog’, ‘sow’, and ‘pig’ have always had unpleasant connotations.” And “in racial terms, ‘pig’ is a neutral word.” (Newton 1995a: 165-166) The label was thus consciously designed to avoid the trap of being charged with practicing “reverse racism”, as that would have deluded from the actual intention of the label: its aid in creating structural Black Visibility by educating

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white’s perception – “to make whites question and even reject concepts they had always unthinkingly accepted.” The subversive aspect of the pig label according to Newton lay in the fact that it would help to “control the police by making them see themselves in a new light.” (Newton 1995a: 165) The strategic aim pursued by labeling policemen as pigs was thus to subvert not so much the individual, mostly white, identity of an officer, but his (or her) institutional identity, thereby weakening the overall efficiency and performance of the police. “We define them as pigs! I think that this is a revolutionary thing in itself. That’s political power. That’s power itself,” Newton insisted. “When black people start defining things and making it act in a desired manner, then we call this Black Power!” (Foner 1970: 61, original emphasis) The black philosopher Charles Mills (1998: 111) points out how white identity and especially whites’ sense of self-worth is based on the deference received from blacks, “since self-worth is defined hierarchically in relation to the class of inferior beings.” Challenging white supremacy therefore necessitates the education of whites’ perception, he argues, by exposing morally reprehensible aspects in whites’ perception as well as the social causation of these racist perceptions. No easy task, for whites “will have a vested interest in the system’s perpetuation and thus be prone to evasion, bad faith and self-deception about its true character. […] So a major obstacle to doing the right thing where right has been defined as white is one’s vertiginous sense of thereby losing one’s racial standing.” (Mills 1998: 142, 161) The pig label challenged this obstacle head-on, for it fundamentally aimed at exposing the violence inherent in institutional racism. “Our people have always been attacked and now we have to let other people know what these racist pigs are. We have to redefine them for exactly what they are,” Bobby Seale (1991: 260) explained. This was done most pronouncedly by John Huggins, coleader of the Los Angeles Panthers at the time, who wrote an Open Letter to L.A. Pig Chief – the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, William Parker, – in November 1968 (original emphasis): “You would like to have the people forget that you and your Racist Pig Force are the outside agitator, the aggressor, and the oppressor who subjects Black Americans to acts of brutality, torture, and murder. You ask how long can your Gestapo take name calling and rock throwing before they blow their taps and kill all the Niggers; but we ask how long do you think the Black Community can take the insults, abuses, and blatant murders before we retaliate in kind? You see, the common denominator of dissident organizations is that we recognize you for the Fascist Pig Occupation Army that you are. […] We say pig! Cease your wanton murder, brutality and torture of Black People or face the wrath of the armed people raising voices and guns saying up against the wall motherfucker!”24

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“O ff the pigs!” John Huggins’ letter reveals the third and ultimate strategy in the Black Panthers’ struggle for structural Black Visibility: provocation. Newton confirmed: “So we were trying to increase the conflict that was already happening and that was between the white racism, the police forces in the various communities, and the black communities in the country. And we felt that we would take the conflict to so high a level that some change had to come.” (Hampton / Fayer 1990: 355) Through their labeling, their actions and particularly through their rhetoric, the Panthers deliberately sought to provoke the government to escalate the situation with their responses to the BPP’s provocations, as a result of which it would publicly delegitimize itself. At the heart of the matter was the question of legitimacy of violence. The Panthers’ key argument was that the routine functioning of the US judicial, legislative, and executive institutions was not only racist, but that this institutional racism was violence – a violence thus inherently unjustifiable, questioning the legitimacy of the government as such. They theoretically founded this claim with the colonial analogy based on Fanon, arguing that this institutionalized racist violence amounted to an existential threat for blacks which could only be met by “the revolutionary violence of the people”. But whereas Fanon (1966: 18, 73) conceived violence directed against the white colonial oppressor as a “cleansing force”, as “man recreating himself”, the Panthers’ understanding of revolutionary violence was more ambivalent and complex. Most importantly, they conceptualized violence not as an act of aggression, but as an act of self-defense.25 Newton’s Executive Mandate No. 1, read by Seale on the steps of the Sacramento Capitol in 1967 and addressed to blacks nationwide, was the BPP’s initial call to arms under the banner of self-defense. A self-defense clearly aimed at the main perpetrators of violence against black people: the police. A self-defense that spelled provocation, especially when practiced in the manner of the Party’s early police patrols. In staged armed confrontations, Newton at once flamboyantly displayed his own lawfulness, while at the same time daring the police in a Western style showdown to draw their guns. Much more than what the historian Nikhil Pal Singh (1998: 81) terms “carefully posed challenges to the so-called legitimate forms of state violence,” these open reenactments of frontier-time scenes deliberately provoked an escalation of violence on the part of the police in order to have them publicly expose themselves as violent aggressors without plausible cause. The limits and dangers of this strategy must have dawned on the Panthers when Newton was heavily injured and a policemen dead as a result of a nightly encounter, which Newton seemed to have no control over, nor were there witnesses. As the Party grew, the Panthers became extremely careful in seeking to control the time and particularly the location of potentially violent encounters with the

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police, so as to ensure that public attention was on police conduct. Many Party chapters and branches turned their local headquarters into small fortresses in order to visibly display their principle of self-defense in case the police would try to seek entry.26 However, violent clashes between Panthers and the police occurred with mounting frequency towards the close of the decade, urging the Chicago Panthers to proclaim in The Black Panther (October 18, 1969: 3): “It is no longer a question of non-violence or violence; it is a question of resistance or nonexistence.” Obviously, the state of conflict between the BPP and the police was on the verge of escalating. And it was much more a result of the Panthers’ rhetoric than of concrete physical aggressions on their part, as the overwhelming majority of these violent clashes was not initiated by the Panthers. But they were deliberately ‘crying wolf’: when the Party office of the San Francisco Panthers was about to be raided by a large police contingent ordering them to step out with their arms raised, the Panthers inside calculatedly provoked a violent police entry in broad daylight, shouting “We don’t take orders from pigs” while a large and angry black crowd was standing outside (TBP, May 4, 1969: 5). The headlines in the following issue of The Black Panther (May 11, 1969: 6) covering the incident struck the same chord: 160 Pigs Provoke Riot – Panthers Keep Cool.27 “We welcome the attacks on the Black Panther Party,” the Indiana Panthers consequently proclaimed, “for it shows the people that we are uncovering the oppressor’s game.” (TBP, July 12, 1969: 17) Their strategy of creating structural Black Visibility seemed to be working: “The more they try to come down on us, the more we’ll expose them for what they are […] Pigs,” as the Los Angeles Panthers commented in their article Concerning the Recent Raids on the Community Information Centers (TBP, August 8, 1970: 10). What the Panthers thus routinely practiced in such instances was to declare in public that their having been targeted by the police was a result of their strategy of provoking such an escalation through their concrete daily activities, which were geared towards exposing the system as inherently racist. “The pig power structure does not want the Free Breakfast Program to go on because this program exposes the system for what it really is,” the Des Moines Panthers maintained (TBP, April 27, 1969: 4). Eldridge Cleaver, with reference to two recent police assaults on breakfast programs, reasoned identically that “the pigs […], with their hostile response to both of these programs, clearly expose themselves as enemies of the people.” (TBP, August 16, 1969: 4) Although not directly provoked, these police attacks against inherently non-aggressive Party activities were argumentatively instrumentalized by the Panthers: the attacks illustrated the Panthers’ claim that the system was inextricably tied to violence. Yet, by themselves, the Party’s daily activities cannot possibly account for the increasing frequency with which they were targeted by the police. Much rather, it was the ways in which the Panthers ‘cried wolf’ – the ways they rhetorically

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dared the government and its executive and judicial powers to negatively expose themselves over and over again. The most evident example of provoking an escalation by rhetorical means is the courtroom-picture of Bobby Seale that went around the world – gagged and chained to a chair before the judge, as a result of his insistence to defend himself. When turning to look at the Panthers’ rhetoric of violence proper, then, it is under the basic contention that their rhetoric was consciously and purposely constructed towards creating a maximum of provocation, with the ultimate goal of showing how the US system with its racist functioning was inextricably tied to violence. Bobby Seale devoted an entire chapter of his biographical account of the BPP to Panther rhetoric and its roots in the historically grown black vernacular, which reflected precisely the experience of violence blacks had always been suffering through whites and white institutions. (Seale 1991: 404411) And David Hilliard defended himself in a radio interview in December 1969 with the words: “I’m saying that it was political rhetoric. We can call it metaphor. It is the language of the ghetto. This is the way we relate. Even the profanity, the profanity is within the idiom of the oppressed people.” (Gallaher 1971: 4748) In his analysis of black rhetoric, Molefi Asante (1987: 117) paraphrased the standard Panther defense concerning Party rhetoric in very similar terms: “In reply to the charge that the Black Panther used too much profanity, the votarists would argue that the society was profane, the government was profane, and the American system was the biggest profanity.” In important respects thus, the Panthers presented a rhetorical mirror to whites. A local San Francisco reverend of the First Unitarian Church, Harry B. Scholefield (1969: 2), confirmed this conception behind the Panthers’ rhetoric in a sermon he held on the Party on October 5, 1969: “It comes from home-grown sources, from American models. The American models are ‘the only good injun is a dead injun’, ‘the only good nigger is a dead nigger’. […] It is not our chickens but our rhetoric that has come home to roost in the language of Malcolm [X] and Eldridge [Cleaver].” Cleaver was particularly skillful at using the BPP’s rhetoric of violence as a weapon to create structural Black Visibility. He consciously and purposely maximized its provocative power. “There’s something more dangerous about attacking the pigs of the power structure verbally than there is in walking into the Bank of America with a gun and attacking it forthrightly,” he argued in one of his speeches, “someone who stands up and directly challenges their racist system, that drives them crazy.” (Cleaver 1969: 150) In other words: The Panthers’ rhetoric of violence was at once a rhetoric about violence and a violent rhetoric, a rhetoric in itself both ambivalent and excessive. Excessive particularly in its labeling. Besides calling the US system fascist, the utmost provocation leveled against the system was the charge of genocide repeated with mounting urgency towards the turn of the decade.

To E xpose, Subver t, and Provoke

That this label was a purposeful exaggeration to dramatize the issue of violence inherent in the racist structure and functioning of the United States is evident from its earliest use in late summer 1968. The typical formulation and argumentation went as follows: “Today we are not merely resisting racism and exploitation. We are not merely resisting brutality and murder, but we are resisting genocide. A systematic killing of our people. It is genocide when pig police go unpunished when they murder Black people in the streets, it is genocide when Black youth are systematically sent off to Vietnam and are dying in such an inordinate proportion. It is genocide when Congress appropriates birth control legislation aimed at eliminating Black mothers from giving birth to children. It is genocide when a Black child’s body is wrecked with the pain of hunger and starvation.” (TBP, September 7, 1968: 6; TBP, January 15, 1969: 10)

Conjuring up the imminent doom of all nonwhite peoples worldwide, the Panthers’ spectacular public launch of the genocidal charge was made in the form of an appeal to the United Nations in September 1968.28 The genocidal charge was more than a deliberately exaggerated catchphrase: the Party continued to insist upon official recognition of this charge in order to ultimately delegitimize the US system. In mid-1970, Newton and Seale codrafted and first signed a Petition to the United Nations formulated by a coalition of blacks and Native Americans. Among them were such well-established figures as the black politician Shirley Chisholm and the black scholar Nathan Wright – a clear indication of the mounting acceptance of the charge among progressive nonwhites. In the petition’s text, the term genocide was once again clearly linked to the racist functioning of the US government – as an extreme form of official violence – and, in addition, contextualized in US history as officially sanctioned by the United Nations. Ultimately, the petition called upon the Human Rights Commission of the UN to institute political and economic sanctions against the United States.29 Clearly, this lent additional credibility and respectability to the use of the term genocide by the BPP. What elevated the certainly provocative charge of genocide to a clear-cut sharp provocation – a calculated daring the US government to react with escalatory violence – was the Panthers’ stated readiness for violent resistance that always accompanied the charge. Their first appeal to the United Nations ended with the warning that black people “are determined to resist this aggression by any means necessary, including revolutionary armed struggle. The hour of showdown for racist-imperialist America has dawned. The case of Huey P. Newton will be the spark that will set this showdown in motion.” (TBP, September 7, 1968: 3) This conjuring up of the hour of revolution was, in fact, a central aspect of the Panthers’ rhetoric of violence. The famed example, which the Party

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soon came to be identified with, was the “war chant” first established at the daily demonstrations in front of the Alameda County courthouse in Oakland during Newton’s first trial in the summer of 1968. While one group of Panthers would sing “Revolution has co-ome, Time to pick up the gu-un!”, another would respond with rhythmic calls of “Off the pigs!” after each line, throwing a clenched fist up into the air. (Off the Pig 1968) With their “war chant”, the Panthers subversively drew from a protest form established by the civil rights movement – the evocation of a sense of community and peace through singing – and filled it with extremely violent content. They practiced psychological warfare with a sophistication that spelled provocation. While “off the pig!” certainly was most likely to be interpreted as a concrete invitation to kill a policeman, the Panthers consciously played with the ambivalence evoked by the term, as Seale (1991: 404, original emphasis) maintained: “Off the pig means to kill the slave master. It doesn’t mean commit murder.” Similar Party slogans functioned mainly in the same way: their character was purposely ambivalent and excessive, sometimes also ridiculing, such as “today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon” (TBP, January 25, 1969: 3). Always, they insinuated the imminence of violence – of black revolutionary violence – toward the government’s key representatives. Another typical formulation was the threat that, “if the piggish landlords won’t provide decent housing for the people … there’s gonna have to be some Bar-B-Que!” (TBP, April 25, 1970: 14) Further representative and widely used examples of Panther slogans include the ominous warning “the sky’s the limit”. Created during the Free Huey campaign, the slogan expressed the Panthers’ determination to exhaust all legal means to free Newton. At the same time, it meant to vividly convey the threat of violent struggle, as Seale (1991: 242) made clear: “We were going to go down with brother Huey.” Ultimately, calls for “two, three, many Vietnams” or “blood to the horses’ brow, and woe to those who cannot shoot!” most directly mirrored the Panthers’ strategy to provoke an escalation of violence on the government’s side. (TBP, December 20, 1969: 2; Singh 1998: 83) Concerning the ultimate goal of this strategy, the creation of structural Black Visibility – establishing the US government as inherently tied to violence in its racist functioning – the Party’s highly symbolical rhetoric around the gun takes center stage. As a matter of fact, “picking up the gun” was probably the single most important slogan by which the Party became identified until 1968. For the Panthers, the gun represented the symbolical link – in fact, a visual link – between violence and institutional racism. With the countlessly reiterated early Party slogans “in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to pick up the gun” or “power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, the gun came to epitomize all aspects of power with respect to white supremacy. And, in turn, it was symbolically heightened into the key liberation tool, as Newton routinely pointed out in the first year of the Party’s existence: “When the people move for

To E xpose, Subver t, and Provoke

their liberation they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun. Only with the power of the gun can the Black masses halt the terror and brutality directed against them by the armed racist power structure.” (Newton 1995b: 85-86) The gun was the BPP’s most valuable symbolic instrument in its struggle for Black Visibility on all levels. It was the initiation ritual tool for black selfrecreation in the Fanonian sense, for the creation of physical and psychological Black Visibility – epitomized in the image of the captive black warrior in Babylon. And it was a tool of reference to the system’s ‘rule of violence’, a tool for creating structural Black Visibility. What Fanon (1966: 61) had contemplated in Wretched of the Earth in this context seems to have been directly instituted by the Panthers: “Castro sitting in military uniform in the United Nations Organization […] demonstrates […] the consciousness he has of the continuing existence of the rule of violence. The astonishing thing is that he did not come into U.N.O. with a machine-gun.” The Panthers’ rhetoric of violence had a strong visual component, as is evident in their body rhetoric – in the ways in which they reconstructed the black body as weapon. This was conveyed also in the Party’s artwork as created mainly by Emory Douglas and its illustration of the black liberation struggle through symbolical or factual depictions of violence. Douglas, in fact, employed the paint brush instead of the gun to break down the abstract complexity of institutional racism into concrete visual terms in order to expose that violence: he simplified and personified institutional racism to a point where highly symbolized representatives and representations resulted. Businessmen, slumlords, teachers, policemen, judges, prison guards, army officers and other officials were portrayed as pigs. Most prominent among them featured the “avaricious businessman” as symbolic representative of all forms of economic exploitation of the black community; the “demagogic politician” as oppressive government agent upholding white privileges and black exploitation both within the black urban colonies of the United States and abroad; the “racist pig cop” as representative of the violence and racism immanent in the US system as a whole, operating to guarantee and maintain the exploitative and oppressive structures and to protect white property and white privileges. To bring their various functions across, Douglas put these figures in contexts that visualized a typical situation representing one specific aspect of institutional racism. Most frequent depictions include policemen brutalizing or murdering black people – usually by attacking them from behind –, and expensively dressed landlords knocking on shabby apartment doors with a greedy grin and an open purse, ready to collect the rent. Inside the apartment – to take another set of drawings centered around this topic –, a woman would be shown fiercely fighting off herds of rats in a heroic attempt to protect her children. Sometimes, Douglas captioned his drawings and collages, as in this latter instance: “When I spend more time fightin the rats, than taking care of

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my children you know, it makes me realize that I have a right to kill the greedy slumlords who forces me to live in these inhuman conditions.” (Durant 2007: 81) Guns were omnipresent in all these pictures, and when Douglas sometimes spelled the message out in writing, it served to maximize the provocative impetus, as in the collage of black men and women attacking representatives of such institutions as the police, the military, prisons or businesses, which carried the title Shoot to Kill (TBP, November 22, 1970: 15). Another typical example is the drawing titled The Avaricious Businessmen Must Return their Looted Profits to the People, Breakfast for Children Is One of the Means: It shows a trembling pig-faced and -tailed businessman who is confronted by a black man sticking a gun in his neck and a little black boy, empty plate in hand, asking him for food (TBP, March 16, 1969: 6). Eldridge Cleaver (1969: 106-107) evoked a very similar image in an open letter to the Californian governor Ronald Reagan – a rhetorical image that, in fact, amounted to an open declaration of war if the system did not recognize the BPP’s struggle for Black Visibility for what it was: “The bottom of the world is in motion, Governor, and Bobby Dylan’s ‘empty handed beggar’ is at the door except that his hand is not empty any more. He’s got a gun in his hand. And he’s stopped begging. In fact, he’s nearly stopped talking, because it’s becoming clear to him that hardly anybody is listening. When he finally stops talking altogether, he is going to start shooting. This brings to a conclusion what I wanted to talk to you about, and I have nothing else to say, except one question: Have you been listening to me, Governor?”

Fig. 4: Indictment (Emory Douglas, 1969, © 2017, Pro Litteris, Zurich/ Art Resource, NY)

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

No sooner had Bobby Seale and the other Panthers in Sacramento filed back into their cars and left the premises of the State Capitol on May 2, 1967 than they were all arrested. The reason given later was an implausible game and fishing law. Among all of them, it was Seale, the Party’s coleader, who eventually received a prison sentence. And as the Mulford bill was accepted that day and enacted swiftly, the Panthers were no longer able to publicly carry – let alone display – their arms. Hence, the California legislature had not only rendered the BPP police patrols entirely ineffective, it had also taken the edge off of the Panthers’ public performances and thus inhibited them from efficiently conquering new ground outside the Bay Area. In fact, the Panthers had already decided to discontinue their police patrols by May 1967. (TBP, January 4, 1969: 14) Not only because of the Mulford bill, but because heavy police interference had made the patrols excessively difficult. Huey Newton maintained that he had been stopped in his car over 100 times by the Oakland police during the first six months of the Party’s existence, with the policemen spending over 15 minutes searching the car each time. In most instances, he did not even receive a ticket. (Newton 1995a: 123) During the same time, however, he and Seale were arrested repeatedly for making speeches in public, although streetcorner speeches in black ghettos had a long tradition – also of being routinely ignored by the police. The police’s encroachment upon the Black Panthers and the passing of the Mulford Act reflect how sensitively the legislative and executive institutions reacted to the Panthers’ strategic efforts to create Black Visibility right from the outset of the Party. Obviously, the BPP’s attempts to expose, subvert, and provoke particularly the executive powers of the government had put California legal officials in a state of high alarm. Eldridge Cleaver quickly emerged as the Party’s key asset in creating Black Visibility once Newton and Seale were in prison, and he consequently became the main target of the authorities’ silencing efforts. In the aftermath of Sacramento, severe restrictions were imposed on his parole, which was a result of an earlier conviction. The restrictions targeted his public appearances and speeches on behalf of the Black Panther Party: he

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was to keep his name out of the news – specifically, he was forbidden to appear on TV –, and he was not allowed to publicly criticize the government and the legal system. (Cleaver 1969: 7; Holder 1990: 211-212) When Cleaver decided to ignore his political silencing and embarked upon the Free Huey campaign, local police forces intensified their persecution of the BPP. And they increasingly did so without any legal foundation. In an attempt to sabotage the Party’s mobilization efforts and dissolve public support for the large Free Huey Birthday rally in February 1968, the San Francisco police forcefully entered Cleaver’s home at three in the morning and proceeded to search it – all without a warrant. The day before the rally, the Oakland police arrested David Hilliard on a simple traffic violation just when he was in the midst of delivering flyers for distribution. After the rally, the Berkeley police entered Seale’s home, again in the middle of the night and without a search warrant, to ‘find’ an illegal weapon there and arrest both him and his wife for it. It was only later revealed that the weapon had previously been planted at Seale’s house. The very same day, 14 other BPP members were arrested on a series of charges – which subsequently were all dropped, as was the charge against Seale. Throughout the following months, the Oakland police continued their attempts to sabotage the BPP’s mobilization efforts and to suppress the Party’s overall public presence and visibility. On April 9, two BPP-affiliated women who were driving around Oakland putting up campaign posters for Newton and Seale were stopped by twelve policemen who subsequently searched their car. Policemen physically hindered Panthers from putting up such posters or, alternatively, tore them down again. On May 1, a 16-year-old girl was arrested on the charge of extortion, because she was selling Free Huey buttons. 1 Practically from the BPP’s inception, then, the official response to the Black Panther Party and its activities was guided by a clear imperative: Back to Black Invisibility. The Panthers’ efforts to expose and provoke major US and state institutions had hit home. As the Party grew all the same, official responses not only expanded from the local to the state and federal levels, but implicated ever larger circles and were increasingly coordinated – with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), President Richard M. Nixon and his Justice Department acting as principal architects of the repression. “From the first day of his presidency, Nixon took a personal interest in repressing the Black Panther Party,” the historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin (2013: 210) point out: he commissioned Attorney General John Mitchell and the Justice Department to set up a task force for extremism to squash the BPP. These endeavors involved all legal government branches on local, state, and federal levels. New laws were passed to annihilate the BPP’s key assets for pursuing Black Visibility, or at least to render them ineffective. The Mulford Act in California was only the beginning.

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

On the federal level, a classical example of the government’s Back-to-BlackInvisibility drive was, quite ironically, the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Originally designed to stop discrimination in the housing market, it was turned into what came to be called the Riot Act. Under this new act, the freedom of movement could – and would – be severely limited for Black Power advocates: they could be arrested and sentenced to jail for the crossing of state borders “with the intention to create unrest” – charges which were leveled against SNCC coleader H. Rap Brown and Bobby Seale in connection with the severe unrest that occurred outside the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago in 1968. Furthermore, the government purposely reactivated old laws instituted during World War II and never used again since. Among them was the McCarran Act, under which Japanese living in the US had been concentrated in detention camps along the West Coast during the Second World War. As The Black Panther (April 11, 1970: 8) reported, President Nixon was officially authorized under the McCarran Act to publicly proclaim an internal security emergency and decree emergency detention in the event of a guerilla type insurrection in black ghettos. Another act actually employed against the Panthers was the highly controversial Smith Act, which prohibited advocating the violent overthrow of the government, or calling for a revolution by way of promoting the assassination of public officials: the BPP’s Chief of Staff David Hilliard was charged with threatening the President’s life during a speech he gave before a large crowd towards the end of 1969 and subsequently imprisoned. The charge occurred in the context of a federal grand jury involved in a broad-scale investigation of the BPP on a nationwide level since May 1969. (The Washington Post, January 14, 1970: A1, A7) The federal grand jury operated through various local branches across the US and was aided by a team of lawyers from the Justice Department operating under sealed orders from Attorney General John N. Mitchell – the man who had publicly vowed to “wipe out the Black Panther Party by the end of 1969” (Newton 1996: 11). The Chicago branch of the grand jury, for instance, looked mainly into the circumstances leading to the deaths of Illinois BPP leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark during the early-morning police raid of a Panther apartment on December 4, 1969. In this course, it engaged in a very peculiar Back-to-Black-Invisibility mission: since the Chicago Panthers refused to cooperate with the grand jury on the grounds that not a single jury member was part of the Panthers’ peers, the grand jury simply moved to dismiss all charges against the involved police officers, despite abundant evidence to their having purposely falsified reports. Instead, it charged the Panthers with “political posturing” to gain publicity, contending: “The grand jury will not permit itself to be used as an instrument of publicity and recruiting by the Panthers.” It decried the “sad fact” that the Panthers were able to “transform such issues” – the killing of one of their key leaders by the police – “into donations, sympathy and membership”. (The New

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York Times, May 6, 1970: 14) As a final consequence, the grand jury issued an indictment charging Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and ten other BPP leaders with conspiring to injure and intimidate the Chicago Police Department by way of luring, tempting, and enticing members of the Chicago police into conducting an early morning raid on a Panther apartment. According to Attorney General Mitchell, the indictment became possible only as a result of the “tremendous cooperation among and between several law enforcement agencies – the FBI, the Secret Service, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Tax Division of the Treasury Department, the Chicago Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Detroit Police Department, the Cleveland Police Department, the New York City Police Department, and the San Francisco Police Department, to name just a few.” (The Washington Post, May 6, 1970: A24) How he could continue to stubbornly deny that any coordinated governmental attempts to curtail the BPP existed remains a mystery. Especially since the House Committee on Internal Security was also investigating various local BPP chapters around the country, as well as the Party newspaper. In its hearings, the committee relied primarily on police officers and disgruntled former BPP members who did not want to be identified in the final report because they feared “the criminal and psychopathic personalities comprising the leadership of the Panther Party” (US House Committee on Internal Security 1970/1971: 4998). Additional federal agencies involved in BPP investigations were: the Internal Revenue Service, which established a special Activist Organizations Committee in 1969 on Nixon’s order, and was researching possible income tax evasion charges (The New York Times, December 23, 1969: 16); its Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Tax Unit, which requested a joint raid on BPP headquarters in Seattle (The New York Times, February 9, 1970: 30); the Central Intelligence Agency (Alkebulan 2007: 86; Grady-Willis 1998: 369; O’Reilly 1991: 270-271); the US Army, whose Security Agency, for instance, monitored all domestic amateur radio communications for five days at the time of Newton’s first trial in the summer of 1968, in order “to determine if there were any groups around the country which might be planning demonstrations in support of Newton” (US Senate 1976: 812; O’Reilly 1991: 270-271); and, of course, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). These federally concerted Back-to-Black-Invisibility endeavors relied not only upon the active cooperation of local and state law enforcement but also on the support of a variety of other public and private institutions on local and state levels. Phone companies were drawn into surveillance – local police forces had bugged most of the BPP’s offices – and the deliberate communicative isolation of local BPP offices. The Seattle Panthers, for instance, complained that their phone lines had been capped as a result of excessively high – manipulated, as they charged – phone bills. (TBP, May 4, 1969: 7) Gas and electric companies were involved towards the same end. In Baltimore, the gas and electric company

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

had cut off power and heat at the 1225 Gay Street office of the BPP, prompting a local Panther to write in his diary: “Forces are gathering to intimidate our branch and attempt to silence the voices of Panthers in Baltimore.” (McCutchen 1998: 123) Other public and private institutions involved in the coordinated repressive measures included mail companies, airline, cargo and shipping companies, printing companies, public health departments, public housing authorities and private landlords, ghetto merchants, public school officials, mayors and other city administrators, and the mass media.

A gents for the P reservation of W hite S upremacy The overwhelming majority of these official actions was orchestrated – and to a large part also initiated – by the FBI, the national bulwark of institutional racism and white supremacy. Founded in the 1920s, at a time when racism was most pronounced in US government and society, the FBI’s most essential duty was to enforce and guarantee the socio-political status quo – a duty that always took precedence over the fight against organized crime, as critical historians Kenneth O’Reilly, Ward Churchill, and Jim Vander Wall argue. Among other things, this meant that the FBI was to safeguard white supremacy, a fact reflected in the history of the institution. Its first major – and successful – venture was the full-blown repression of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association, the first black mass movement of the twentieth century. (O’Reilly 1991: 13-14; Churchill 2001: 79-80) Among the many black political advocates who were targeted by the FBI for their potential of rupturing the surface of Black Invisibility were the singer and political activist Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Invariably, the FBI tried to systematically discredit them in public – by labeling them as communists (Robeson and Du Bois actually were members of the Communist Party of the USA), and through the subtle employment of racial stereotypes: they were painted as morally inferior, sexually aberrant or promiscuous and – if possible – criminal, or at least inherently disrespectful of the law. Behind all this stood J. Edgar Hoover, the man who founded and led the FBI for close to 50 years. Hoover was obsessed with the supposed threat of Communist infiltration and subversion. And he was a man of pronounced and intense racist perceptions and convictions, which he had firmly built into ‘his’ institution’s functioning. According to historian Kenneth O’Reilly (1991: 260), “Hoover worked every day to build up a surveillance system that reflected his belief that all of Black America, not just [H. Rap] Brown and [Stokely] Carmichael and the troublesome [Martin Luther] King posed a subversive threat to the real America – the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding white people of this country.”

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Hoover and the FBI were consequently in distress because of the waves of ghetto revolts and the rise of Black Power. The color of a person’s skin increasingly became the initial, often the only reason for becoming an FBI target in the second half of the 1960s, as a former FBI agent recalled. (Davis 1992: 106) Therefore, while the army began to train urban police forces and equip them with tanks, jeeps, helicopters, and electronic surveillance apparatus as part of their coordinated so-called antiriot planning; while the National Guard was increased by 12.000 men specifically dispatched for revolt-control duty; while the Pentagon developed computerized databases on US cities with possibilities of future black uprisings, and two computers – the so-called “nerve centers of federal riot watching activities” – were installed in the Justice Department and continuously fed with data; (TBP, May 18, 1968: 3; Tergeist 1982: 234) the actual nerve center of federal riot watching activities – unbeknownst to the American public – was the FBI’s so-called Ghetto Informant Program, a black community surveillance program launched in October 1967. The basic belief which prompted this program, according to a memo from then Attorney General Ramsey Clark to Hoover, dated September 14, 1967, was that “there is more organized activity in the riots than we presently know about” (US Senate 1976: 253). The typical ghetto informant was an individual who worked or lived in the ghetto area and had access to information concerning “racial activities” and the general “racial situation” in that area. As so-called “listening posts”, ghetto informants furnished the FBI with information on a confidential basis. Specifically, they were to supply data concerning the planning and organizing of revolts or other public disturbances. (US Senate 1976: 228, 253) From a historical perspective, the whole Ghetto Informant Program essentially documents how ignorant the Justice Department and the FBI were – and purposely chose to continue to be – toward the totally spontaneous outbreak and development of the ghetto revolts and, above all, toward the impetus lying behind these revolts. As a result, increasingly absurd developments ensued: for one thing, the number of ghetto informants kept rising, from 4067 in 1969 to 7402 in 1972. In addition, the “duties” of these informants expanded further and further as they were given specific assignments, such as attending public meetings of “extremist groups”. Thus they gradually mutated into active spies. (US Senate 1976: 252-254) Most likely, they were sent to BPP rallies and public speeches, possibly even to the political education classes various Party branches conducted regularly for the black community. Almost parallel to the Ghetto Informant Program, in the late summer of 1967, Hoover launched another program specifically directed against blacks: COINTELPRO.2 COINTELPRO was remarkable in several ways. There was, for instance, its excessive secrecy. The initial three-page letter from August 25, 1967, advising FBI field offices to establish the program, was written by Hoover himself and specifically addressed to 23 selected field offices around the

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

country – to be expanded half a year later to include 41 field offices. (Smith 1974: 14-20) The tone of the initial letter suggests a conspiratorial alliance between the FBI director and the addressed, obviously highly trusted field agents. Hoover cautioned his men “that the nature of this new endeavor is such that under no circumstances should the existence of the program be made known outside the Bureau and appropriate within-office security should be afforded to sensitive operations and techniques considered under the program.” And he closed his letter with the following words: “You are urged to take an enthusiastic and imaginative approach to this new counterintelligence endeavor and the Bureau will be pleased to entertain any suggestions or techniques you may recommend.”3 Among the reasons for the excessive secrecy of this COINTELPRO, the sweeping scope of the program and the purposeful engagement in clearly illegal activities stand out. COINTELPRO targeted practically all politically active black groups, organizations, and individuals of the 1960s. Not because they engaged in any kind of criminal activity, but simply because of their “radical or revolutionary rhetoric actions” (US Senate 1976: 20) – a label attached not only to Black Power groups but to virtually every black person uttering a political statement in public, as historian O’Reilly (1991: 261) argues. The official aim was thus clearly to silence any form of black protest: reverting to Black Invisibility. As Hoover stated in his initial letter, the purpose of the program was to “neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters” (Smith 1974: 14) His second letter of April 3, 1968 – one day before Martin Luther King was assassinated – was even more specific as to the nature and purpose of this Back-to-Black-Invisibility venture: “Prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist groups,” Hoover wrote. He ordered his men to completely isolate black protest groups from one another, from their youthful adherents, and from both “the responsible Negro community” and potential white supporters – “the ‘liberals’ who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalists simply because they are Negroes.” Last but not least, blacks were to be isolated from all possible means for creating Black Visibility: “Consideration should be given to techniques to preclude violence-prone or rabble-rouser leaders of hate groups from spreading their philosophy publicly or through various mass communication media.” (Smith 1974: 15-18, original emphasis) Again, the wording depicts how Hoover systematically and deliberately invigorated specific racial stereotypes as a means to uphold white supremacy. The FBI chief also sought to instrumentalize previously “established local news media contacts or such contact with sources available to the Seat of Government” for the purpose of spreading negative, false visibility – fabricated by the FBI. While Hoover thus hailed the mass media for its power to shape

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public opinion, he at the same time also feared this very power – possibly as a consequence of his deliberate attempts to manipulate the mass media. His ambivalent attitude to the media may also reflect the fact that COINTELPRO agents – sometimes at his specific request – pursued clearly illegal activities, with operations spanning from wiretapping and surveillance, the production and distribution of false information, particularly on the personal level, the fabrication, destruction or withholding of evidence, the intimidation of witnesses, the coercion of individuals in order to obtain false testimony, to, ultimately, the incitement to commit a crime – including murder –, and the direct order to kill. 4 The FBI’s conscious engagement in such blatantly illegal activities essentially reflects the racist convictions of its administrators who regarded themselves as “agents for the preservation of white supremacy” (Abu-Jamal 2004: 122). Hoover habitually denigrated black protesters as individuals having “backgrounds of immorality, subversive activity, and criminal records” and reminded his field agents that “the two things foremost in the militant Negro’s mind are sex and money”.5 Internal memos and reports about targeted blacks were routinely written in an extremely stereotyped and racist language, describing blacks as “conniving”, “criminal-minded”, “monkey-like”, “sullen”, “loud-mouth[s]”, “dope-head[s]”, “movement pimps”, “Beale Street bums”, etc. (O’Reilly 1991: 272). Agents had no problems airing such perceptions in public, either. A San Francisco field agent, for instance, told a reporter from The New York Times how many of the conversations he overheard on the wiretaps installed in the San Francisco BPP headquarters reminded him of Amos ’n’ Andy, a popular comedy show in which two white men impersonated blacks by overexpressing and overaccentuating black stereotypes for laughs, concluding: “Fundamentally, I think, black people are jovial, happy, and fun loving.” (O’Reilly 1991: 341) As a logical consequence, then, the FBI did not consider itself to be engaged in illegal activities – quite simply because in its racist perception and administration of right and justice, those targeted by COINTELPRO did not possess any legal rights the law enforcement agency felt bound to respect. Kenneth O’Reilly speaks of a “total disregard for human rights and life itself” in the case of the FBI’s pursuit of the Black Panther Party. Hoover had labeled the Panthers the greatest threat to internal security in the fall of 1968 and consequently turned them into the prime COINTELPRO target. Four out of five COINTELPRO actions were directed against the BPP between 1967 and 1971 – and this although the Panthers did not become the focal point of COINTELPRO activity until July 1969, as the United States Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities argued after its intense inquiry into illegal activities by the FBI against the Black Panther Party, published in a voluminous report usually named after

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

the Committee’s chairman Frank Church (US Senate 1976: 187). But from a historical perspective, it was the Panthers’ appearance in the State Capitol in Sacramento in May 1967 that had triggered the federal response. O’Reilly (1991: 294) couldn’t have phrased it more laconically: “The Black Panthers attracted the nation’s attention, so J. Edgar Hoover decided that they had to be destroyed.” The BPP had been targeted by the FBI practically from the Party’s first attempts to expand its influence and visibility beyond the local confines of the Bay Area.6 The concerted police activities against the Panthers before and after the Free Huey Birthday Rally in February coincided with the FBI actively encouraging local police forces to arrest black radicals and raid their homes. (US Senate 1976: 220-222) In view of COINTELPRO’s stated aim of preventing alliances between radical black organizations, it is equally remarkable that Bobby Seale was arrested and charged with conspiring to murder SNCC coleader H. Rap Brown only hours after the BPP and SNCC had publicly announced their merger, and that Brown was also arrested shortly after his speech at the Free Huey Birthday Rally.7 Eldridge Cleaver (1969: 82) also observed very specific police tactics in the context of the BPP’s campaign to free Huey Newton in the first months of 1968: “Whenever we staged a large fund raising event, the Oakland police would move, first, to try to prevent it from happening; then, failing that, they would arrest a lot of Party members and drain off whatever money was raised because we would then have to bail these Party members out of jail and there were legal fees.” In fact, the FBI had been successful in employing exactly this tactic against a radical black organization in Philadelphia in April 1968. As Hoover proudly related to his 41 field offices involved in COINTELPRO, the leadership of the organization had been effectively neutralized because “they were arrested on every possible charge until they could no longer make bail.” (Smith 1974: 17; Grady-Willis 1998: 367) In cities where preestablished COINTELPRO ties between FBI field offices and local police departments existed, legal repression of the BPP occurred practically from the founding of the local Party branch and was particularly harsh. In San Diego, for instance, the FBI conducted so-called “racial briefing sessions” for the police department. “Through these briefings”, as one field agent reported, “the command levels of virtually all of these police departments […] are being apprised of the identities of the leaders of the various militant groups. It is felt that […] police officers are much more alert for these black militant individuals and as such are contributing to the overall Counterintelligence Program, directed against these groups.” In Chicago, the Gang Intelligence Unit of the Chicago Police Department and the local FBI field office shared not only information but also informants and their pay from 1967 on. From there, it was only a small step to the installation of the so-called ‘Panther Squad’ in the Gang Intelligence Unit. Cooperation between the Los Angeles Police

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Department (LAPD) and the FBI seems to have been an especially close one, too: the FBI, who had an informant planted within the local BPP branch from its inception, supplied the LAPD with informant reports and details on Party activities on a daily basis. 8 Local field offices were thus well prepared when J. Edgar Hoover com­ manded the nationwide coordination of all FBI activities against the BPP under COINTELPRO on September 27, 1968. (Churchill / Vander Wall 1990b: 124) Only two months later, Hoover ordered them to submit “imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP” (US Senate 1976: 22). The immediate response was a series of nationwide concerted police raids on local BPP headquarters and apartments. The first one took place in Denver in September 1968. (Churchill 2001: 100) Then, around Christmas 1968, a sweep of attacks occurred: Indianapolis, Des Moines, the headquarters of the New Jersey BPP, Los Angeles and New York City – both raided twice –, and Seattle – raided three times. (TBP, January 15, 1969: 8-11; Churchill 2001: 100-101) In 1969, these assaults continued: between April and July, BPP offices and apartments were raided in San Francisco, Washington, Denver, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, Des Moines, Detroit, Sacramento, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Chicago.9 Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, and New Haven offices were also attacked during 1969. (Seale 1991: 371; Churchill 2001: 99) Particularly BPP headquarters and offices in cities where FBI and police worked closely together experienced multiple raids: Chicago was raided at least five times between June and December 1969, Los Angeles on three different occasions – with three coordinated attacks occurring on December 8 –, and San Diego twice. 10 In Philadelphia, where a special anti-Panther police squad existed, BPP offices were attacked three times, with the last of these raids occurring simultaneously at three different locations. (Churchill 2001: 99) In Philadelphia and elsewhere, raids continued into 1970: Birmingham, New Bedford, and Detroit were attacked at least once, Toledo twice on the same day, and New Orleans three times between September and November. (Smith 1974: 9; Churchill 2001: 100) In sum, Party offices nationwide were raided on almost a monthly basis – at least in 1969. And the LAPD continued to threaten the Los Angeles BPP headquarters with raids, sometimes as often as once a week. (Forbes 2000: 225-239) What is particularly noteworthy about all these attacks is how the police often proceeded with excessive violence: Party offices were shot at, bombed, maced, and set afire. 11 At the same time, the majority of all these nationwide police raids was based on pretexts or purposely fabricated charges – such as the often-used claim that the Panthers were stacking illegal weapons at their office. In Detroit, the police forcefully entered the Party headquarters on the pretext of searching for a missing walkie-talkie, but eventually spent over an hour taking pictures of files and confiscating office equipment (TBP, June 21, 169: 17) –

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

another routine procedure accompanying the police raids. In Philadelphia, the police seized the Party’s daily activities logbook, personnel files, photographs, and signed petitions for community control of the police, before they moved on to destroy the entire office. (Churchill 2001: 99) The standard police procedure is caught in an exemplary report by the Chicago Panthers, who bore the brunt of police violence over the course of 1969: “On June 4 at 5.00 in the morning, 500 fascist pigs cornered off a 5 block area surrounding the office. Federal marshals, FBI agents, and local pigs armed with machine guns, heavy weapons, bullet-proof vests, and a helicopter raided the office. Eight members of the Black Panther Party were arrested and charged with ‘harboring a fugitive’ that the pigs never found. Following the arrests, fascist wrecking crews armed with hatchets went to work to destroy the office. All equipment and fixtures were either stolen or destroyed beyond repair.” (TBP, June 21, 1969: 9)

The police also confiscated posters, literature, money, financial records, and lists of members and contributors, as well as all legal weapons. (Churchill 2001: 98) Parallel to these headquarter raids, the FBI encouraged local police forces to arrest Panthers and raid their homes – “often with little or no apparent evidence of violations of State or Federal law”, the Church Report concluded in its investigation of COINTELPRO, a finding suggested earlier already by two investigators of the Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panther and Law Enforcement who had compiled data on Panther arrests in the Bay Area and implied that “the police are giving the Black Panther Party an unusual amount of attention for relatively petty matters” (Jones / Hancock 1970: 8). Local police officers across the US heeded Hoover’s call and arrested Black Panthers with unprecedented frequency. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the charges were indeed trivial to insubstantial: Panthers were arrested for traffic violations, profane speech, disorderly conduct in public, illegal use of sound equipment, etc. Often the charges were fabricated only after the arrest. “We still had not been told what we were being kidnapped for. We were taken to 77th pig station, to the back and beaten,” a Panther described his experience in the Party newspaper. “After two hours of harassment I was told I was being arrested for driving with a revoked license even though I was not anywhere around a car or in a car.” (TBP, November 8, 1969: 6) In Los Angeles, where this type of police harassment was particularly intense, 42 Party members were arrested a total of 56 times within four weeks in the spring of 1969. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 20) During the same time span, Panther homes were raided, sometimes even set afire, as the Party claimed. In similar fashion, 95 BPP members were arrested within a four-week period in the first half of 1969 in Chicago, practically all of them on phony charges which subsequently had to be dropped. (Arlen 1973: 100)

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In a 26 pages special issue of The Black Panther (February 21, 1970), the BPP systematically listed all registered incidents between Panthers and the police nationwide from 1966 to 1970, including date, city, state, name of the arrested or killed Panther, what he or she was charged with, disposition status, and bail set. JoNina Abron (1993: 347), scholar, journalist, and former BPP member, listed 739 Panther arrests between January 1, 1968 and December 31, 1969 on a nationwide level, but the source of this exact figure remains unclear. Quite evident, on the other hand, is that the FBI pursued to deplete BPP funds with these arrests and the subsequent charges. And indeed: the bail and fine money the BPP had paid by the end of 1969 exceeded 5.000.000 $. 12 A special feature of the COINTELPRO-orchestrated tactic to deplete BPP funds was that bail was frequently set excessively high, particularly for Party leaders. In their case, charges also often involved serious offenses. When David Hilliard was charged with threatening the life of the President, he was released only after a non-refundable 30.000 $ premium had been paid as part of the bond to get him out of jail. Soon thereafter, all charges against him were dropped. Others were less ‘fortunate’, like the New York 21 or the 13 Panthers who defended themselves with guns as the LAPD attempted to raid their headquarters in the early morning hours of December 4, 1969: they were held at extremely high bail and it was not before December 1971 that all of them were exonerated. Other less publicized examples include the case of 20 New Bedford Panthers who were charged with conspiring to riot in the summer of 1970 and jailed against a 2.000.000 $ bond; again, the charges were later quietly dropped. COINTELPRO obviously reached far beyond local law enforcement: judicial powers on various levels worked hand in hand with the FBI. In repeated instances, evidence was fabricated or withheld, testimonies in court were false or forced, and jurors were influenced. All of this would not have been possible without the consent of judges and state and prosecution attorneys. A comparably harmless case was Bobby Seale’s Chicago trial, during which the FBI attempted to influence the jurors by sending them threatening letters signed with “The Black Panthers” and by calling bogus witnesses. (Churchill / Vander Wall 1990a: 51; The New York Times, October 1, 1969: 34; Churchill 2001: 102) Much more serious was the involvement of State Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan in the prosecution of the BPP in the aftermath of Fred Hampton’s and Mark Clark’s murder in Chicago and the attempted whitewash of the police respectively, as the following chapter of this book will detail. Highly disturbing were also the repeated instances in which extralegal FBI practices and maneuvers within the legal system resulted in the sentencing of Panthers for crimes of which they were innocent beyond any reasonable doubt. The most notorious of these cases include Los Angeles BPP leader Geronimo ‘Jijaga’ Pratt, imprisoned from 1971 to 1998 until all charges were finally dropped; the New York BPP leader Dhoruba Bin Wahad, imprisoned from 1971 to 1990; and the still pending case

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

of the Omaha BPP chapter leaders Ed Rice and David Poindexter, imprisoned since 1971. While Poindexter continues to be behind bars, Rice died inside prison in March 2016, maintaining to his last breath that he was innocent. As the then governor later admitted, Rice and Poindexter “were convicted for their rhetoric, not for any crime they committed.”13 The emerging pattern behind these FBI-concerted anti-Panther activities of the legal system points to two major, interlocking goals of COINTELPRO: to criminalize the Black Panthers, particularly in front of the public, and to instill fear within the Party. What the headquarter raids, frequent and arbitrary arrests, fabricated charges, excessively high bail, and the manipulation of the judicial process were meant to communicate to the Black Panthers again and again was that, indeed, they did not possess any rights which the legal system of the United States was bound to respect. As Hoover advised a San Francisco field agent who was ordered to publicly expose David Hilliard as diverting large funds from the Party, but failed to come up with any evidence corroborating this accusation: “Purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt BPP and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.” (Churchill / Vander Wall 1990b: 150) In fact, there is no question that the FBI was heavily involved in the Party split (US Senate 1976: 200-207): in mid-September 1969, Hoover had encouraged field offices on the West and East Coasts to develop programs aimed at splitting the BPP on a nationwide basis. In March 1970, he had initiated a concerted program to drive a wedge between Eldridge Cleaver, who was running the international section of the BPP in Algiers, and Huey Newton, who, although still in prison, was considered to be running the Party national headquarters. Two months later, Hoover instructed the San Francisco field office to launch “a disruptive – disinformation operation targeted against national office of the Black Panther Party” and its leadership (Smith 1974: 22-23). In the beginning of 1971, both the campaign to alienate Cleaver and Newton from each other and to cause dissension between local BPP branches and national headquarters in Oakland were intensified. (US Senate 1976: 204) Of central importance in the FBI’s endeavor to produce factionalism within the BPP was the deliberate creating and heightening of internal paranoia. Towards this end, the Bureau extensively used such COINTELPRO techniques as forged letters or snitch-jacketing, the false labeling of persons as informants. In fact, Hoover specifically advised various field offices on January 30, 1969 to concentrate their efforts on snitch-jacketing ranking BPP officials. (US Senate 1976: 22) To exacerbate Party-internal fears of informants, the FBI used various other techniques. The Los Angeles field office, for instance, had a stringent program of conducting harassing interviews with BPP members in order to sow distrust between Panthers and intimidate the interviewed enough to leave

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the Party. (US Senate 1976: 199) The Indianapolis field office successfully applied the technique of overtly interviewing Party members and thus isolating them to the point where they would fall under suspicion and be expelled from the Party. (US Senate 1976: 44) Frequently, the various field offices used faked letters, phone calls, and the spread of false rumors to directly label individual Panthers as informants. (US Senate 1976: 46-49, 198-200) Or, the FBI used its own informants and agents provocateurs, as they were COINTELPRO’s key asset when it came to creating internal paranoia and criminalizing the Party in public. In early 1969, the FBI was actively ‘investigating’ 42 local BPP chapters and branches (Davis 1992: 108) and it had close to 70 agents provocateurs planted within the Party – not counting the agents provocateurs and informants from local police departments already active within the BPP –, according to BPP lawyer Charles Garry (Churchill 2001: 95-96; Churchill / Vander Wall 1990a: 47-48). By the end of that year, as political activist and scholar Ward Churchill (2001: 263, fn. 216) estimates, about 10 percent of the Black Panther Party’s membership was comprised of informants and agents provocateurs. One of their key purposes was to exacerbate internal paranoia through putting the snitch-jacket on other Party members. A task which they could perform all the more efficiently from their supposed position of trust within the Party, as many of them had acquired positions in which they were responsible for security. William O’Neal, who rose to the position of security captain within the Chicago branch of the BPP and functioned as Fred Hampton’s personal bodyguard, is exemplary in many respects. He played the classic agent provocateur role, including the blaming of several Panthers for allegedly being informants or police agents. At one point, he even attempted to introduce torture devices for alleged informants. 14 The Baltimore branch of the BPP, which was heavily infiltrated with police informants and agents provocateurs, also had a particularly eager agent provocateur, Mahoney Kebe. Among other things, Kebe actively participated in the torture and murder of a police informant who had infiltrated the branch. 15 Similar things happened in New Haven: George Sams, pretending to act on orders of national headquarters while not even being a recognized Party member any longer, successfully lured other Panthers into participating in the torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a completely loyal Party member on whom Sams had put the snitch-jacket. (Churchill 2001: 96-97) In the case of the California-based agent provocateur Melvin ‘Cotton’ Smith, his snitching occurred in such a heated atmosphere of internal paranoia and distrust – just before the Party split –, that the falsely accused Panther was killed by fellow Party members – quite possibly also with Smith’s active involvement. (Holder 1990: 314) And the FBI-induced bad-jacketing continued, as rumors were spread that the BPP national headquarters had ordered the killing. As the historian Kit Kim Holder (1990: 314) argues, this was one of

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

the final blows dealt by the FBI that not only sealed the Party split but further escalated intra-Party violence. O’Neal, Smith, Kebe, and Sams illustrate one of the key tasks of agents provocateurs: to incite violence on the part of Panthers – usually for the purpose of criminalizing them. Following the murder of the police informant in Baltimore, Kebe and two other informants publicly charged several Party members with the murder. As a result, almost the entire leadership of the Baltimore branch was arrested, imprisoned, and brought to trial. 16 That this was not an isolated incident is evident in the contention of the Church Report that “the chief investigative branch of the Federal Government, which was charged by law with investigating crimes and preventing criminal conduct, itself engaged in lawless tactics and responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting violence and unrest.” (US Senate 1976: 189) It can indeed be substantiated that one of the central functions of agents provocateurs was to engage BPP members in illegal activities or to set them up by planting illegal devices at Party homes and offices in order to give the police a pretext for raids and arrests. Again, O’Neal in Chicago was at the forefront of activities in this area. As security chief, he prepared a weapons cache at a Panther apartment before telling the police that the Party was stacking illegal weapons there – an endeavor which resulted in the early morning raid which killed Hampton and Clark. Entrapping other Party members with illegal possession of weapons belonged to O’Neal’s major activities, as Holder (1990: 296) argued. Indeed, O’Neal seems to have been involved in a case where three Panthers were arrested by 79 police and FBI agents when they met with undercover agents who had offered two – obviously illegal – weapons for sale. (TBP, May 4, 1969: 6) Agents provocateurs also routinely provoked their own arrest by carrying illegal weapons in public or otherwise engaging in illegal activity in order to further the criminalization of the BPP as a whole – at least, this is suggested by O’Neal’s activities in Chicago and Kebe’s in Baltimore. 17 The agents provocateurs repeatedly went to extremes in their efforts to criminalize the Panthers as violence-prone outlaws. O’Neal, at one point, unsuccessfully tried to lure two Panthers into bombing city hall. (Churchill 2001: 101) Similarly, police agent Wilbert Thomas, who had infiltrated the Brooklyn branch of the BPP, sought to convince other Panthers to participate in ambushing the police. In this case, although the other Party members were obviously not willing to perform the act, they were arrested while driving together in a car, and had to stand trial. Eventually, the case collapsed, as it became obvious that only Thomas was in any way actively involved in the planned ambush. (Chevigny 1972) There is also the case of Alfred Burnett, agent provocateur within the BPP’s Seattle branch, who had constructed a bomb he wanted another Panther to use. When the Panther refused, Burnett simply paid another ghetto black with no relation to the BPP whatsoever to plant

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the bomb and proceeded to inform the police about a supposed BPP bombing attempt. (Churchill 2001: 101) Agents provocateurs were also intimately involved in the COINTELPRO scheme of fostering violence between the Black Panther Party and rivaling Black Power organizations and other black groups. O’Neal at one point successfully provoked a shootout between Panthers and a street gang Fred Hampton had worked hard to politicize and win as ally. (US Senate 1976: 198, fn. 54) The most notorious campaign in this context was conducted by the FBI offices in Los Angeles and San Diego: they sought to pitch the BPP against the wellestablished Black Power organization US, lead by Ron Karenga. To this end, FBI agents fabricated flyers, pamphlets, cartoons and the like supposedly coming from one of the two organizations, which either ridiculed the other group or contained only thinly veiled death threats. 18 And physical assaults did occur, from both sides – many of them provoked or personally inflicted by the various active agents provocateurs in both organizations. Darthard Perry, code-named Othello by the FBI and known as Ed Riggs to the Los Angeles Panthers whom he had infiltrated, physically assaulted a member of Karenga’s group at one point. In January 1969, George and Larry Stiner, agents provocateurs within Karenga’s group, killed the two key leaders of the Los Angeles BPP branch, John Huggins and Alprentice ‘Bunchy’ Carter. Ward Churchill (2001: 93-94) lists several more killings of Panthers in the context of FBI-fostered violence between the BPP and Karenga’s organization in which agents provocateurs were indirectly involved. The FBI itself at least implicitly confirmed that the overwhelming majority of violent acts and murders which resulted from the COINTELPRO scheme of pitting radical black groups against each other were actually committed by agents provocateurs: an internal memorandum dated January 13, 1969 complained that “the BPP at present is not believed as violence prone as” other black organizations (US Senate 1976: 189). Ultimately then, with the aid of agents provocateurs, law enforcement agents from the FBI and local police departments moved to kill key Party leaders, as in the case of Fred Hampton in Chicago. He was virtually executed by the police during the early-morning raid in December 1969 – thanks to detailed plans of the apartment which indicated where Hampton slept, and which O’Neal had provided to the police. The striking similarities in the early-morning raid four days later against BPP offices in Los Angeles suggest that the same fate was at hand for Los Angeles BPP leader Geronimo Pratt: two agents provocateurs, Louis Tackwood and Melvin ‘Cotton’ Smith, had provided the LAPD with plans of the local Party headquarters, including the indication of Pratt’s bed, which was riddled with bullets during the raid. Pratt, however, had been sleeping on the floor, due to back problems. (Churchill / Vander Wall 1990a: 84; Holder 1990: 306-307)

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

While these two cases remain exceptional in terms of the extremes to which the legal system was ready to go in its Back-to-Black-Invisibility drive, law enforcement officers across the country proved time and again that their inhibitions to pull the trigger increasingly vanished when dealing with members of the Black Panther Party. Ward Churchill (2001: 109) lists 29 dead Panthers as “police-induced fatalities”: eleven of them, or 38 percent, occurred in Los Angeles, ten between March 1968 and October 1969, thus accounting for two thirds of all police-related Panther deaths nationwide during that period. Another six, or 21 percent, of these police-induced BPP fatalities occurred in Chicago, all in the period between September 1969 and July 1970, thus accounting for two thirds of all police-related Panther deaths in that period. The lengths to which the government’s executive powers were willing to go in order to publicly criminalize the Black Panther Party mirrors one fact beyond all: as holders of the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, the authorities felt threatened at their very foundation by the BPP’s struggle for Black Visibility. For the FBI-orchestrated efforts to criminalize the Panthers revolved around two major aspects: on the one hand, they served to suppress the BPP’s physical and psychological presence and visibility – to deconstruct and destroy the captive black warrior by deliberately reinforcing racial stereotypes and painting the Panthers as morally inferior, violence-prone, and criminal-minded, and thus eliminate them from the streets. On the other hand, the government thus thought to thwart any efforts by the Black Panthers to create Black Visibility on the structural level. The FBI precisely targeted the key instruments the BPP used to expose the US state institutions as racist: the Party’s leadership, public speeches and speaking engagements, its erection of alternative, communitycontrolled institutions, and its weekly newspaper. All along, the FBI aimed at totally isolating the Black Panther Party from the local black community, from both actual and potential black and white supporters, and from the larger American public.

N o F reedom of S peech In the initial formulation of the BPP-specific COINTELPRO of September 1968, the neutralization of Party leadership was one of the key goals. Hoover ordered his men “to create factionalism between not only the national leaders but also local leaders”, and to “create suspicion amongst the leaders as to each others’ sources of finances, suspicion concerning their respective spouses and suspicion as to who may be cooperating with law enforcement.” (Churchill / Vander Wall 1990b: 125) Among other things, this lead to such seemingly peripheral endeavors as the attempt to break up Panther marriages through anonymous letters or the spreading of false rumors. (US Senate 1976: 200) In

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his later directive to specifically target national headquarters’ leadership, Hoover was much more detailed and precise, suggesting tactics carefully designed to instill paranoia and thus paralyze national headquarters’ functioning. With confidence in his superiority – his supremacy –, he concluded: “Effective implementation of this proposal logically could not help but disrupt and confuse Panther activities. Even if they were to suspect FBI or police involvement, they would be unable to ignore factual material brought to their attention through this channel [an allegedly disgruntled police employee]. The operation would afford us a continuing means to furnish the Panther leadership true information which is to our interest that they know and disinformation which, in their interest, they may not ignore.” (Smith 1974: 23)

The key reason for thus targeting BPP leadership, especially on the national level, was the enormous public presence of the national Party leaders. These men were the epitome of physical and psychological Black Visibility. And they were the Party’s most frequent public speakers on a nationwide basis and before large crowds – either in person or mediated through films, audio tapes or columns in the Party newspaper. Accordingly, the FBI was persistent in its various efforts to remove key national leaders from public visibility. As mentioned earlier, Eldridge Cleaver was pursued by California’s legal system to a point where the only choices left to him by the end of 1968 were imprisonment – notably on political rather than criminal charges –, or underground and exile: invisibility in either case. After that, the focus shifted to Bobby Seale, who was confronted with entirely fabricated charges in the Chicago and New Haven trials – charges which effectively kept him behind prison bars for almost two years, from August 1969 to May 1971. 19 No sooner was he removed from the public than the government’s attention moved to the next Panther leader in line, chief of staff David Hilliard. Huey Newton finally, who had remained in prison from October 1967 throughout August 1970, was heavily targeted by COINTELPRO as soon as he was released. The Party leader fell victim to false rumors and forged letters spread by the FBI. He was physically and electronically monitored around the clock in his apartment, with the adjacent apartment being rented by an FBI undercover agent, who at one point even seems to have staged a trap together with police and FBI which, if successful, would have killed Newton. (Grady-Willis 1998: 367; Newton 1996: 64) The other key leadership group targeted nationwide by the FBI and local law enforcement were the local coordinators of the BPP’s community service programs – those responsible for unmasking structural racism not only by word, but by deed. They were singled out for particularly intense police harassment, including frequent arrests on insubstantial charges; they were arrested and jailed for prior charges unrelated to their current activity, or

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

otherwise put behind prison bars in a thinly veiled attempt to sabotage the effectivity of the BPP’s community efforts.20 In the spring of 1969, the FBI initiated and coordinated a nationwide campaign to destroy all BPP leadership: in April and May alone, over 40 Party leaders throughout the country were arrested; especially in Oregon, Connecticut, Colorado, New Jersey, and California, key Party leaders were systematically jailed. (TBP, June 21, 1969: 5; The Washington Post, June 25, 1969: A9) It was around this time, too, that the entire New York leadership – the New York 21 – was arrested and imprisoned. It was no coincidence that practically all of New York’s BPP program coordinators were among the New York 21. (TBP, June 7, 1969: 20) The imprisonment of Rory Hithe and Landon Williams in Denver seems to have been similarly motivated. At least, the BPP regarded these two Party leaders as “instrumental in the instituting of the Party’s programs”, for they seemed to have travelled across the country to help get other chapters and branches started with their community service programs. (TBP, August 23, 1969: 11) In effect, by mid-1969, much of the original Party leadership across the country was either in jail or in exile. Excessively high bail, the upholding of fabricated charges, and the postponement of trial beginnings had effectively removed most of these BPP leaders permanently from the US public. With one notable exception: Fred Hampton. The regional Party leader from Chicago was among the most active and successful community organizers of the BPP. A talented and charismatic orator with great appeal to both blacks and whites, he publicly signaled the arrival of the captive black warrior. As Holder (1990: 305) contends, “Hampton was for all practical purposes a leading candidate for developing into the ‘black messiah’ that Hoover so alarmingly instructed his agents to guard against.” Indeed, within two years the FBI had gathered a 12-volume, 400-page surveillance file on him. (Churchill / Vander Wall 1990a: 64) In the course of its Back-to-Black-Invisibility campaign, the FBI’s BPP-specific COINTELPRO reached beyond the Party leadership, particularly when it came to suppressing public appearances by the BPP: speeches, rallies, campaigns, and conferences were sabotaged – less because of the Panthers’ physical public presence and visibility than because of their attempts to expose the racist functioning of the US government. “Numerous attempts were made to prevent Black Panthers from airing their views in public,” the Church Report (US Senate 1976: 217) concluded. One of the earlier examples once more concerns Eldridge Cleaver: he had been invited to hold ten lectures at an interdisciplinary course on racism at the University of California at Berkeley – yet, the regents of the university seem to have been pressured into withdrawing this invitation.21 In May 1969, the FBI successfully prevented Bobby Seale from embarking on a West Coast speaking tour by placing an anonymous phone call to his

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mother, implying that an attempt on her son’s life was planned. Earlier that year, Fred Hampton, scheduled to appear on a TV talk show, had been arrested on the ominous charge of “mob action” – a charge which predated his Panther days – while already on the premises of the TV studio just prior to the show. Presumably, this constituted an effective precedent, as such last-minute actions certainly made other TV or radio talk show masters think twice before inviting a Panther. Equally devious was also how the FBI got a Jewish organization to cancel its speaking invitation to David Hilliard: it had sent copies of fabricated newspaper articles denouncing Hilliard as anti-Semitic. (Churchill 2001: 8687) Still, Hoover explicitly urged field offices in a memo dated December 4, 1969 to become more active and imaginative in preventing the local BPP chapters and branches from setting up speaking engagements. He specifically suggested the field officers to contact “established sources” for the purpose of “preventing such speeches in colleges or other institutions”, as this tactic had already been successfully employed before. (US Senate 1976: 218) That spring in Chicago, for instance, the city’s School Superintendent had called on all high school principals citywide to deny the Panthers any platform to speak at their schools. (TBP, April 20, 1969: 18) In fact, the various nationwide attempts to suppress public speeches not only by Party leaders but also by BPP rank and file had been in the making since the fall of 1968. Panthers were arrested for spontaneously addressing the public in the streets, for instance. (Holder 1990: 308) “Every time we start a rap, the pigs seem to come down in full force. So we really have a fight on our hands anytime we get outside and start to use a bullhorn,” a New York Panther complained in The Black Panther (October 5, 1968: 3). Every time the BPP planned to stage a larger public speaking event, such as a rally or a conference, preparations were systematically sabotaged. Sponsoring institutions or individuals who originally had agreed to provide their facilities were ‘encouraged’ to withdraw their offer. It was not uncommon in this context that there was an anonymous threat to the sponsor’s physical safety – fabricated by the FBI. (Churchill 2001: 86) In Kansas City, where the Panthers were preparing for the local Free Huey Birthday Rally of February 1969, the president of the city’s black community council, who had agreed to let the Party use the community center for its rally, had received calls just prior to the event that he should not play host to the Panthers. (TBP, March 3, 1969: 3) In Philadelphia, the Temple University had initially agreed to accommodate the preliminary session of the BPP’s largest conference ever – the Revolutionary Peoples’ Constitutional Convention (RPCC) – in September 1970, but was pressured into withdrawing the agreement. (Abu-Jamal 2004: 73) This pattern repeated itself two months later, concerning the planned actual constitutional convention in Washington DC, scheduled to be held at the Howard University.

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

In a similar vein, the Party’s community mobilization efforts in the preparatory stages of such large public events were systematically sabotaged. Panthers were arrested on phony charges while distributing flyers or hanging up posters, just as they were arrested for selling campaign buttons.22 Sound trucks used to inform a wider public about the event ahead were confiscated. (TBP, May 4, 1969: 5) Repeatedly, the local BPP’s campaign and publicity material was either confiscated or destroyed, especially during headquarter raids just prior to larger rallies or conferences, as in the case of the RPCC in Philadelphia. Mass arrests of Party members around that time were also not uncommon: 14 Philadelphia Panthers were arrested during the coordinated raids of three BPP facilities. (TBP, September 5, 1970: 1; TBP, September 17, 1970: 3) And it was certainly no coincidence that a brand-new sign prohibiting “demonstrations, pickets, parades or the like” appeared in front of the New Haven courthouse just days before Bobby Seale’s trial was to begin (The New York Times, March 23, 1970: 57). Other BPP campaigns met with similar suppression efforts. The petition for community control of the police is an example: during the raids in Philadelphia in September 1970, the police confiscated and destroyed signed petitions, and in Baltimore, a court order barred the distribution of what was termed BPP anti-police literature. (The Washington Post, May 2, 1970: A6) Why this systematic violation of the BPP’s right to freedom of speech and use of other legal political tools? Arguably, the Panthers’ language of exposure, their provocative rhetoric of violence, and its subversive undercurrent played a key role in these mostly FBI-coordinated reactions. And they reflect the racist manner in which the FBI and other executive powers perceived this right. The Chicago’s city officials, for instance, who banned Panther speakers from public schools, seem to have had no problem with routinely granting these public platforms to white right-wing extremist groups such as the National States Rights Party, let alone criticize its members for the frequent use of the term “nigger” during their speeches (TBP, April 20, 1969: 18).

N o M ore F ree B re akfast When the Panthers began to establish community service programs in cities across the nation, Hoover’s response was swift: only a few months after Seale had called for the setting up of breakfast programs and health clinics, Hoover instructed his field offices in May 1969 to “eradicate ‘serve the people’ programs” (O’Reilly 1991: 302). Some field offices, as the one in Chicago, were repeatedly and specifically ordered in May and June 1969 to destroy the BPP’s breakfast programs, the liberation schools and also the community education classes. (Churchill / Vander Wall 1990a: 68) In general, field offices across the country seem to have heeded the Bureau’s instructions promptly. Almost

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immediately after Hoover’s order, numerous BPP chapters and branches started to complain about official interference and attempts to stop their community service programs – primarily the breakfast program.23 The FBI used a multitude of approaches to thwart the Panthers’ programs. During the increasingly frequent police raids of Party headquarters and offices, food supplies for the breakfast program were routinely destroyed, and other equipment instrumental in administering the programs confiscated.24 Where the food was stored directly at the breakfast site, as in San Diego and Philadelphia, the police raided these locations. (TBP, December 6, 1969: 9) And as mentioned earlier, the FBI also stripped many local branches of their program coordinators. Likewise, other Party members actively involved in the community service programs were often heavily besieged by local police. Chicago Panthers, for instance, were stopped by the police on their way to the breakfast site and taken to the precinct because of “improper identification”. On another occasion, they were “snatched” by the police in front of the breakfast location, taken for a “ride” and dropped off again miles away from the site. (TBP, June 24, 1970: 9) In Richmond, members of the breakfast program staff were arrested while in the process of opening the location for the daily serving of food. (Holder 1990: 96) In San Diego, the police – with a massive contingent of six cars – stopped in front of the local breakfast site and extensively interrogated the Panthers who were in the course of guiding children across the street. (TBP, July 26, 1969: 15) And in Mount Vernon, a Panther who had been asking various local merchants for donations to the breakfast program was arrested and charged with “soliciting funds without a license” shortly afterwards (TBP, December 6, 1969: 9). In various other instances, Panthers who were asking business owners in the black community for donations to their programs were arrested and imprisoned several weeks for robbery before these charges were dropped. (Churchill 2001: 87; Major 1971) Clearly the ‘favorite charge’ in this context was that of extortion. In the case of the Bay Area Panthers and the Party’s national headquarters in particular, the FBI tried to produce evidence for its claim that the BPP extorted funds from business owners for five years – but finally had to admit that it had found nothing whatsoever to substantiate the charge. (Churchill 2001: 88) A considerable amount of the FBI’s efforts to destroy the Panthers’ community service programs was focused on sabotaging all BPP attempts to secure infrastructure, material and personal contributions to their programs. To this end, FBI agents approached city officials and administrations, as well as other public institutions. In Philadelphia, doctors and nurses who had volunteered their services to the BPP’s medical clinic were restricted by the city to continue to do so (TBP, February 7, 1970: 6) – an interference most likely prompted by the FBI. The procedure in Chicago was similar: the city’s Board of Health repeatedly tried to close down the Panthers’ health clinics on the

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

grounds that they were not properly licensed to dispense drugs. However, those dispensing the drugs were properly licensed doctors volunteering at the Panther clinic. (TBP, February 28, 1970: 17; TBP, March 28, 1970: 8) In San Francisco, the Public Health Department closely inspected the facilities of the church in which the Panthers had just set up their breakfast program. (TBP, October 10, 1969: 7) In White Plains, to take another example fitting the pattern, city officials denied the BPP the use of the local community center for its breakfast program, on the grounds that the Party was a political organization. (TBP, July 19, 1969: 11) In numerous instances, the FBI directly intervened to dissuade food companies, business owners, and clergymen from supporting the Panthers’ community service programs in any way. Hoover, for instance, suggested in September 1970 to send a discrediting letter supposedly coming from a “concerned citizen” to California’s Jack-In-the-Box headquarters, with the intent of stopping the company from sending hamburgers to the BPP’s breakfast program.25 In Chicago, FBI agents approached both owners and drivers of local bus companies in an intimidating manner, as The Black Panther (October 9, 1971: 6, 18) reported, and told them to stop lending their services to the Party’s Free Bussing to Prison program. In Oakland, White Plains, and Detroit, agents intervened to either prevent or stop business people from donating to the Panthers’ community service programs.26 Their tactics in Detroit were particularly insidious: the Bureau sent forged letters to local business people – supposedly coming from the BPP –, threatening them if they did not contribute to the breakfast program. Clergymen who offered their church facilities to the Panthers were frequently targeted. In San Diego, the FBI and police harassment was particularly severe. Just before the first breakfast program was to open, some “‘unidentified’ vandals broke into the church and virtually destroyed the files and equipment,” The Black Panther reported. “The act was enough to intimidate the church’s director into asking the Panthers to hold the free breakfast elsewhere.”27 As soon as the Party had found another church willing to offer its facilities, one of the pastors was approached by a plainclothes policeman and asked to “put the thing off” (TBP, July 26, 1969: 15). Shortly after the breakfast program had opened anyway, the pastor and the church were intimidated into closing it down for at least two weeks, after members of Ron Karenga’s US – possibly inspired by or themselves being agents provocateurs – had tried to provoke a shootout with Panthers. (TBP, August 30, 1969: 15) At the same time, the FBI began to place phone calls, supposedly coming from parishioners, to the auxiliary bishop of the San Diego diocese, requesting to remove the pastor or threatening to suspend financial support. By October 1969, roughly three months after the breakfast program had started, the pastor had been banished to another state. (US Senate 1976: 210-211; O’Reilly 1991: 316) The FBI used similar procedures

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in other cases. In New Haven, for instance, it sent an anonymous, highly discrediting letter from “a concerned Christian” to the superior of a priest who supported the local Black Panther programs (US Senate 1976: 211). FBI and police agents also personally intervened to ‘convince’ clergymen – either by intimidation or through fabricated facts about the local Panthers – to end their cooperation with the BPP, as in the Bronx and Harlem breakfast programs.28 Again and again, the Panthers were thus driven out of their breakfast locations – right down to their own apartments: in San Francisco, the FBI had a female BPP member evicted from her apartment in a public housing project by telling the public housing authority that she was using the apartment for the Panthers’ breakfast program. (US Senate 1976: 200) Leaving aside the cases of obvious intimidation, what arguments could the FBI produce to convince people willing to support daily hot breakfasts for poor black children to refrain from contributing? One of the major claims was that the Black Panthers were politically indoctrinating the children participating in the breakfast programs along black extremist lines to hate white people. Besides the fact that the Panthers never advocated anti-white sentiments, this argument was particularly insidious because many storeowners and clergymen offering their support to the BPP were themselves white. Once more, the FBI did not hesitate to fabricate or manipulate evidence to fit its arguments. The most telling example is the story around the infamous BPP coloring book for children. Originally produced by an aspiring Party member in late 1968, national headquarters refused to use it because it regarded the book as inappropriate for children. Yet, an FBI-controlled agent provocateur snatched the coloring book and secretly produced about 1000 copies of it. Thus it came into the hands of the FBI, which anonymously sent these copies to contributors of the Party’s breakfast programs in the Bay Area, among them large food chains such as Safeway or Jack-In-The-Box, in order “to impede their contributions to the BPP Breakfast Program”.29 In the black communities of Peekskill (TBP, November 15, 1969: 17) and Richmond (TBP, November 29, 1969: 4), FBI agents went from door to door, interrogating people about the local BPP and telling them not to let their children attend the breakfast program because the Panthers were teaching them racism or telling them to riot at school. Routinely the FBI and the local police also spread rumors that the Panthers were teaching the children to kill or that they were poisoning the food, as in California, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. (Holder 1990: 96) In San Francisco, FBI agents actually brought one of the breakfast programs to a halt by talking the parents of the participating children into believing that the food the Panthers were serving was infected with a venereal disease. (Churchill 2001: 89)

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

Even less subtle ways to intimidate the black community enough so it – and especially the children – would stay away from the BPP’s community service programs included various forms of physical violence perpetrated mostly by local police forces. They repeatedly stormed fully armed into a breakfast site while the children were eating – a tactic employed ever since the BPP had established its first breakfast program in Oakland in 1968. (Holder 1990: 293) In many instances, the police seem to have taken particular pleasure in horrifying the children. In Baltimore, for instance, twenty policemen stormed the breakfast site and harassed the Panthers there in front of all the children. (McCutchen 1998: 126; Holder 1990: 238) Officers of the Los Angeles Police Department forced the children at gun point to leave the premises and proceeded to throw out all the food.30 Besides storming the premises, the Chicago police also took photographs of the children present. The procedure seems to have intimidated the youngsters so much that their attendance dropped to a level which forced the Panthers to temporarily suspend the breakfast program. (TBP, January 24, 1970: 9) To a similar effect, the health clinic of the Boston Panthers was shot at in July 1970 – possibly by local police forces themselves, since the bullets came from the type of weapon used by the city’s police, as the local Panthers had found out. (TBP, July 18, 1970: 6) In cities where the BPP was about to finish the process of setting up its community service programs and sought to publicize their imminent opening, police forces repeatedly demonstrated violently that a participation of the black community in these programs could be harmful. When the New Haven Panthers, for instance, put up posters in their community to announce the opening of their breakfast site, the police not only tore down the posters and trampled on them, but proceeded to arrest the Panthers and, at the same time, started to wave their billy clubs at the gathering crowd, telling the people to either go home or face arrest as well. (TBP, December 6, 1969: 7) In another instance, where the Panthers were conducting a rally to inform about their community service programs and raise funds for them, they and the gathered black community were attacked by the police. (TBP, April 27, 1969: 5) Quite obviously then, the great majority of the FBI’s efforts to bring the Panthers’ community service programs to a halt directly envisaged – as one of the major goals of Hoover’s initial BPP-specific COINTELPRO stated – “creating opposition to the BPP on the part of the majority of the residents of the ghetto areas” (Churchill / Vander Wall 1990b: 125). In addition, the arguments used were outrageously far-fetched, which further substantiated the only sensible explanation why the FBI wanted free food, clothing, and health care for black urban poor to be banned: because such programs exposed the inadequacy of existing institutions in their functioning towards blacks; because the Panthers thus did, in fact, create structural Black Visibility. And this, as the FBI feared, presented a real and dangerous threat to the stability of the US system – in

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case the public got the message. Hence, in the FBI’s logic, not only the black community, but also the larger (white) public had to be averted from the Black Panther Party. In fact, the Bureau used various COINTELPRO tactics to not only stop but prevent white support for the BPP. A broad range of groups and individuals regarded as possessing public influence – among them public officials, newspaper editors, conservative businessmen, and the clergy –  received anonymous FBI mailings which put the Party in a negative light. In addition, the FBI went out of its way to divert anybody with any possible vestiges of sympathy for the Panthers – in the eyes of the Bureau, this included liberals, Jews, and “other naïve individuals” – from supporting the BPP (US Senate 1976: 34-35, 209, 212). To this end, the FBI went beyond anonymous mailings of negative media portrayals. It sent forged letters to company executives, exposing their employees as contributing to the BPP and threatening to stop all investment in the company if this continued.31 Addressing Jewish organizations and individuals, the FBI deliberately constructed the Panthers as anti-Semitic. Thus, a field office proposed to send a letter supposedly from “a Negro man who is 48 years old” to the director of the Jewish Defense League, wherein this “good Negro” would list anti-Semitic tendencies of his son, who was a member of the Black Panther Party (Churchill/Vander Wall 1990b: 137). When highly public arts and entertainment celebrities were involved, the FBI went yet another step further: it negatively exposed and ridiculed individuals known to support the BPP financially. Hollywood celebrities such as actresses Jane Fonda or Jean Seberg were targeted from 1970 on – as “an effective means of combating BPP fundraising activities among liberal and naïve individuals”.32 In the case of Jean Seberg, the wife of French novelist Romain Gary, the FBI spread false rumors – which were quickly picked up by gossip columnists – that she was pregnant with the child of a Los Angeles Panther leader. The vicious public campaign was highly detrimental to Seberg’s marriage and at least partially responsible for her miscarriage, from which she never recovered; she eventually committed suicide several years later.33 Hoover himself publicly assailed such prominent individuals as Leonard Bernstein, Otto Preminger, Dick Gregory or Sidney Lumet for having made “substantial contributions” to legal defense funds for BPP leaders accused of crimes (The New York Times, May 9, 1970: 21). In a similar way, attorneys representing Black Panthers in court were heavily targeted by COINTELPRO. The chief victim was Charles Garry, who defended most national Party leaders. He was publicly discredited and received forged letters and anonymous phone calls, all of which aimed at getting him to step down from his mandate. (US Senate 1976: 212) Probably the most heavily targeted white support group were the Friends of the Panthers, particularly the group based in California / Los Angeles around

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

writer and lecturer Donald Freed. (Jeffries / Foley 2007: 283-286) This group not only supported the Panthers financially but also worked with them actively, thus lending support and credibility also to the BPP’s Black Visibility campaigns. In repeated instances, the FBI used similar – illegal – techniques as those used against the Panthers to publicly incriminate and terrorize this group and its members. A possibly COINTELPRO-related attack against a female member of the group was the nightly firebombing of her camper truck, which was used regularly by the BPP to distribute Party newspapers and transport food for the breakfast program. (TBP, March 7, 1970: 4) Another female group member, who was actively engaged in one of the breakfast programs of the Los Angeles Panthers, was subjected to a dozen police and FBI agents forcefully entering her apartment with guns drawn at midnight, on the pretense that she was hiding a Panther. (TBP, November 5, 1969: 17) Raiding the homes of Friends of the Panthers and claiming they were protecting a fugitive Panther seems to have been a repeatedly employed measure by the FBI. In yet another case involving a female member of the Los Angeles group, not only was her home raided, but she was arrested and charged with giving refuge to a fugitive, with her bail set at an excessively high level. According to The Black Panther (November 1, 1969: 21), “Miss Spivak was held in Sybil Brand Women’s Detention Facility in lieu of $ 12.600 bail. The police refused to tell Miss Spivak or her friends who she was accused of harboring.” The Los Angeles Friends of the Panthers were also infiltrated with informants and agents provocateurs, as became evident when one of them surfaced to accuse two leading members of the group of possessing illegal weapons which the informant himself seemed to have planted at one of their homes. As The Black Panther reported, “Professor Donald Freed was accused of possessing hand grenades given him by the police spy; Mrs. Shirley Sutherland was charged with contributing money for the weapons. If anyone knowingly possessed the arms it was the agent, but there was no mention of throwing him in jail.” (TBP, November 1, 1969: 21; US Senate 1976: 208) It was only 15 weeks later that the two were temporarily released from prison as the indictment was ruled deficient by a US District Court judge – yet the prosecution sought to appeal, as The Washington Post (February 18, 1970: A17) reported. In an attempt to drive a wedge between the group and the BPP, the COINTELPRO technique of snitch-jacketing was used against key members of the Friends of the Panthers on the occasion of the BPP’s United Front Against Fascism conference in the summer of 1969: pamphlets suddenly appeared at the conference, charging the heads of Friends of the Panthers groups in several cities across the country with being informants and pigs. (TBP, August 2, 1969: 19; US Senate 1976: 208) With similar tactics, the FBI sought to disrupt and destroy all alliances between the Black Panther Party and other groups and organizations. Members of the Peace and Freedom Party, Students for a Democratic Society,

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the Young Lords or Young Patriots, and SNCC – or the BPP respectively –, received bogus letters supposedly coming from the allied group.34 With respect to whites, the FBI would sometimes play the race card or threaten with violence in these letters. When black groups such as SNCC were involved, or in other cases where the BPP was attempting to create a broad black alliance, the Bureau employed heavier COINTELPRO techniques to destroy the coalition or even prevent it from forming. These measures ranged from harassment, forged letters, anonymous phone-calls, and snitch-jacketing to the calculated provocation of violence. (O’Reilly 1991: 300-301; Churchill 2001: 89-90) The ultimate break between Stokely Carmichael from SNCC and the BPP was caused by a phone-call to Carmichael’s mother in September 1968, telling her that several Panthers were out to kill him. Carmichael left for Africa the day after. (US Senate 1976: 199, fn. 60) Once more, Fred Hampton was of notorious concern to the FBI: he was about to forge an alliance between the Chicago Panthers and the Blackstone Rangers – a Chicago street gang 3000 members strong –, politicizing them to a point where they seriously considered becoming engaged in community service along similar lines as the BPP. Hence, the FBI proceeded to provoke violence between the two groups, using similar tactics as in the case of Los Angeles and Ron Karenga’s US. In January 1969, it sent a fabricated letter to the leader of the Blackstone Rangers, warning him of a supposed BPP order to kill him. (US Senate 1976: 195-198) According to an internal FBI memorandum, the letter’s intention was to “intensify the degree of animosity between the two groups”, an animosity which had already been created in the months before, in order to provoke “retaliatory action which would disrupt the BPP or lead to reprisals against its leadership” (US Senate 1976: 42). The FBI thus once again deliberately pitted blacks against each other in order to uphold the stereotype of the criminal black ghetto youth and thereby sabotage the Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility.

F e ar and Par anoia The Panthers themselves took the government’s Back-to-Black-Invisibility endeavors as a confirmation that their strategies to expose, subvert, and provoke were actually working – at least when they were addressing the public. “Their attempts to destroy the Black Panther Party are in fact due to the very sharp contradictions that are being exposed by the Party through its practice,” the managing editor of the Party newspaper explained to an audience of white students in the summer of 1969. “Contradictions began to arise when the Black Panther Party began to feed over 15.000 children free breakfast every morning before school, when the Party began to implement free medical clinics, and

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

when the Party went forth to educate and make coalitions.” (TBP, August 23, 1969: 11) In the face of escalating police raids on local Party offices and apartments at the end of 1969, the Panthers angrily continued to quite literally measure their success in terms of the violent official response they met: “This is why the United States government is trying to destroy the Black Panther Party. We, in fact, expose the true nature of this racist decadent AmeriKKKan society.” (TBP, January 31, 1970: 9) The Panthers’ alertness to all forms of official responses to their struggle for Black Visibility had led to an early and high awareness of COINTELPRO-type activities coordinated against them – an awareness which, naturally, further spurred their strategic efforts to achieve Black Visibility on all fronts. As early as the fall of 1968, Captain Crutch from Oakland appealed to all Party members to go out into their respective black communities and expose what he called a conspiracy against the Black Panther Party on the judicial level to eliminate Party leadership. (TBP, November 2, 1968: 10) Another case in point is the BPP’s reaction to the murders of Los Angeles Party leaders John Huggins and Bunchy Carter in January 1969, committed by members of the rivaling Black Power organization US. Alerted to the involvement of both LAPD and FBI in pitting the Black Panthers against US – in fact, as US leader Ron Karenga later disclosed, both LAPD and FBI had actually collaborated with US and Karenga against the BPP (Karenga 1976) –, the Panthers refrained from taking revenge and attacking US. Instead, they concentrated on gathering evidence to link Karenga’s shooters to the police and the FBI and on exposing that the police and the FBI had directed the killing: they claimed to thus “make the establishment work against itself” because it now “must prosecute its own agents, or admit the perverted type of racist activity in which it is engaged” (TBP, February 2, 1969: 5). Around that time, the Panthers had also become keenly aware of the fact that they had been infiltrated on a nationwide level by informants and agents provocateurs – “super-militants” and agitators, as they called them. And they were conscious of the key goals thus pursued by the government: to criminalize the Party, in order to alienate and isolate it from the black community, and other potential supporters and to paralyze the organization, as these agitators embarked upon sowing internal distrust and paranoia. (TBP, January 25, 1969: 16) Over the following months, numerous examples of “agents provocateurs” who “have lied on the Party, informed on the Party, and planned jive robberies to discredit the Party which the Black Panther Party had no knowledge nor part of” were cited in The Black Panther (April 20, 1969: 6) and were identified as “nothing but a slick power structure – FBI operation to destroy our support in the community”. At the same time, the Panthers were able to pinpoint most of the COINTELPRO tactics, such as that of financially starving the Party. They were

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aware that the frequent arrests on insubstantial charges served primarily to elicit bail money from the Party – particularly in the cases where exorbitant bail was set for Panthers in key organizational positions.35 Consequently, it was clear to them how such government activities ultimately aimed at bringing all Party activities to a halt. Accusations were very concrete: “The Los Angeles Pig Power Structure, in accordance with national plans, has stepped up its program of repression of the L.A. Panthers. In a less than one month period (late April to mid-May) 42 Panthers in L.A. were arrested a total of 56 times. So far, over $ 100.000 bail has been set for the 42 brothers,” the Southern California chapter reported in The Black Panther (May 31, 1969: 20), concluding that as a result “the Party funds are being drained and worthwhile programs slowed down.” The Panthers also soon found out to what extent police and FBI possessed organizational knowledge of each Party chapter and branch. In April 1969, the Indiana chapter detailed in The Black Panther (April 20, 1969: 8) what the questioning of two uncovered informants had revealed: office phone lines were bugged; wiretaps and concealed microphones were ready for use; the Party’s bank statements were directly forwarded to the FBI; the FBI possessed information about each and every staff member and its family; it was informed about all planned public speaking engagements and rallies; Panthers from other Party chapters and branches who visited the Indiana Panthers were carefully registered; and the Bureau insisted that weapons were proven to be stored on the Party chapter’s premises. By 1970, the BPP had also become conscious of how the FBI had been forging letters supposedly coming from Party members to further heighten internal distrust. An internal FBI memorandum from May 1970 sought to capitalize on precisely these suspicions. (US Senate 1976: 201) The downside of the Panthers’ high awareness of COINTELPRO-type activities was the early manifestation of mounting internal paranoia, fear, and distrust. At first, the BPP sought to counter this offensively. In an attempt to regain control over its membership and consolidate the organizational structure, the Central Committee in Oakland announced so-called internal purges in the beginning of 1969. (TBP, January 4, 1969: 6) Thus they hoped to get rid of – or at least neutralize – informants and particularly agents provocateurs. In the following weeks and months, The Black Panther featured lists of expelled members, which the chapters and branches across the US had sent in. Often these lists carried full names and addresses, as well as the reasons for being purged, sometimes even a picture.36 Apparently, there were whole chapters and branches that had never been officially recognized by the BPP’s Central Committee – in Charlotte, North Carolina, for instance, or in Oklahoma City. As a consequence, national headquarters did not hesitate to close down entire chapters. Milwaukee was among them, disbanded in January 1970 because the local leadership lacked discipline and the branch had failed to engage in community work.37 Even if the reasons for the purges varied, in most cases

Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy

violations of Party rules were pointed out as grounds for action.38 One of the often cited reasons for expulsion was that a Party member had been exposed as a police informant or an agent provocateur – an accusation frequently interwoven with other disciplinary reasons, since one of the main tasks of agents provocateurs was precisely to incite other BPP members to commit a crime or otherwise harm the BPP in public. The overall extent of the purges was considerable: the East Oakland branch purged 38 members, for instance, the Vallejo branch 26, the Jersey City branch 22, the Omaha chapter 21, the Boston branch 17, and the Kansas City chapter 16.39 While the contemporary journalist Louis G. Heath (1976a: 92) estimated that the purges prompted roughly 1000 Panthers to leave the Party over the course of 1969, Bobby Seale retrospectively calculates that by the end of 1970, a total of 30 to 40 percent of all BPP members had left, due to a veritable paranoia created by government infiltration, police repression, and internal accusations and expulsions. (Churchill 2001: 97-98) In the end, then, it was the FBI who profited from the BPP’s increasing awareness and knowledge of COINTELPROtype activities. As a rank and file member from Oakland recalled: “Between the years of 1968-1970, we all felt the pig infiltrations of our organization. The pigs were playing dirty tricks on us through letters that pitted one leader against another and through wire taps. Still a young organization, we were unable to discern what was real or fake. We were constantly fortifying our office on the strength of leaks from agents who had turned into supposed sympathizers. Such infiltration changed whatever sense of normalcy the Panther environment ever had. Our situation was always on the periphery of alarm. The very nature of existing in Oakland, or any place in America for that matter, as a Black group organized to defy the racist oppression of the state entailed constant tension. Add to this the infiltration of pigs who were Blacks like us, and one can only imagine how the Panther environment was continually charged with suspicion and tension. We rank and file lived every day as if it was our last. At times, in a frenzied, scary way, all of us sometimes questioned whether to trust one another; and we all lived together, worked together, studied together, played together, ate together, and drank together.” (Jennings 1998: 262)

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Fig. 5: Paperboy (Emory Douglas, 1969, © 2017, Pro Litteris, Zurich/ Art Resource, NY)

Crucial Role of the Media

Sacramento was “conceived as a media event”, as both Bobby Seale (Hampton/ Fayer 1990: 368) and Huey Newton pointed out. “Dozens of reporters and photographers haunt the capitol waiting for a story. This made it the perfect forum for our proclamation,” Newton (1995a: 147) recalled. And indeed: as soon as the uniformed and visibly armed Panther group had begun to march towards the steps of the Capitol, the media people were flocking towards them. Once inside the building, the Panther delegation was swarmed by journalists and cameramen “running from our left and from our right […] jumping in front of us taking flicks and clicking flicks”, as Seale (1991: 157-158) vividly remembered. “Bulbs were flashing all over the place.” He proclaimed Newton’s Executive Mandate No. 1 first inside the building and, at the request of the journalists, several times again on the steps of the Capitol, flanked by a disciplined cadre of fellow Panthers. The impact was simply tremendous. Radio and TV stations interrupted their regular programs to bring live reports. The story of armed blacks ‘invading’ the California State Capitol flashed across all major US TV networks, while national US magazines such as Life, Time or the New York Times Magazine carried picture reports. The Panthers even made international headlines: the London Times displayed the story across the front page, and German newspapers also reported the incident. Media interest in the Black Panther Party continued for several days, with news reporters calling the Panther office nonstop, as Seale remembered. Channel 7 invited them into its A.M. program on TV, and The New York Times even sent a reporter over to the West Coast to interview Newton. 1 Seale (1991: 177) happily commented: “News of the existence of the Party went all around the world.” Catching the attention of the mass media was the sine qua non of their Black Visibility quest, as the Panthers were well aware. Canny to the mass media’s functioning and particularly their interest in confrontational situations, the Panthers had deliberately catered to the mass media with their street performances practically from the outset. Soon enough, however, they

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discovered that the visibility thus created often ran counter to their intentions: they broke into the glaring spotlight of the American public “in blood and disfigurement”. In response, they proceeded to create their own media apparatus and resorted to a variety of tactics in the deliberate attempt to regain control over their public image and make sure that their message got across – namely, that key US institutions functioned to oppress and exploit blacks and to uphold white supremacy. The first testing of media waters had taken place only weeks before Sacramento, when the Panthers had forced two standoffs with the police – first at the airport, then outside the Ramparts office – in front of a crowd of newspeople who had originally intended to cover the arrival of Malcolm X’s widow Betty Shabazz, for whom the Panthers acted as bodyguards. “Aided by the media,” as the sociologist Christopher B. Booker (1998: 341) judged, “this incident quickly became part of the rapidly growing legend of the Panthers.” With their strategically staged performance at the State Capitol, the Panthers had arrived on the national scene: Calls poured into their office from blacks across the United States who wanted to set up their own BPP branches, engage Newton to speak before student audiences or request copies of the Party newspaper for their own distribution – all because media reports had alerted them to the Black Panther Party and its aims. (Newton 1995a: 150-155; US House Committee on Internal Security 1970/1971: 5004) Sacramento had certainly nurtured Huey Newton’s optimism that the mass media could be instrumentalized in order to multiply Black Visibility and carry the Panthers’ struggle into every US household. As Louis Heath, who wrote one of the first journalistic assessments of the BPP in 1976, commented on one of Newton’s articles in The Black Panther from July 1967: “He was optimistic that a vanguard group, no matter how small, could guide even ‘millions’ of persons through the proper ‘physical activities’ and the ‘mass media’.” (Heath 1976a: 39) Indeed, the Panthers proved inventive in the tactics they developed to catch, hold, and maximize media presence. Kathleen Cleaver was instrumental in this process: she introduced professional media work into the Party, having acquired her public-relation skills as a member of the SNCC cadre. When she joined the BPP around November 1967, she immediately created the position of communications secretary and began to initiate and coordinate media relations, writing press releases and getting photographers and journalists to publish stories about the Black Panthers. With obvious success: at the official launch of the Free Huey campaign in early December 1967, a large crowd of reporters and cameramen had gathered, eager to interview Bobby Seale about the campaign. He and Eldridge Cleaver subsequently both appeared on the radio and on TV, where news items on the Newton case and the Panthers’ campaign flashed across the screen. Eldridge, Kathleen’s husband, turned out to become the BPP’s actual media wizard. “Cleaver played the media,” Robert

Crucial Role of the Media

Scheer, a founding member of the Peace and Freedom Party, wrote about Cleaver’s public addresses. “His performance was a one-man guerilla theater.” (Cleaver 1969: xxiii) By April 1968, the BPP had an actual public-relations machinery running in the Bay Area, with radio stations announcing upcoming BPP events.2

The Panthers and the M edia : a Tug of W ar Calling press conferences was one of the earliest tactics the Panthers devised. Once successfully tested at the Free Huey Birthday Rally in February 1968, the Panthers would call a press conference in the immediate run-up to every larger public event they planned, such as a demonstration, a rally or a conference, in order to cater to the mass media’s expectations of provocative Panther rhetoric and public performance. At the same time, they sought to use the media as an aid in organizing the event and in mobilizing support. A case in point are the May Day rallies on the occasion of Newton’s case being appealed at the California Supreme Court on May 1, 1969: BPP headquarters held a national press conference in late April to announce that rallies were to take place in front of local US district courts in over 20 explicitly listed cities across the United States as well as in front of US embassies abroad. Even the sociologist Christopher B. Booker, who is highly critical of the BPP in other matters, admits how “the Panthers pushed this process at every opportunity,” while the cultural historian Jane Rhodes calls the Party “a well-oiled publicity machine” holding press conferences on an almost daily basis.3 The BPP national headquarters had indeed set up a highly efficient infrastructure and network for the sole purpose of dealing with the mass media. Each Party chapter and branch office was required to have operative telephones and a tape recorder with microphone ready at all times, primarily for the purpose of recording, transcribing, and printing press releases from national headquarters on the local level. (TBP, April 20, 1969: 19) Typewriters and mimeograph machines were also part of the required office equipment, as this enabled the Panthers to reprint and distribute such press statements to the media. Most importantly, each office had to maintain a list of all local media, complete with phone numbers and addresses, to be able to quickly alert “all newspapers, radio stations, T.V. stations, and the underground press” (TBP, August 30, 1969: 6-7). In this way, a nationwide, finely meshed net of media connections could be addressed within hours – as in the case of the murder of Chicago BPP leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 277; McCutchen 1998: 123) Under less urgent circumstances, BPP national headquarters also made sure that the actual calling and especially holding of a press conference was systematically set up to generate maximum possible

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impact. First, the press conference was announced ahead of time through direct phone calls to the different media. In a second round, the content of the press conference was communicated. Then, shortly before the conference, phone calls to the various media were issued again in order to make sure that they had actually received the message and were indeed attending the BPP press conference. (TBP, August 30, 1969: 6-7) The Black Panther generally took great care and pride in referencing to or even reprinting whole press conferences and press releases by BPP chapters and branches – often including a list of all media representatives present. Quantitatively speaking, the Panthers’ strategic efforts seemed to pay off well. In Chicago, for instance, the city’s newspapers printed well over 200 articles about the Black Panther Party between December 1968 and December 1969. As the journalist and writer Michael J. Arlen (1973: 102) put it: “On one hundred and thirty days of that year there was a piece about the Panthers in one of the main Chicago papers – or on one out of every three days a year.” Large Panther rallies and conferences, such as the United Front Against Fascism in the summer of 1969, were covered by magazines with a nationwide or even international audience, among them Time, Life, and Newsweek. (Hayes / Kiene 1998: 175, fn. 40) Then, in December 1969, the nationwide police raids on BPP offices, resulting in the deaths of Hampton and Clark in Chicago, catapulted the Panthers into the glaring light of the nationally broadcasted Sunday morning CBS show Face the Nation. David Hilliard was invited and interviewed by three reporters in front of live cameras on December 28, 1969 – a “colossal event” for the Party, as he judged in retrospect, because his “appearance provide[d] the Party with important national exposure” (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 271). Particularly such TV and radio coverage was actively sought by the Panthers. For one thing, as Rhodes (2007: 157) notes, audiences reached by the national press paled in comparison to those the major TV stations broadcasted to: without a TV audience, she concludes, “any social movement would be relegated to invisibility”. Moreover, live interviews offered the Panthers an ideal platform to address the audience directly – as opposed to being quoted only in newspaper reports. Newton (1995a: 146) recalled how during one of his first appearances on a radio talk show “[h]undreds of calls poured in – the lines were jammed. Some people agreed with us; others disputed our points. We welcomed the discussion, because criticism helped us to find weaknesses in our program and to sharpen our position.” BPP chapters and branches across the nation sought to follow in Newton’s footsteps. Fred Hampton and Bobby Rush from the Chicago chapter, for instance, grasped the opportunity of their appearance on a radio talk show in January 1969 to talk about their local activities and programs. (US Senate 1976: 198) Hampton’s later wife Deborah Johnson remembered how his appearance in another TV talk show had won her heart for the Black Panther Party and its struggle. (Hampton / Fayer 1990: 521)

Crucial Role of the Media

A Baltimore Panther who appeared on the regional TV program Brass Tacks in January 1970 was also able to leave a lasting impact: “The audience and panel were impressed,” he noted in his diary. “They had no idea that Panthers could understand the relationship between Huey and Martin Luther King, let alone address other relevant concerns of the community. A good showing for the branch of the Party.” (McCutchen 1998: 124) The New York Panthers – most certainly an exception – were not only able to secure weekly time on the air, their program was even aired during prime time, according to an ad in The Black Panther (August 16, 1969: 20): “The Black Panther Party on Radio – Every Saturday Nite, 8:45 – 9:15 p.m.” As these examples show, the Panthers’ intentions went beyond merely multiplying the Party’s public presence and visibility through the mass media – although this was an important aspect. Moreover, the key message the Panthers sought to convey with every press conference they organized was to expose the structural racism inherent in various public institutions as well as in the legal system. For this purpose, Party chapters and branches routinely held press conferences to document concrete instances of illegal police conduct – whether they were directed against members of the black community in general or against Party members in particular. At a press conference in the aftermath of the police raids and the ensuing arrests in Los Angeles in December 1969, the Panthers presented medical doctors who were to inspect and treat those incarcerated to issue “a statement documenting the treatment that the prisoners had received at the hands of the L.A. authorities” in front of cameramen from all networks (Heath 1976a: 309). Regular press conferences before and during Panther trials aimed at ensuring that the BPP stayed in glaring spotlight and at documenting the racist mechanisms of the courts and the judicial process. Wherever institutional racism could be dramatically visualized, moreover, the BPP made sure that cameras were present – as when the Bronx Panthers guided various TV cameramen and reporters through their dilapidated black neighborhood and got them to talk to the occupants of the housing projects, in order to thus document the discriminatory methods of welfare and public housing authorities. (TBP, February 7, 1970: 8, 15) This example also illustrates another key tactic the Panthers employed to secure media attention: they appealed to the mass media as witness – particularly in situations where they were not in control of events. Another case in point is, once more, the killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark during the nightly headquarter raid in Chicago in December 1969. The Panthers immediately began to organize guided tours through the crime scene in order to refute the official version of events the police and FBI catered to the media. “Twenty-five thousand people came through the apartment to see what was going on,” Bobby Rush, coleader of the Chicago BPP chapter, remembered. “That was the biggest thing in terms of making sure that our version of the

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story was at least heard and also accepted.” (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 269, original emphasis) The venture proved successful: Rush, another BPP member, and State Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan – who refused to come – were invited to discuss events on the NBC midday news talk show. “That’s how the word really began to get out that Fred had been murdered:” the mass media started to question the police version of events. Seizing the opportunity created by the similarly set-up police attacks upon BPP offices in Los Angeles only days later, the Panthers sought to drive home their most important point to the media – namely, that Fred Hampton’s “assassination isn’t simply the action of a particularly fascist police force but part of a national search-and-destroy mission against the Party.” (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 277, original emphasis) Under such circumstances, calling upon the media as witness – as routinely practiced by local BPP offices who were (about to be) raided by the police – could become a lifesaving tactic. In Los Angeles, the Panthers in the local BPP headquarters furiously defended themselves during the prolonged nightly shoot-out, holding out just long enough so the media could rush to the scene and record the police attack: “The Panthers all surrendered before a huge audience of community and newspeople.” (Holder 1990: 49) The heavy armament of the LAPD’s newly-formed SWAT team included helicopters and tank-like vehicles and indeed made the shoot-out look like a fight between David and Goliath – or between Vietnamese civilians and the US army, for that matter –, an impression on which the Panthers promptly capitalized before the media, pointing out the essential correctness of their labeling the police a violent occupation army. (TBP, December 27, 1969) When it came to getting the media into ghetto neighborhoods to witness police behavior, the BPP increasingly relied on the black community at large. In mid-1970, the Party distributed a full-page poster – certainly meant to be put on walls and other public spots – depicting a policeman violently clubbing a black man lying on the ground. In big letters, the poster called on the black community to report all police activities both to the BPP and to the mass media. (Black Community Bulletin, August 12, 1970: 12) All these efforts – and the BPP’s quantitative media presence – not­ withstanding, the Panthers soon discovered the limits of instrumentalizing the mass media to support their struggle for Black Visibility. When reading what one of his first interviews had been turned into by the press in the spring of 1967, Seale (1991: 148) bitterly complained: “They wrote it all backwards. They said we were anti-white and were black racists.” While thus developing a highly ambivalent stance to the mass media, the Panthers nonetheless doggedly continued to pursue mass media attention. At the same time, they embarked upon a systematic exposure of the media’s role in the (re)construction of Black Invisibility. What did they hope to achieve with this seemingly paradoxical strategy?

Crucial Role of the Media

Firstly, the Panthers sought to instruct the public and specifically the black community that the mass media was by no means an independent force in American society, but much rather functioned primarily to reproduce and guarantee the existing social order – in other words, to perpetuate white supremacy. “The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather, they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring […] Whites over Blacks,” media analyst Michael Parenti (1993: 8) formulated 25 years later. “The press does many things and serves many functions, but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.” Moreover, as Rhodes (2007: 89) notes, reporting about blacks took place in a segregated news universe: stories about the Panthers, consequently, were usually relegated to the so-called “Negro pages” and “remained invisible elsewhere”. From the Panthers’ perspective, the media’s chief function was to legitimate the oppression and exploitation of nonwhites both in the US and abroad. “I pay very close attention to the way that information is disseminated from the mass media, and I’ve become aware, as many people are aware that one of the key instruments of oppression, of controlling the oppressed people, is the mass media,” Eldridge Cleaver pointed out in a statement from exile towards the end of 1969: the reports “justify the murderous operations of the United States government” and thereby “perpetuate oppression” (TBP, November 8, 1969: 2). Essentially, the Panthers sought to expose the mass media as lackeys of the system, particularly of the government’s judicial and executive powers, in order to delegitimize the media’s authority and to wrench another supportive leg from the government’s legitimacy and stability. To this purpose, the Panthers sought to document and publicize the mass media’s conceptual Black Invisibility at various occasions. They charged mass media entertainment with deliberately ignoring black existence and experience in urban America, particularly by creating black role models who had to conform to “some trumped-up version of the ideal of what Washington would like and expect of Black People”: three out of four blacks playing in TV series appeared in the roles of police and government agents, “traitors to Black people”, as the Panthers argued (TBP, July 3 1971: 10-12). When the mass media created and handled news, they routinely adhered to “lies, distortions, intentional omissions, quoting-out-of-context, and incorrect paraphrasing” to reproduce and spread the hegemonial white perspective, as an editorial statement in The Black Panther from September 1969 observed. Two years earlier, the Party newspaper had already documented what it termed a total “whiteout on black news”, criticizing the racist character of the guidelines issued by the President of the Northern California Chapter of the Radio and Television News Directors Association concerning civil disorder coverage – the coverage of black ghetto revolts – in the summer of 1967 (TBP, July 20, 1967:

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20). According to these guidelines, reporters were to be dispatched to police command posts and not directly to the scene. The reporters were advised that the police would provide them with all the information needed to present an overall picture of the revolt. And they were explicitly forbidden to interview, film, or otherwise document black ghetto residents participating in the revolt. As a matter of fact, the reporters were to provide the police with “maximum assistance in the reestablishment of control”. At the ultimate end of the media’s involvement in guaranteeing the reproduction of the system thus stood, as the Panthers maintained, the media’s willful ignorance regarding black victims of crime. “As always, when our people are the victims of rape, robbery, or murder, a cloud of mystery and racist-press misinformation descends on the Black ghetto like a herd of starving locusts.” (TBP, January 25, 1969: 1) What the Panthers alluded to with such phrasings was that crimes committed against blacks were not registered by whites the same way as crimes against whites were. In its institutionalized from, this amounted to a total dehumanization of blacks. The conclusion reached by the Los Angeles Panthers as a result of their careful and systematic documentation of the deaths of 24 blacks shot by the LAPD is revelatory in this respect: “Many of our Black brothers have been shot and killed on the charge that they allegedly moved suspiciously. From nine years old to ninety, many of the killings are not put in the press, on the air or on T.V. When they do, it’s put in the middle of the paper on the back. And as Malcolm X once said, ‘they make the victim look like the criminal, and the criminal look like the victim’.” (TBP, November 16, 1968: 17)

Essentially, the BPP’s central charge against the mass media gravitated around their construction of blacks as criminals. The Chicago Panthers were particularly insistent on documenting to what extent the executive and judicial powers actually collaborated with the media in this criminalization of blacks. The most flagrant example concerned Illinois State Attorney Edward Hanrahan, who was given a broad platform by the local and regional media – press, radio, and TV – to spread his views concerning the black community and its most pressing problems, and to advertise what he perceived to be the solution, namely his newly created special unit of the police which targeted black youth gangs. The Panthers were outraged in particular about Hanrahan’s TV and radio commercials, which depicted black youths as dangerous criminals and projected the special-unit policemen as righteous heroes. Fred Hampton advised the black community to “[t]urn this fool off instead of turning in your children” (TBP, September 6, 1969: 11). Not surprisingly, as must be added, the Black Panther Party was the key target of this special unit of the Chicago police department. The Chicago Panthers chastised the media particularly for reporting uncritically whatever information came from State

Crucial Role of the Media

Attorney Hanrahan. (TBP, June 21, 1969: 7) When, for instance, Bobby Rush was arrested by the police because he happened to be in the vicinity of a shootout – by pure coincidence, as The Black Panther (May 4, 1969: 6) pointed out –, the media reported the next day that there had been a war between the BPP and a “rival street gang”. Another incident happened only weeks later, when Panthers transporting medical supplies for their health clinic were stopped and searched by the police and the Panthers charged that the “pig press misled the public into believing that medical supplies that were in the car were chemicals for explosives” (TBP, June 21, 1969: 9). Other BPP chapters and branches made similar experiences –  especially in those cities where the legal and executive forces pursued the Panthers with particular aggressiveness, such as Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia. “Strangely enough, it is the Party which receives the short end of the straw by the mass media. We are shown as the racists, the ‘Black fascists’, the hoodlums,” the Philadelphia Panthers inferred. “We see this as an informal wedlock between the pigs with the sticks and the pigs with the pen.” (TBP, December 6, 1969: 9) A wedlock orchestrated by the government, as David Hilliard charged when contending that “the mass media has been silenced, channeled” – ordered “from above” to “give the Black Panther Party no more exposure” (TBP, August 30, 1969: 6-7). Indeed: although cameramen from various networks had followed the Bronx Panthers through the dilapidated projects of their black neighborhood and reporters had talked to the inhabitants, the mass media remained conspicuously silent. (TBP, February 7, 1970: 8, 15) For the Panthers, this kind of news reporting – or rather, non-reporting in the case of the BPP’s community-based activities – clearly went beyond the racist depiction of blacks and black-related issues. By systematically documenting how the media collaborated with the police in constructing the Black Panther Party as a criminal organization, they ultimately sought to expose an actual conspiracy between the mass media and the executive and judicial powers of the country. A conspiracy in which the mass media’s role was to prepare the public ground for and to legitimize the total physical destruction of the Black Panther Party by the government’s executive and judicial powers. With the headline New Onslaught In the Making, The Black Panther reported already in late 1968 how “the racist controlled news media has been giving conspicuous attention to the spokesmen of the reactionary US ruling authorities and their racist utterances against the Black Panther Party.” After listing several of these accusations, the paper concluded: “These are no isolated instances nor are they accidental.” (TBP, November 2, 1968: 6) By mid-January 1969, accounts of how the mass media depicted clashes between the BPP and the police resulting in the death of several Los Angeles Panthers culminated in the following claim:

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When almost the entire East Coast Party leadership – the New York 21 – was arrested on a host of indictments in early April 1969, the Panthers, and with them the entire radical left, jumped to the occasion to illustrate these conspiracy charges: “Panthers are revolutionaries, not terrorists,” (original emphasis) and thus “would not attack common people, those who shop in Alexander’s and Bloomingdale’s or visit the Bronx Botanical Gardens.” They accused District Attorney Frank Hogan and the mass media of having “entered a conspiracy to convict the Panthers before trial”. Not only had Hogan announced the indictment of the Panthers “in an unprecedented press conference […] which was given exceptionally wide and exclusive coverage by all news media,” with The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and The New York Post carrying the story with headlines blasted across the front page, and with all radio and TV stations of the city reporting about it for days. The mass media simultaneously also printed Hogan’s “phantasmagoria about the illicit riches of the Black Panther Party – about money pouring in from Cuba, from China, from stolen Youth Corps poverty funds”. At the same time, as the Panthers and their New Left allies charged, the media remained conspicuously silent about the fact that DA Hogan had been unable to produce a single shred of evidence for any of his indictments a month after the arrests, and that even where he had been forced to publicly admit that no evidence existed, the original indictment was maintained all the same. Moreover, the Panthers pointed out, the media never reported the obvious mistreatment of one of the arrested female Panthers – despite their presence at her court arraignment, when she appeared all bruised up and her attorneys pointed out the policeman responsible for her state by name. (TBP, May 4, 1969: 4, 8; TBP, June 14, 1969: 4) Other BPP allies and groups from the political left picked up the Panthers’ conspiracy charges. The Bay Area Socialist Workers Party, for instance, presented a list of nationwide law-enforcement activities employed against the BPP between May and June 1969, pointing out the mass media’s involvement in this “campaign of harassment, frame-ups and smear tactics” that “serves to prepare public opinion for the destruction of the Black Panther Party” (TBP, July 12, 1969: 17). The cumulation of violent police aggression against the Panthers on a nationwide scale towards the end of 1969 seemed to prove these conspiracy charges. But what about their factual foundation?

Crucial Role of the Media

In one important respect the Panthers were certainly right: the mass media did play a central role in the FBI’s Back-to-Black-Invisibility campaign. For one thing, J. Edgar Hoover was highly aware of the media’s power to shape public opinion and consequently sought to instrumentalize them in a dual way. Within the scope of COINTELPRO he advised his trusted selection of field officers not only to prevent groups such as the Black Panthers from spreading their philosophy through the mass media. In a parallel effort, they were also to seek ways to influence, if not control the content of media reports about black radicals towards exclusively adverse publicity. As Hoover pointed out, “in every instance careful attention must be given to the proposal to ensure the targeted group is disrupted, ridiculed, or discredited through the publicity and not merely publicized.” (Smith 1974: 15) This essentially implied a highly selective focus on issues that served to reproduce black stereotypes, particularly those pertaining to urban black youth. In the case of the Black Panther Party, the FBI subsequently sought to construct and control the media-produced public perception of the BPP as a hoodlum gang of violence-prone criminals of low moral caliber. Towards this end, the FBI sent anonymous mailings and entire media dossiers which portrayed the Panthers negatively to a broad range of groups and individuals regarded as possessing public influence – chief among them public officials and newspaper editors. (US Senate 1976: 212, 34-35) The material contained in these dossiers was widely quoted in the mass media, particularly the statements from such high-ranking officials as Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who, like Attorney General John Mitchell, had vowed to wipe out the BPP by the end of 1969 and had labeled the Panthers a “completely irresponsible, anarchistic group of criminals” (Churchill 2001: 84). Other officials obviously impressed by the FBI-fabricated dossiers included the San Francisco Mayor Joseph L. Alioto and the Deputy Chief of Police James G. Fisk of the LAPD. Alioto, who was seriously considering running for governor of California in 1970, had turned his “anti-Pantherism into one of his main campaign planks”, which lent even more publicity to his claim that the Panthers were nothing but “a bunch of hoodlums and gunmen, a small-time Murder Inc”, as The Christian Science Monitor (September 25, 1969: 3) and The New York Times (December 14, 1969: 64) quoted him. And The Washington Post (December 14, 1969: 24) chilled its readers with Fisk’s insistence that the Panthers were part of “a conspiracy to destroy our government”, with unnamed white plotters “providing leadership behind the scenes”. A racist display that at the same time grossly inflates the threat of violence emanating from an organization with often no more than a handful of members in various cities, and dwarfs the Panthers’ intellectual capabilities with the allegation that they needed guidance from whites to actually pull through. Quite obviously, the FBI-fabricated paranoia –  along with the racist conceptions thus advanced – rubbed off on public officials and was eagerly digested by the mass media.

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To further ensure negative publicity for the BPP, the FBI and local police repeatedly informed local news media of imminent police activities against the Party – as in Baltimore, where arrests of local BPP members flashed across the screen, and the police, on another occasion, announced the issuing of arrest warrants for Panthers via local TV stations. (McCutchen 1998: 121, 126) And in Chicago, the FBI and the police made sure that the BPP was negatively exposed in the local news media after each of the four headquarter raids between June and October 1969. Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo from Philadelphia proved particularly imaginative: he routinely mobilized a corps of newspeople and photographers to record all of the major police raids on BPP offices. On the occasion of three simultaneous raids just prior to the Philadelphia Panthers’ hosting of the Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention in the late summer of 1970, he ordered the 14 arrested Panthers to strip naked in front of the gathered media. The photo appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News and was subsequently distributed nationwide by the Associated Press. (Churchill 2001: 99) A particularly blatant example of how black radicals could be publicly dehumanized and relegated to an inferior status, and proof of the Panthers’ charge that the mass media not only functioned in an inherently racist way, but that the media thus assisted the establishment in reproducing and upholding white supremacy. The effectiveness of such ventures was facilitated by the FBI’s carefully assembled and nationally coordinated list of so-called friendly media sources, which encompassed a network of over 300 journalists ready to “pump the bureau line”, as the historian and political activist Ward Churchill argued. According to him, 25 such ‘friendly’ journalists existed in Chicago alone, and in the much smaller New Haven he counted even 28. For greatest possible efficiency and effect, the FBI also kept a blacklist of reporters critical of the FBI. In addition, the Bureau possessed so-called confidential sources within the media – read: informants – to ensure cooperation. In the case of the Black Panther Party, it was largely through these previously established networks that the COINTELPRO operatives propagated false and derogatory stories. While in some cases Bureau specialists wrote entire news stories, columns, or opinion pieces themselves and let them appear with the signature of a friendly journalist, the specially designated reporters were mainly furnished with exclusive information and fabricated evidence. (Churchill 2001: 84; US Senate 1976: 34-35) Two reporters most likely on the FBI’s list of friendly media sources were Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, whose joint articles repeatedly appeared in the highly influential Washington Post. In early 1970, for instance, two articles that discredited the Panthers extremely appeared under the names and photos of Evans and Novak, one flashing the headline Liberals Rush to Aid Panthers, Closing Eyes to Criminal Record, the other claiming in its title that

Crucial Role of the Media

Panther Charges Against Police Are Not Borne Out by the Facts. Evans and Novak presented a host of charges geared towards rupturing public sympathies for the BPP, which had surged in the aftermath of the concerted and excessively violent police attacks against the Panthers in Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. The arguments presented by Evans and Novak virtually smacked of FBI influence. They deplored the Panthers’ supposed “close ties with overseas Communist parties” and suspected that the Party received financial aid from these sources. The Panthers’ community service programs were mentioned in parentheses and only to be discarded as mere “gimmicks”. The bulk of both articles was concerned with constructing the Panthers as dangerous and violence-prone criminals. Sweeping indictments were used: “Nobody knows the full extent of Panther involvement in extortion, robbery, and burglary. The arrest of more than 350 Panthers on criminal charges in 1969 alone barely scratches the surface of suspected Panther participation in unresolved and undetected crime,” as an example of which they named “[e]xtortion from white merchants in the ghetto.” Concerning the BPP’s repeated violent clashes with police forces, they simply contended that, “[t]ypically, the Panthers opened fire first.” To add to the chills of the readers, they claimed – with obvious reference to confidential governmental sources – that “Panthers in a large Western city were themselves plotting a late December ambush intended to assassinate three police officers. Thanks to police intelligence work, the killings were aborted (although, to protect sources of information, no arrests were made).” (The Washington Post, January 14, 1970: A19; The Washington Post, January 16, 1970: A19) While it is uncertain whether this last point was, in fact, supported by evidence or merely an FBI-manufactured charge, the deliberate fabrication of documentation for the media was extensively practiced in the context of COINTELPRO. According to the historian Kenneth O’Reilly (1991: 300), the FBI “drafted dozens of ‘treatises’, including one entitled The Black Clan, for referral to appropriate news media representatives.” In January 1970, Hoover specifically advised nine field offices to furnish the press and TV stations with unfavorable data “of a public source nature” concerning local BPP activities. As a result, numerous adverse editorials and TV programs appeared between May and October in the Los Angeles area alone. (US Senate 1976: 219; Jeffries / Foley 2007: 285-286) The actual extent to which the FBI as well as local and state judicial institutions were willing to purposely falsify evidence regarding the Panthers and then present it to the media, is exemplified in the case of the police killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in December 1969. State Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan called press conference after press conference in the immediate aftermath of the deadly police raid, in order to furnish the media with the police version of what had happened – in particular, to insist that the police had been violently attacked by the Panthers from inside the apartment and had opened fire only in response. The police, in fact, went

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as far as reenacting and filming their version of the raid for CBS national television. (Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police 1973: ix) Hanrahan, in turn, exclusively provided the Chicago Tribune with – falsely captioned – ‘official’ police photos. As a result, the Chicago Tribune and other local newspapers continued to carry only and exclusively the police version of what had happened for days – a version which later proved to be entirely false: the Panthers had fired but one single shot. (Holder 1990: 300; Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police 1973; The Murder of Fred Hampton 1971) Just as the BPP had suspected, a similar cooperation and procedure in the case of the New York 21 – involving the FBI, the state attorney, the police, and The New York Daily News, among other papers – led to “a veritable blizzard of police- and FBI-generated publicity” in the immediate aftermath of the first arrests. 4 As a result, the thus slandered Panthers were, for all practical purposes, convicted in the public’s eyes before the trial had even begun. During most of the more than ten months prior to the trial, moreover, the 21 Panthers were scattered over six different jails, with the media being denied access to any of them. Thus, FBI, police, and the state attorney assured that all information concerning the case against the New York 21 came exclusively from them. (The Washington Post, February 5, 1970: A22) There were other instances where the FBI actively sought to prevent or stop the media from publishing BPP standpoints. In Denver, for instance, after the police had driven by the local BPP office and shot into it – notably while several Panthers were present –, the Panthers immediately organized a press conference concerning this incident. Thereupon, the FBI seems to have contacted several local newspapers, as is suggested by one of the reporters present at the BPP press conference: he informed the Panthers “that his editor and the F.B.I. had warned him not to print the story” (TBP, January 15, 1969: 10). Irrespective of whether such patterns experienced by the Panthers were, in fact, influenced directly by the FBI – it is clear that from 1970 on, the US Justice Department actively sought to silence those media and reporters which still provided the Panthers with a platform to create and multiply Black Visibility. The grand jury created to investigate the Black Panther Party also shed an eye on the mass media: it subpoenaed the material of TV stations, newspaper reporters, and independent journalists who had interviewed and filmed the Black Panthers and published their statements. The Chicago filmmaker Mike Gray, who was editing a documentary about the murder of Fred Hampton at the time, was ordered to hand over a large segment of footage shot inside the BPP apartment immediately after the police raid. (Christian Science Monitor, February 4, 1970: 15) Earl Caldwell, a black West Coast correspondent of The New York Times who had repeatedly portrayed the Panthers in the renowned national newspaper, was ordered to appear before the grand jury to present

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“notes and tape recordings of interviews covering the period from Jan. 1, 1969, to date” (The New York Times, February 3, 1970: 20). CBS national networks was served with two subpoenas. One came directly from the grand jury and requested all interview and film material relating to the appearance of David Hilliard on the distinguished CBS program 60 Minutes. The other was served by the CIA and FBI, who demanded a complete record of all correspondence, memoranda, notes, and phone calls made in connection with the Black Panther Party, covering records from the CBS national news department as well as from individual CBS-owned regional stations across the United States. (The New York Times, January 27, 1970: 87) What role, then, did the mass media play in shaping public perception of the Black Panther Party? Were they, indeed, deliberately upholding white supremacy with their reporting, as their distribution of the blatantly humiliating picture of the Philadelphia Panthers, lined up and stripped naked, suggests?

The M ass M edia : K ep t in L e ading S trings B y the G overnment ? To be sure, the Justice Department and the FBI certainly thought the upholding of white supremacy to be part of the media’s responsibility – hence the subpoenas. Ironically, it is precisely the reaction of such influential media as CBS, The New York Times, Time, Life or Newsweek to these subpoenas that corroborates the Panthers’ charges of the mass media’s conceptual Black Invisibility and their racist functioning. While there still were individual reporters contemplating whether, in fact, “the Government wished deliberately to disrupt reporters’ access to the Panthers, so as to cut off some of their publicity” (The New York Times, February 6, 1970: 40), the media basically worried about its own status. Something of a small outcry went through the mass media concerning a possible government infringement of the freedom of the press. Particularly the extent and scope of the subpoenas met with opposition, as they were perceived as “an unwarranted handicap on legitimate investigative journalism” (The New York Times, January 27, 1970: 87). Most interesting, however, is what came to light as a side effect of the media’s defense of investigative journalism and inside reporting: the existence of a routine, close collaboration between the mass media and the government concerning the handling of insider information. The nature of this collaboration was such that it did not threaten the confidence established by the journalists, yet it still allowed the government to receive confidential information – “a tradition of mutual nonaggression and a pattern of cloudy law, leaving the Government and the media to work out specific cases as they develop,” as The New York Times (February 6, 1970: 40) bluntly stated. Not surprisingly

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then, the stir caused by the various subpoenas was little more than a storm in a teacup. Attorney General John Mitchell was quick to offer “an unusual confession of error and expression of sympathy for the ‘peculiar problems’ that a subpoena to testify raises for reporters,” and reached out his hand to negotiate and find a compromise. Thus, he reassured the mass media that past practices would continue – namely, that “subpoenas have been served but ignored, with no further attempt to enforce them,” as The New York Times pointed out in the same issue, and that “the Federal Government has never forced a newsman into court to testify against his will.” When the Justice Department chose to proceed otherwise with practically the entire staff of The Black Panther, however, and even jailed TBP reporters who refused to testify, not a single voice of criticism was raised in the mass media. In the end, much rather, the official media all complied with the subpoenas. Regarding David Hilliard’s appearance on 60 Minutes, CBS turned over all material to the grand jury – including portions never shown to the public –, reasoning that the larger issue was “a criminal case involving an individual accused of threatening the life of the President of the United States” (The New York Times, January 27, 1970: 87; The New York Times, February 3, 1970: 20). An absurd statement from a historical perspective, as it was but a rhetorical figure of speech Hilliard had uttered at a rally. The behavior of the mass media in response to these federal subpoenas reveals two aspects of their basic institutional functioning: the extent of voluntary cooperation with the government’s Back-to-Black-Invisibility campaign, and their virtually exclusive focus on the BPP in a criminal context. To begin with, the mass media repeatedly offered the police, the FBI, and other legal powers an exclusive platform to present their views. The New York Times, for instance, gave FBI director J. Edgar Hoover the opportunity to present an exhaustive response to several newspaper articles published around the turn of the decade, which had reported the BPP’s gains in sympathy after the police raids on the Los Angeles and Chicago BPP offices and apartments in December 1969.5 According to Hoover, “the police in several cities had been wrongly accused of harassment by many well-intentioned but uninformed voices echoing outright lies generated by the Panthers.” He maintained that “law enforcement agencies were not to blame for confrontations between the Black Panther Party and the police,” and “attributed Panther clashes with the police in both Chicago and Los Angeles to the militant black organization’s intense hatred of and vindicative hysteria against local police.” Once again, he discredited the Panthers with the standard FBI label of a “‘black extremist organization’ consisting mostly of ‘hoodlum-type revolutionaries’, who stockpile weapons, espouse Marxist-Leninist doctrines and terrorize black communities.” Hoover even went as far as claiming that the Panthers – and everybody who as much

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as spoke out publicly on their behalf – endangered the functioning of the US justice system. He criticized judges in Detroit, Washington, Philadelphia, and Saint Louis for having “given light sentences to hardened criminals”: “The law-abiding majority is rapidly losing its patience with those whose flagrant abuse of the humanitarian principles of parole and probation makes a mockery out of justice.” (The New York Times, May 8, 1970: 21) Failing to question such sweeping accusations as to their factual grounds and to grant the thus accused the opportunity to respond and in turn present their evidence stands in stark opposition to journalistic principles of reporting. It took The New York Times (October 15, 2016: online) almost 50 years to admit that much. When reporting clashes between the Panthers and the police, the mass media always mentioned the police version prominently, if not exclusively. Even the rare, more in-depth reports exhibited this pattern, such as the one in The Washington Post (December 14, 1969: 24) about the context of the police raid on the Los Angeles BPP offices. While quoting several voices from the neighboring black community, particularly concerning their fear of the police, the article gave two high-ranking LAPD officers a large platform to deny that there were any grounds for these fears. Additionally, the article highlighted the police-side of the story through such intermittent titles as “Police Wounded”, or the thus pointing out that it was a “30-Year Veteran” who presented the “Police Argument”. Compared to the BPP’s strategic efforts to get the media to document the racist functioning of key US institutions, their effect on the urban black community, and what the BPP was trying to do against this, the platform the Panthers received by the mass media was virtually nil.6 In the rare instances where the Panthers themselves actually got the opportunity to directly address an audience – as in radio or TV talk shows –, they were immediately cornered into defending the criminal charges leveled against them by the executive and judicial powers of the government. When Bobby Seale was interviewed by the Bay Area radio station KQED in the summer of 1969, for instance, the host of the show “spent considerable time introducing Seale by recounting a series of accusations and indictments of the Panthers, most of them taken from highly questionable ‘evidence’ of informers,” as a critical reporter charged in an open letter. “When Seale himself had an opportunity to speak, he was hardly given a fair chance to present a balancing picture of the views of the Black Panther Party.” (TBP, July 12, 1969: 4) In the handful of print articles that mentioned the BPP’s community service programs at all, all possible positive associations were immediately deconstructed. When The Wall Street Journal (August 29, 1969: 1, 12) featured an in-depth report on the BPP, headlined The Black Panthers: Negro Militants Use Free Food, Medical Aid to Promote Revolution, the subtitles promptly stated that “Anti-Capitalist Indoctrination Comes After Breakfast” and “Many Leaders

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Are Jailed – Teaching Hatred of the ‘Pigs’”. In this way, the community service programs of the Panthers were routinely incriminated and related to criminal charges, such as the extortion of money from ghetto merchants. Within the text, the BPP’s “repeated bloody clashes with police and association with major crimes” were listed extensively, including previous arrest records, indictments, and charges against the Party brought forth by police informants and agents provocateurs. As in other articles, these criminal charges against the Panthers – or the origins of those charges – were never questioned; they were simply cited and repeated. The mass media’s virtually exclusive focus on the criminal charges leveled against the Panthers is concomitant with the fact that the overwhelming majority of articles on the BPP appeared in response to clashes with the police, after the arrest of Panthers, and in the context of Panther trials. Often, the headline itself was already incriminating. In the context of Bobby Seale’s Chicago trial, for instance, The New York Times (October 1, 1969: 34) headlined Threats Against 2 ‘Chicago 8’ Jurors Reported, with the subtitle revealing that “Letters Signed ‘Black Panthers’” were involved. The damage to the Panthers was thus done, although the article itself was not only highly critical of Judge Hoffman, who had previously ordered Seale bound and gagged, but also quoted the BPP’s contention that the letters were part of a frame-up – which, indeed, they were: fabricated by the FBI, as the previous chapter has shown. Another article in The New York Times (August 1, 1969: 67) was titled Five Policemen Shot in Chicago During Battle at Panther Offices, only to disclose further down in the text that not only was none of the policemen wounded seriously, but also that there were two totally opposing statements of what had actually happened. While the police claimed that they were shot at from inside the BPP office, Panthers and witnesses from the neighboring black community maintained that it was the police who had opened fire. And again, a litany of arrests and criminal charges against the Panthers followed. Arguably the most vicious series of articles unfolded in the early summer of 1969, when the mass media spread sweeping accusations made against the BPP during Senate hearings – accusations that stemmed from ex-Panthers of questionable credibility, Larry and Jean Powell. Panthers: A Recital of Fear and Crime, the Washington Post (June 19, 1969: A1, A7) titled across its front page, and the Christian Science Monitor (June 23, 1969: 3) blurted: Ex-Black Panther tells of arms, extortion, campus action. The Powells were presented as victims of an organization that “thrives on armed robberies and shakedowns of ghetto merchants” and quoted in excessive detail, including claims that multiple robberies took place each night in Oakland, and that such large sums as $ 50.000 to 100.000 were flowing into the pockets of the BPP’s national headquarters on a monthly basis – with “none of it” being spent on the ghetto poor. What the press never mentioned – quite probably because they did not

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know at the time – was that Larry and Jean Powell were expelled from the BPP after having been active within the Party not only as informants, but as actual agents provocateurs throughout 1968.7 Yet, why did the media never question neither the credibility of these two nor any of their statements? Why did they quote the Powells verbatim so often, and leave their accusations undisputed? Why was the Black Panther Party not given an opportunity to present its side of the story? “The cumulative effect of leaving through such material is overwhelming,” the political scientist Edward P. Morgan (2006: 331) concludes after having systematically scanned national magazine articles on the Panthers between 1966 and 1976: “The Panthers are reduced to a single, dominant essence – they are about violence and crime, period.” Consciously or not – and most probably based on routine –, the mass media also participated in the COINTELPRO-instigated smear campaigns against white liberals of celebrity status who publicly supported the Panthers in the aftermath of the Chicago and Los Angeles police raids. The most prominent among these were certainly the Bernsteins, who held a fundraising cocktail party for the BPP in early 1970. They were ridiculed and portrayed as naïve coddlers of criminals by The New York Times (January 15, 1970: 48) or Time magazine, and ultimately in Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic, which originally appeared in the New York magazine. A kind of news reporting that effectively dissuaded other potential BPP supporters and quickly hushed liberal voices inclined to publicly lend the Panthers credibility and legitimacy. (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 283-284; Morgan 2006: 346-349) All in all, then, while the mass media constantly reported about the BPP, the Panthers themselves were routinely and systematically marginalized – they were treated as insubstantial, and thus relegated to a status of subpersonhood: Back to Black Invisibility. As James Baldwin had noted in the case of the most prominent incarcerated Panther at the time: “Huey is one of the most important people to have been produced by the American chaos. His fate is very important. And not one person in white America, if they read the mass media, knows anything about Huey, what produced him or what produced the Black Panther Party.” (Heath 1976a: ix)

The Part y N e wspaper : The W orld as S een F rom the O ther E nd of the G un With their very first testing of media waters, the Panthers realized that they needed to create a counter-public sphere in their struggle for Black Visibility – they needed their own ‘voice’: “Huey compared the Party’s need for a publication with the armed struggle of the Vietnamese people that was going on at the time,” Emory Douglas recounted years after the BPP’s demise. “He said that

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the Vietnamese carried mimeograph machines wherever they went to produce flyers and other literature to spread the word about their fight to free their country. The Party needed to have a newspaper so we could tell our own story.” (Abron 1993: 348) A newspaper that presented “factual, reliable information” – an “alternative to ‘government approved’ stories presented in the mass media” that would “present the facts, not stories as dictated by the oppressor, but as seen from the other end of a gun,” as The Black Panther advertised itself. When the Panthers started their own newspaper in the spring of 1967, it was designed to present a radically different, a distinctly black perspective – “a conglomeration of the historical experience and present events of the blood, sweat and tears of Black people here in racist America” – and to thus create Black Visibility, to tell “the true story of what happens in the concrete inner-city jungles of Babylon” and to document “before the whole world” how blacks and other nonwhite people were oppressed and exploited by the US government. 8 The very first issue of The Black Panther was concerned with the case of Denzil Dowell, a young black from Richmond who had been shot and killed by the police under questionable circumstances, and other “racist murders” that had occurred shortly before in the various black communities of the Bay Area. (TBP, April 25, 1967: 1-4) Produced roughly once a month at the outset, the Party newspaper soon developed into the backbone of the BPP and its struggle for Black Visibility: it tied the Party together organizationally, financially, and ideologically, it served as a recruiting and organizing tool within local black communities and also the larger New Left, and it quite virtually interlinked all the Panthers’ efforts to create Black Visibility on the physical, conceptual, and structural levels – it was, in other words, the BPP’s central oppositional institution. And The Black Panther was without question the BPP’s most successful – and professional – venture. Initially printed on a mimeograph machine at the homes of Eldridge Cleaver’s attorney Beverly Axelrod and various Party members, the newspaper received a steady production site once the Panthers moved into their larger office on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley in January 1968. From then on, it appeared on a weekly basis and was typeset, first on a justifax machine, later on a compugrafic machine. (Abron 1993: 349-350) Probably from around that time, The Black Panther was printed in San Francisco by a company named Howard Quinn. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 3) For more than a decade it went to press every Thursday night.9 As a professional news product, it appeared in a steady length of about 20 pages between at least 1969 and 1972, was carefully layouted and featured only very few spelling mistakes. This is all the more remarkable since none of the Panthers working on the Party newspaper had ever had any formal journalistic training or newspaper experience until they started working on the paper’s staff. 10 For the Party leaders, the paper’s dedicated rank and file staff was a source of pride. As Seale (1991: 179) pointed out, “the quality

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and development of that paper has come from brothers who have previously been in jail, brothers who have previously just been on the block, lumpen proletarian everyday Afro-American brothers who became politically organized and politically conscious, and learned their skills in producing that paper.” The staff included a managing editor, a circulation manager, and a layout team headed by Emory Douglas, who oversaw the paper’s format and developed its layout from mid-1967 on. 11 Producing the newspaper was a full-time job, with the staff’s responsibilities including layout and proofreading, the production of artwork, and the taking of photos, sometimes also researching and writing articles. (Davenport 1998: 197) An ad in The Black Panther on January 15, 1969 indicated the growing size and workload of the staff: it called out for typists, writers, typesetters, stenographers, photographers, and office equipment. During its heyday the newspaper must have had well over a dozen Panthers working full time, as its staff still included 13 members in 1974, at a time when the BPP was again a local organization based in California’s Bay Area. (Abron 1998: 182) As professional as its production was the paper’s distribution. Setting up an actual distribution system that reached over the Bay Area had become necessary in the very early stages of the production of The Black Panther, as demand for the paper was rising as a result of the State Capitol incident and its nationwide coverage in the media by mid-1967. In fact, the increasing demand for The Black Panther was a major impulse for the BPP’s organizational growth: the paper became a tool for organizing new chapters and branches. “The whole bureaucracy of Black Panther offices started around the distribution of the newspaper,” Eldridge Cleaver later recalled. “It was one of the most powerful and successful things we did.”12 Sam Napier, who had become the paper’s circulation manager by early 1968, travelled the country to secure distributors nationwide. (Abron 1993: 350) Special contracts were made with United and TWA airlines, who distributed The Black Panther every week from San Francisco to destinations across the United States. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 3) From there, BPP chapters and their regional distribution managers organized the second level of distribution, making sure that every Party branch received its share of copies as soon as possible. The regional chapters’ responsibility probably also included the distribution to non-Party places which sold The Black Panther, such as campus and other specialized or left-wing book shops. Organizations and individuals from across the country or from abroad who subscribed to the BPP’s newspaper more likely received it by mail, directly from national headquarters in Oakland. Since a new issue appeared every week, the Party’s distribution network obviously functioned efficiently and fast. The local rank and file played a major part in this finely meshed distribution network: selling the Party newspaper in the streets of the black community comprised a central part of their daily activity. In fact, each of them had an

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assigned quota of papers they were to sell every day – not only in the streets but also on campus, in community institutions outside the black community which had a largely black staff, and, specifically, in housing projects, where selling the paper meant going from door to door explaining about the BPP and its programs. (Holder 1990: 183) Particularly in the early days, children would help hawking the paper; in turn, they received part of the proceeds from each copy. And Party leaders helped to boost paper sales at speaking engagements and other public occasions. 13 In the course of the Free Huey campaign in 1968, the Panther newspaper became “the most visible, most constant symbol of the Party”, as David Hilliard (1993: 149) recalled, “its front page a familiar sight at every demonstration and in every storefront window organizing project throughout the country.” From a historical perspective The Black Panther is judged to be “one of the most visible manifestations of the BPP during this era” – the late 1960s and early 1970s. (Davenport 1998: 193) The circulation figures of the Party newspaper certainly corroborate this powerful multiplication of Black Visibility the Panthers were able to achieve. The very first issue in April 1967 was already printed in 3000 copies. From 1968 on, the paper’s circulation rose rapidly and came to surpass 125.000 copies by 1970, according to both Bobby Seale and JoNina Abron, who later served as editor. The FBI even estimated the circulation of The Black Panther to exceed 139.000 in May 1970, tendency rising. 14 Local Party branches reported their sales numbers with according pride. Milwaukee, for instance, stated in June 1969: “Since the reorganization of the Milwaukee Branch of the Party we have tripled our circulation from 600 to 1800 papers and are looking towards 5000 as soon as papers become more available.” (TBP, June 21, 1969: 8) And the Illinois chapter boasted of selling 8000 papers a week around the same time, probably in Chicago alone, and expressed its confidence in raising this number to 15.000 within the next few months. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 5) The tremendous distribution efforts also reflect how essential the newspaper was in terms of Party finances. Once published regularly, The Black Panther quickly became not only the most reliable, but the main source of funds for the BPP. (Seale 1991: 179) Initially sold at 10 cents a copy, it soon cost from 25 to 50 cents, depending on whether it was sold in the streets or in a bookstore. (Church League 1969: 19-20) When looking at how production and distribution costs added up – producing the paper cost 8 cents a copy, mailing and shipping 2 cents, and Party members were allowed to keep 10 cents –, the net return from each copy sold in the streets was only 5 cents. Both national headquarters and the local chapters and branches received their share from the proceeds of the paper sales. With this money, they paid rent on the Party offices, phone bills, and other expenses, as Seale (1991: 181) explained. Basically, then, the net returns from paper sales kept the everyday organizational structures of the BPP going. Very often, they also secured the daily economic survival of the rank and

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file. “Ironically, as we fed hungry children breakfast, and later gave out bags of groceries to the poor, often times Panthers themselves had little food and certainly very little money,” as one Party member recalled. “We lived mostly off paper sales.” (Jennings 1998: 260) The Black Panther tied together the BPP organizationally in other respects as well: as a communicative link and platform, it created group identity and coherence, particularly during the months of rapid Party growth across the country. And it functioned as the Central Committee’s key organ through which it disseminated all its directives, general policy, and Party ideology. The BPP’s 10-point program and its set of rules were a mainstay in The Black Panther. When the so-called purges started in 1969, the rules, by then extended to 26, plus the “3 Main Rules of Discipline” and the “8 Points of Attention” appeared regularly from January 4, 1969 for at least eight months. But not only that: rule #17 explicitly demanded that “[a]ll Leadership personnel who expel a member must submit this information to the Editor of the Newspaper, so that it will be published in the paper and will be known by all chapters and branches” – an attempt to gain organizational transparency and control that ultimately proved futile and counterproductive, as the preceding chapter has demonstrated. Throughout the Party’s history, The Black Panther functioned to set out “the correct political line” and ideology of the Party as promoted by the Central Committee in Oakland. Well into 1969, a major focus in the newspaper’s articles rested accordingly on ideological, often quite theoretical aspects. Newton, the Party’s chief ideologist and theoretician, had his own column, Quotations from Huey. Its title obviously referred to one of the regularly quoted ideological and organizational fathers of the Black Panther Party, Mao Tsetung. Other revolutionary black leaders, both historical and contemporary, also had their columns which appeared irregularly in The Black Panther, among them Malcolm X and W.E.B. Du Bois. The writings of Newton, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Mao Tse-tung ranked high on the Central Committee’s mandatory reading list – but it was topped clearly by the Party newspaper, as various former Panthers pointed out. 15 Not surprisingly, The Black Panther also occupied central stage in the political education classes of all chapters and branches – with a role that reached beyond discussing Party ideology. For one thing, The Black Panther also carried controversial internal issues, among them especially the role of women – in the Sisters’ Column or elsewhere – and the question of violence. On the other hand, the Party paper played a key role in initiating the various community service programs of the BPP. National headquarters had officially launched the setting up of the Breakfast for School Children program in The Black Panther (December 21, 1968: 15) with a call that was placed in every issue for close to half a year. Weekly reports or parts thereof began to appear with increasing frequency in TBP and informed

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the nationwide Panther community about local Party activities and about the various issues other BPP branches struggled with. Among other things, these reports thus provided both national headquarters and the local chapters and branches with an overview of the state of implementation of community service programs nationwide: The Black Panther announced each new opening of a local program and informed about the continuous functioning of the various programs in different cities. It also supplied model examples for other chapters and branches to emulate, concerning setting up and running community service programs. The New York Panthers, for instance, featured a step-by-step guide on how to proceed when setting up a breakfast program. (TBP, March 23, 1969: 17) And The Black Panther offered a platform for sharing difficulties and showing how to cope with them when establishing these programs. While the Party newspaper continued to feature articles on Party ideology, reports about local community activities increasingly took center stage, coupled with background articles that addressed issues affecting poor urban blacks in their daily lives: housing, health care, education, family structure, police brutality, exploitative business practices, alcohol and drug abuse, and so on. Generally, these articles related to concrete experiences in the local black communities and pointed out the ties existing between the Panthers and their community. Or the articles sought to establish these ties in the first place: the launch of the community service programs in the late fall of 1968 largely grew out of the realization that the struggle for Black Visibility first had to be won in the black communities. “The minds of the black masses have been divided and brainwashed by a racist-infested pig structure,” the Panther leaders argued, with specific reference to the role of the mass media in this. By building oppositional institutions that served the needs of the black community, they sought “to erase the negative impression that has been dropped on the Party by the racist-owned and -operated news media.”16 The Black Panther was to play a central part in motivating the black community to join the Panthers in their struggle. For, as editorial statements and other self-reflective articles consistently declared, the paper’s key purpose was the “raising of the consciousness of the people” and to “teach the people the strategic means for resisting the power structure” (TBP, January 17, 1970: 8-12; TBP, February 2, 1969: 5, 16). Hence, the launch of the breakfast programs was accompanied from the outset by calls for help in setting up and running them on the local level – calls that ranged from supplying information concerning locations for a breakfast site over donating food and cooking utensils to volunteering time in preparing the meals and cleaning up afterwards. 17 As soon as the first breakfast programs were established in the Bay Area, the Panthers hired a photo journalist who portrayed their breakfasts in the Party newspaper, in order to further promote community support. “Make an appointment with the manager of your nearest Safeway store,” the paper suggested. “Tell him

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about the free breakfast program. Show him the pictures of this page. He’ll agree there’s nothing wrong with kids getting free breakfast.” (TBP, April 27, 1969: 5, 10) Thus the black community was encouraged to participate in the BPP’s oppositional institutions and bring them to life. To further engage the black community in the Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility, the Party newspaper offered community members a platform and actively encouraged the voicing of grievances about local businesses and other institutions shaping black ghetto existence. (TBP, August 16, 1969: 12) In this same vein, the Panthers created such jobs as community reporters in the aftermath of the United Front Against Fascism conference in the summer of 1969 and opened BPP-affiliated offices to increase the exchange with the community – i.e., by conducting political education classes there for the black neighborhood. Once more, The Black Panther served as the basis for discussion in these classes, as its concrete examples documented how Panthers across the United States actively fought to improve everyday problems of poor urban blacks and organized local black communities. At the same time, the Party newspaper advanced alternative evaluations of political, social, and economic realities not represented in the mass media: by documenting the various aspects and concrete expressions of institutional racism in businesses and chain stores, but also in public schools, health institutions, public housing and city planning authorities and welfare institutions, The Black Panther put the community service programs into a larger context. It was mainly through this explanatory context provided in and by the Party’s newspaper that the programs achieved their expository power. Last but not least, the thus advanced Black Visibility proved instrumental in creating sympathies and financial support from a larger, also white public: national headquarters received numerous donations of money and occasionally also food from across the country – donations specifically addressed to the Party’s community service programs. The Black Panther was equally instrumental as a tool for conceptually educating and organizing the black community and mobilizing public support when it came to issues that related to the Panthers’ struggle against the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the US government. Particularly concerning the violent clashes with police forces that stood so much in the focus of mass media reports on the BPP, the Party newspaper fundamentally challenged the hegemonial perspective thus purported by pointing out in each case – often with carefully collected evidence – how the police had been the initial aggressor and the Panthers had simply responded according to the Party’s principle of self-defense. 18 And it did not hesitate to point out its role in exposing the racist functioning of the government’s legal powers, coupled with a call for financial support to its readers: “Because of the severe repression that the pigs have brought down on our Party last week, (and the high ransom we

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had to pay,) we have had to cut down on the size and circulation of our paper,” a framed statement declared in the August 30, 1969 issue of TBP. “If you believe in the freedom of the press and in our right to publish the paper that exposes the bullshit that’s going on in this country, please send contributions.” As more and more Panthers ended up in prison as a result of their commitment, the Party newspaper also became a key organizing tool within prisons. And The Black Panther helped groups in farther surroundings as well: it assisted various nonwhite groups allied with the BPP in organizing their respective communities by offering them space in the paper to present themselves and their activities, among them Los Siete de la Raza and the Brown Berets. The Black Panther generally served as the key tool to mobilize support within the larger New Left movement: both local and national BPP demonstrations and rallies on behalf of Panther leaders pursued by the government were thus organized. At the same time, the Panthers prepared large nationwide events via their newspaper, among them the United Front Against Fascism conference, which was announced and administered through registration forms in several issues. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 2; TBP, June 14, 1969: 19) Moreover, The Black Panther’s growing international section presented issues and theoretical concepts which appealed to the radical left’s antiwar, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist stance. And it published telegrams and letters of mutual support from and to groups involved in various anticolonial liberation struggles around the world. As a matter of fact, Eldridge Cleaver, who ran the Party’s international office in Algiers – the city which was dubbed “media capital” of Africa at the time –, at one time actually attempted to create a Revolutionary Peoples Communication Network there which would unite all BPP allies worldwide. And the US-based Panthers contemplated in 1969 to establish a publishing house which would produce, among other things, a daily newspaper. 19 Although these publicity ventures never materialized, they illustrate the BPP’s determination and imaginativeness in their pursuit of Black Visibility by way of creating a farreaching and fine-meshed counter-public sphere. On the local level, Party branches produced a variety of printed items, among them flyers, leaflets, pamphlets, and bulletins. Some of them served to announce rallies, demonstrations, picnics, parties, and other events organized by the BPP. Others meant to spread information about Party activities, particularly the community service programs: the New York City Panthers, for instance, advertised their Breakfast for Children program by passing out leaflets in the neighborhood. (TBP, June 7, 1969: 20) With the spread of the Party-affiliated Community Information Centers, the Panthers seem to have attempted to create Black Community Bulletins which contained some national information, probably taken from The Black Panther, but mainly covered local events. One example is the 16-page “San Francisco Edition” dated August 1970.

Crucial Role of the Media

Some chapters like the ones in Southern California, Rockford, and Chicago produced a regional Newsletter or Ministry of Information Bulletin – “to combat the daily racism perpetuated by the city newspapers,” as the Chicago Panthers pointed out (TBP, June 21, 1969: 7; Alkebulan 2007: 158; Rhodes 2007: 112). National headquarters also produced and distributed the irregular Black Panther Party Ministry of Information Bulletins, which were individually numbered and usually contained a single topic of national actuality and concern. No.12, for instance, dating from July 5, 1969, covered the BPP’s antifascism campaign and included texts written by Seale, Hilliard, and BPP lawyers Garry and Patterson. No.13 dealt with The Kidnapping of Chairman Bobby Seale just before the New Haven trial. The national distribution office of the BPP also circulated booklets and pamphlets concerned with a variety of subjects, such as Panther Sisters on Women’s Liberation. (Heath 1976a: 339-345) Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide by Michael ‘Cetewayo’ Tabor, coleader of the New York BPP chapter, was particularly widely distributed. (TBP, July 25, 1970: 14) Most of these pamphlets contained messages by Panther leaders – printed speeches or messages from prison originally produced on tape. In addition to these printed items, the BPP’s national distribution office also circulated an ever expanding panoply of other Panther publicity material: posters and greeting cards designed by Emory Douglas; tapes and records with speeches of Party leaders or revolutionary songs by Elaine Brown and such BPP-affiliated groups as The Lumpen.20 A diary entry of a Baltimore Panther specifically attested to the fact that these products were strategically employed tools in the BPP’s Black Visibility quest: “Lots of new material from National Distribution now. Buttons, posters, Che’s diary, Elaine’s album, and the Chairman’s book due out soon. Keeps the community involved in our support. Spreads the visibility of the Party around.” (McCutchen 1998: 124, original emphasis) Once more, the Party newspaper played the key role: it not only advertised all BPP paraphernalia and printed material, but also included the necessary order forms. Moreover, since the Panthers were well aware that their main constituency was not an avid reading community and that it could thus be reached and eventually organized far better through actions, speeches, and images, The Black Panther itself came to rely heavily on Emory Douglas’ artwork, as it was predicated on this conception of the black community. It soon became a central feature of the Party newspaper, as Frank Jones, managing editor of TBP in early 1969, emphasized: “The eye-appeal of The Black Panther is a tremendous factor in influencing the circulation of the newspaper, and Emory is directly responsible for the new increase in circulation that can be attributed to the eye-appeal of the paper’s layout.” (TBP, March 16, 1969: 9) The new iconography of black men and women created by Douglas was certainly a

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central aspect of this appeal, as were the ways in which he sought to capture and visualize various forms of institutional racism in his drawings. Moreover, he and other Panther artists – among them Tarika Jones, who signed as “matilaba”, and a certain “blood brother” – actually visualized news: The Black Panther repeatedly featured entire comic strips that sometimes stretched over several issues and depicted what was happening in other urban black communities, for instance in terms of police repression, always showing the Panthers and the black community outsmarting the police. The figures were clearly identifiable as real-existing persons – policemen, for instance, sometimes wore badge numbers of real-life counterparts infamous for harassing members of the black community. (Doss 2001: 183) And the plot satirized recent incidents and those involved, like the series about Philadelphia police chief Rizzo and his attempts to destroy the local BPP branch, or “The Adventures of Mafia Joe” series that reviled the mayor of San Francisco. In an effort to reach broader segments of the black community, the Panthers also began to print their Party program in the form of a comic: each of the ten points was simplified to the demand issued in the first part and visualized by a concrete example of how to put it into practice. (TBP, July 12, 1969: 20) Canny to the overriding power of the visual when it came to efficiently counter the Black Invisibility reproduced by the mass media, the Panthers increasingly also relied on photography and its documentary power. They counted on the specific eye-witness character of photographs particularly in the many instances of confrontations with the police: The Black Panther is full of pictures showing raided and violently destroyed BPP offices with splintered furniture, heaps of paperwork and other administrative infrastructure splattered across the room, broken food cans and other supplies for the Panthers’ community service programs thus rendered useless.21 In April 1969, BPP national headquarters even issued a call via the Party newspaper to all chapters and branches, urging them to systematically collect such visual evidence of police brutality. (TBP, April 20, 1969: 19) Half a year later, the Oakland Panthers launched an entire project designed to produce a photographic history of the BPP: repeated calls in The Black Panther asked both Party members and radical whites to send photos depicting Panther activities to national headquarters, pointing out – in italicized capital letters – how “these photos will be used in the very near future to combat the lies and repression of the fascist mass media machinery”. Specifically, the Central Committee asked for pictures of the “program in action, meetings, conferences, rallies, demonstrations, pig confrontations, etc.” and “other photos illustrating the ‘problems and solutions’ of the peoples’ struggle.” (TBP, October 10, 1969: 5) While it remains unclear whatever became of this project, the Panthers certainly sought to employ the eye-witness character of photography to thus augment their struggle for Black Visibility on all levels. A few months later,

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in any case, they had put together a new slide show of the BPP which they presented at rallies and other mass events (TBP, February 7, 1970: 16) – quite possibly an outcome of the photo history project. And the Party newspaper featured many photos to document the Panthers in action, particularly in connection to their community service programs: children enjoying breakfast or participating attentively in Liberation School classes, local Party leaders wearing aprons and serving breakfast, and so on. Increasingly, The Black Panther also resorted to dramatic pictorial reports to expose the deplorable living conditions in black ghetto neighborhoods: in mid-1970, to take just one example, the Party newspaper carried a whole series of articles on the housing and living conditions in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn with large photos depicting children playing between heaps of garbage around burned-down, seemingly bombed-out tenements.

The Panthers L ive on S creen S pell P rovocation “There is an old saying,” Huey Newton (1995b: 204) contended retrospectively: “‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’” What he referred to, however, were not photographs: “we found in our political education that it is very helpful to show films.” For one thing, the Panthers used films about liberation struggles in the so-called Third World to put across various aspects of their more theoretical conceptions to the black community. Newton explicitly mentioned films of the revolution that took place in Algeria: “The community is very impressed with that kind of thing because they can easily see the relationship between the way the French treated the Algerians and how we are treated in this country.” Moreover, the Panthers used cinematography to present themselves and their struggle on screen –emotionally charged with soundtrack and the power of montage, to bring their message across to both the black and sympathetic white communities and to propel them to become active. And since they had neither experience in filmmaking nor access to means of production, they greatly welcomed white radicals who were ready “to make themselves, their skills, and their access to the apparatus the vehicle for a discourse that is essentially the Panthers’ own,” as the film historian David James (1989: 183) argues. Among these white radicals were such individuals as Mike Gray, who ran a television, commercial, and documentary production company at the time and was convinced that, at the close of the 1960s, “the film industry is in the midst of an irrevocable revolution. Involvement, viewer participation, relevance, realism – these are the trends,” as The Christian Science Monitor (February 4, 1970: 15) quoted him. “[N]othing can ever return the industry to the big-budget ‘meaningless’ films of the old studio system.” He saw himself as a dissidents’ advocate in celluloid: “I want to give people a crosscut of life – to duplicate

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reality in all its accuracy. I want people to be forced to think, to be participants to what they’re viewing. And I want it to mean something to them,” as he stated somewhat naively. Others involved in producing films with and about the Panthers include the San Francisco-based group American Documentary Films, Inc., which saw its main responsibility in doing educational work in the white community.22 In Huey (1968), the group put together a montage sequence wherein black men in a barbershop – a traditional place where politics are discussed in the black community – talk about key issues of the BPP, such as the necessity for armed self-defense. Huey is the earliest of several films that originated and gravitated around large rallies and other activities in the context of the Free Huey campaign. Apart from the barbershop sequence the half-hour documentary focuses mostly on the Free Huey Birthday Rally and the speeches held by Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and others.23 Other Panther films subsequently steadied their cameras on the talking heads of key Party leaders, among them Prelude to Revolution (1968), a lengthy interview with Huey Newton in prison, Eldridge or Angela Davis, who was shortly associated with the Black Panthers and imprisoned as a result of it.24 Even the agitprop shorts from the student-based Newsreel collective exhibit this tendency –  with the notable exception of Off the Pig, described in detail in the first chapter: May Day Panther, a 12-minute San Francisco Newsreel production from 1969, is concerned largely with speeches of various exponents at that year’s May Day rally in San Francisco on the occasion of Newton’s appeal. And Bobby Seale (from Prison), produced in 1970, revolves around a prison interview with the cofounder of the BPP, periodically intermitted by short sequences of visual collages of police brutality accompanied by Elaine Brown’s song Seize the Time.25 A double strand runs through most of the Panther films. On the one hand they demonstrate – particularly to white audiences – how the Black Panthers stood in unison with the black community at large and thus were its legitimate spokespersons. In much more detail and textual coherence than Huey, Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers: A Report (1968), which also revolves around a Panther rally, constantly interweaves both Panther and black community voices. On the other hand, particularly the Newsreel productions purposely sought to link the BPP’s struggle with issues virulent in the larger New Left movement. May Day Panther opens with images of the worker’s movement in the 1930s, and the voice-over links the class-struggle issues of that period with the Panthers’ contemporary struggle for working-class people of all colors. It also features white speakers at the Panther rally and continues to point out both visually and argumentatively that the Panthers and the New Left are involved in a common struggle against an increasingly fascist regime. Other films, whose topics very directly demonstrate the Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility, are a film about Emory Douglas and his work, titled

Crucial Role of the Media

Revolutionary Art, and several shorts about the BPP’s community service programs.26 Mike Gray also started out to produce “a film about the philosophy and community activities of the Black Panther Party in Chicago” – their community service programs –, as The Black Panther (July 10, 1971: 12) noted. However, this subject was abandoned after the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in December 1969, when everything seemed to happen at once. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, whites working with the BPP – who may or may not have been part of the original film crew – rushed to the scene with cameras. Flint Taylor for instance, a white law student working at the People’s Law Office in Chicago, went to the Panther apartment with a colleague who “had the presence of mind to get a cameraman down there, someone with a sixteen-millimeter camera.” As he remembered, they just started to film what might later constitute evidence: “We didn’t know what significance things had. So we took everything. We took every bullet, and there were shells all over the place.” (Hampton / Fayer 1990: 537) In all likelihood, parts of this material was used in the film, which, during over a year of filming and editing, sought to document Fred Hampton’s case. “There’s much in our society that we should be outraged about. When most people actually see it on film, they are. And then they take action to change things,” Mike Gray told reporters while in the midst of production (The Christian Science Monitor, February 4, 1970: 15). Essentially, he thus mirrored the Panthers’ own belief about how the successful creation of structural Black Visibility would activate people to join the struggle for radical social change. Consequently then, the revised purpose of the film was clearly to expose the judicial and executive powers involved in Hampton’s death as racist institutions, whose representatives did not hesitate to lie, fabricate or destroy evidence – and ultimately kill – in order to stop a charismatic black leader. Mike Gray’s The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971) stands apart from the other Panther films not only because of its long production span from 1969 to 1971 and its feature length. To build his case, Gray did not use narrative comment, but relied on the power of montage to create visual arguments. At one point, for instance, he juxtaposed footage of the bullet-riddled apartment with police testimony on the soundtrack – and thus left it to the visual evidence to contradict and override the official verbal account, thereby exposing the police as lying. In another sequence, he crosscut statements from State Attorney Edward Hanrahan with what police agents were saying, in order to pinpoint the inconsistencies in their own versions of what actually happened. Essentially, the film thus exposed the executive and judicial authorities of Chicago as delegitimizing themselves. How convincingly the film managed to convey this to a predominantly white audience is suggested by the upheaval The Murder of Fred Hampton caused at the Cannes Film Festival in France, where it had to be rerun several times. (TBP, July 10, 1971: 12) In the US, Gray’s feature-

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length political documentary actually found its way to the mass public: it played at movie theaters and was shown on television by Public Broadcasting Services. The other Panther films also found audiences that reached far beyond the black communities, partly as a result of their own distribution system, partly because they were able to tap the distribution channels of the larger New Left movement as well. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest New Left organization, greatly aided the Panthers with its distribution network to carry their mediated presence into circles to which the Panthers otherwise would have found no access: SDS promised to help print and distribute Panther literature and it made sure that such Panther films as Off the Pig were shown on college and university campuses throughout the nation in 1968 and 1969. (Foner 1970: 228; Heath 1976a: 80, fn. 96) Government forces seem to have been highly alarmed by the film’s popularity and Black Visibility potential: conservative news reporters close to the FBI warned of its violent content with explicit quotes from the film – obviously, they, too, had seen the film.27 In fact, the government grew increasingly disconcerted with the Panthers’ imaginative and pertinacious efforts to create and maintain a counter-public sphere and present themselves in self-controlled direct address to an ever larger public. By mid-1970, numerous laws on the local and state levels had been instituted across the nation specifically aimed at crippling the BPP’s most efficient Black Visibility instrument – its weekly newspaper. New York City, for example, had issued a city ordinance that prohibited to sell papers in the subway, with an additional ordinance having people selling The Black Panther there arrested. In other states, new laws prohibited to sell papers after daylight, or demanded the existence of a stationary news stand, a permit or a license to sell papers in the streets. (TBP, August 8, 1970: 11) In Baltimore, the State Attorney General secured a temporary injunction against the distribution of The Black Panther in May 1970. (Jeffries 2007b: 29-30) And while the House Committee on Internal Security already scrutinized the BPP newspaper (The New York Times, March 5, 1970: 34), quite obviously worried about what they perceived to be the Panthers’ most dangerous weapon (Rhodes 2007: 295), the San Francisco branch of the federal grand jury, which had started to investigate the BPP on a broad scale in April 1969, specifically focused on indicting and thus silencing the Party newspaper: it subpoenaed not only the managing editor, the production manager, and the circulation manager of the newspaper, but also other staff members. Apart from the risk of facing jail, this meant that they had to make frequent trips to the courts, thus being effectively prevented from producing The Black Panther. Eventually, practically the entire newspaper staff was subpoenaed, and some of them even jailed for their refusal to yield any information on the grounds of their rights as reporters to keep their sources confidential. (TBP, September 26, 1970: 11)

Crucial Role of the Media

Amazingly enough, it was not before May 1970 that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover resorted to issuing COINTELPRO orders directly aimed at The Black Panther and the Party’s highly efficient distribution system. “The Black Panther Party newspaper is one of the most effective propaganda operations of the BPP. Distribution of this newspaper is increasing at a regular rate thereby influencing a greater number of individuals in the United States along the black extremist lines,” he told his usual selection of trusted field offices, advising them to propose counterintelligence measures “which will hinder the vicious propaganda being spread by the BPP,” as this would surely result in “helping to cripple the BPP.” (US Senate 1976: 214) Hoover’s memo reflects not only the mounting urgency with which he sought to suppress the newspaper, but also the obvious failure of all previous attempts to sabotage The Black Panther. And there had been numerous such attempts. In fact, they serve to demonstrate the magnitude of COINTELPRO influence upon and collaboration with various local, state, and federal legal powers, government administrations, and key national companies. Direct FBI involvement in suppressing The Black Panther reached back to 1968, as the Panthers suggested in an editorial: “Our national and international news story are missing from this issue because of theft of new releases by CIA and FBI Pigs.” (TBP, December 7, 1968: 2) The FBI launched a broad variety of efforts to stall the distribution and circulation of the BPP newspaper. Police infringement of Panthers selling the Party newspaper in the streets was routine practice in cities across the states. According to Holder (1990: 309), “the selling of the Black Panther newspaper became the primary pretext for local police action” – an observation confirmed also by members of the Baltimore black community. (Jeffries 2007b: 25) And the FBI was involved from the very beginning: in a deliberate attempt to create confusion about the BPP’s program and its internal rules, the FBI ‘briefed’ San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto in February 1969 by furnishing him with manipulated information that led the mayor to publicly state that robbery and raping were part of the Panther program and advocated in every issue of the Party’s newspaper.28 Not surprisingly, this prompted sweeping arrests of Panthers selling the Party newspaper in the streets. Once established, the practice continued. Panthers hawking The Black Panther were arrested on such charges as obscene language, disorderly conduct, obstructing traffic, littering, loitering, etc. (TBP, August 30, 1969: 15; TBP, August 16, 1969: 13) The systematic nature of these attempts to suppress the distribution of the Party newspaper is particularly evident in the case of the distribution manager of Southern California, Walter ‘Pope’ Toure, who had been successful in substantially raising the circulation of The Black Panther in Los Angeles: in his case, police and FBI harassment continuously intensified over the summer of 1969 – in fact, repeated false arrest charges such as suspicion of robbery or

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suspicion of attempted murder systematically prepared the grounds for his fate – until he was shot and killed by the LAPD. (TBP, October 25, 1969: 3) Numerous other attempts to bring the circulation of The Black Panther to a halt had been launched by the FBI by the spring of 1969, some of them on a nationwide level. In May, the Panthers published a compilation of specific incidents under the title Nationwide Move by Power Structure to Suppress Black Panther Newspaper: obviously, many chapters and branches, as well as individual subscribers both within the US and abroad, had failed to receive the newspaper for weeks, if not months. In return, national headquarters, which administered the nationwide and international distribution of the Party paper, had obtained piles of returned papers marked “no such number”, “address unknown”, “addressee unknown”, etc. Other, obviously FBI-coordinated means which stalled the delivery of The Black Panther included papers being confiscated at customs or at the border, and shipments of papers arriving only partially or not at all, with the delivery companies denying ever having received papers to be shipped according to contract. In May 1969, the FBI itself confiscated the entire shipment of the May 3 issue – 15.000 copies – at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 3; TBP, August 8, 1970: 11) Several months later, the Bureau tried to get United Airline officials to charge the BPP “the full legal rate allowable for newspaper shipments”, which for the Party would have resulted in a 40 percent increase in payment. The FBI also tried to launch a nationwide union boycott of handling The Black Panther in late 1970. (US Senate 1976: 215-216) In parallel attempts, the Bureau sought to suppress the circulation of the BPP newspaper by preventing or stopping public institutions from subscribing to it. Especially schools were targeted: in Buffalo, for instance, a forged letter supposedly from a “concerned parent” and protesting the subscription of a local high school to The Black Panther was sent to the city’s School Superintendent, the mayor, the Commander of the American Legion, and local newspapers in early 1970. (US Senate 1976: 30, fn. 126) Months before, the Conservative Society of America, which collaborated with the FBI, had launched a campaign against “BPP-infiltration of schools” in 1969. (Courtney 1969) Parallel FBI efforts to curtail The Black Panther concentrated more on the production side. In this vein, employees at the printing company were approached and intimidated, in an attempt to ‘persuade’ them to quit their jobs or stop working on the Panther paper. The company printing the BPP newspaper was also otherwise subjected to overt and direct FBI investigations and it received several anonymous bomb threats. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 3; TBP, September 6, 1969: 9) Other FBI-initiated attempts to sabotage and stop the production of The Black Panther sought to destroy the BPP financially. Towards this end, several tax laws and a vigorous inquiry by the IRS were contemplated. (US Senate 1976: 214) The continuing arrests and charges of Panthers selling

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their paper in the streets and the subsequent bail costs also served this purpose. Indeed, the Panthers repeatedly had to launch explicit calls for contributions to keep The Black Panther in operation. (TBP, August 30, 1969: 5; TBP, October 18, 1969: 9) Less subtle methods, too, seem to have been employed to stop the paper’s circulation, including the outright physical destruction of stacks of printed issues. Various chapters and branches repeatedly complained that a shipment of papers had arrived crushed and mutilated or soaked in water – although the container was still sealed. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 3; TBP, September 6, 1969: 9; TBP, August 8, 1970: 11) During the frequent police raids of BPP headquarters and offices, as the Panthers charged, it was among the executive forces’ primary aims and objectives to “make sure that all newspapers in stock are destroyed or confiscated” (TBP, August 8, 1970: 11). When the Party’s central storage hall in San Francisco mysteriously caught fire in January 1970, the Panthers accused the police – at least implicitly – of arson, and of purposely calling the fire squad, whose water caused the greatest damage, i.e., the destruction of all historical issues of the newspaper. (TBP, January 31, 1970: 10-11) While it is unclear whether the FBI was, in fact, involved in these cases, what is certain is that the FBI did entertain ideas of this nature. The San Diego field office, for instance, suggested spraying the BPP’s newspaper printing room with a foulsmelling chemical. (US Senate 1976: 214-215) In the immediate aftermath of the official Party split in February 1971, targeting the newspaper for destruction seemed to escalate. In March, the central distribution office in San Francisco was bombed; in April the East Coast distribution office was destroyed by fire and in May, Panthers working in both distribution offices were arrested. (TBP, May 27, 1971: 18) However, there is no readily accessible evidence for any direct or even indirect involvement of the FBI. In fact, several former Panthers maintain that it was the escalation of intra-Party paranoia and warfare accompanying the split which was responsible for these incidents, including the murder of the BPP’s long-time circulation manager, Sam Napier.29 In one respect, however, the evidence concerning the FBI’s attempts to systematically sabotage the Black Panther Party newspaper is conclusive: the FBI thus directly violated the First Amendment right protecting the freedom of the press. (Jones 1988: 427) And this, of course, bolstered the Panthers in their strategic aim to expose, subvert, and provoke particularly the legal forces of the US government to resort to actions through which the government would ultimately delegitimize itself. Each attack on The Black Panther filled the Panthers with a sense of pride – for it proved how successful their key Black Visibility instrument operated. In early 1969 already, after the first acts of sabotage had occurred, the Panthers boasted how “our paper has grown so large that it has put fear into the racist, avaricious pig power structure” (TBP, February 2, 1969: 16). Subsequent attacks

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were sardonically linked to the government’s obviously mounting desperation to come to grips with the Panthers’ exceptional Black Visibility tool.30 “These attacks started when people began to notice the oppressive conditions and the terrorist tactics waged against them by a blood-thirsty Government which is being exposed through the Black Panther Black Community News Service. J. Edgar Hoover was correct in his analysis that the effectiveness of the Party is through the newspaper.” (TBP, August 8, 1970: 11)

Fig. 6: The Struggle Continues. Black Lives Matter! (Emory Douglas, 2015, © 2017, Pro Litteris, Zurich/Art Resource, NY)

Where Do We Go From Here?

Angela Davis was studying philosophy in Germany when the pictures of uniformed and armed black men and women on the steps of the California State Capitol went around the world. It was these photos, she later recalled, that propelled her to return to the United States and become active in community organizing in Los Angeles. (Doss 2001: 180) She was not the only one jolted into action by the captive black warriors and their message to America. Within two years after Sacramento, the Black Panthers had placed themselves in the vanguard position of both the black and larger New Left movements. Berets, leather jackets, and sunglasses had become the standard outfit of the revolutionary and BPP rhetoric and slogans resounded throughout the black ghettos, other nonwhite communities, and college and university campuses across the United States. The issue of justice was of paramount importance in this development: the Panthers strategically employed the colonial analogy to place themselves in a position of moral integrity and authority from which they could forge alliances and coalitions and direct the political onslaught against the US government. To begin with, the Panthers framed their struggle for Black Visibility basically as a struggle for racial social justice, thus squarely rooting themselves in twentieth-century black protest. They drew from the civil rights movement’s moral crusade for justice that had inspired millions of northern whites. In particular, the Panthers capitalized upon Martin Luther King’s sometimes rather Macchiavellian strategy of getting the police and key symbolic representatives of the southern segregation system to negatively expose themselves in front of TV cameras. Be it by placing black children at the spearhead of a demonstration march that was likely to be violently attacked by police dogs or water hoses, be it by escalating confrontations behind the scenes to such a point that once in front of a camera, the highly agitated Commissioner for Public Safety Bull Connor from Birmingham, Alabama, would spit out racial slurs or even physically attack a self-possessed black protester. The historian Nikhil Pal Singh (2004: 206) specifically likened King and the Panthers in their attempts

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“to expose the exertions of racist violence on black bodies” and in the way they “both were attuned to the geopolitics of pride and shame, governing the visual transmission, reception, and interpretation of their spectacular performances.” What the Panthers repudiated, however, was the fact that the civil rights movement had based its moral standards and conceptions of justice on the hegemonial white perspective. Civil rights leaders and activists had always recognized and welcomed the existing US system and society and focused their struggle on becoming an integral part of it. Their moral struggle centered around the stated aim to perfect the existing system by fighting against selective unjust laws in what they considered an otherwise neutral legal system. Hence they never tackled the problem of structural Black Invisibility outside the – highly visible – segregationist structures of the South. It was only after the Watts revolt that King began to ponder the problem of Black Invisibility in his famous last book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), and subsequently to radicalize his political outlook and to take a poignantly anticolonial and even anticapitalistic stance. However, when he shifted the center of his campaign north to Chicago, his heretofore highly successful nonviolent strategies utterly failed. (Ralph 1993) No less immersed in a fight for racial social justice was King’s political rival Malcolm X, who had always chastised civil rights leaders for their public profiling as “respectable Negroes”: well-dressed, well-behaved, marching hand in hand with whites, chanting peace songs and turning the other cheek to police violence, they did not create a radically new or different image of blacks on the physical and psychological levels. Malcolm X, on the other hand, had fiercely pointed out the systematic nature of the injustice whites perpetrated against blacks with his famous moral monitory finger, poignantly demanding justice “by any means necessary”. Unlike King, he did not come from a welleducated black middle-class family, but had risen from the ghetto streets. And while the ears of the revolting Watts youth had been much more attuned to his fierce oratory than to King’s message of brotherhood and reconciliation, Malcolm X’s influence also extended to the college and university campuses – places that were in the process of becoming the epicenters of protest by the mid-1960s. Malcolm X had basically tapped a vast reservoir and prepared the grounds for the Black Panthers’ arrival on the scene there. Not coincidentally, the BPP’s 10-point platform and program reverberated what Malcolm X had defined as the central issues of the black struggle when founding the Organization of African-American Unity shortly before his death in 1965. (Breitman 1968: 105-124) The Panther Party program also paid homage in both title and outer structure to the black organization Malcolm X had projected to national fame – an organization well rooted and respected in the urban black communities across the United States at the time: the Nation of Islam. The Black Muslims, as they were commonly called, had built their own

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institutions and infrastructure that sustained all members. But they chose to live a separate life of pointed noninvolvement in US politics. Malcolm X had been expelled from the Nation of Islam precisely as a result of his political commitment. And while the issue of racial social justice implicitly ran through every point of the BPP program, it culminated in the ultimate explicit demand for “a United-Nations supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate,” a demand added in the spring of 1968. (TBP, May 4, 1968:12, 25; Heath 1976a: 58) On this basis, the Panthers would launch several concrete appeals to the United Nations that amounted to calls for a world tribunal to indict the United States as a worldwide white supremacy system and thus create Black Visibility: two appeals were launched in 1968 in the context of the Free Huey campaign (TBP, September 4, 1968:3; Booker 1998: 343), another one, which charged the United States with genocide, in mid-1970 (Foner 1970: 119, 254-255). Again, two central black figures the Panthers claimed heritage to had embarked upon this path before. In 1964, Malcolm X had demanded that “Uncle Sam should be taken into the United Nations and charged with violating the U.N. charter of human rights.” (Breitman 1990: 54) The attempt to bring the plight of US blacks to the attention of the world originally stemmed from W.E.B. Du Bois, who had appealed to the United Nations on behalf of the NAACP in 1946. (Singh 2004: 53, 157; Foner 1970: 274, fn. 24) Seeking to extend their influence on the struggle for racial social justice beyond the Bay Area, the Panthers aimed at tapping the resources of the one remaining civil rights organization that called the shots on the national stage when it came to Black Power – SNCC – and its main exponent, Stokely Carmichael. The Panthers purposely and specifically flattered Carmichael because of his potential as both a rival and an asset to the Panthers in their struggle for Black Visibility. On the one hand, Carmichael had publicly elaborated the colonial analogy and claimed heritage to Malcolm X. On the other hand, Huey Newton admired Carmichael for the way in which he had purposely staged the proclamation of Black Power towards maximizing the slogan’s impact in front of the media and then moved to define it politically: “no matter how the oppressor tried in his own media to distort and confuse the message of Brother Stokely Carmichael, Black people all over the country understood it perfectly and welcomed it.” (Newton 1995b: 18; Eyes on the Prize 1987) Hence, only weeks after Sacramento and the proclamation of the BPP’s Executive Mandate No. 1, Newton launched his first attempt to instrumentalize Carmichael by drafting him into the BPP with his Executive Mandate No. 2, arguing that “you have set such a fine example, in the tradition of Brother Malcolm, of dedicating your entire life to the struggle of Black Liberation,

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inspiring our youth and providing a model for others to emulate” (TBP, July 3, 1967: 6). Four months later Huey Newton was in jail facing a possible death penalty for killing a police officer, and Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver intensified efforts to instrumentalize Carmichael and SNCC for the BPP’s own purpose – namely, to get the Free Huey campaign off the ground and bring it to the nation’s attention. They eventually succeeded not only in recruiting Carmichael as a keynote speaker for the Free Huey Birthday Rally in February 1968, they also made sure that this would be announced widely before the rally, thus granting the BPP and its event the utmost public exposure. Just days before the rally, they arranged for a meeting between Carmichael and Newton in jail and organized an ensuing press conference for Carmichael. (TBP, March 16, 1968: 2) Their tactics proved successful: Carmichael’s prison visit received national media attention. (Seale 1991: 219) At the rally itself, all leading SNCC representatives – Stokely Carmichael, James Forman, and H. Rap Brown – spoke on behalf of Newton and the Black Panther Party, whereupon Cleaver officially drafted them into the Party and bestowed the honorary titles of Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Minister of Justice upon them. (TBP, March 16, 1968: 15) In this way, the Panthers had cleverly and publicly assumed the vanguard role in the black liberation struggle and presented Newton as “the central leader of the revolutionary movement that was coming out of the black community”, as Seale (1991: 220) retrospectively claimed. After his appearance at the Panther rally in Oakland, Carmichael “spent nine days beating the drums for Huey” up and down California (Cleaver 1969: 9). Later on, the Panthers themselves were invited to speak at numerous occasions across the state, including at large mass rallies – a clear indication of their rising appeal and status within the broader New Left movement. 1 With Martin Luther King murdered only weeks after the Free Huey Birthday Rally, the Black Panther Party was definitely thrust onto the national scene as the only viable alternative to the leadership King had provided in the black struggle, as Kathleen Cleaver, who had been working full time for SNCC before joining the BPP in 1967, retrospectively assessed. (Hampton / Fayer 1990: 514) Thanks to the ensuing organizational takeoff after April 1968, the Panthers no longer needed SNCC to multiply the BPP’s public presence and visibility and consequently simply lost interest in pursuing a concrete collaboration with SNCC. While Carmichael continued to appear as a speaker at BPP rallies at least until the summer of 1968, there is no evidence of any concrete involvement of his in everyday Party work. In fact, the names of Carmichael, Forman, and Brown were quietly dropped from the list of Central Committee members of the BPP before a year had passed.2 The Panthers’ vanguard role within the black protest movement in the late 1960s never remained unchallenged, particularly from black individuals

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and organizations who held nationalist or cultural nationalist outlooks, such as Ron Karenga’s US in Southern California or Robert Williams, who had originally inspired the Panthers with his 1962 manifesto Negroes With Guns. Matters were different, however, regarding the Panthers’ status and appeal among other nonwhite urban minorities who developed organizations which closely modeled themselves on the Black Panther Party concerning ideology, program, physical appearance, and mode of operation. They worked towards the same goals as the Panthers, mobilizing their own respective communities. The Panthers seized the strategic opportunity created by their own popularity to build what they could publicly present as a rainbow coalition united in an anticolonial struggle.

U nited F ront A gainst US I mperialism at H ome and A broad The Puerto Rican Young Lords had originally emerged from a street gang in Chicago and subsequently became active also in New York, Philadelphia, Newark, Hayward, and Puerto Rico itself, possibly also in White Plains, Peekskill, and Milwaukee.3 They copied the BPP’s physical style and either erected their own community service programs or ran them jointly with the Panthers. In the state of New York, nine breakfast programs existed in 1969, “operated by the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and the people of the community” (TBP, September 27, 1969: 5), and in New York City, the two groups collected more than three tons of clothes for a joint distribution rally (TBP, October 11, 1969: 5). In Chicago, the Young Lords and the Panthers also jointly operated one of the health centers, the Spurgeon Jake Winters People’s Medical Center. And they worked together towards eliminating intergang violence in that city. Last but not least, the Panthers and the Young Lords supported each other during times of governmental repression when organizing rallies, demonstrations, pickets, and other events. Smaller, primarily California-based Mexican American organizations that were part of the rainbow coalition included the Brown Berets of Southern California and Los Siete de la Raza. The mutual support between Panthers and Brown Berets extended to each other’s work and included the participation in events organized by the other group. Los Siete de la Raza and the Panthers ran joint breakfast programs in San Francisco and Los Angeles. 4 To further assist these two groups in their organizational efforts, the Panthers also offered them space in the Party newspaper. Entire sections of The Black Panther repeatedly reported in Spanish about the activities of Los Siete and the Brown Berets. (TBP, August 16, 1969: 1-8, TBP, September 6, 1969) Other ethnic minorities also seemed eager to adopt the BPP’s 10-point program as a basis for political

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education and community organizing – among them a group of American Indians (TBP, June 14, 1969: 11) and several Chinese organizations, such as the Red Guards or I Wor Kuen in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. The San Franciscan Red Guards even attended the BPP’s political education classes and set up free health clinics and free legal aid in Chinatown, as did their New York branch. (TBP, March 23, 1969: 9; Morozumi 2007: 132) To complete the rainbow, the Panthers furthermore engaged in a coalition with a white organization – again one which concretely styled itself after the BPP and came from poor neighborhoods: the Young Patriots, later reorganized as the Patriot Party. The Patriots were active in Chicago, New York, New Haven, Cleveland and more rural parts of the country such as Carbondale, Illinois, Richmond, Virginia, and Eugene, Oregon. Their programs featured a breakfast program, but also other programs catering to the specific needs of their more rural constituency, such as a free lumber program.5 The Panthers principally embarked upon a coalition with the Patriots because in this way they hoped to gain access to poor white neighborhoods in which nonwhites were clearly not welcome. The alliance resulted from the United Front Against Fascism conference the Panthers had organized in July 1969. Through this nationwide four-day happening that drew between 3500 and 4000 participants from predominantly nonwhite groups and organizations, the Panthers sought to further broaden and strengthen their rainbow force and draw other local groups and organizations from regions where the BPP was not yet present into the coalition. (Cleaver 1998: 212; Holder 1990: 127-128) To reach this goal, they also initiated the organization of so-called National Committees to Combat Fascism offices that were to function primarily as local agents for the BPP and broaden the Party’s presence. By November 1971, such BPP-affiliated offices had been established in 65 cities across 27 states. (TBP, November 13, 1971: 9) Part of the Panthers’ urban rainbow coalitions were also other black groups, particularly street gangs, among whom the Panthers sought to work out a truce and politically educate them towards becoming engaged in positive community work. In Philadelphia, for instance, the BPP organized a three-day conference for and with over 200 local gang members: the black youths were encouraged to see themselves as protectors not of gang turfs but of the black community, thus being on a noble mission as captive black warriors in Babylon. (TBP, November 22, 1969: 15; Dyson / Brooks / Jeffries 2007: 228-230) At the end, several rivaling gangs obviously agreed to end their war and asked the Panthers for support in reorganizing themselves. Eighteen months later, the Philadelphia BPP organized a second meeting during which shared problems were discussed and a gang council engaging in constructive community work was about to be formed. Below various photos of grouped gang members, the Philadelphia Panthers spelled out their success in The Black Panther (June 12,

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1971: 4): “It is clear that so-called gangs in Philadelphia have a new face – one of understanding brotherhood, unity and a true interest in the community.” Once more, it was the Chicago Panthers who proved particularly successful at both politicizing black street gangs and in building multilateral rainbow coalitions. They were also exemplary in another BPP tactic that went hand in hand with forging alliances: calling press conferences to publicly announce such coalitions and thus demonstrate the broadening appeal and strength of the Black Panthers and their rainbow force. The jubilant comment below a photo of the press conference held together with two equally determined radical organizations in Chicago in late spring 1969 illustrates this point: “To the surprise of Chicago’s TV and newspapers, a new alliance was revealed at a recent press conference. The Black Panther Party, the Appalachian white Young Patriots, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords announced their solidarity. They represent three different ethnic groups and neighborhoods in Chicago. United by common battles against the police and the City’s power structure, the three organizations have been supporting each other. The Panthers, Patriots, and Young Lords have been visiting each others’ neighborhoods, sharing a political education program and learning about each others’ history and traditions.” (TBP, June 7, 1969: 15)

Only weeks later, Cha Cha Jimenez, chairman of the Young Lords, explained in an interview with the alternative Liberation News Service how the Panthers, his organization, and the Patriots collaborated to “get Chicago organized” (TBP, August 2, 1969: 9). And the Panthers backed up these efforts with yet another press conference, this time together with two formerly rivaling black youth gangs – the Blackstone Rangers and the Black Disciples –, announcing that they all had joined forces and would work together to fight the system and to organize the black community, closing with the joint statement: “Now we are all one army” (Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police 1973: 26) – an army of captive warriors in Babylon, struggling to free their colony from the yoke of US white supremacy. “We have been brainwashed to believe that we are powerless,” Huey Newton (1995b: 83) stated. “We have been taught that we must please our oppressors, that we are only ten percent of the population, and therefore must confine our tactics to categories calculated not to disrupt the sleep of our tormentors.” By publicizing the various coalitions across ethnic boundaries, the Panthers wanted to rupture Black Invisibility. From the conceptual perspective provided by the colonial analogy, they envisioned a whole new revolutionary power potential that extended even beyond the confines of the United States: in the struggle of subjugated nonwhites of the world against the United States as a worldwide white supremacy system, black Americans suddenly became part of a numerical majority.

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Eldridge Cleaver urged blacks to create alliances and unite with other nonwhite peoples not only at home, but also around the world. “The American racial problem can no longer be spoken of or solved in isolation. The relationship between the genocide in Vietnam and the smiles of the white man toward black Americans is a direct relationship,” he wrote from exile in March 1969. “The black man’s interest lies in seeing a free and independent Vietnam, a strong Vietnam which is not the puppet of international white supremacy. If the nations of Asia, Latin America, and Africa are strong and free, the black man in America will be safe and secure and free to live in dignity and selfrespect.” (Foner 1970: 101-102) Once he resurfaced in Algiers in 1969, Cleaver immediately began to establish ties with peoples and movements from Africa and Asia engaged in anticolonial struggles, including the North Vietnamese and the North Koreans, and started to build a center of revolutionary forces in Algiers. The Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in July 1969 proved crucial in this respect, as it “placed the Panthers amid representatives of antiimperialist movements and governments from around the globe.” (Bloom / Martin 2013: 317) Soon The Black Panther started to feature letters of support for the BPP coming from the Association of Democratic Jurists from North Korea, the Korean Democratic Lawyers Association, the South Vietnam People’s Committee for Solidarity with the American People, the Palestine National Liberation Movement or the French Federation of Black African Students, to name only a few.6 Furthermore, The Black Panther printed reports from alternative US and foreign news agencies such as Liberation News Service, Third World Press, Pan-African Press, and Hsinhua from Peking: a powerful demonstration of the existence of a worldwide revolutionary community surrounding and supporting the Black Panther Party and its struggle. Alternatively formulated, as the historian Nikhil Pal Singh (1998: 67) contends, “the Panthers became transmitters for struggles within the decolonizing world and for the appropriation and absorption of ‘third-worldist politico-cultural models’ across the spectrum of 1960s oppositional practices.” The colonial analogy the Panthers advanced in both theory and practice, then, provided the student- and antiwar-movements on the New Left with a perspective that unified their struggle with the black liberation struggle. The Panthers were in fact convinced that once they had succeeded in educating radical whites towards recognizing the United States as a white supremacy system, the thus created Black Visibility would automatically cause these whites to align themselves with the BPP. Cleaver was the most ardent representative of this belief. He put great hope into the youth of the larger protest movement: “The new generation of whites, appalled by the sanguine and despicable record carved over the face of the globe by their race in the last five hundred years, are rejecting the

Where Do We Go From Here? panoply of white heroes, whose heroism consisted in erecting the inglorious edifice of colonialism and imperialism; heroes whose careers rested on a system of foreign and domestic exploitation, rooted in the myth of white supremacy and the manifest destiny of the white race […] When whites are forced to look honestly upon the objective proof of their deeds, the cement of mendacity holding white society together swiftly disintegrates.” (Cleaver 1968: 68, 77)

And the Panthers, for all practical purposes, attempted precisely that: to force radical whites to look upon the United States from the vantage point of the colonial analogy. In speech after speech at rallies, demonstrations and conferences of the student and antiwar movements, they pointed out the parallels between the behavior of the US government – as a colonialist, imperialist force – within black communities in the United States and around the world in such places as Vietnam. And they were determined to be heard and recognized. The few Panthers who took part in the Hemispheric Conference to End the War in Vietnam in Montreal in December 1968, for instance, managed to turn around not only the entire agenda at the very first session of the large event, but also to adjust the content of individual workshops. “The tone of this conference should be changed from supporting world peace to supporting Third World Liberation struggles,” Bobby Seale demanded, “and the title of this conference changed […] to Hemispheric Conference to Defeat American Imperialism!” (TBP, December 21, 1968: 5) Seeking to instrumentalize the New Left movements opposed to the US government and its politics towards aligning themselves behind the BPP and its struggle, the Panthers deliberately took a moral position, drawing upon the radical white youth’s guilt about their forefathers’ deeds and appealing to their sense of justice at the same time. Newton labeled them middle-class “rebels” who had never experienced any form of overt oppression themselves. “So therefore I call their rejection of the system somewhat of an abstract thing.” But he credited them with seeking “to wash away the hypocrisy that their fathers have presented to the world” and recognizing in this course “the people who are really standing for justice and equality and peace throughout the world. These are the people of Vietnam, the people of Latin America, the people of Asia, the people of Africa, and the Black people in the Black colony here in America.” Even the old left, although disagreeing with the BPP putting race and not class in a central position, credited the Panthers for their “relentless struggle for equality of rights and human dignity”, which had “both awakened and inspired millions of white youth who, until the emergence of the Panthers, paid little heed to the dehumanizing effects of racism on them or of its effects on national morality”, as William Patterson, black leader in the Communist Party of the USA, commented in The Black Panther. (Newton 1995b: 170-171)

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On university and college campuses right down to local high schools, the Black Panthers secured speaking engagement after speaking engagement to drive this point home and thus draw on the vast resources of campus unrest. For the year of 1969 alone, the FBI had registered 189 such occasions. (Heath 1976a: 139) Initially, the Panthers were sought as speakers at colleges and universities as a direct result of their Sacramento publicity. (Newton 1995a: 171) Eldridge Cleaver, the BPP’s probably most provocative and subversive orator, proved absolutely instrumental in subsequently tapping these sources to build a support base for the launch of the Free Huey campaign in the fall of 1967. Not surprisingly, the California parole board ordered Cleaver to limit his public speaking around the same time. (Cleaver 1969: xiv-xvii) A year later he spoke on campuses up and down California and across the states to 3000, 5000 and 10.000 people. (Seale 1991: 257) He had even been invited to give a speech before peace activists in Japan. (Clemons / Jones 2001: 33) Particularly for Party leaders, speaking engagements could become very time-consuming. “Often I would be very busy, jumping on planes, going to New York, flying back to L.A. the next day, or going away for three or four days around the country speaking at colleges and rallies,” Seale (1991: 178-179) recalled. Nevertheless, it was usually worth the effort –  not only financially, but also because most student audiences responded favorably to the Panthers’ exposing the United States as a white supremacy system. “I spoke to a packed auditorium. Denounced J. Edgar [Hoover] and the CIA during the speech and condemned the US government and its policies toward oppressed people in the US and around the world,” a Baltimore Panther noted in his diary, pointing out how “the audience understood and did approve.” The next day, he and two other Baltimore Panthers stayed on at the University of West Virginia to lecture classes on “Black History and the history of American oppression”. They “were well received there”, too. (McCutchen 1998: 125) Last but not least, the Panthers deliberately sought this direct public exposure because they could maximize the positive impact upon their audiences and make sure that their message actually got across. The Panthers’ great appeal among white student audiences and the larger New Left movement definitely had a lot to do also with the way they presented themselves as captive black warriors and with the rhetoric they employed. Young white radicals were lured by the Panthers’ appearance to the point where many of them adopted their outer guise – black leather jacket, beret, dark sunglasses – as the dress style of the revolutionary. Likewise, Panther rhetoric became extremely fashionable within the broader New Left. They routinely used typical Panther expressions ranging from “right on” or “dig” to BPP-slogans like “power to the people”. The term pig was soon employed as standard reference to the police. By May 1969, the Panthers had tens of thousands of predominantly

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white people chanting “Free Huey”, “revolution has come”, and “no more brothers in jail”.7 The Black Panthers shrewdly capitalized on the appeal of the captive black warrior as model revolutionary to back up their argumentative efforts in forcing radical white groups and organizations into alliances and coalitions. Such cooperations were to function on terms set exclusively by the Panthers, as Newton had clarified from the outset in a message to white radicals originally published in The Movement and further distributed as separate print. “As far as our Party is concerned, the Black Panther Party is an all black Party,” he pointed out, “and we will decide the political as well as the practical stand that we’ll take. It’s the duty of the white revolutionary to aid us in this.” (Foner 1970: 55) In practice, this meant that whites could not join the Panthers and were kept at distance regarding organizational or programmatic decision making processes, as a Cleveland Panther recalled. (Jones 1998b: 149) Instead, whites were to function as a support apparatus – both in a very material and financial sense, and as multipliers of the Panthers’ concrete efforts to expose and subvert the racist functioning of the US white supremacy system within their own white communities. This did not preclude close personal friendships between Panthers and individual whites. Particularly in the unique socio-cultural and political environment of the Bay Area, contacts between Panthers and white radicals ranging from antiwar activists to hippies were both frequent and friendly from the BPP’s outset. (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 146-147; Seale 1991: 203-211; Brent 1996: 96) Even where close personal friendships existed, as in the case of Stew Albert, antiwar activist and cofounder of the Yippies along with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, official working relations remained architectured and controlled by the Panthers. “We wouldn’t exactly be joining hands in a loving community,” Albert stated in retrospect. “The Panthers would remain an allblack outfit,” with him functioning as a “go-between connecting revolutionary Black America to the funkiest edges of rebellious White America”. (Albert 2001: 188-194) Others who collaborated closely with the Panthers, such as members of the San Francisco Newsreel group, essentially corroborated this. While they benefited from the films Newsreel produced about the BPP, the Panthers exercised full control over the final stages of production. 8 Most alliances and coalitions with white organizations from the New Left, however, seem indeed to have functioned almost exclusively to the advantage of the Panthers. As Newton laconically stated to The Movement: “As soon as the organized white groups do not do the things that would benefit us in our struggle for liberation, that will be our departure point.” (Foner 1970: 57) The BPP’s first coalition partner from the Bay Area, the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), is a case in point. Officially founded in November 1967 to launch a joint electoral ticket for 1968, the PFP essentially operated to prepare the stage for

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the Panthers’ organizational takeoff. It fueled the BPP with a veritable publicity apparatus that included sound trucks, sound equipment, duplicating machines, and actual manpower to get the Free Huey campaign off the ground. And it organized rallies and demonstrations in support of Newton and the BPP, while white and black radicals supporting the PFP helped to spread and multiply the BPP’s Black Visibility.9 In addition, the Peace and Freedom Party provided the initial cofunding for Newton’s defense, financed the Free Huey Birthday rally and sponsored national speaking tours for Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver – officially for their respective political campaigns on the PFP ticket. In reality, Cleaver and Seale embarked upon a nationwide Free Huey campaign and initiated the organization of local BPP chapters at this occasion. 10 On top of all that, the Peace and Freedom Party vowed to canvass local white communities to explain about the BPP program and its importance, thereby helping to create visibility not only for the Black Panther Party but for black existence under white supremacy in general: after Martin Luther King was murdered, the PFP organized a demonstration march to end racism that purposely lead “not through the poor black neighborhoods surrounding downtown Oakland, but through the wealthy white enclaves, including Piedmont, where the fight against racism must be carried”, as the flyer March Monday to End Racism in America Now! announced (Newell Hart Collection). And when the Panthers launched their petition for community control of the police, the PFP not only cosponsored the initiative, its local support committees also carried the petition into their respective white communities. (TBP, November 2, 1968: 8) Four months later, the largest and most influential organization within the New Left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), officially vouched to help circulate the BPP’s police petition. The SDS national council meeting on March 3, 1969 in Austin, Texas, in fact resolved to give “complete support” to the Black Panther Party’s struggle for Black Visibility and refocus all activity to “fight white supremacy”: “We see clearly the need to join with the Black Panther Party and other revolutionary black groups in the fight against national chauvinism and white supremacy. The development of the Panthers as a disciplined and militant group fighting for black liberation has had a tremendous impact on the white radical movement. No longer can we refuse to deal with the chauvinism and white supremacy which exists both in the larger society and in our movement. Toleration of any vestige of white supremacy in the schools, shops, and communities must be seen as nothing less than ‘scabbing’ on the black liberation movement and on possibilities for unity of the working class. SDS declares: – its support for the Black Panther Party and their essentially correct program for the liberation of the black colony; – its commitment to defend the Black Panther Party and the black colony against the vicious attacks of the racist pig power structure; – its commitment to join with the Black Panther Party and other black revolutionary groups in the fight against

Where Do We Go From Here? white national chauvinism and white supremacy; – its total commitment to the fight for liberation in the colony and revolution in the mother country.” (Foner 1970: 227-228)

The resolution called upon SDS chapters nationwide to strengthen their informal and formal ties with the BPP. Specifically, all available SDS media channels were to cater to the needs of the BPP by spreading and multiplying Black Visibility: the national office of SDS was “mandated to print and distribute information about the history, development and programs of the Black Panther Party”, to keep up to date and distribute information about the repression of the black community, and to produce literature about black history, particularly about the “400 years of unending struggle against oppression” (Foner 1970: 228). For all practical purposes, SDS had thus officially sanctioned the BPP’s claim to the vanguard position in the broader protest movement. Countless white individuals and a host of other predominantly white groups – some of whom came into existence for the sole purpose of supporting the Black Panthers in their struggle for Black Visibility – substantiated this claim. Among the latter were the Friends of the Panthers, originally formed by Donald Freed in Los Angeles. Their primary purpose was to create favorable publicity for the BPP. (Churchill 2001: 91-92) This included the promotion of Panther paraphernalia and public-relations material, the organization of rallies to advance the BPP’s cause or the calling of joint press conferences. In Los Angeles, the Friends of the Panthers also helped to launch a breakfast for children program and collected clothes for the Panthers’ free clothing program. (US House Committee on Internal Security 1970: 87; Heath 1976a: 310) The Panthers possessed great appeal among Hollywood celebrities and other progressive white artists who were, as Elaine Brown (1992: 209) recalled, “lending us their homes for fund-raising soirees that produced thousands of dollars in hard cash. They subscribed to and helped obtain other subscriptions for our newspaper. They sent monthly checks for our breakfast program, and paid our incessant bails.” The BPP had in fact promoted home discussion groups in white communities from its earliest times (Brent 1996: 98) – a venture purposely sought not only to generate financial support but promoted as an asset in the BPP’s struggle for Black Visibility, since the fame and public stature of Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda or Leonard Bernstein rubbed off on the Panthers. The moral imperative the Panthers sought to raise met with receptive ears also among white progressive men and women of the cloth. They lent their church facilities to the Panthers’ programs and sometimes even helped to serve breakfast, as a 35-year-old sister in Harlem did. (The Wall Street Journal, August 29, 1969: 12) Some also wrote open letters or held sermons they subsequently published, portraying the Panthers as positive black role models and explicitly chastising public authorities and the mass media for their institutional racism.

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Harry Scholefield, reverend of the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco, warned his liberal white community not to take the mass media reports about the BPP at face value because they employed black stereotypes to paint the Panthers as violent police killers. And he alerted his listeners to what the Panthers were actually up against – “the existence of deep-seated, poisonous racism which to a greater or lesser extent permeates all of our institutions”. The institutions he no doubt specifically envisaged were the executive and judicial powers of the government. In fact, his sermons seem to have been prompted by a meeting he had attended along with other community leaders, where the Panthers and their lawyer Charles Garry had spoken on the question: “Is it possible for a black person to get justice in our courts?”11 The issue of justice is clearly of overriding importance in explaining why so many white groups and individuals felt compelled to – often unconditionally – ally themselves with the Black Panthers. All the more so since the Panthers had deliberately linked the questions of justice and legitimacy with every one of their strategic efforts to expose and provoke the US government from their very outset, fully aware of its mobilizing potential both within the protest movement and the still large liberal-progressive communities of society. The campaign to Free Huey continually provided the Panthers with concrete occasions around which to mobilize white support, initially mainly from Bay Area campuses. During Newton’s first trial between July 5 and September 8, 1968, hundreds of demonstrators protested almost daily in front of the Alameda County court house in Oakland, with white student groups co-organizing regular demonstrations on Mondays and Thursdays. 12 When Newton’s case was appealed to the California Supreme Court on May 1, 1969, the Panthers had organized May Day Free Huey rallies not only in front of the supreme court in San Francisco but at US district courts nationwide, among them Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Indianapolis, Des Moines, Kansas City, Denver, Detroit, and Boston. Participation numbers in these May Day rallies were impressive: in San Francisco alone at least 10.000 demonstrated (TBP, May 11, 1969: 12-13), Chicago reported around 2000 people (TBP, May 19, 1969: 3). Both speakers and participants at these rallies came from a broad cross section of allied groups and organizations, many of them white. The Panthers even had people congregate in front of US embassies across Europe and in Tanzania to demand justice for Huey Newton (TBP, May 4, 1969: 10; TBP, May 11, 1969: 10) – a result of the extensive speaking tour throughout Europe Bobby Seale and Raymond ‘Masai’ Hewitt from the BPP’s Central Committee had embarked upon earlier that year, leaving two BPP members behind to build support committees. Panther solidarity committees had subsequently begun to spring up in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium, France, Great Britain, Germany, and Switzerland. (TBP, March 31, 1969: 12-13; TBP, June 21, 1969: 18; Clemons / Jones 2001: 35)

Where Do We Go From Here?

Waves of often international support from radical activists, students, and white liberals materialized around other trials of BPP leaders, such as the New York 21 and the trials against Bobby Seale in Chicago and New Haven. Seale’s provocative self-defense in Chicago that led to his being chained to a chair and gagged in the courtroom prompted worldwide protest, addressed both at US Attorney General John Mitchell and at various United Nations delegations. (TBP, October 4, 1969: 10-11) Simon Federman, President of the American Association to Combat Fascism, Racism, and Anti-Semitism, representing 200 organizations, labeled it “a picture reminiscent of Nazism”, thus lending credibility and respect to the Panthers’ charges of fascism and genocide against the US government (TBP, November 8, 1969: 8). And in March 1970, 600 people gathered in front of the US embassy in London to demand the release of Bobby Seale. (Bloom / Martin 2013: 256) At the occasion of the trial’s opening in New Haven, the President of the Yale University publicly declared that he believed it to be impossible for black revolutionaries to receive a fair trial in the United States, as The New York Times reported. (Umoja 1998: 419) In the preceding weeks, the Panthers had successfully mobilized the whole campus through a series of demonstrations and teach-ins to rally to the support of the indicted New Haven Panthers and Bobby Seale: when a coalition of faculty and student organizations finally launched a class boycott demanding the release of Seale and of the other nine Panthers in April 1970, about 95 percent of all classes at the university actually closed down. (Holder 1990: 144-145) And when the trial started, the initial two-day rally in support of Seale in New Haven drew 15.000 participants, most of whom were white. (Christian Science Monitor, May 5, 1970: 5) There were also legal organizations such as the National Lawyers Guild or the American Civil Liberties Union who helped to mobilize for the defense of Panthers, or went to court themselves on behalf of the BPP. (TBP, December 20, 1969: 10-11; The Washington Post, May 2, 1970: A6) A host of white support groups furthermore formed for the sole purpose of raising funds for the BPP’s swelling legal expenses and, at the same time, inform about the Panthers and their treatment by the government and its legal institutions. Among them figured the Legal Defense Committee of the New York BPP, the Committee to Defend the Panthers or, to take an early example, the International Committee to Defend Eldridge Cleaver. The calls and petitions from these groups had repeatedly received public backing by a host of well-known sponsors from academia, politics, arts, and entertainment. 13 The Panthers’ greatest alliance coup, forged with the SDS resolution in March 1969, further corroborates the supreme mobilizing potential generated through the issue of racial justice: the national council of SDS placed special emphasis upon the commitment to “continually expose and attack the role of the pigs and the courts in oppressing the black community” and to “publicize the inhuman, brutal, and unjust

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nature of ‘justice’ in this society”. And it asked all SDS chapters to form Newton Cleaver defense committees and start raising funds for the defense of imprisoned Panthers. 14 With the Panthers’ publicity machinery in full gear, white support peaked in the aftermath of the excessively violent police raids on Panther headquarters in December 1969. The New York Times (December 14, 1969: 64), for instance, reported how – in order to prevent a repetition of what had happened in Los Angeles – “[y]oung whites in the San Francisco Bay Area showed their support for the Panthers by holding around-the-clock vigils in front of the various Panther offices,” and white lawyers were spending the nights in the Panther offices. Three days after the concerted nightly raids of the Los Angeles BPP offices, a massive rally in front of City Hall mobilized over 10.000 participants, with many whites speaking and both lawyers and doctors coming forth to volunteer for 24-hour-calls in case the arrested Panthers were brutalized in jail. (TBP, December 20, 1969: 10-11) Several prominent Americans called for an investigation to determine whether the Panthers were the victims of a nationwide campaign of police harassment. (The Wall Street Journal, January 13, 1970: 1) As a result of these appeals, the Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and Law Enforcement was founded. Its unpublished Preliminary Investigation into the Relationship Between the Black Panther Party and Local Law Enforcement Agencies was conducted in the Bay Area by two researchers – one of them a former San Francisco police officer. They contended that the police basically perceived any form of black protest as illegitimate and as a direct threat to the status quo, with the ultimate consequence that “concepts such as justice and due process are sacrificed, because of the way in which the police have prejudged the Panther members” (Jones / Hancock 1970: 17). When the Commission eventually published its report Search and Destroy in 1973, it was concerned singularly with the circumstances leading to the deaths of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago. By the time the report unveiled the criminal misconduct of city and state executive forces, moreover, the Black Panther Party had fallen to pieces, the large waves of protest subsided, and President Richard Nixon seemed to have capitalized upon what his domestic advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan had suggested in a memo in early 1970 –  namely, that “the time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of benign neglect” (Estell 1994: 6263). And while support for the BPP around the issue of justice continued to thrive, 15 the Panthers’ retrospectively last and most ambitious effort to coalesce all revolutionary forces within the United States in the Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention in the fall of 1970 already bore the mark of demise. To be sure, progressive whites still voiced their sympathies for the Panthers and condemned the Philadelphia police after it had rampaged all BPP offices in the city and thus severely sabotaged the conference just days before it was to

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take place. (TBP, September 12, 1970: 3) And the BPP was still able to mobilize large contingents from within the protest movement: around 15.000 people, many of them white, attended the first session of the conference in Philadelphia in September. However, the conference’s aim of rewriting the Constitution in the name of justice and equality from the perspectives of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation proved too large to muster. The second session in Washington DC two months later drew a considerably smaller contingent of predominantly white radicals and ultimately failed to materialize altogether. (Katsiaficas 2001: 153-154) Newton had come to realize that in the course of forging alliances with white radical organizations and groups towards creating a revolutionary rainbow force, the focus on race had somehow been lost. “I made up my mind that we could not let white radicals define the struggle for us; they knew too little about the Black experience and the life in the Black communities.” (Newton 1995a: 298)

C ommunit y S upport : “W e H ave D ug S ome D eep R oots ” It was obviously not lost on Newton that the more BPP rallies were attended by large groups of whites, the less involved the black community often became. According to the Christian Science Monitor (May 5, 1970: 5), black participation in the large support rally for Seale on the opening day of his New Haven trial was practically nil, because few blacks placed any faith in white radicals. Indeed, the fact that the Panthers were not only willing to work together with whites, but actively sought to build coalitions with them, “freaked out” many blacks, as the Panthers noted after they had allied with the Peace and Freedom Party in late 1967 (TPB, March 16, 1968: 3). It was a problem the BPP would have to grapple with throughout its existence. Especially black college and university students were highly critical of the Black Panther Party for that very reason, as Newton had to find out during his first speaking engagements at black colleges in the summer of 1967. (Newton 1995a: 172-173) The Panthers remained unrelenting in trying to rally black college and university students over to their side. Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin (2013: 272, 286) accredit the Panthers with having been highly successful in organizing black student unions throughout the state of California, and even nationally, and with having advanced black university admissions and black studies programs in 1968. Despite these efforts, however, the cooperations that materialized with black student unions mostly remained sporadic and focused on campus-related issues. In some instances the Panthers also sought to influence the curriculum itself. The New York chapter, for instance, worked with students from Fordham University to develop “free university classes on topics that pertain to the people’s struggle”. The classes were to be taught by

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Panthers and be open to the public, while at the same time offering university credit. (TBP, June 20, 1970: 19) Increasingly, the BPP’s efforts shifted towards securing black campus support for imprisoned Panthers. (Holder 1990: 142143) In May 1970, for instance, The Black Panther Party and the black student union from Yale University co-organized a Black Revolutionary Student Conference as part of the mobilizing efforts around Bobby Seale’s trial in New Haven. When it came to mobilizing black college and university students towards becoming actively involved in concrete community work, however, the response in many instances was nil. Although local examples of Panthers and black college students working hand in hand exist, as in the case of Brooklyn, (Monges 1998: 139) Bobby Seale repeatedly reprimanded black college and university students for their lack of interest in helping the BPP to organize the black community. “You see the decay of our housing, help your brothers and sisters do something about putting pressure on landlords instead of playing cards in the cafeteria all day,” he scolded the black students from Merritt college in Oakland after having passed out over 4000 leaflets in vain. “I don’t care how many books you read by Fanon, Che, Debray, Malcolm, Nkrumah, and essays from Huey. If all you’re going to do is sit around and discuss them you’re jiving.” (TBP, May 25, 1969: 7) Eight months later, in January 1970, he essentially repeated the same position in a broad appeal: “you must relate to the community more,” he urged, “never separate yourself from the community.” (TBP, January 10, 1970: 10-11) But most young blacks bound for higher education quite obviously sought precisely that: to separate themselves from the squalor of the ghetto – however intellectually compassionate they may have remained about black ghetto existence – and strive for the opportunities opening up for them. With black high school students on the other hand, things were different. Many of them sold the Party newspaper in their schools and neighborhoods and helped to serve breakfast. And they protested in Panther-fashion against institutional racism in their schools: in March 1969, for instance, large black student strikes and uprisings took place throughout Los Angeles, with the students demanding the installation of Black Studies programs and “an end to the school’s racist practices”. Striking students subsequently established several Liberation Schools. (TBP, March 31, 1969: 16) In various cities, moreover, high school students not only actively supported and emulated the Panthers, they joined the BPP and often comprised the bulk of Party membership. (Jones / Jeffries 1998: 45-46; Abu-Jamal 2004: 194) When the BPP began to focus on its community service programs in 1969, many of these Panthers dropped out of school to work full time for the Party. (Holder 1990: 142-143, 147) What compelled them to choose the daily drudge of getting up before daybreak to start preparing breakfast for schoolchildren, selling an assigned quota of The Black Panther in the streets, organizing food, clothes, medical supplies and other

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necessities to keep the Party programs going, coordinating rallies for various BPP and community causes, writing reports, attending political education classes in the evening and, on top of all that, dealing with the increasing police harassment? Arguably, it was the Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility on all levels that captured the imagination of young ghetto blacks who would otherwise have participated in the waves of ghetto revolts to, however fleetingly, escape their existence in Black Invisibility. As Fred Hampton pointed out, “we’re the first group to come above ground where the people can follow you and see you. And if we make a mistake, it’s better than not even being at all.” (Heath 1976a: 245) The Panthers thus became role models – or rather, they provided a strong alternative to the usual role models ghetto youngsters were commonly exposed to in the streets of the black neighborhoods. “You take kids in Harlem, they sort of envy hustlers – guys who take numbers, push dope,” the head of a New York antipoverty center told a reporter. “But the Panthers are telling kids from grade school level, don’t mess with dope. It works. […] They appeal to young kids and create a lot of black awareness. They’re not just advocating militancy; they’re talking about economic and political power. Right now, they’re backing up what they preach.” (The Wall Street Journal, January 13, 1970: 1) Far beyond superficially emulating the captive black warrior, then, the ghetto youth was drawn to the Panthers because of their very concrete and activities-oriented efforts to expose, subvert, and provoke the US government and its institutions in their racist functioning. “The Panthers have had more success in organizing these kids than any other group ever,” the father of a sixteen-year-old from New Haven stated vis-à-vis the media (Christian Science Monitor, May 5, 1970: 5). Local high school and even elementary school teachers invited the Panthers to speak at their school or discuss their activities in the classroom.16 Many parents sent their children not only to the Panther breakfasts but also to the BPP liberation schools, because they valued the critical black consciousness their children thus acquired. As one liberation school teacher reported: “One mother of five told me that her children made satisfactory grades in school, but when she saw the work they were doing in the Liberation School, such as; choosing articles and writing about them or giving an oral report about an event that happened in the world, she smiled with pride; she said, ‘their work shows that they can relate to what is happening to them and other poor people in the world’.” (TBP, August 2, 1969: 12)

The fact that the Panthers not only exposed the racism inherent in the US government and its institutions in the black ghettos, but also presented concrete alternatives with their community service programs, generated a lot of community support. 17 The programs, in fact, propelled many teenage and adult community members – most of them women – to become actively engaged and

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help prepare and serve breakfast, clean up afterwards, collect and distribute clothes, drive buses to prison visits and so on. 18 In Cleveland, as one ex-Panther remembered, “we had volunteers – church members, my mother, and a lot of other seniors there who would volunteer to work with us. And they were the ones who really kept the free clothing program going.” (Jones 1998b: 148) “I didn’t know the people in the room. I got off on just washing dishes,” a woman from Oakland recalled the first time she volunteered for the Panthers’ breakfast program, “because to me, it was so invigorating just to be part of it. It was so uplifting.” (Abron 1998: 183) “Uplifting the race”, experiencing and promoting black self-respect and black pride and, ultimately, black empowerment seems to have guided many adult participants in the BPP’s community service programs – particularly those who had become most entangled in the oppressive structures of governmental institutions: single mothers on welfare. (TBP, November 1, 1969: 21) In several cities, members from the local black community eventually moved to take over BPP programs, particularly the breakfast for schoolchildren, or to organize breakfast programs by themselves. In Austin, Texas, the black community had opened up a free breakfast program without any Party presence in the city, and in Manhattan, only one of the six existing breakfast programs was actually run by the BPP. “The rest of them the people instituted, and that’s what our job is all about”, as the local Panthers commented (TBP, November 8, 1969: 9). Where a BPP program was threatened in its existence – mostly as a result of official interference –, local community members often organized to defend it. Chicago is a case in point: after the church board had, for rather technical reasons, suddenly refused to offer its facilities any longer, the Panthers called a community meeting which subsequently exerted pressure on the church. (TBP, September 6, 1969: 7) And when the city’s Health Board attempted to close down the Party’s medical centers, the black community took to the streets to protest. (TBP, February 28, 1970: 17) Community support for the Panthers could exist down to a very personal level, as a female Panther from Oakland recalls: “There were homes in the community where I could always get a good meal, and neighborhood residents consistently watched my back.” (Jennings 1998: 263) Strong ties had quite obviously developed between the BPP and the community, since the Panthers had started their presence on the local level and had become engaged in concrete community organizing on a daily basis from the end of 1968 on. “When people got a problem they come to the Black Panther Party for help and that’s good,” Fred Hampton had remarked at a public speech already in April 1969 (Foner 1970: 140). “The offices were like buzzing beehives of Black resistance. It was always busy, as people piled in starting at its 7:30 a.m. opening time and continuing ’til nightfall,” Mumia Abu-Jamal (2004: 197) from the Philadelphia Panthers remembered. Indeed, the repeated complaints

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by Panthers about all the folks hanging around in and around the Party office or about non-stop calls pouring in, making it difficult to get work done, provide unexpected evidence for the often magnetic attraction the BPP offices possessed. (Seale 1991: 367; Austin 2006: 178; Jeffries 2007a) The arrival of local community information centers set up by the Panthers after the summer of 1969 further broadened and deepened BPP-community relations. Many community members obviously felt more at ease there than at the BPP offices, and they welcomed the weekly community meetings the Panthers organized in these centers to discuss problems regarding housing, schools, welfare or various forms of harassment, often leading to their becoming committed to community organizing themselves. (McCutchen 1998: 122,123; TBP, August 23, 1969: 18; TBP, January 24, 1970: 3) Through their close community ties, local Panthers were able to expose not only concrete examples of institutional racism, such as racist business practices of local store owners (TBP, August 23, 1969: 7; TBP, August 29, 1970: 2), but also to organize and coordinate public black protest against city administrations, housing authorities, and welfare departments. When a city order which prohibited the burning of trash led to increasing garbage heaps and filth in the black community of Kansas City, as blacks were unable to pay for the official trash collection, the Panthers organized demonstrations in front of city hall to direct public attention towards such structural ghetto problems. (TBP, June 21, 1969: 11) In Winston-Salem, the local BPP fought the eviction of several black families after one of these families had turned to the Party for help. (TBP, March 28, 1970: 2) Well-respected members of the black community consequently fought to keep the Panthers located in the heart of the community. When one of the BPP offices in San Francisco fell victim to urban renewal in early 1970, the chairman of the Western Addition Community Organization petitioned the project director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency to provide the Panthers with a new locality in the same neighborhood, arguing that “[t]he Black Panther Party has done a commendable job in bringing unity in the Western Addition, especially in their work with the youth and the Free Breakfast for School Children.” (TBP, January 17, 1970: 9) Among the most consistent and concrete supporters of the BPP were black clergymen. They provided their church facilities to the Panther programs and mostly remained unwavering in their commitment even in the face of COINTELPRO-instigated pressure. Their material, financial, and especially political support of the BPP on the local community level in many instances clearly went far beyond the aspect of charity. A minister of the Methodist Innercity Parish in Kansas City, for instance, defended the support of his church for the local Panthers even to the House Committee on Internal Security, before which he had to testify. His church had not only provided the BPP with a building for their local Party headquarters, but had also repeatedly

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bailed Panthers out of prison. (The New York Times, March 5, 1970: 34) Father Earl Neil of the St. Augustine Episcopal Church in Oakland is another example. He extensively and enthusiastically supported the BPP in many ways, offering his church facilities for the Party’s community service programs and actively participating in and co-financing various Party events and programs. “In a hostile white world without any power to make whites recognize Blacks as persons,” as he reminded his fellow clergymen in a long article written for The Black Panther (May 15, 1971: 10-12), “we have to constantly drive home the reality and concrete condition of our oppression as a people and that this oppression is against the will of God.” The Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility seems to have renewed and invigorated the black church’s historical role as a place where protest and resistance to oppression and exploitation in the United States could form itself. “The thing I really loved about the Black Panthers is that they refused to be ignored,” a Chicago pastor later recalled. “They had these things they would say, like, ‘by any means necessary’. And you know, that shook people up.” (Hampton / Fayer 1990: 523) The use of Panther rhetoric – including such government-directed labels as “fascism” – seems to have become increasingly acceptable even among men of the cloth, given such blatant visualizations of institutional racism as violence, for example when Bobby Seale was bound and gagged in court. “The oppression of the Black Panthers and their leader, Mr. Seale, is a gross crime that calls for our unequivocal denunciation. We believe the Panthers are a genuine people’s organization that has been a constructive force in the Bay Area,” numerous clergymen wrote in a letter of protest to public officials, pointing out specifically that “everyone who opposes fascism in this country must actively oppose the use of police-state tactics on any minority group.” (TBP, November 8, 1969: 4) In the face of escalating state violence against the BPP towards the close of 1969, an increasing number of blacks feared that they shared a common plight with the Panthers, as The Washington Post (December 14, 1969: 24) reported. At the same time, police repression often did not deter, but further strengthened active community support for the Panthers. Neighbors warned the Panthers of imminent dangers, as in the case of Detroit, where people from the neighborhood prevented the Panthers from approaching their headquarters because the police were searching the place and “had a trap set inside” (TBP, June 21, 1969: 17). In Baltimore, the local community came to the Panthers’ aid when the mass media announced to arrest local Panthers. (McCutchen 1998: 126) And when a Boston Panther who had been repeatedly persecuted and falsely charged by the local police had to appear in court, the trial had to be relocated several times because so many people from the black community packed the courtroom. (TBP, January 31, 1970: 9) Alternatively, as in Chicago, neighbors of the local BPP headquarters would start demonstrations to protest against Panther harassment by the police. And in Philadelphia, the local

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community took the initiative to clean up and rebuild the BPP office after it had been destroyed during a police raid. (Dyson / Brooks / Jeffries 2007: 243, 248) Most astounding, however, is that black communities in various cities turned into an army of captive black warriors protecting the Panthers and standing up to encroaching police forces. And if the police became violent, the community’s attempts to aid the Panthers would turn physical as well, as The Black Panther (August 9, 1969: 20) reported: “The people who witnessed the scene started to throw bottles and hurl rocks at the pigs. The people took a very defensive, antagonistic stand against the pigs!” That the black community thus consciously risked falling victim to police violence is also suggested by the example of Des Moines, where “[p]eople from the community came to the defense of the Panthers and they were attacked and maced by the cops” (TBP, May 11, 1969: 3). The increasing frequency of such incidents prompted the BPP Minister of Education Raymond ‘Masai’ Hewitt to boast to the press: “It used to take two pigs (police) to harass an unarmed Panther selling the Party newspaper. Now it takes ten – two to do the harassing and eight to watch the community.” (The Washington Post, December 14, 1969: 24) In Baltimore, where the police had sieged the BPP office and threatened to raid it, residents from the community formed a line and stood watch in front of the Panther office to protect it – and this for two entire weeks. (Jones/ Jeffries 1998: 41-42) At the height of concerted police and FBI infringement on the Baltimore Panthers in May 1970, community support was simply overwhelming, as one of the involved Panthers noted: “There is a wall of people in the streets protecting the office. People on rooftops – up and down the block. Supporters are bringing in medical supplies, food, and volunteering every kind of assistance. Power to the People! Comrades and supporters are selling papers from the sidewalks, car to car. A powerful statement to defer a vamp. The cowards are still subject to come in the night, but the vigil and support keep them at bay for now. The pigs’ attempt to defame us hasn’t succeeded. Efforts to intimidate community people and comrades aren’t working. Young high school comrades Anita and Patsy are mobilizing the students on behalf of the branch and the comrades. […] We have dug some deep roots. But deep enough?” (McCutchen 1998: 126-127)

The police had indeed changed its tactic and resorted to attack Panther headquarters at night. In the course of the early morning raid in Los Angeles in December 1969, the LAPD even used helicopters “to prevent the community from coming to the support of the Panthers”, as Holder (1990: 306) maintains. Immediately afterwards, the black community – under the leadership of Angela Davis – began to stand vigil outside the BPP’s main office. And when the police later attempted to move against the 700 to 800 people in and around the Panther office, neighbors from the area opened their doors to offer protection.

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(TBP, December 20, 1969: 10-11) The next time – community members had come to aid the Panthers in building up their totally demolished office when the police approached again – the supporters remained steadfast: “instead of leaving, the people formed a line all the way down the block walking in a circle saying ‘All Power to the People, Defend our Community, and Off the Fascist Pigs’.” (TBP, December 20, 1969: 2) With most L.A. Panthers in jail, members from the black community worked to rebuild not only the BPP office, but keep the community service programs running as well. On top of that, they sold over 15.000 copies of The Black Panther in less than a week. (TBP, December 20, 1969: 10-11, 14) After the police proved unsuccessful at stopping the black community from rebuilding the Panther office, the Los Angeles Department of Building and Public Safety declared the house “unsafe and unfit for occupancy by human beings”. This, in turn, prompted black assemblyman Mervyn Dymally – himself a victim of police brutality surrounding the BPP headquarter raid – to write a letter to the president of the Department, requesting him to refrain from any further attempts to evict the Panthers as the black community was determined to refurbish the structure. (TBP, December 27, 1969: 16) Many other politically moderate or even conservative blacks from Los Angeles publicly voiced their support for the Black Panthers in the aftermath of the December raids and announced more community militancy against the police. (The Washington Post, December 14, 1969: 24) At a large rally in front of what the Panthers referred to as the LA “Hall of Injustice”, a broad cross-section of the black community spoke on behalf of the Panthers – among them the executive director of the local NAACP. (TBP, January 17, 1970: 2) Similar patterns of concerted nightly police raids on Panther offices, black communities aligning themselves behind the Panthers and concerned black citizens rallying in support of the BPP followed in other cities, among them Kansas City (TBP, January 10, 1970: 6) and Philadelphia (TBP, September 12, 1970:3; TBP, September 19, 1970: 11). As a matter of fact, in all of these cases black support for the BPP transcended far beyond the local black communities and involved key national representatives and leaders of well-established, traditional civil rights organizations. Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King’s successor and chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had spoken at Fred Hampton’s funeral in Chicago. “If we let them suppress the Panthers, then the next group on the list will be your group,” he was quoted as saying in The Washington Post (December 14, 1969: A24). In January 1970, Abernathy consequently vowed to provide both moral and material support for the New York 21 Panthers at a press conference. (Jones / Jeffries 1998: 42) And Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP with little sympathies for the left, had already begun in late summer 1969 to publicly contemplate a coalition with the Black Panther Party – on the grounds of the BPP’s adamant struggle

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for Black Visibility, especially on the structural levels. After the series of headquarter raids in late 1969, he helped to finance a commission to investigate all clashes between the Panthers and the police with 50.000 $. (Jones / Jeffries 1998: 42) The unequivocal support the Panthers enjoyed from blacks nationwide is mirrored in the polls. A survey by Louis Harris and Associates in early 1970 revealed that every fourth black American “respected the Panthers ‘a great deal’” and stated that the BPP represented his or her own views (Time Magazine, March 30, 1970: 28). According to The Wall Street Journal (January 13, 1970: 1, 27), which had conducted 100 interviews with blacks in New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and San Francisco around the same time, this kind of support was voiced by three out of four blacks. What’s more: “Some 60 percent expressed full support for both the philosophy and tactics of the Panthers, including the Panthers’ asserted willingness to resort to violence.” “[N]ow, as always, the primary precedent and the primary rationale for violence comes from the established order itself,” Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace (1970: 30-31) contended in their study on violence in American history published at that time – only to warn: “But the frequency and the manner in which official violence is used is of signal importance to the legitimation of the civic order. Any liberal democratic state is in danger of wearing away its legitimacy if it repeatedly uses violence at home or abroad when the necessity of that violence is wholly unpersuasive to a substantial number of people.” And it was a substantial minority extending far beyond the black community indeed, that had begun to question the legitimacy of the US executive and judicial powers at the turn of the decade. Following the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in December 1969, even the mass media – albeit for a short time only – raised the question whether the authorities were engaged in a searchand-destroy campaign against the Panthers, rather than in legitimate law enforcement. (Morgan 2006: 342) The Panthers had, as the historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin (2013: 114) conclude, put America on trial. But was their struggle for Black Visibility successful in the end?

L e t ’s Talk A bout R ace – A gain The answer is a positive, yet ambivalent one. And the Panthers’ rhetoric of violence plays a pivotal role in this assessment. Without doubt, the Black Panthers’ appearance and profiling as captive black warriors had a profound impact upon the contemporary American public. They thus “engaged the dominant culture in a debate about the parameters of Black racial and sexual identity and its impact on policy and politics,” as the historian Tracye Matthews (1998: 294) argues: “This was particularly significant given the history of

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struggles by Black people to be recognized as respectable, fully human beings.” To be sure, this was not the Panthers’ doing alone, but the result of the larger Black Power movement. Slogans like “black is beautiful” and the reorientation towards African roots in culture and dress style quickly became an accepted part of American (consumer) culture – arguably because these aspects did not force whites to question their own identity in a fundamental way. “Power does not grow out of the sleeve of a dashiki,” as Bobby Seale pointed out in an interview with reference to the colorful men’s garment fashionable among blacks at the time (Bobby Seale (from Prison), 1970). According to the Panthers’ strongly favored slogan, much rather, “power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. The captive black warrior embodied this slogan – moreover, it fundamentally altered the image of blacks and the black man in particular. For many blacks and especially male ghetto youths, the captive black warrior has since come to epitomize a positive image of blackness that lived on in the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s and particularly in rap and hip hop culture, which at its best produced a supremely ambivalent performative style that carried the rhetoric of violence to its extremes. N.W.A. – Niggaz Wit Attitudes – are certainly a prime example, emerging Straight Outta Compton, the neighboring black community of Watts in Los Angeles, in the mid-80s, with an all-out verbal attack against unabated police brutality. N.W.A. are exemplary in quite another sense as well, for they demonstrate what got lost in this course: a broad focus on race that refrained from making it essential, the fight against both sexism and homophobia (instead of their reinvigoration), and, above all, a genuine sociopolitical commitment. N.W.A. members like Dr. Dre did not empower the black community, but rather themselves –  as role models of black capitalism. In a similar vein, the self-proclaimed New Black Panther Party, which formed around 1990, capitalizes on the outer appearance of the captive black warrior and has given the Panthers’ rhetoric of violence an antiwhite and antisemitic spin that runs counter to what the original BPP stood for. Neither have its members shown any factual community commitment so far. No wonder are they vigorously opposed by former BPP members such as David Hilliard and Bobby Seale. (Mulloy 2014: 78, 85-87) The subversive ambiguity of the Panthers’ performance as captive black warriors was lost also on many contemporary ghetto youths who imitated the Panthers in dress style and poise and took their rhetoric of violence at face value. In 1969, the BPP banned the wearing of the Party uniform, except on ceremonial occasions, “to rid itself of responsibility for the actions of every black American wearing a leather jacket and a black beret” (Heath 1976a: 127). The problem was precisely that during the unchecked growth of the Party in 1968, it often sufficed to put on Panther garb to actually become one. Anonymous testimonies from disgruntled ex-Panthers before the US House Committee on Internal Security (1970/1971: 4425-4428) linked the Seattle chapter to several

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acts of violence that had occurred over the course of 1968, among them the firebombing of two business establishments. Aaron Dixon from the Seattle Panthers retrospectively boasted that the Panthers were, at least indirectly, involved in almost all of the firebombings and snipings that occurred in Seattle between 1968 and 1970. (Austin 2006: 179) Criminal activities of Party members were indeed an often cited reason for the internal purges national headquarters in Oakland resorted to in 1969. However contrary to official Party line, further testimonies from ex-Panthers and a call from a certain Obatunde in The Black Panther (November 16, 1968: 16) suggest that “liberating” goods or money “to finance the revolution” was actively encouraged at times, at least before the onset of the purges. Even thereafter, some Panthers would resort to criminal activity out of dedication to the Party’s community service programs. Steve McCutchen from the Baltimore Panthers, for instance, went on stealing tours with other Panthers to keep the local branch and its programs running. (McCutchen 1998: 120-121) The purges and the accompanying measures to strengthen Party discipline, in the end, proved detrimental to the BPP’s functioning. They exacerbated internal problems and feelings of alienation and paranoia, as national headquarters in Oakland resorted to an increasingly authoritarian leadership, reorganizing entire Party branches by expelling cadre or degrading them to rank and file status and appointing new local leadership, advising them how to operate regardless of the specific conditions the local black community faced. Local chapters and branches also felt increasingly exploited, as all fundraising money, donations, and large shares of their paper sales had to be turned over to national headquarters. Last but not least, internal ideological tensions were building up, as when the East Coast Panthers were hindered from forming alliances with the various powerful and influential black cultural nationalist organizations existing in New York. (Alkebulan 2007: 74-75; Johnson 1998: 400-402; McCutchen 1998: 117; Holder 1990: 257-261) The leadership cult that developed around Newton aggravated this situation: physically removed from the streets, Newton not only continued to shape Party politics from behind bars, he was omnipresent through symbol-laden images of him as embodiment of the captive black warrior and subsequently became something of a “shrine” or “fetish” – a “man-god akin to Prometheus who, instead of stealing fire, unleashed the raging fire of Black millions at a system that spat on them and their ancestors for centuries”. (Moore 1993: 113; Holder 1990: 265; Abu-Jamal 2001: 43) When he materialized in the streets again after his release in August 1970, Panthers and BPP supporters were not only disappointed in him as a public speaker – Newton had a high-pitched voice and tended to get very academic before large crowds –, but also grew increasingly irritated by his shifts and changes in Party ideology. (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 302, 319) As parts of the New York chapter and Newton’s chief internal antagonist,

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Eldridge Cleaver, began to openly contemplate going underground and taking up arms, the internal rifts – energetically promoted by COINTELPRO – widened into a Party split in early 1971. Months of intra-Party violence ensued that appalled Panthers and supporters alike. 19 Newton subsequently moved to radically reorient the BPP towards maintaining a low profile – Bloom and Martin (2013: 369) call it “a sweeping demilitarization of its image” –, and the captive black warrior vanished from the national scene and consciousness and slipped back into Black Invisibility. That the Panthers’ rhetoric of violence rebounced to produce a variety of negative ramifications, however, had a lot to do with the government’s executive forces, the police and the FBI, who took the rhetoric entirely at face value. Particularly the BPP’s initial focus on the gun – although completely within legal bounds – put the government in a high state of alarm. The Panthers’ early performance as captive black warriors thus proved – quite ironically – supremely successful at creating Black Visibility on the physical and psychological levels: its effect on whites, as the historian Nikhil Pal Singh (1998: 89) argues, was “uniquely subversive” – and “instantly traumatizing”. For a moment, at least, whites and particularly the police were jolted into existential fear by a group that never encompassed more than a couple of thousand members scattered across the nation’s urban ghetto landscapes. But the government’s response was swift and its intensity caught the Panthers unprepared. Police forces and the FBI deliberately operated far beyond legal confines to pin down the Black Panthers as violence-prone and criminal-minded. No matter how rare actual incidents of Panther misconduct actually were, they were wrenched into the glaring spotlight, along with other instances that involved Panther skirmishes with the law. COINTELPRO certainly played its part in narrowing down the spotlight on the BPP to a focus that rested almost exclusively on violence. That the public was not aware of “how government officials used criminal laws as a pretext to arrest Panthers”, as the historian Charles E. Jones (1988: 423-424) notes, cannot be explained solely by the fact that both police and FBI deliberately catered to the mass media’s traditional, stereotyped depiction of black men and their preference for headlines of violent clashes instead of background reports about feeding breakfast to schoolchildren. The mass media actively participated in and strengthened the government’s Back-to-Black-Invisibility drive against the Panthers. Ultimately, it was the mass media who turned the captive black warrior into the well-known, racist image of the violence-prone, criminal-minded black male of a low moral caliber. What reached the American public via mass media about the BPP’s struggle for Black Visibility was thus mutilated virtually beyond recognition. As a logical consequence, the Panthers’ claim to moral authority when it came to determine what racial social justice entailed was undermined and ultimately annihilated. From a historical perspective, one is inclined to ponder the

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question whether it would have made a difference if the American public had known about COINTELPRO and not learned about it only years after the BPP’s demise in the mid-70s. As Huey Newton (1995a: 304) contended in retrospect, the Panthers’ fight against their criminalization came to overshadow all other Party activities, in that “time was measured not in days or months or hours but by the movements of comrades and brothers in and out of prison and by the dates of hearings, releases, and trials. Our lives were regulated not by the ordinary tempo of daily events but by the forced clockwork of the judicial process.” Yet, despite the numerous COINTELPRO-instigated efforts to silence the BPP’s key asset in creating Black Visibility – the Party newspaper –, the “voice of the Party” remained steadfast in exposing the various forms of institutional racism that kept black people locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, with a special focus on the juridical system. And as the law specialist Bridgette Baldwin (2006: 70) points out: “even the BPP’s most controversial acts of armed self-defense were not simply rational or morally justified but constitutionally legal.” However, the Panthers erred in a key aspect related to their struggle for Black Visibility on the structural level: the belief that once the racist mechanisms inherent in the systems functioning were laid bare, this would automatically prompt social change. In many respects they did, in fact, undermine white self-perception and identity, they did pose a fundamental challenge to whites’ position in society and to the nature and legitimacy of the US government. But America refused to realize the consequences of the Black Visibility created by the Panthers, let alone act upon them. Whites, as the philosopher Charles Mills (1998: 142) points out, are “prone to evasion, bad faith and self-deception” about the true character of a white supremacy system. “[R]acism is still rampant in the white movement,” a New Left activist told The Movement: “fifty thousand people marched during the People’s Park crisis – mostly because it was the first time a white brother was murdered by the pigs. The response of the white movement to Hampton’s murder compared to that was nil.” White students’ hesitation to take risks similar to those of the Panthers in exposing the racist functioning of the US government and its key institutions was reminiscent of racism, the author argued, as it reflected their contention of having something to lose – of being privileged as whites. (TBP, December 27, 1969: 6, 16) Indeed, even for SDS, who vowed to take up the Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility and carry it into the white communities, the commitment essentially remained lip service. Various BPP members repeatedly chastised SDS for their lack of dedication and for what they perceived to be attempts to patronize the Party. (TBP, August 9, 1969: 12-13) The historian David Barber (2006: 224) essentially reached the same conclusion –  namely that SDS entirely failed to organize white communities around the issue of race and instead sought to tutor the Panthers on how to organize the black community.

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As Mills (1998: 157) argues, a “felicific calculus that would register accurately the sufferings of [blacks] would disrupt the reproduction of the system”. In hindsight, the waves of support for the BPP that rocked even liberal white communities around Panther trials and events of police repression, then, turn out to be little more than upsurges of moral conscience towards single, blatant acts of injustice. The investigations prompted by these protests, and the reports they resulted in, confirm the refusal to recognize even police killings of Panthers or the existence of COINTELPRO as anything else but isolated instances of illegal behavior by those whose function it is to uphold the law. The report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (known under the name of its chairman as Church Report), which scrutinized COINTELPRO, is a case in point. While it can be argued that the investigation committee’s being staffed by members of the US government seriously hampered their predisposition towards independence and impartiality, the conclusions they drew in full knowledge and conscience of the extent and nature of COINTELPRO are nonetheless surprising. They never questioned the legitimacy of the FBI as an institution and, quite obviously, did not perceive those responsible for and actively engaged in COINTELPRO as criminals. All the Senate Select Committee did was declare its “irritation” regarding the fact that “high officials of the FBI desired to promote violent confrontations between BPP members and members of other groups, and that those officials condoned tactics calculated to achieve that end”. What the Committee found “equally disturbing” was the attitude and work ethic arising from internal memoranda and reports – “the pride which those officials took in claiming credit for the bloodshed that occurred” (US Senate 1976: 189). A perception which only confirmed the Committee’s refusal to recognize the racist nature and functioning of the FBI. Just as in other reports (Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police 1973), the government’s monopoly in the legitimate use of violence was strengthened as a result. None of the state attorneys, FBI officials, agents and policemen involved either directly or indirectly in COINTELPRO activities against the BPP and in actual killings of Panthers were ever legally prosecuted or punished for their deeds. A finding that rings familiar almost half a century later with respect to police killings of black people. And it cannot be reduced to a missing “felicific calculus”, as authors like Michelle Alexander, Naomi Murakawa, and Elizabeth Hinton have demonstrated. Much rather, black struggles for racial social justice since World War II that culminated in the Black Panthers confronting white supremacy head-on met with parallel efforts by the executive, juridical, and executive forces of government to discredit these demands by systematically criminalizing insubordinate blacks. By the time the Panthers and other

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nonwhite radicals ultimately engaged the entire nation in a discourse on race, thus forcing whites to look into the abyss of racism that permeated the structures of US government and society, President Richard M. Nixon was already erecting the foundations on which the system of mass incarceration in the 1980s would be built. As his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman quoted him in one of his diary entries in 1969, Nixon was convinced that, regarding the issue of street crime, “the whole problem is really the blacks”, and he thus sought “to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to” (Hinton 2016: 141-142). The answer was provided by the culture of poverty approach made popular with the Moynihan Report: “The ‘social pathologies’ of the poor, particularly street crime, illegal drug use, and delinquency, were redefined by conservatives as having their cause in overly generous relief arrangements,” Michelle Alexander (2012: 45) writes. “Black ‘welfare cheats’ and their dangerous offspring emerged, for the first time, in the political discourse and media imagery.” And Nixon proceeded to substitute the War on Poverty with a War on Crime that was, in fact, a war on blacks. The concomitant rise of the ideology of colorblindness, as Nixon embraced Moynihan’s idea of “benign neglect” regarding issues of race, effectively veiled the reerection of racial stereotypes in this course. When Ronald Reagan officially launched his War on Drugs in 1982, the term “welfare queen” had long become a code for “lazy-greedy, black ghetto-mother” and, as Alexander (2012: 49, 54) points out, “the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race: […] cloaked in race-neutral language, [it] offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility towards blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.” In her seminal study The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness from 2010, she demonstrates how the federal government proceeded to implement a web of laws, rules, and policies that systematically discriminates blacks, in that it not only flushes them into prison in grossly disproportionate numbers, but assures that they remain locked up in poverty after having been released: legally barred from employment, housing, and welfare benefits and denied the right to vote. “Mass incarceration”, Alexander (2012: 192) concludes, “has nullified many of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.” Moreover, being black has become equal with being a criminal. In Denver, for instance, the police’s gang database listed 80 percent of all blacks in the entire city as suspected criminals in the early 1990s. “For black youth, the experience of being ‘made black’ often begins with the first police stop, interrogation, search, or arrest. The experience carries social meaning – this is what it means to be black”, Alexander (2012: 136, 199, original emphasis) writes. A ritual of dominance and subordination played out every day in ghetto streets across America – no different from the everyday experience of police brutality

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that had triggered the Watts revolt in 1965 and the majority of the ensuing ghetto uprisings in the second half of the 1960s. “Felony”, Alexander (2012: 164) quotes a black minister, “is the new N-word. They don’t have to call you a nigger anymore. They just say you’re a felon. […] Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree.” In the era of colorblindness, race has become a taboo, and structural racism accordingly hard to pin down because it has been legally sanctioned – all that is needed for the system to reproduce itself is racial indifference (read: professed colorblindness). Moreover, as Nikil Pal Singh (2004: 217) points out, the insistence upon colorblindness is “a product of the steady erasure of the legacy of unfinished struggles against white supremacy”. The Black Panthers’ struggle for Black Visibility must be considered as an unfinished struggle whose legacy has been subdued. “In retrospect, it seems clear that nothing could have been more important in the 1970s and 1980s than finding a way to create a durable, interracial, bottom-up coalition for social and economic justice,” Michelle Alexander writes. The Panthers had come a long way in building such a coalition, and as David Hilliard confided to the author of this book in the late 1990s, if there was one thing he regretted in hindsight, it was that they didn’t just keep on organizing on a nationwide scale beyond 1972. “Let’s Talk About Race,” Alexander advocates by way of conclusion. The ideology of colorblindness must fall. “That race should be irrelevant is certainly an attractive ideal,” Charles Mills (1998: xv, original emphasis) also contends, “but when it has not been irrelevant, it is absurd to proceed as if it had been.” Indeed, this may well be the central legacy of the Black Panthers today: their insistence upon the recognition of the centrality of race in shaping one’s being and their ingenuity in laying bare and confronting the structural foundation and dynamics of racism. Michelle Alexander has called for a new social movement that takes on this task. Black Lives Matter is a beginning – and they seem to have scrutinized the legacy of the Black Panthers well. They put race in an absolutely central position without making it essential, and they are a bottomup organization including all those who have experienced discrimination because of their gender or sexual orientation, the LGBT community. What many outsiders still grapple with is the fact that the Black-Lives-Matter movement repudiates any forms of disciplined, hierarchical structures and leadership figures. But Black Lives Matter is united by its “own voice” –  its mediated presence in internet channels and on social media platforms. This is only a beginning. Much will depend on the ability of all those who endorse Black Lives Matter –  particularly those from the privileged white sections of society – to reach out to poor white communities, who often have to fight similar social and economic problems as ghetto blacks do, and win them over for a common struggle against white supremacy.

Notes I ntroduction : P l aying the R ace C ard 1 | mappingpoliceviolence.org (September 5, 2016) 2 | Charles W. Mills (1999; 1998) has advanced this argument most convincingly, along with other critical race theorists such as Robert Birt (1997), Lewis R. Gordon (1997a; 1997b; 1995), Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (1997), Cheryl I. Harris (1997), Richard Delgado (1995b) or Nathaniel Gates (1997) and historians and social scientists such as George M. Fredrickson (1997; 1988; 1987; 1981), Pierre L. Van den Berghe (1967) or David Brion Davis (1966). 3 | Among the 79 sworn witnesses to the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, 60 percent were city and state officials; taken together with politicians and executives of various public and private organizations, they made up 87 percent of all witnesses, as the appendix of the report (Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots 1965: 93-100) reveals. The written transcripts of all testimonies are collected together with consultants reports and other documents in 18 volumes deposited in the Main Library of the University of California at Berkeley. Volumes IV, XIII, and XIV are particularly informative about how witnesses from the black community — including a particularly outspoken white female teacher — were treated. 4 | During the Watts revolt, the destruction of stores was selective and committed predominantly by neighbors familiar with the individual merchant’s exploitative business practices: black property was spared, as were stores of white merchants known for their fair treatment of blacks. (Viorst 1979; McCord / McCord 1977; Oberschall 1971; Quarantelli / Dynes 1971; Bullock 1970; Cohen 1970; Conot 1967; Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots 1966) And it was not individual police officers who came under attack — the goal was much rather to turn the tables on the police as an oppressive force. (Blauner 1966; Viorst 1979; Johnson / Sears / McConahay 1971) 5 | Seale reflected about how he and Newton had acquired a broad and intimate knowledge about the historical dimensions of the black experience, existence and consciousness. (Hampton / Fayer 1990: 352) In his autobiography, Newton explicitly mentioned Du Bois and Ellison among the authors influencing him most in his thinking. The January 4, 1969 issue of The Black Panther, for instance, carried a whole-page

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Racism and Resistance picture poster of Du Bois on page 17, captioned with his famous prophesy about the color line as the central problem of the twentieth century. 6 | Around June 1966, Stokely Carmichael had founded the Lowndes County Black Panther Party as an independent third and black party to gain control over the Alabama county, which was 80 percent black. Black Power thus initially encompassed a new approach to politics in the South: community control. (Carmichael 1966: 4, 24-29) Newton and Seale had adopted both name and symbol of this Southern party. The book Carmichael published in 1967 meant to theoretically found Black Power and provide a guide for action. 7 | Besides Harrison (TBP, February 2, 1969, quoted in Foner 1970: 151) and Newton (TBP, August 23, 1969: 10), Eldridge Cleaver (TBP, August 23, 1969: 5), Bobby Seale (1991: 256) and the Seattle Panthers (TBP, March 25, 1969: 8) had also rejected cultural black nationalism as turning black people into racists and as a means of disguising structural racism and black exploitation. Newton later revised his interpretation in the course of his fundamental ideological reorientation in mid-1971 and began to endorse black capitalism — as long as it served the black community. 8 | TBP, May 19, 1969: 11. The quote is taken from Malcolm X’s famous speech The Ballot or the Bullet, held on April 3, 1964 in Cleveland (Breitman 1990: 24-25). 9 | Eldridge Cleaver in: TBP, May 18, 1968: 10. Cleaver’s phrasing is exemplary for what amounted to a Panther formula almost when Party members drew the colonial analogy. Compare only Newton’s statement behind bars in the film O ff the P ig (1968), or a flyer from the Brooklyn branch of the BPP titled Defend the Ghetto! (Foner 1970: 180). 10 | In his seminal work Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power, originally published in 1965, the psychiatrist Kenneth C. Clark had defined the black ghetto as surrounded by “invisible walls […] erected by the white society, by those who have power, both to confine those who have no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The dark ghettos are social, political, educational, and — above all — economic colonies.” (Clark 1989: 11, original emphasis) James Baldwin, who like Clark also lived in Harlem, explicitly categorized the police as an occupation army whose functioning in the ghetto could only be oppressive: “Their very presence is an insult, and it would be even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place.” (Baldwin 1962: 65) During a speech in May 1964, Malcolm X was clearly framing the ghetto as an internal colony, when charging that “the police in Harlem, their presence is like occupation forces, like an occupying army. They’re not in Harlem to protect us; they’re not in Harlem to look out for our welfare; they’re in Harlem to protect the interests of the businessmen who don’t even live here.” Most astoundingly, he then added — certainly without knowing Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, which was translated into English only after Malcolm X’s death: “The same conditions that prevailed in Algeria […] prevail today in America in every Negro community.” (Breitman 1990: 66) One year later, the revolting ghetto youth of Watts plainly perceived itself at war with the police as occupying army and linked the

Notes ghetto streets with the battlefields in Vietnam. (Conot 1967: 204; Hofstadter / Wallace 1970: 264-265; Raine 1970b: 407) 11 | As chapter two will show, the BPP essentially corresponded to a cadre party with a rigid internal hierarchy and a strong focus on discipline that essentially reflects whom the Panthers regarded as their key constituency, as derived from Fanon: the urban black Lumpenproletariat. However, the BPP’s rank and file actually came from a much broader socio-economic background that differed in its composition from city to city, with the probably most typical member being a young adolescent likely to be in high school or college. (Jones / Jeffries 1998: 44-46) Most party leaders had at least some years of college (Heath 1976a: 133), with many in key leadership positions across the country possessing a college or university education and a political background as civil rights activists. (Jones / Jeffries 1998: 45-46; LeBlanc-Ernest 1998: 310; Brown 1992: 179-180) 12 | Here in the phrasing of Afeni Shakur from the New York BPP (Foner 1970: 161). 13 | The original formulation of the culture of poverty goes back to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1966; 1959) and was made popular by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), which guided Johnson’s War on Poverty.

E nter the C ap tive B l ack W arrior in B abylon 1 | Alkebulan 2007: 104; LeBlanc-Ernest 1998: 308; Seale 1991: 153-161; Holder 1990: 35. 2 | New or aspiring Party members had to go through intensive internal legal training that included the correct handling of guns, before they were allowed to accompany the police patrols (Newton 1995a: 122; Hilliard / Cole 1993: 150; Seale 1991: 86). The BPP’s internal political education classes, which included this legal training, are detailed in chapter two. 3 | Cleaver 1969: 34-38, quote p. 36. Cleaver’s description is an early piece of evidence for his attempt to mystify Newton, as becomes clear in his conclusion of the situation — which prompted him to join the BPP: “Huey P. Newton is the ideological descendant, heir and successor of Malcolm X. Malcolm prophesied the coming of the gun to the black liberation struggle. Huey P. Newton picked up the gun and pulled the trigger, freeing the genie of black revolutionary violence in Babylon.” (Cleaver 1969: 38). 4 | There are varying accounts of what happened that night: Newton 1995a: 174176; Newton 1991: 43-65; Moore 1993; Marine 1969; Bazaar 1968; Rosebury 1968; Pearson 1994: 145-147. Pearson claimed that “years later, Newton would boast to close friends that he did, in fact, shoot John Frey” — without producing any traceable evidence. 5 | A variety of these flyers is collected in the Newell Hart Collection. Consider, for instance, the flyer Free Huey!, issued by two groups called “community organization

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Racism and Resistance for Huey Newton” and “campus mobilization” and printed entirely in capital letters. It reads: “On Monday, Aug. 19, there will be a massive demonstration of community support — and especially white support — for the demand that Huey Newton be freed. The demonstration will be held at the Alameda County Court House — 12 th Street and Fallon, Oakland — from 11:30 to 1:00, and will include a press conference at 12:05 with the community mobilization for Huey Newton. […] Demonstrations will continue at the courthouse every Monday and Thursday, 11:30 to 1:00, from now until the trial is over. Plan to attend regularly to put across the message that Huey must be set free!!” (original emphasis) Shortly before Newton’s trial was over, another flyer titled Back to the Courthouse! announced a rally and barbecue on Sunday, 25 August, in a large public park in the black community of Oakland, with speeches by Panther leaders Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver and obviously also by Stokely Carmichael, the BPP’s Prime Minister at the time. The same flyer also made known that the next courthouse demonstration would take place the following day and included information on carpools and where they were leaving from. 6 | The Jersey City and Bronx Community Information Centers, for instance, held such meetings on a weekly basis, see TBP, May 31, 1970: 9; TBP, January 24, 1970. 7 | Free Huey Birthday rallies, for instance, became a yearly event in the Bay Area and other parts of the US where the BPP was present. The second “Huey P. Newton Birthday Benefit Celebration”, as it was announced on a flyer in February 1969, took place in the Community Theatre in Berkeley (Newell Hart Collection, TBP, February 2, 1969: 2). Besides the broad range of speakers, Newton was present through tape-recorded and filmed statements offered to the audience. Last but not least, the Panthers provided entertainment by music bands and dance troops, and there were also poetry readings. The flyer announcing the birthday celebration lists twelve places for buying tickets as well as the prices for both advance and evening-door payment, mirroring the magnitude of the BPP’s presence in the Bay Area by that time. In other cities where the Party was active in 1969 and 1970, the annual Free Huey Birthday Rally might not so much be a celebratory event but an occasion to further spread and anchor the Party’s presence in the local black community (TBP, March 3,1969: 3; McCutchen 1998: 124). 8 | Compare the reappearing ads in The Black Panther, for instance in the issues of April 18, 1970: 17 or July 18, 1970: 23. Some of the smaller Panther paraphernalia are collected in: Stanford University, Libraries, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, Inc. Collection, 1968–1994. Special Collections M864. Series 2: Box 12, Folder 22. 9 | My work base has been a 16mm-copy of B lack Panther from the Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film in Göttingen, Germany. A slightly different VHS copy exists at the University of California at Berkeley in the Media Center under VIDEO/C 4131, featuring the names of three of the involved filmmakers of the San Francisco Newsreel collective: Robert Lacativa, Robert Machover, and Paul Shinoff. I was able to contact all three of them and conduct interviews with both Paul Shinoff (Berkeley, September 3, 1998) and Bob Lacativa (New York City, September 17, 1998).

Notes 10  |  Among them the three-day conference for gang members hosted by the Philadelphia Panthers in the fall of 1969 (TBP, April 27, 1969: 3; TBP, November 22, 1969: 15), the People’s Free Festival in San Francisco in the spring of 1970 (TBP, April 18, 1970: 1213), or a Memorial Service held in New Haven in April 1969 for two Party leaders who had been killed (TBP, May 25, 1969: 3). 11 | A flyer from the Newell Hart Collection announces a screening for the Huey P. Newton Birthday Benefit Celebration in February 1969, and The Black Panther (March 3, 1969: 3) reports of one at a Free Huey Birthday Rally in Kansas City. Screenings at colleges and universities are mentioned in Holder (1990: 147).

To E xpose , S ubvert, and P rovoke 1 | Without claiming to be comprehensive, the following cities with Party activities announced the introduction or opening or commented on the operation of a breakfast program between January 1969 and the spring of 1971: Albany, Atlantic City, Baltimore, Berkeley, Boston, Brooklyn (NY), Chicago, Denver, Des Moines, Detroit, Eugene, Fair Haven, Harlem (NY), the BPP Indiana chapter, Jersey City, Kansas City, Los Angeles, the Maryland chapter, Milwaukee, Mount Vernon, New Haven, Oakland, Peekskill, Philadelphia, (Portland), Queens (NY), Richmond, Rockwell, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Staten Island (NY), Vallejo, Washington, DC, White Plains, Winston-Salem. Among those featuring more than one breakfast site were San Francisco which had four, Los Angeles, Harlem, and Philadelphia which had three, and the particularly active Chicago Panthers who had opened three locations by May 1969 and expanded them to five by April 1971. (TBP, November 22, 1969: 2; TBP, March 31, 1969: 9; TBP, August 23, 1969: 15; TBP, May 4, 1969: 7; TBP, April 10, 1971: 4) 2 | TBP, June 21, 1969: 14; TBP, September 27, 1969: 6. The reported numbers of children to whom breakfast was served daily in Chicago are quite spectacular: in May 1969, two months after their opening, the first two locations were serving 220 and 360 children respectively. (TBP, May 4, 1969: 7; TBP, May 31, 1969: 4) Only four months later, the Chicago Panthers claimed to feed over 3000 children throughout the city. (TBP, September 6, 1969) Generally, the number of children eating at BPP breakfast sites each day was smaller and varied according to the capacity of the location. Smaller locations served between 50 to 80, sometimes 100 children, larger ones between 150 and 350, sometimes more, according to regular reports in The Black Panther. 3 | The Black Panther carried information on Liberation Schools between June 1969 and February 1970 from BPP chapters and branches in Baltimore, Berkeley, Bronx (NY), Brooklyn (NY), Chicago, Kansas City, Oakland, Omaha, Philadelphia, Queens (NY), Richmond, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Staten Island (NY), Vallejo, White Plains, and Winston-Salem. 4 | The following chapters and branches reported about their clothing programs: Baltimore, Boston, Bronx (NY), Chicago, Cleveland, Harlem (NY), Jersey City, Kansas

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Racism and Resistance City, Mount Vernon, Oakland, Philadelphia, Richmond, Seattle, Toledo. Free Health Clinics existed in Berkeley, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago (two clinics), Cleveland, Eugene, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New Haven, Oakland, Philadelphia, Portland, Rockford, San Diego, and Seattle. 5 | Seale 1991: 381; Holder 1990: 85. Many Panthers shared communal living ar­ rangements. Depending on the region, the BPP rented or bought houses or apartments in which Party members lived. The usual setting on the West Coast consisted of several Panthers living together in a house, with larger branches and chapters having several such ‘Panther pads’ at their disposal. In other cities, especially in the North and East, where real estate prices were prohibitive, the Party had to rent apartments for its local members. It was also increasingly common that the local BPP office functioned as a living and sleeping quarter. (McCutchen 1998: 115; Seale 1991: 381; Brown 1992) 6 | See the reported numbers from Brooklyn (NY), Staten Island (NY) or San Francisco. (TBP, August 2, 1969: 14; TBP, August 30, 1969: 21; TBP, September 6, 1969: 12) A notable exception was the Queens Liberation School, where 90 kids enrolled on opening day. (TBP, August 16, 1969: 14) As a result, the children were divided into three different groups and taught according to their age. Usually, the classes were far from homogenous, as the children participating varied greatly in age. Some were only two, others already 15 or 16 years old, with the majority of them being between ages nine and 13. 7 | The clinic in Eugene was open Monday through Friday from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. (TBP, January 31, 1970: 7), the opening hours of the Berkeley clinic ran Monday through Saturday from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. (TBP, June 28, 1969: 6), and both the Portland and San Diego clinics were open weekdays and Sunday through Friday respectively between 7 and 10 p.m. (TBP, February 28, 1970: 17; TBP, January 24, 1970: 8). Other health clinics had even more restricted opening hours: the Boston clinic was open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7 to 11 p.m. and on Saturdays and Sundays from 2 to 6 p.m., (TBP, June 13, 1970: 2) the Seattle clinic provided medical services on Mondays and Thursdays between 5.30 and 9 p.m. (TBP, December 13, 1969: 7), and the Brooklyn clinic, at least in the beginning, was open Thursday nights only from 7.30 to 9.30 p.m. (TBP, November 15, 1969: 17). 8 | During one of the initial screenings, the Chicago’s health clinics’ personnel tested about 600 children for both sickle cell anemia and the sickle cell trait at a local elementary school over a three-day period. (TBP, May 22, 1971: 10) By June 1971, testing was also done in Berkeley, Boston, Philadelphia, and Seattle. (TBP, June 12, 1971: 16; TBP, July 3, 1971: 2) The Black Panther repeatedly reported on the efforts to establish the Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation over the course of 1971. (May 22: 10; October 9: 9; December 18: 16) Eventually, the BPP’s campaign seems to have prompted President Nixon to mention sickle cell anemia in his 1971 health message to Congress, as David Hilliard (1993: 339) remembered. 9 | In Newton’s words: “We realize that the fascist regime that operates the prisons throughout America would like to do their treachery in the dark. But if we get the

Notes relatives, parents, and friends to the prisons they can expose the treachery of the fascists.” (Newton 1995b: 21) 10 | The military ranks of the ministers vary slightly according to different sources. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 4; Heath 1976b: 9-11; Church League 1969: 24) The military ranking, ministries and titles were maintained until well after the Party split, being officially dropped in July 1972. In this course, Huey Newton’s title was changed twice: first, after his release from prison in August 1970, when he was named “Supreme Commander”. After the split, he renamed himself “Supreme Servant of the People”. 11 | See TBP, May 31, 1969: 4; US House Committee on Internal Security 1970: 86; Umoja 2001: 7. Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois chapter, was Deputy Chairman, for example, and Geronimo Pratt from the Los Angeles Panthers held the rank of Deputy Minister of Defense. Leaders on this level were either chosen or confirmed in their position by the Central Committee of the BPP. (Johnson 1998: 398) Sometimes larger, well-functioning chapters also oversaw other states or states with only small chapters. The Illinois chapter, for example, held regional control over the Omaha, Des Moines, and Kansas City chapters. On the other hand, California as the place of origin and center of Panther activity had two chapters — the Southern California and the Northern California chapter, which was largely identical with national headquarters. (Holder 1990: 19-20) 12  |  In cities with larger black communities, the BPP often ran several offices, as was the case in New York City, where the Panthers operated out of offices in Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx respectively. (US House Committee on Internal Security 1971: 88-89; Holder 1990: 20) Other cities with several Party offices included Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Hierarchically, branches were further divided into sections and subsections, with squads occupying the lowest level on the organizational ladder. (Brown 1992: 135) The lower leadership positions within chapters and branches consisted of section leaders in the rank of sergeant and subsection leaders accorded with the rank of corporal. The ordinary rank and file carried the ranks of privates. (Seale 1991: 397; Church League 1969: 24; TBP, May 31, 1969: 4; US House Committee on Internal Security 1970: 86) 13 | Sources for these varying accounts include an ex-Panther testifying before the US House Committee on Internal Security (1970/1971: 5006-5007), Heath (1976a: 120-121), Hilliard (1993: 159) or such high-ranking Panthers as Geronimo Pratt, who claims to have helped initiate and develop chapters in Atlanta, Dallas, New Orleans, Memphis, and Winston-Salem (Umoja 2001: 7). Dhoruba Bin Wahad also maintains that as member of the East Coast BPP leadership, he organized chapters and branches throughout New York State and along the Eastern Seaboard down to Maryland. (Fletcher / Jones / Lotringer 1993: 29) Training programs for aspiring Panthers existed practically from the Party’s outset, as Emory Douglas, who became a BPP-member around late 1966 or early 1967 recalled. (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 150) The later BPP leader Elaine Brown (1992: 134) also vividly remembered her training instructions in April 1968. According to the Church League (1969: 19-23), the six-week training program contained specific political education reading classes three times a week and additional sessions

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Racism and Resistance in practical training concerning the Party’s chain-of-command, the handling and safety of guns, close order drills, and unarmed combat. 14 | Such reports typically contained significant daily activities, accounts of con­ frontations with the police or incidents witnessed in the black community involving the police; a discussion of other local happenings including the position taken by the Black Panther Party, attendance of rallies, speaking engagements, demonstrations, etc.; progress in the implementation of community service and other proposed programs; planned activities; efforts to spread BPP material, especially The Black Panther; the content of political education classes; liaisons with other radical groups. (Holder 1990: 182; US House Committee on Internal Security 1970/1971: 5007) When of interest to other BPP branches or the black community in general, these reports were printed in the Party newspaper. 15 | This could include physical punishment. A harmless variant could take the form of physical exercise, such as doing push-ups or running laps around the block. (Jennings 1998: 261) More serious was the practice of “mud-holing”, where a person was put in the center and stomped down. Some Party leaders even advocated “to operate on the ‘greater fear’ theory: Make the rank and file more frightened of the Party than of the police” (Hilliard / Cole 1993: 234-236). In January 1969, the Central Committee announced that it would start with sweeping expulsions — purges, as they were called — in order to consolidate the BPP after the unchecked growth of the preceding months had brought an influx of undisciplined members, accompanied by an increasingly slanted public image of the BPP as a whole. (TBP, January 4, 1969: 6) See chapter three for details. 16 | In his Letter from Chairman Bobby, No.3, published in The Black Panther (September 13, 1969: 17), Seale took all rank and file to task because of this. The Central Committee obliged all Party members to attend three two-hour political education classes a week and additionally read two hours per day to keep abreast of current developments. (TBP, May 31, 1969: 4) For local Party leaders, there existed an extensive mandatory reading list, including various essays by Huey Newton, the autobiography of Malcolm X and his speech The Ballot or the Bullet, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, three books by Kwame Nkrumah, Chedi Jagan’s The West on Trial, Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution, Che Guevara’s book on guerilla warfare, Mao’s Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, and two books by Lenin. Also part of the list were such alternative or oppositional newspapers and journals as Ramparts, Muhammad Speaks, National Guardian, Granma, Tricontinental, and Minority of One. (Church League 1969: 18) 17 | One such directive the Central Committee issued by phone had been wiretapped by the FBI. (US Senate 1976: 218) 18 | Seale (1991: 382) maintained that a speaking engagement brought between $ 500 and $ 1000. While this large amount was probably offered exclusively to important Party leaders, other BPP leaders hired for speeches also received quite large sums. (Seale 1991: 178-179; Alkebulan 2007: 49-50) Even local cadre members were able to

Notes contribute substantial amounts of money to their local branch through their speaking engagements. (McCutchen 1998: 124; US House Committee on Internal Security 1970/1971: 5007) 19 | Political education classes for the local black community were held regularly, for instance, in Oakland (Brent 1996: 97-98), Chicago (TBP, July 26, 1969: 20), WinstonSalem (TBP, July 4, 1970: 6), Philadelphia (Abu-Jamal 2001: 47), and Seattle (TBP, November 16, 1968: 18). And while the Kansas City Panthers chose to organize a panel with community leaders (TBP, March 3, 1969: 3), members of the Seattle branch contributed regular Sunday sermons in late 1968 (TBP, November 16, 1968: 18), as did the New York Panthers once in May 1969 (The New York Times, May 26, 1969: 30) and on several later occasions in the Washington Square Methodist Church (The New York Times, January 5, 1970: 42). 20 | This was the case in San Francisco (TBP, October 24, 1970), for example, or in Chicago (TBP, April 10, 1971: 4). The Boston Panthers even taught the black community how to ‘mau-mau’ and thus subvert the official welfare institutions. (TBP, July 3, 1971: 2) 21 | The Toledo Panthers, for instance, started to provide free legal assistance in January 1971 in the form of a 24-hour hotline and lawyers. (Holder 1990: 244) 22 | Pamphlet titled Black Panther — White Dove: Eldridge Cleaver and You, handdated to October 1968. (Newell Hart Collection) 23 | An official visit that finally materialized a year later, by then with Newton heading an Oakland BPP delegation. See photos in Newton 1995b: 106-107. 24 | TBP, November 16, 1968: 20. Two months later, John Huggins and Bunchy Carter, both enrolled at UCLA, were shot and killed by members of Ron Karenga’s US (meaning “Us black people”), a cultural-nationalist black organization that rivaled the BPP, at a controversial black students’ meeting at the university surrounding the course and content of a Black Studies Program. The LAPD had capitalized on the existing hostilities between the BPP and US by instrumentalizing Karenga and US against the Panthers. And while the US killers received aid in their escape from the scene of the crime, a direct link between them and a police or FBI agent could never be fully established. See Brown (1992: 156-170), Karenga (1976). Abu-Jamal (2004: 103-104) suggests differently, quoting a former FBI agent who had worked in the LAPD’s so-called racial squad at the time. 25 | See how the Panthers initially called themselves Black Panther Party for SelfDefense. Even Eldridge Cleaver, maybe the Party’s most explicit and uncompromising rhetorical advocate of violence, insisted to clarify in an interview: “I don’t dig violence. Guns are ugly. People are what’s beautiful; and when you use a gun to kill someone you’re doing something ugly. But there are two forms of violence: violence directed at you to keep you in your place and violence to defend yourself against that suppression and to win your freedom.” (Cleaver 1969: 166) 26 | In March 1968, Newton — already imprisoned — had issued Executive Mandate No. 3 as a response to BPP members and sympathizers increasingly falling victim to police

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Racism and Resistance aggression: “Therefore, those who approach our doors in the manner of outlaws; who seek to enter our homes illegally, unlawfully and in a rowdy fashion; those who kick our doors down with no authority and seek to ransack our homes in violation of our human rights will henceforth be treated as outlaws, or gangsters, as evil-doers. We have no way of determining that a man in a uniform involved in a forced outlaw entry into our home is in fact a guardian of the law. He is acting like a law-breaker and we must make an appropriate response. We draw the line at the threshold of our doors. It is therefore mandated as a general order to all members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense that all members must acquire the technical equipment to defend their homes and their dependents and shall do so.” (Newton 1995b: 12-13, original emphasis) 27 | Other such stories include Denver Pigs Incite Riot (TBP, January 5, 1969: 10). See also how Bobby Seale (1991: 246) commented upon two Oakland police officers firing off their guns at the BPP headquarters in the aftermath of Newton’s first trial, in which he was not convicted for murder, as the police had wished: “All that stuff exposed those pigs. The racism was placed out front, where it belongs. You dig? The people saw it for what it is.” 28 | It read: “The Central Committee of the Black Panther Party has called this press conference to alert the American people, the people of the world, and particularly the oppressed and colonized people of the world, to an already dangerous situation which is rapidly deteriorating. […] The United States, which is waging a genocidal war of aggression against the Vietnamese people, is also waging a war against the colonized black people within her own borders. […] We call upon the member nations of the United Nations to authorize the stationing of UN Observer Teams throughout the cities of America wherein black people are cooped up and concentrated in wretched ghettos. This action is necessary because the racist power structure of this imperialist country is preparing to unleash a war of genocide against her black colonial subjects.” (TBP, September 14, 1968: 3) 29 | The petition read: “We, the undersigned citizens of the United States, gravely concerned with the continued racist persecution, conscious and unconscious, and centuries-old denial of Constitutional rights and respect for human dignity to men, women and children of red, brown, yellow and particularly black Americans, assert that: The savage police activities, based upon official policies of Federal, State and City governments, has resulted in innumerable beatings, frameups, arrests and murders of black Americans, the classical example of which is the Black Panther Party. The murderous attacks […] are […] in violation […] of this government’s commitment under the Charter of the United Nations. The Genocide Convention adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 8, 1948, defines as genocide ‘killing members of the group and any intent to destroy in whole or in part a national racial or ethnic or religious group’. And further, according to the Convention, ‘Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’ is Genocide. We assert that the Genocide Convention has been flagrantly violated by the Government of the United States. We further assert that the United Nations has jurisdiction in this matter […] The racist

Notes planned and unplanned terror suffered by more than 40 millions of black, brown, red and yellow citizens of the United States cannot be regarded solely as a domestic issue. […] On the basis of simple justice, it is time for the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations to call for universal action, including political and economic sanctions against the United States. We further demand that the United States government make reparations to those who have suffered the damages of racist and genocidal practices.” (Foner 1970: 254-255)

R esponse : To D isrup t, D iscredit, and D estroy 1 | All of the above taken from: Black Panther Party Ministry of Information Bulletin 4, a flyer dated February 26, 1968, announcing a courthouse demonstration (Newell Hart Collection); TBP, January 4, 1969: 14; Holder 1990: 218, 285. 2 | Initially called “Counter Intelligence Program, Black Nationalist–Hate Groups, Internal Security”, it was re-subtitled “Racial Intelligence” in April 1968. While counterintelligence programs had previously existed and continued to exist parallel to this one, the abbreviation COINTELPRO used throughout this book refers solely to the black-specific program of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 3  |  Smith 1974: 16. While it is unclear to what extent the White House was informed about detailed activities, clearly the Administration must have known about the program’s existence and also endorsed its chief aim. President Nixon himself had ordered some 40 FBI agents and 30 clerks to collect information on the international section of the BPP in Algiers, (Cleaver 1998: 234) as he obviously was convinced that the FBI was better qualified for this job than the CIA. Officially, it was only after a break-in in an FBI building in March 1974, during which some COINTELPRO files were stolen and handed to the media, that the Justice Department released a memo publicly admitting to the existence of a black-specific COINTELPRO. (Estell 1994: 68) 4 | See the results of initial investigations of COINTELPRO in the US Senate (1976) or in the report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police (1973) and the ensuing historical studies of O’Reilly (1991), Churchill and Vander Wall (1990a), Umoja (1998), or Churchill (2001), to name only a few. 5 | The first quote is taken from Hoover’s letter, which initiated the black-specific COINTELPRO (Smith 1974: 15) — the statement can thus also be read as a justification for whatever is to follow. The second quote stems from Memo 157-601 to the San Francisco field office (Roz Payne’s private collection of copied FBI files), wherein Hoover voiced his concerns about the announced merger between SNCC and BPP. 6 | See Memo 157-601 (Roz Payne’s private collection of copied FBI files), which Hoover sent to the San Francisco field office, advising them about measures to sabotage the merger with SNCC the BPP had announced to take place at the Free Huey Birthday Rally in February 1968. Furthermore, the first agent provocateur active for the FBI inside the

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Racism and Resistance BPP, Earl Anthony, was centrally involved in establishing the Party’s first branch outside the Bay Area — in Los Angeles — sometime between February and April 1968. 7 | See flyer dated February 26, 1968 from the Newell Hart Collection and Holder (1990: 285). In this case, COINTELPRO activity was probably geared first and foremost against SNCC, which was — contrary to the BPP — one of COINTELPRO’s initial targets. 8 | All evidence from US Senate 1976: 222-223. In virtually all cities where the BPP existed, the FBI could build and expand its COINTELPRO activities on hundreds of taps and bugs installed in Panther offices and homes by local and state police forces. Around the time of the Party split in 1971, only 13 telephone surveillances of the Black Panthers installed directly by the FBI existed; most of them at BPP national headquarters in Oakland and at the homes of key national Party leaders. (O’Reilly 1991: 340-341) 9 | TBP, May 11, 1969: 3; TBP, June 21, 1969: 9, 12-13, 17; Freed 1973: 24-25; Churchill 2001: 100. 10 | TBP, June 21, 1969: 9; TBP, August 9, 1969: 20; TBP, December 13, 1969: 10-11; Churchill 2001: 98-99; Churchill / Vander Wall 1990b: 142; Holder 1990: 306; O’Reilly 1991. 11 | TBP, May 11, 1969: 3; Churchill 2001: 100. According to TBP (August 9,1969: 20) and the local black community of Chicago, where the BPP headquarters were set ablaze, the police started firing, while the Chicago police maintained that they were initially shot at from the BPP office (The New York Times, August 1, 1969: 67). 12 | According to the Panthers’ estimate (TBP, February 21, 1970: 18), the Party had paid a total of $ 5.240.568 of bail and fine money by the end of 1969. Abron (1993: 247) lists a similar amount for the two years of 1968 and 1969. For the following examples of how the BPP was thus deprived from its leadership, see Churchill (2001: 99-103), Newton (1991: 156) or Holder (1990: 232). 13 | The above cases are detailed in Churchill (2001: 103-105), Umoja (1998: 423), and Olsen (2000). Rice and Poindexter were charged with murdering a policeman, while the actual person who set off the bomb which killed the policeman was not only known to the FBI at the time, but ‘convinced’ by federal agents to change his confession and instead appear as witness in court and name the two BPP leaders as key agitators, in exchange for immunity from prosecution. For Rice’s death, see Omaha World-Herald, March 16, 2016. 14 | See O’Reilly 1991: 312; Churchill 2001: 96; Holder 1990: 297, 301; Churchill / Vander Wall 1990a: 399. 15 | See McCutchen 1998: 126, 132, fn. 25, Churchill 2001: 97. Curiously, Jeffries (2007b) neither believes that the Baltimore branch was heavily infiltrated, nor does he identify Kebe as an informant or agent provocateur. 16 | As the trial revealed the direct involvement of the police in the murder, all charges against the Panthers were dropped — see Jeffries (2007b: 33-34), McCutchen (1998: 126, 132, fn. 25), and Churchill (2001: 97). 17 | See Holder 1990: 295, McCutchen 1998: 118. O’Neal, for instance, conducted a drug transaction over the bugged phone line of the BPP office (Churchill 2001: 101).

Notes 18 | US Senate 1976: 41, 193. Various reprinted originals can be found in Blackstock (1975: 34-35) and Churchill / Vander Wall (1990a: 47-48). 19 | After his release in the Chicago trial, where he was charged with conspiracy to riot because of his coincidental presence in the city during the tumultuous upheavals around the Democratic National Convention in 1968, he was immediately rearrested, again because of his coincidental presence close to New Haven at the time of the murder of BPP member Alex Rackley. (TBP, August 30, 1969: 6-7; Churchill / Vander Wall 1990b: 147-148) 20 | The case of the Richmond Panthers, for instance, is documented in TBP, November 29, 1969: 15. See also what happened in Philadelphia in January 1970, as described in Holder (1990: 236-237). 21 | A contemporary student flyer (Newell Hart Collection) protests the “silencing of Cleaver”; see also Robert Scheer’s introduction to Cleaver (1969: xxii). The following examples are taken from US Senate 1976: 217-218. 22 | Documented cases include the Free Bobby Seale campaign in New Haven (Holder 1990: 242), the San Francisco May Day rally in 1969 (TBP, May 4, 1969: 5, M ay Day Panther 1969) or the Free Huey rally in Oakland in February 1968 (Black Panther Party Ministry of Information Bulletin 4). 23 | Among them Detroit (TBP, June 21, 1969: 17), Harlem (TBP, July 5, 1969: 15), White Plains (TBP, July 19, 1969: 11), Chicago (TBP, July 19, 1969: 16; TBP, September 6, 1969: 7) and San Diego (TBP, July 26, 1969: 15; TBP, August 30, 1969: 15). 24 | Examples include Des Moines, Sacramento, and Detroit (TBP, May 11, 1969: 3; TBP, June 21, 1969: 12-13, 17). 25 | See memo from Hoover dated September 5, 1970, in the private collection of FBI files of Roz Payne. 26 | See TBP (July 19, 1969: 11) for the case of White Plains and Churchill (2001: 87) for Oakland. The Detroit case is documented in Holder (1990: 293), O’Reilly (1991: 316), and TBP (February 21, 1970: 25). 27 | TBP, July 26, 1969: 15. Vandalizations of breakfast sites also occurred in other cities, for instance in Brooklyn. (TBP, February 28, 1970: 18; Holder 1990: 96) 28 | For the Bronx case, see letter from the New York field office to Hoover, dated November 3, 1969 and reprinted in Fletcher / Jones / Lotringer (1993: 250-251). The Harlem incident was reported in TBP, July 5, 1969: 15. 29 | Quote from FBI memo in US Senate 1976: 210. Similar accounts of the story of the coloring book can be found in Seale (1991: 383-385), Major (1971: 87), Holder (1990: 291-292), and Churchill (2001: 88). 30 | TBP, September 13, 1969: 6. The LAPD proceeded identically in the case of a BPP child care center, where, in addition, one of the adult caretakers was beaten up in front of the children, as Holder (1990: 238) wrote. 31 | See the bogus letter to both president and vice president of Union Carbide from January 1970, copied in US Senate (1976: 209).

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Racism and Resistance 32 | Memo from Hoover from May 1970, quoted in US Senate (1976: 209). See also Grady-Willis (1998: 373-374). 33 | See Jeffries and Foley (2007: 285-286) and the documented art work around the Freedom of Information Act by the artist Margia Kramer (1979a, 1979b) as well as the handbook to her video installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (Kramer 1981). 34 | Various examples are listed in US Senate (1976: 43-44, 208), Grady-Willis (1998: 375), and TBP (June 21, 1969: 7). 35 | The Panthers routinely referred to bail money as ‘ransom’ (TBP, August 30, 1969: 5; TBP, October 18, 1969: 9). See also how the Party lawyer Charles Garry assessed the systematic nature of these procedures in TBP, December 27, 1969: 5, 17. 36 | Examples of larger purges are found in the following 1969 issues of TBP: March 23: 4; March 31: 1; May 4: 7; June 21: 11; July 19: 13; August 16: 18. The following examples are taken from TBP (September 13, 1969: 4) and Holder (1990: 236). 37 | The example of Milwaukee also shows, however, that the reasons put forward could not always be taken at face value, as they could also be the result of internal conflicts and power play — see the local histories of the Milwaukee branch of the BPP in Jeffries (2007b, 2009). 38 | Repeatedly listed in TBP were: “failure to follow the teachings of Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton”, “complete disregard for the discipline of the Party”, refusal to participate in political education classes, insufficient community work, propagating cultural nationalism, criminal activities, pimping or prostituting, use of drugs, and “racism”, “subjectivism”, or “individualism” (see the following issues from 1969: July 19: 13; August 16: 18, 20; August 23: 27; September 27: 5; February 7, 1970: 8, 15). 39 | See the following 1969 issues of TBP: March 23: 4; March 31: 17; May 4: 7; June 21: 11; July 19: 13; August 16: 18.

C rucial R ole of the M edia 1 | See Newton 1995a: 149; Holder 1990: 35; Booker 1998: 343; Seale 1991: 177; Unger / Unger 1988: 169; Rhodes 2007: 70-79. 2 | See Cleaver 2001: 125; Holder 1990: 214-215, 220; LeBlanc-Ernest 1998: 308; Seale 1991: 203, 229. The Black Panther Party Ministry of Information Bulletin 2 called out to “Watch Channel 2 on January 29 at 10.30 pm: Interview With Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver!” (Newell Hart Collection) 3 | See TBP, May 4, 1969: 10; TBP, May 11, 1969: 10. Other examples with the same underlying drive include a press conference called by the New Haven chapter to announce a mass demonstration for Lonnie McLucas and the so-called “New Haven 9”, all of them imprisoned Panthers awaiting trial (Newton 1995b: 223-227), and a press conference held to explain the background of the BPP-organized boycott of Safeway

Notes stores in the Bay Area in June 1969 (TBP, June 21, 1969: 14; Booker 1998: 343; Rhodes 2007: 145). 4 | Churchill 2001: 102. For a list of detrimental headlines and newspapers involved, see Zimroth (1974: 26-28). 5 | See such headlines as Declining Black Panthers Gather New Support From Repeated Clashes With Police (The New York Times, December 14, 1969: 64) or Raid in L.A. Gains Panthers Black Moderates’ Support (The Washington Post, December 14, 1969: 24). Most notably, as Morgan (2006: 346-352) demonstrates, the “credible liberal voice” giving the BPP a semblance of legitimacy — essentially represented in Earl Caldwell from The New York Times — was immediately countered and became the target of a backlash. What Morgan does not mention is the arguably decisive factor: Caldwell, who was personally subpoenaed by the federal grand jury as a result of his reporting on the BPP, was black himself. 6 | Morgan (2006: 330), who systematically studied all articles about the Panthers that appeared in Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report between 1966 and 1976, reaches the same conclusion. And he links it to the mass media’s focus on those aspects of protest that will hold the attention of the public — namely, the behavior, appearance and dramatic conflict, the spectacle, while the actual arguments are closed off. (Morgan 2006: 227-228) 7 | Larry Powell was expelled after he was caught by the police for an armed robbery he claimed to have carried out “at the direction of the Black Panther Party” in December 1968, whereas the BPP leadership insisted upon Powell being an agent provocateur, as Seale (1991: 379-389) argued with a considerable amount of evidence, concerning a certain “P_____”. Similar accusations as in the case of the Oakland Panthers surfaced in Seattle, too. Incidentally, Powell had been active in that chapter as well, as Seale maintained. 8 | Such were the routine formulations in subscription calls for The Black Panther (see TBP, February 21, 1970: 28) and other self-reflective articles (TBP, August 8, 1970: 11; TBP, January 17, 1970: 8). 9 | See Davenport 1998: 196–197. From January 1968 to 1978, the Party newspaper appeared weekly without interruption, first under the name The Black Panther — Black Community News Service, after the split in February 1971 with the slightly varied subtitle Intercommunal News Service. Between 1978 and the last issue in October 1980, TBP appeared only sporadically. (Abron 1993: 356) It experienced a short revival in the Bay Area in the early 1990s but vanished again after only a few issues. 10 | See Abron 1993: 353-354. The only exception was David G. Du Bois, stepson of W.E.B. Du Bois, and managing editor of The Black Panther between 1973 and 1975. 11 | Succeeding managing editors until the Party split were: Eldridge Cleaver, Raymond Lewis, Frank Jones, Elbert ‘Big Man’ Howard, and Elaine Brown; the task of circulation manager rested with Sam Napier until he was killed in the aftermath of the split in 1971. (Abron 1993: 349-354)

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Racism and Resistance 12 | Hampton / Fayer 1990: 367. David Hilliard (1993: 154) also recalled how The Black Panther served to organize new chapters in early 1968. 13 | See Holder 1990: 212; Seale 1991: 179; Newton 1995a: 143; Abron 1993: 350. 14 | For the various figures, see Brent (1996: 88), Newton (1995a: 143) and Moore (1993: 58), who set the circulation of the first TBP-issue at 5000, Abron (1998; 182), Seale (1991: 179) and Jones / Jeffries (1998: 29). 15 | See Ma’at-Ka-Re Monges 1998: 140-141; Seale 1991: 82, 365; Holder 1990: 197; McCutchen 1998: 116. 16 | See TBP, December 21, 1968: 15; TBP, July 5, 1969: 15. David Hilliard selfcritically remarked how the BPP had extracted too much energy away from the internal colonies over the course of the Free Huey campaign in 1968. He and other BPP leaders urged Panthers across the United States to concentrate more on efforts to organize their local black communities by selling The Black Panther and going from door to door — because: “The people should begin to come out to hear first hand exactly what is taking place with the Black Panther Party, since the press is a racist press. It doesn’t serve the correct point of views of the community. Their point of view is always racist.” (TBP, October 12, 1968: 2) 17 | See the following issues of TBP, for example: March 23, 1969: 7; April 27, 1969: 3; November 29, 1969: 15. 18 | See, for instance, the careful documentation of What Really Happened in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the police raids in December 1969 (TBP, December 27, 1969: 15), or how the Panthers countered incriminating allegations from the media that they were extorting money from business people for their community service programs (TBP, June 14, 1969: 8). 19 | Connie Matthews, BPP representative in Scandinavia, mentioned the Panther plans to establish a publishing house in an open letter to the Danish Foreign Ministry. (TBP, May 11, 1969: 5) And Eldridge Cleaver’s intentions were recounted by his wife Kathleen Cleaver (1998: 243, 223), who also pointed out that “[f]or African liberation movements, Algiers was an ideal center of communication, for both the Western and the socialist press were well-represented in the city” — it thus offered ideal conditions for getting international media attention. 20 | No distribution and circulation figures are available, as the BPP’s national distribution office in San Francisco — along with all records contained therein — was destroyed by fire in the spring of 1971. At least, the Party newspaper provides some information on what was in circulation, what was in high demand, and at which occasions and to what audiences Panther films were screened (see chapter one) and records played. A variety of speeches and interviews with Huey Newton were taped in prison; they were played at Party rallies, conferences and other events along with recorded speeches from other BPP leaders. (TBP, October 12, 1968: 6; TBP, November 22, 1969: 15) See also the various ads in The Black Panther (November 29, 1969: 17; April 18, 1970: 17; July 18, 1970: 23) or the flyer A Message From Huey from the Newell Hart Collection. Elaine Brown, who had composed and performed revolutionary

Notes songs for the BPP — among them a black national anthem —, was able to sign a contract with a record company and produce the album Seize the Time (TBP, October 18, 1969: 8), which was also sold at various record stores (TBP, November 22, 1969: 17). Some music groups such as The Vanguards, The Lumpen or the Freedom Messengers even gave revolutionary concerts spreading the Panthers’ messages. (TBP, November 28, 1970: 16; TBP, December 26, 1970: 18) At least The Lumpen were a genuine BPP band appearing at rallies, speeches and campaigns of the Party throughout the Bay Area. (Newton 1995a: 301) 21 | See the following issues of TBP: January 29, 1969: 6; May 11, 1969: 2; May 19, 1969: 15; June 21, 1969: front page, 12-13; August 9, 1969: 17; August 17, 1969: 1617; October 11, 1969: 3; December 20, 1969: 14. 22 | See the letter from Jerry Stoll, president of American Documentary Films, Inc., to the BPP’s lawyer Charles Garry, in: Stanford University, Libraries, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, Inc. Collection, 1968-1994, Special Collections M864, Series 2: Box 12, Folder 10. 23 | A VHS-copy of the film is stored at the University of California at Berkeley in the Media Center under Video/C 2175. 24 | P relude To R evolution was produced and directed by a certain John Evans associated with Cougar Productions. It was publicly screened by the Panthers under this title at the second Huey P. Newton Birthday Benefit Celebration in Oakland in February 1969, according to a flyer from the Newell Hart Collection and announced in The Black Panther. (February 17, 1969: 2) Eldridge is mentioned in a letter from Panther lawyer David G. Lubell to Elaine Brown, dated October 13, 1970. (Stanford University, Libraries, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, Inc. Collection, 1968-1994, Special Collections M864, Series 2: Box 52, Folder 6) No other references as to the actual existence, let alone the screening of the film, could be found. The same holds for the prison interview with Angela Davis, which is mentioned in the Lubell correspondence to Newton. (Stanford University, Libraries, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, Inc. Collection, 1968-1994, Special Collections M864, Series 2: Box 52, Folder 7) A VHS-copy of the film under the title A ngela Davis P rison I nterview is available at the University of California at Berkeley in the Media Center under Video/C 8159. Its origins are unclear, as is whether it was screened or distributed by the BPP. 25 | M ay Day Panther , B obby S eale , and other Panther films from the Newsreel collective are available from Third World Newsreel in New York City on DVD. Other BPP-related rallies documented on film include a demonstration at Columbia University in New York City, this time in the context of the New York 21 trial. These demonstration scenes are part of largely unorganized footage depicting French writer Jean Genet’s visit to the BPP New York headquarters. The material’s origin is unclear, as is the answer to the question whether it was ever actually shown to a larger audience. The footage titled Columbus University 1970 stems from a video cassette labelled B lack Panther M iscellany distributed by Villon Films from Vancouver, Canada.

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Racism and Resistance 26 | R evolutionary A rt is mentioned only once in The Black Panther (July 25, 1970: 14), because two of its copies were missing from the BPP’s National Distribution office. A film about the Breakfast for Children program in Oakland existed, the screening of which was mentioned in the context of a local community meeting in Oakland in The Black Panther (April 27, 1969: 3). The Los Angeles Newsreel collective started, but ultimately aborted, a project with the working title B reakfast F or C hildren . (James 1989: 182) None of the above-mentioned material could be located. 27 | See The Washington Post, January 14, 1970: A19. It does not seem unreasonable to assume that the FBI, in fact, possessed a copy of the film, which it screened or distributed to reporters trusted to reproduce the Bureau line. 28 | Churchill 2001: 86. Quite obviously, Alioto had never actually seen an issue of The Black Panther, or he would have realized that the BPP’s 10-point program — reprinted in every issue of TBP — was of an entirely different nature, and that robbery and raping were addressed in the Party’s rules and main points of attention, also printed in every issue of TBP: Rules #5, 7, and 8 regulated the handling of weapons and specifically prohibited the engagement in criminal activity such as stealing; #7 of the Party’s points of attention prohibited Party members to “take liberties with women” (Foner 1970: 5-6). 29 | Among them Anthony (1990) and Cox (2001); see also Pearson (1994). 30 | See especially the following TBP issues: August 16, 1969: 13; August 30, 1969: 15; October 25, 1969: 3; January 31, 1970: 10-11.

W here D o W e G o F rom H ere ? 1 | See various flyers in the Newell Hart Collection from the BPP, the Peace and Freedom Party, Newton Defense Committees, and other groups. Bobby Seale, for instance, spoke besides Muhammad Ali and others at the March & Rally Against the War, Racism, Poverty, Repression, and the Draft in San Francisco on April 27, 1968. 2 | Carmichael’s presence at Panther rallies is last confirmed in a flyer titled Back to the Courthouse (Newell Hart Collection) and Agnès Varda’s documentary film B lack Panthers: A R eport, shot around the same time as the flyer was issued, in the summer of 1968 during Newton’s first trial in Oakland. The Panthers’ distancing themselves from SNCC and Carmichael, Forman, and Brown was certainly ‘facilitated’ by the severe organizational problems SNCC was experiencing at the time. (Carson 1981: 215-304) In Carmichael’s case, it also had to do with his taking an increasingly cultural nationalist stance that ran counter to the Panthers’ conceptions of a black liberation struggle, compare TBP, May 31, 1969: 16; TBP, August 9, 1969: 7; TBP, August 16, 1969: 5. 3 | Compare various articles in TBP, primarily February 17, 1970: 6; September 27, 1969: 5; June 21, 1969: 8. See also Ogbar (2006: 262-273) and Holder (1990: 123-124). 4 | See TBP, July 5, 1969: 19; TBP, October 25, 1969: 8; as well as Ogbar (2006: 256262) and Holder (1990: 122-123).

Notes 5 | See TBP, October 25, 1969: 8; TBP, February 17, 1970: 12. David Hilliard later hinted that the coalition seemed to function primarily in Chicago, but that ties on the national level were about to be built as a Chicago member of the Patriot Party planned to travel to Oakland for political education. (TBP, February 17, 1970: 4, 17) Once The Black Panther (August 2, 1969: 18) also reported about a White Panther Party from Ann Arbor: its members sold the BPP newspaper in their white neighborhood and seemed to run activities that paralleled the Panthers’ efforts. Their White Panther Party 10 Point Platform was a rather liberal adaptation with an esoteric touch, basically demanding “everything free for everybody”. No concrete coalition seems to have developed between them and the BPP. 6 | Compare the following issues of TBP: October 4, 1969: 10; April 18, 1970: 3; April 11, 1970: 15; July 26, 1969: 16; May 19, 1969: 19. The following list of alternative news services is also mentioned in Church League 1969: 20. 7 | Compare the two Newsreel films O ff The P ig (1968) and M ay Day Panther (1969). For the various May Day rallies and the large crowd of participants they drew, see TBP, May 11, 1969: 12-13; TBP, May 19, 1969: 3; TBP, May 31, 1969: 15. 8 | Interview with Paul Shinoff (September 3, 1998, Berkeley) from San Francisco Newsreel and informal talk with Larry from California Newsreel (as San Francisco Newsreel was renamed in the 1970s) in 1992. While Larry still vividly recalled the conspiratorial atmosphere at the Newsreel office during the editing process of O ff The P ig , Shinoff remembered how the Panthers repeatedly protected or rescued them from an often hostile black ghetto environment. He recounted what he experienced during the months of producing O ff The P ig as virtually jolting him into radical political consciousness. Compare also James 1989: 181, 183 and TBP, December 21, 1968: 14. 9 | Among the rallies the PFP organized to generate white support for the BPP were the demonstration march “to end racism in America now” in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King’s murder (flyer from Newell Hart Collection, handdated to April 7, 1968) and series of rallies surrounding Newton’s trial in the summer of 1968 announced on a leaflet titled Show Your Support for Huey! (Newell Hart Collection). In Heath’s (1976a: 50) contention, “the availability of numerous militants, white and black, to write, print, and distribute thousands of buttons, posters, leaflets, and other literature helped to publicize the Newton case and the Panther program not only nationally but also abroad.” 10 | Holder 1990: 215-216, 120; Anthony 1990: 8, 44; Seale 1991: 227, 238. Wilson (2006: 198), on the other hand, seems to believe that the Panthers were serious about entering electoral politics — with whites — as early as 1967. Moreover, he argues that the Peace and Freedom Party fell into two groups, with only one wholeheartedly supporting the BPP. 11 | Compare Scholefield’s two sermons dated September 28 and October 5, 1969 (Newell Hart Collection); the quotes are taken from page 2 of the second sermon. Another white San Franciscan clergyman who actively supported the BPP in many ways

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Racism and Resistance was Eugene J. Boyle; see, for instance, his open letter reprinted in TBP, October 10, 1969: 7. 12 | See the flyers Free Huey!, issued by two groups called “community organization for Huey Newton” and “campus mobilization”, and Back to the Court House! (Newell Hart Collection). 13 | See Cleaver’s case (The New York Times, November 20, 1968: 29) or a letter from the New York Committee to Defend the Panthers, calling for support for the defense of David Hilliard and the New York 21 (Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, Inc. Collection, 1968-1994. Special Collections M864. Series 2, Box 15, Folder 5). 14 | Likewise, the BPP solidarity committees in Europe principally focused on two activities: publicizing the Panther cause and raising money to help pay for the BPP’s legal defense fees. Examples of the former include: Amsterdam Vrijheidsschol (1971): The Black Panthers. Amsterdam; Schuhler, Conrad (1969): Black Panther: Zur Konsolidierung des Klassenkampfes in den USA. München; Black Panther Solidaritätskomitee (ed.) (1970): Der Prozess gegen Bobby Seale — Rassismus und politische Justiz in den USA. Frankfurt am Main. There were also many articles in mostly leftist magazines, among them: Black Panther Solidaritätskomitee (1971): “Zur Spaltung der Black Panther Partei.” In: Antiimperialistischer Kampf 1 and Mumm, H.M. (1971): “Zur Spaltung der Black Panther Party.” In: Neues Rotes Forum 2, pp. 27-36. Many pamphlets from the BPP, most of them concerning ideological matters, have appeared in German translations, some of them even in compilations (Amendt 1970), and the contemporary books published by or about Seale, Newton, and Cleaver have been translated into German. 15 | An “Emergency Conference to Defend the Right of the Black Panther Party to Exist” took place in Chicago in March 1970. (Heath 1976a: 139) And at a European solidarity conference held one month later in Frankfurt, West Germany, Panther solidarity committees from Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden demanded freedom for political prisoners. (Holder 1990: 237-238) 16 | Holder (1990: 186-188) argues that speaking at local schools was part of the daily routine even, while an early concrete example of what Panthers discussed with 11-yearolds in class at the invitation of the teacher can be found in TBP, November 2, 1968: 5. 17 | Compare such diverse sources as The Wall Street Journal (January 13, 1970: 1), the House Committee on Internal Security, (Holder 1990: 95) and, of course, The Black Panther, with its numerous reports from BPP chapters and branches from across the country, for instance in TBP, June 21, 1969: 8, 15. More recent literature also confirms that the BPP’s community service programs greatly enhanced the BPP’s popularity and reputation within the black community. (Bloom / Martin 2013: 180-181; Dyson / Brooks / Jeffries 2007: 225; Forbes 2006: 50) 18 | Chapters and branches with broad community participation in their programs included New Haven (TBP, November 8, 1969: 10), Harlem (McCutchen 1998: 120), Indiana (TBP, July 19, 1969: 16) — although Jeffries and Morris (2007) found that the Indianapolis Panthers received only lukewarm support from the black community —,

Notes Chicago (TBP, March 28, 1970: 8), Baltimore, Winston-Salem, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles (Jeffries 2007a). 19 | Detailed accounts and varying interpretations of the events surrounding the split — only Bloom and Martin (2013: 478, 364-366) call it a “mutiny” by Cleaver, Geronimo Pratt, and the New York 21 leadership — and its aftermath can be found in Austin (2006: 297-333), who produced various inside accounts alluding to intra-Party violence existing even before the split throughout his book, Johnson (1998), Demny (1996: 108117), Pearson (1994: 231-232). Both distanced and personal recounts from former BPP members include Abu-Jamal (2004: 205-226), Anthony (1990: 23), Brown (1992: 266267), Cleaver (1998: 236-239), Cox (2001), Hilliard (1993: 320-325), Holder (190: 244-247), Newton (1995a: 301-303).

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