Black against Empire

The History and Politics

of the Black Panther Party

WITH A NEW PREFACE

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished

university presses in the United States, enriches lives around
the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social
sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by
Joshua Bloom the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions
from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit
www.ucpress.edu.
and Waldo E. Martin, Jr.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2013, 2016 by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr.

isbn 978-0-520-29328-1 (paper)

isbn 978-0-520-96645-1 (ebook)
The Library of Congress has cataloged an earlier edition of
this book as follows:
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bloom, Joshua.
Black against empire : the history and politics of
the Black Panther Party / Joshua Bloom and Waldo E.
Martin, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-520-27185-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Black Panther Party—History. 2. African
Americans—Politics and government—20th century.
3. African Americans—Civil rights—History—20th century.
4. Civil rights movements—United States—History—20th
century. 5. United States—Race relations—History—20th
century. 6. United States—Race relations—Political
aspects—History—20th century. I. Martin, Waldo E.,
1951–. II. Title.
e185.615.b5574 2013
322.4′20973—dc23 2012021279

Manufactured in the United States of America

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary
for one people to disolve the political bonds which have
connected them with another, and to assume among the
To
powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which
Hana, Mikhayla, Julius, Theodore, Eva, Emila, and Kian;
the laws of nature and nature’s god entitled them, a decent
Jetta, Coral, and Kayla
respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should
and declare the causes which impel them to separation.
Che Patrice Lumumba, Darryl, Dassine, Dorian, Ericka, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
Fred Jr., Jaime, Joju Younghi, Maceo, Mai, Malik Nkrumah are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator
Stagolee, Patrice, Romaine, Tupac, and all the cubs (here with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life,
and gone) liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these
and rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving
young revolutionaries everywhere. 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 new government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers in such form,
as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and
happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long
established should not be changed for light and transient
causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that
mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are
sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the
forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long
train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably
the same object evinces a design to reduce them under
absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to
throw off such government, and to provide new guards
for their future security.
—Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, as excerpted in the
Black Panther Party’s original Ten Point Program, Black Panther,
May 15, 1967
 9 41st and Central 216

10 Hampton and Clark 226

Contents 11 Bobby and Ericka 247

PA RT FOUR . RE VOLUTION H A S C OME! 267

12 Black Studies and Third World Liberation 269

13 Vanguard of the New Left 288

14 International Alliance 309

PA RT FI V E . C ONC E S SION S A ND UNR AV ELING 339

15 Rupture 341
List of Figures xi
Preface to the 2016 Edition xiii 16 The Limits of Heroism 372

Conclusion 390
Introduction 1

Notes 403
PA RT ONE . ORGA NIZING R AGE 17 Acknowledgments 487
1 Huey and Bobby 19 Index 491

2 Policing the Police 45

Figures follow pages 160 and 322

PA RT T WO. BA P TISM IN BLOOD 63

3 The Correct Handling of a Revolution 65

4 Free Huey! 99

5 Martyrs 115

6 National Uprising 139

PA RT THREE . RE SILIENC E 177

7 Breakfast 179

8 Law and Order 199

 xii | Figures

22. Bill Whitfield serving breakfast to children, April 16, 1969

23. Breakfast at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church
24. Black Panther Party Children’s Institute
Figures 25. Black Panthers distributing free clothing, September 28, 1969
26. Panther Cubs and members of the San Francisco Black Panther Party
27. Raid at Los Angeles Black Panthers’ offices, December 8, 1969
28. Rally in support of the Los Angeles Black Panther Party,
December 11, 1969
29. Arrested Black Panthers in Los Angeles, December 11, 1969
30. Fred Hampton
31. Death of Hampton
32. Free Bobby graphic by Emory Douglas
33. Seattle Panthers at Washington Assembly building,
February 29, 1969
1. Original Black Panther logo
34. Vanetta Molson and Aaron Dixon, Seattle chapter, January 1971
2. Black Power conference flier
35. New York rally, April 8, 1969
3. First issue of the Black Panther newspaper
36. National Guardsmen raid on the Party office in Lima, Ohio,
4. Bobby and Huey
August 6, 1970
5. Armed Black Panthers at the California Assembly building
37. Detroit Party members’ surrender to police, October 25, 1970
in Sacramento
38. Attempted eviction of Black Panthers, New Orleans,
6. Huey on wicker throne
November 19, 1970
7. Huey on gurney, October 28, 1967
39. “Big Man” Howard and Audrea Jones at press conference,
8. Huey Newton birthday celebration, February 17, 1968 September 1970
9. Lil’ Bobby Hutton 40. Black Panther Party members at Community Information Center,
10. Hutton memorial, May 12, 1968 Washington, D.C., 1970
11. New York Panthers 41. Omaha Black Panther Party members, June 27, 1969
12. Bunchy Carter 42. Black Panther Party rally in Philadelphia, September 6, 1970
13. John Huggins 43. George Murray
14. Ericka Huggins 44. Asian American and Latino supporters of Party, 1969
15. Bobby Seale at “Free Huey!” rally, July 14, 1968 45. Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization, January 7, 1970
16. Black Panther women in “Lil’ Bobby Hutton Park,” August 25, 1968 46. Feminists’ march in support of Black Panthers, New Haven,
17. Panther allies at “Free Huey!” rally November 1969
18. Kathleen Cleaver 47. David Hilliard at Yale University, May 1, 1970
19. “It’s All the Same,” a graphic by Emory Douglas 48. Rally for Panthers in Stockholm, September 21, 1969
20. Eldridge Cleaver, Sproul Plaza, October 3, 1968 49. Eldridge Cleaver with representatives of the North Vietnamese
National Liberation Front
21. Charles Bursey serving breakfast to children, June 20, 1969
50. Huey Newton in China with Zhao Enlai, September 1971

xi
 xiv | Preface to the 2016 Edition

negotiation while he seated the exclusionary white Mississippi delega-

tion at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jer-
sey. As with many politicians, Johnson’s power rested, in part, on racist
Preface to the 2016 Edition political institutions immune to the pressures of civil rights action. With
redress unavailable from traditional civil rights organizations, the Dow-
ell family sought assistance from the Black Panther Party.
Soon, hundreds of black people were joining Black Panther Party ral-
lies in North Richmond demanding justice for Denzil Dowell. At that
time still a small group of young activists based in nearby Oakland, the
Black Panther Party frontally challenged containment policing and the
legitimacy of the American state with its anti-imperialist politics and
armed self-defense against the police. The virulent repression it drew
exposed the brutality of American rule in black communities. In the late
1960s the Party grew exponentially, catalyzing a wide movement for
black liberation and eclipsing traditional civil rights organizations in
activity, influence, funding, and notoriety.
We wrote this book because we wanted to learn how the Black Pan-
How do you fight white supremacy in the era of “color blindness”? ther Party mobilized so many people to take severe personal risks to
In the early morning of April 1, in North Richmond, California, fight racism. Like Max Weber, we believe the questions that motivate
Deputy Sheriff Mel Brunkhorst shot Denzil Dowell, black and unarmed, social research are always informed by social and political commit-
in the back and head as he ran away. Dowell was left bleeding without ments and that the objectivity of social science inheres in the rigor of
medical attention and died lying in the street. His mother proclaimed, research and analysis. Some would prefer we had instead produced a
“The police murdered my son.” After thirty minutes of deliberation the study of the personalities of the Party leaders and their flawed judg-
coroner’s inquest found “justifiable homicide,” and the state declined to ments or the crimes of the small remnants of the Party in Oakland after
investigate further or to try Brunkhorst for any crime. The year was it unraveled in the 1970s. Those stories have been told before, and we
1967. We would not know Denzil Dowell’s name if not for the Black recount them here. But first and foremost, this book is dedicated to
Panther Party. making sense of the politics of the Black Panther Party.
By the time of Dowell’s death, the Civil Rights Movement had val- Our analysis shows how the Black Panther Party mobilized so many
iantly dismantled legal segregation. But whites maintained many forms people to fight white supremacy and capitalist exploitation. The Party
of racial privilege. Most black people continued to live impoverished, in generated an escalating cycle of insurgency by linking disruptive actions
segregated communities, excluded from the middle class. Black people to community programs as part of a coherent anti-imperialist politics.
enjoyed little electoral representation, little access to elite higher educa- In the late 1960s this politics forged common cause with a wide array
tion. And black communities were mostly policed by whites— of domestic and international constituencies. The Black Panther Party
often brutally. Politicians worked within, and sometimes intentionally sustained disruption as a source of power by leveraging broad political
leveraged, these institutionalized racial divides to win and maintain cleavages to draw widespread black, antiwar, and international support
power. in resistance to repression. The Party became repressible only once the
Traditional civil rights organizations had little to offer Dowell’s fam- state made sweeping concessions to its allies—namely affirmative action,
ily. Many movement activists had come to recognize the limits of civil repeal of the draft, and international diplomatic reconciliation.
rights politics three years earlier when President Lyndon Johnson had We see our findings as especially important in the contrasts and sim-
tricked his “allies” from the movement into participating in a faux ilarities they illuminate with the political practices of the Civil Rights

xiii
 Preface to the 2016 Edition | xv xvi | Preface to the 2016 Edition

Movement. These suggest important lessons about the fight against the general political dynamic common to both the Civil Rights Move-
white supremacy today. ment and the Black Panther Party. History shows how difficult it is to
As racial progress has proceeded in the fifty years since the formation frontally challenge white supremacy in the face of coordinated repres-
of the Black Panther Party, so have the forces of racial retrenchment. sion. Yet it also reveals important lessons about how contemporary
Whites have fought mightily to maintain their racial advantages. Politi- antiracist activists might sustain such a challenge.
cal leaders—from Richard Nixon in the Panther era to Bill Clinton in the Our findings suggest that dismantling the new Jim Crow will require
1990s and Donald Trump today—have used racial division as a source insurgent practices that not only make business as usual impossible but
of power. Despite the absence of formal racial subordination, the elec- do so in a way that is difficult to repress. Historically, antiracist insur-
tion of a black president, and broad proclamations of a postracial era, gents have built followings and influence by drawing wide support in
racial inequality has expanded in recent decades. Since 1970 the prison resistance to repression. In particular, antiracist insurgents sustained
population of the United States has quintupled. Black people suffer seven disruption as a source of power by advancing practices whose repres-
times the rate of incarceration of whites. Young black men are twenty- sion graphically exposed the brutality of racism. This was true of the
one times more likely than young white men to be killed by police. As sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, Selma, and the other civil rights campaigns
Michelle Alexander observes in The New Jim Crow, there are more in the early 1960s. This was true of Ferguson in 2014. And perhaps
black people under carceral control today than there were slaves in especially, this was true of the practices of the Black Panther Party in
1850. By 2000 the median white family owned ten times the assets of the the late 1960s and early 1970s analyzed in this book.
median black family. Today, a decade and a half later, the median white In our view, only by developing such practices will contemporary
family owns almost twenty times the assets of the median black family. activists drive the dynamics of mobilization rather than simply respond
In the past several years, graphic video footage of police killings of to external events. Only then will #BlackLivesMatter draw the breadth
unarmed black people has called attention to the persistent inhumanity of allied support in resistance to repression achieved by the Black Pan-
of “color-blind” racism. Activists have rallied around these cases to ther Party. Only then will the movement command, rather than being
some effect. Like the Black Panther Party, #BlackLivesMatter and other held subject to, the media’s inclinations. Only then will contemporary
contemporary activists have coupled confrontational tactics with com- activists be able to sustain disruption as a source of power. Such insur-
munity organizing and sought to challenge racism by mobilizing against gent practices are the source of democracy, the best hope for disman-
police brutality. And again, today antiracist activists face repression tling white supremacy, and the pathway toward creating an egalitarian
including state surveillance, arrests, and coordinated public vilification. society.
As in the 1960s, the forces of racial retrenchment are eager to move on Joshua Bloom, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
without disturbing the basic arrangements of white privilege. Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Berkeley, California
Unfortunately, antiracist activists today cannot dismantle the new
Jim Crow by emulating the specific practices of the Civil Rights Move-
ment. The law now purports to protect black people’s citizenship rights.
Unlike segregated lunch counters in 1960, police brutality cannot be
directly defied with a sit-in. Bodily integrating public institutions is no
longer illegal. Neither can antiracist activists today dismantle the new
Jim Crow by emulating the specific practices of the Black Panther Party.
Armed resistance to police brutality would be broadly construed as ter-
rorist activity.
Indeed, each generation must make its own history, under new con-
ditions, in new ways. Rather than emulating the specifics, we believe
that developing effective antiracist practices today requires emulating
 2 | Introduction

vate meeting.3 On National Day, the October 1 anniversary of the

founding of the People’s Republic of China, Premier Zhou honored
the Panthers as national guests. Tens of thousands of Chinese gathered
Introduction in Tiananmen Square, waving red flags and applauding the Panthers.
Revolutionary theater groups, folk dancers, acrobats, and the revolu-
tionary ballet performed. Huge red banners declared, “Peoples of the
World, Unite to destroy the American aggressors and their lackeys.”4
At the official state dinner, first lady Jiang Qing sat with the Panthers. 5
A New York Times editorial encouraged Nixon “to think positively
about Communist China and to ignore such potential sources of fric-
tion as the honors shown to Black Panther leader Huey Newton.” 6

FORBIDDEN HIS TORY

In Oakland, California, in late 1966, community college students Bobby

Seale and Huey Newton took up arms and declared themselves part of
a global revolution against American imperialism. Unlike civil rights
The Panthers shut out the pack of zealous reporters and kept the door activists who advocated for full citizenship rights within the United
locked all day, but now the hallway was empty. Huey Newton and two States, their Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. gov-
comrades casually walked from the luxury suite down to the lobby and ernment. The Panthers saw black communities in the United States as
slipped out of the Hong Kong Hilton. Their official escort took them a colony and the police as an occupying army. In a foundational 1967
straight across the border, and after a short flight, they exited the plane essay, Newton wrote, “Because black people desire to determine their
in Beijing, where they were greeted by cheering throngs.1 own destiny, they are constantly inflicted with brutality from the occu-
It was late September 1971, and U.S. national security adviser Henry pying army, embodied in the police department. There is a great simi-
Kissinger had just visited China a couple months earlier. The United larity between the occupying army in Southeast Asia and the occupa-
States was proposing a visit to China by President Nixon himself and tion of our communities by the racist police.”7
looking toward normalization of diplomatic relations. The Chinese lead- As late as February 1968, the Black Panther Party was still a small
ers held varied views of these prospects and had not yet revealed whether local organization. But that year, everything changed. By December,
they would accept a visit from Nixon. the Party had opened offices in twenty cities, from Los Angeles to New
But the Chinese government had been in frequent communication York. In the face of numerous armed conflicts with police and virulent
with the Black Panther Party, had hosted a Panther delegation a year direct repression by the state, young black people embraced the revolu-
earlier, and had personally invited Huey Newton, the Party’s leader, tionary vision of the Party, and by 1970, the Party had opened offices
to visit. With Nixon attempting to arrange a visit, Newton decided to in sixty-eight cities from Winston-Salem to Omaha and Seattle. 8 The
accept the invitation and beat Nixon to China.2 Black Panther Party had become the center of a revolutionary move-
When Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, greeted Newton in Beijing, ment in the United States.9
Newton took Zhou’s right hand between both his own hands. Zhou Readers today may have difficulty imagining a revolution in the
clasped Newton’s wrist with his left hand, and the two men looked United States. But in the late 1960s, many thousands of young black
deeply into each other’s eyes. Newton presented a formal petition people, despite the potentially fatal outcome of their actions, joined the
requesting that China “negotiate with . . . Nixon for the freedom of Black Panther Party and dedicated their lives to revolutionary strug-
the oppressed peoples of the world.” Then the two sat down for a pri- gle. Many more approved of their efforts. A joint report by the Federal

1
 Introduction | 3 4 | Introduction

Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense sands of Black Panthers—who dedicated their lives to a political pro-
Intelligence Committee, and National Security Agency expressed grave gram involving armed resistance to state authority—stand alone.
concern about wide support for the Party among young blacks, not- Why in the late 1960s—in contrast to the Civil Rights Movement’s
ing that “43 per cent of blacks under 21 years of age [have] . . . a great nonviolent action and demands for African Americans’ full participa-
respect for the [Black Panther Party].”10 Students for a Democratic tion in U.S. society and despite severe personal risks—did so many
Society, the leading antiwar and draft resistance organization, declared young people dedicate their lives to the Black Panther Party and em-
the Black Panther Party the “vanguard in our common struggles against brace armed revolution? Why, after a few years of explosive growth,
capitalism and imperialism.” 11 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover famously did the Party so quickly unravel? And why has no similar movement
declared, “The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the developed since?
greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”12 Most obvious explanations do not stand up to the evidence. Some
As the Black Panthers drew young blacks to their revolutionary pro- believe the Party was a creation of the media. But most of the media
gram, the Party became the strongest link between the domestic Black attention came after the Party’s rapid spread. Some assert that the
Liberation Struggle and global opponents of American imperialism. Party’s success was just a product of the times. But many other black
The North Vietnamese—at war with the United States—sent letters political organizations, some with similar ideologies, sought to mobi-
home to the families of American prisoners of war (POWs) through lize people at the same time, and none succeeded like the Panthers.
the Black Panther Party and discussed releasing POWs in exchange for Others contend that this or that Panther leader was an unrivaled orga-
the release of Panthers from U.S. jails. Cuba offered political asylum nizer and that by the force of his or her efforts, the Party was able to
to Black Panthers and began developing a military training ground for recruit its vast following. But most of the new recruits to the Black
them. Algeria—then the center of Pan-Africanism and a world hub of Panthers came to the Party asking to join, not the other way around.
anti-imperialism that hosted embassies for most postcolonial govern- One common view is that the Party collapsed because it could not with-
ments and independence movements—granted the Panthers national stand the government’s repression, but the year of greatest repression,
diplomatic status and an embassy building of their own, where the 1969, was also the year of the Party’s greatest growth.13
Panthers headquartered their International Section under the leader- While much has been written on aspects of the Black Panther Party,
ship of Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver. none of the accounts to date have offered a rigorous overarching analy-
But by the time of Newton’s trip to China, the Black Panther Party sis of the Party’s evolution and impact. Most writers have looked at a
had begun to unravel. In the early 1970s, the Party rapidly declined. small slice of the Party’s temporal and geographic scope, providing lim-
By mid-1972, it was basically a local Oakland community organiza- ited historical context. Party sympathizers are as guilty of such reduc-
tion once again. An award-winning elementary school and a brief local tion as its detractors are. Commentators reduce the Party to its commu-
renaissance in the mid-1970s notwithstanding, the Party suffered a nity service programs or to armed confrontation with the police. They
long and painful demise, formally closing its last office in 1982. claim the Panthers espoused narrowly Marxist or black nationalist ide-
Not since the Civil War almost a hundred and fifty years ago have ology. They maintain that Huey Newton was a genius or that he was
so many people taken up arms in revolutionary struggle in the United overly philosophical, or that he was a criminal. They say the Party’s
States. Of course, the number of people who took up arms for the power came from organizing young blacks from the urban ghettos or
Union and Confederate causes and the number of people killed in the that its influence stemmed from its ability to draw broad support from
Civil War are orders of magnitude larger than the numbers who have a range of allies. To some people, the Party was a locus of cutting-edge
engaged in any armed political struggle in the United States since. debate on gender politics, and they applaud its embrace of women’s and
Some political organizations that embraced revolutionary ideologies gay liberation; to others, it was sexist and patriarchal.
yet eschewed armed confrontation with the state may have garnered Occasionally, commentators have even suggested that the Black
larger followings than the Black Panther Party did. But in the general Panther Party was all of these things. But no one has made sense of
absence of armed revolution in the United States since 1865, the thou- the relationship among the parts, situated the varying practices of the
 Introduction | 5 6 | Introduction

Party in time and place, and adequately traced the evolution of the Chicago in December 1969, equipped with an informant’s map of the
Party’s politics. As Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Garrow apartment, police and federal agents assassinated a prominent Panther
recently pointed out in an extensive review of historical works on the leader in his bed while he slept, shooting him in the head at point-blank
Panthers, no one has yet offered a serious analysis of how the politi- range.18
cal practices of the Black Panther Party changed during its history or In attacking the Black Panthers as enemies of the state, federal agents
why people were drawn to participate at each juncture of its evolution. sought to repress not just the Party as an organization but the politi-
“Panther scholarship,” Garrow observes, “would benefit immensely cal possibility it represented. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Program
from a detailed and comprehensive narrative history that gives special (COINTELPRO) sought to vilify the Black Panthers and “prevent [the
care to how rapidly the [Black Panther Party] evolved through a succes- Party and similar] black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining
sion of extremely fundamental changes. . . . Far too much of what has respectability by discrediting them.” 19
been written about the [Party] fails to specify expressly which period FBI director J. Edgar Hoover emphasized time and again, in dif-
of Panther history is being addressed or characterized, and interpre- ferent ways, that “one of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it
tive clarity, and accuracy, will benefit greatly from a far more explicit concerns the BPP is to keep this group isolated from the moderate black
appreciation and identification of the major turning points in the [Black and white community which may support it.” 20 Federal agents sought
Panther Party’s] eventually tragic evolution.” 14 “to create factionalism” among Party leaders and between the Panthers
Writing in the New York Times in 1994, sociologist Robert Blauner and other black political organizations.21 FBI operatives forged doc-
commented, “Because of the political mine fields,” the “complex and uments and paid provocateurs to promote violent conflicts between
textured social history that the Panthers deserve” has not yet been writ- Black Panther leaders—as well as between the Party and other black
ten and “may be 10 or 15 years in the future.” 15 More than forty years nationalist organizations—and congratulated themselves when these
have passed since the heyday of the Black Panther Party, and almost conflicts yielded the killing of Panthers. And COINTELPRO sought to
twenty years have passed since Blauner’s writing, but to date, despite lead the Party into unsupportable action, “creating opposition to the
comment by a diversity of writers, no one has presented an adequate or BPP on the part of the majority of the residents of the ghetto areas.” 22
comprehensive history.16 For example, agent provocateurs on the government payroll supplied
As a popular adage suggests, “History is written by the victors.”17 explosives to Panther members and sought to incite them to blow up
Writing a history that transcends preconceptions is challenging. It public buildings, and they promoted kangaroo courts encouraging
takes time and perspective and endless sifting through often-contra- Panther members to torture suspected informants. 23
dictory evidence to test competing explanations and weigh the impor- One school of commentators simply took up Hoover’s program of
tance of divergent forces. But the lack of an overarching history of the vilification, portraying the Party as criminals and obscuring and min-
Panthers and their politics, despite the abundance of writing on various imizing its politics. In an influential article in 1978, Kate Coleman
aspects of the Party, is unusual. We suspect that the long absence of an and Paul Avery made a series of allegations about personal misdeeds
adequate history is due, in part, to the character of state repression of and criminal actions by Panthers in the 1970s, after the Party had lost
the Party. Aimed specifically at vilifying the Black Panther Party, state influence as a national and international political organization: “Black
repression powerfully shaped public understandings and blurred the Panthers have committed a series of violent crimes over the last sev-
outlines of the history. eral years. . . . There appears to be no political explanation for it; the
The federal government and local police forces across the nation Party is no longer under siege by the police, and this is not self-defense.
responded to the Panthers with an unparalleled campaign of repression It seems to be nothing but senseless criminality, directed in most cases
and vilification. They fed defamatory stories to the press. They wire- at other blacks.”24
tapped Panther offices around the country. They hired dozens of infor- David Horowitz wrote a series of essays in 1994 building on these
mants to infiltrate Panther chapters. Often, they put aside all pretense allegations, treating them as the totality of what was important or
and simply raided Panther establishments, guns blazing. In one case, in interesting about the Panthers and describing the Black Panthers as “an
 Introduction | 7 8 | Introduction

organized street gang.”25 Hugh Pearson, in consultation with Horo- ject so glibly undertaken.”31 Yet the argument gained traction, perhaps
witz, then wrote The Shadow of the Panther, a full-length book ver- in part because it built upon a kernel of truth. Stewarding a predomi-
sion of the story Horowitz had developed, telling the history of the nantly male organization in the beginning, some Black Panthers indeed
Black Panther Party through the alleged crimes and personal misdeeds asserted an aggressive black masculinity. But by misrepresenting this
of Huey Newton.26 The major newspapers celebrated the book as a black masculinism as the totality of the Party’s politics, Wallace and
respectable history of the Party and its politics. The New York Times her ilk distorted and defamed the Party. They erased the women who
called the book “a richly detailed portrait of a movement” and named soon constituted a majority of the Panther membership and devalued the
it one of its Notable Books of the Year 1994. 27 considerable struggles Panther women and men undertook to advance
The storm of criminal allegations touted as movement history effec- gender and sexual liberation within and through the Party, often pro-
tively advanced J. Edgar Hoover’s program of vilifying the Party and gressing well in advance of the wider society.
shrouding its politics. While many of the criminal allegations that If J. Edgar Hoover were alive today, he would undoubtedly take
Horowitz and his colleagues made about Huey Newton and other Pan- great pride in the persistence of the factionalism he sought to create
ther leaders were thinly supported and almost none were verified in among the Panthers. Fights that erupted between Panther factions as
court, these treatments also omit and obscure the thousands of peo- the Party lost its national and international political influence in the
ple who dedicated their lives to the Panther revolution, their reasons 1970s have long outlived the organization. Decades later, former Black
for doing so, and the political dynamics of their participation, their Panther leaders continue to condemn each other virulently in public.
actions, and the consequences. These disputes distract from the politics of the Black Panthers in their
Hoover’s program aimed to drive a wedge between the Party and heyday and sustain the Party’s public vilification.
its nonblack allies. Today, the popular misconception persists that the But in recent decades, the history of the Black Panther Party has
Black Panther Party was separatist, or antiwhite. Many current internet proven irrepressible. Memoirs by former Black Panthers, as well as
postings mischaracterize the Party in this way. 28 In fact, the Party was scholarly books, edited collections, articles, doctoral dissertations, and
deeply antiracist and strongly committed to interracial coalitions. Even master’s theses, have chipped away at public fallacies, clearing obscu-
some newspapers got the basic story wrong, such as the Providence rity and uncovering the history of the Party piece by piece. Memoirs
Journal-Bulletin, whose editorial board characterized the Party as an by, and biographies of, Black Panther activists who served in various
“organization based on racial hostility . . . a mirror image of the Ku parts of the country, and some who were national leaders—including
Klux Klan.”29 Such misconceptions have also taken root among some David Hilliard, Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Assata Shakur, Geronimo
of today’s young activists seeking to emulate the historical example of Pratt, Elaine Brown, Safiya Bukhari, Stokely Carmichael, Marshall
the Black Panthers, such as the so-called New Black Panther Party, dar- “Eddie” Conway, Flores Forbes, Evans Hopkins, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
ling of Fox News, which while claiming to carry on the legacy of the Steve McCutchen, Robert Hillary King, Huey P. Newton, Afeni
original Black Panthers, preaches separatism and racial hate. Shakur, and Johnny Spain—provide personal perspectives and rich
Another influential line of attack—the argument that the Panthers accounts of life in the Party. Edited collections by Kathleen Cleaver and
primarily advanced “black macho” rather than a broader liberation George Katsiaficas, Judson Jeffries, Charles Jones, Yohuru Williams
politics—has also done more to obscure than to illuminate the history and Jama Lazerow, and countless journal articles, fill out the story of
of the Party. Michelle Wallace first popularized this argument in her local chapters in cities across the country and develop thematic insights
influential 1978 book Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman, in across them. Books on the Panthers by Paul Alkebulan, Curtis Austin,
which she denigrates the role of Angela Davis and other revolutionary Christian Davenport, Donna Murch, Jane Rhodes, as well as more gen-
black women as “do-it-for-your-man” selfless subservience to misog- eral recent books that contain significant discussions of the Panthers,
yny in the name of black liberation. 30 As June Jordan commented in build analytic perspective.32 A new generation of scholars has provided
a 1979 review, Black Macho is “a divisive, fractious tract devoid of rigorous treatments of myriad facets of the Party’s history, producing
hope and dream, devoid even of competent scholarship for the sub- the extraordinary number of ninety dissertations and master’s the-
 Introduction | 9 10 | Introduction

ses—most written in the last decade—analyzing specific aspects of the became. Retrospective accounts decades after the fact—with memo-
Party’s history, such as the sickle-cell-anemia programs, the multira- ries shaped by intervening events, interests, and hearsay—are highly
cial alliances of the Chicago Panthers, or the artwork of Black Panther contradictory. So although we did rely extensively on conversations
minister of culture Emory Douglas.33 with historical actors to test our analysis and push our understanding,
These previous treatments are invaluable, and the depth of our anal- we have avoided using retrospective interviews as a principal source
ysis is much richer for them. But despite the strength of many of these of evidence, preferring to consult documentary or recorded evidence
contributions, none has presented a complete picture of the Black Pan- that was temporally proximate to the events. In the end, what made it
ther Party, or an adequate analysis of its politics. Pinning down history possible to uncover this history was a vast wealth of primary sources,
is always complex. The vociferous efforts of the federal government to including many thousands of firsthand accounts of historical events
vilify the Panthers, and the legacy of factional dispute, made the his- offered by participants shortly after they occurred.
tory of the Black Panther Party nearly impenetrable. We conducted much of the research through the Social Movements
Project at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University
of California, Berkeley, which we codirected from 2000 to 2005. We
HOW W E W ROTE THIS BOOK
benefited greatly from the assistance of dozens of graduate and under-
What is unique and historically important about the Black Panther graduate research assistants. Several of our graduate research assis-
Party is specifically its politics. So in seeking to uncover the history of tants and advisees have gone on to complete dissertations and publish
the Black Panther Party, we have sought to analyze the Party’s politi- their own books on aspects of the Party history (see our acknowledg-
cal history. In an early proposal for the book in 2000, we elaborated a ments). We early consulted the range of primary sources on the Party
method of “strategic genealogy” to conduct this analysis. Rather than already available in archives at Stanford University, the University of
center our analysis on particular individuals or on dissection of the California, Berkeley, Howard University, the University of Wisconsin –
Party’s organization, we uncovered the political dynamics of the Party Madison, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the
by studying the evolution of its political practices.34 New Haven Museum and Historical Society, and the Oakland Public
We could not have written this book without the insight we gained Library; in articles in the black press, underground press, and main-
talking with former Panthers, especially David Hilliard, former Black stream press; and in government documents. In addition, we developed
Panther chief of staff, and Kathleen Cleaver, former Black Panther com- two new archival sources in the course of producing this book.
munications secretary. We also benefited from getting to know almost In our first major archival project, we assembled the only near-com-
all of the other living former leaders of the Black Panther Party, and plete collection of the Party’s own newspaper, the Black Panther. This
together with our students, we spoke with many regional leaders, rank- collection includes every issue published during the Party’s heyday
and-file members of the Party, and important Party allies, including from 1967 to 1971, and 520 of the 537 issues published overall. Chock-
Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins, Angela Davis, Emory full of Party members’ firsthand accounts of unfolding events and pro-
Douglas, Billy X Jennings, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), grammatic statements by Party leaders, the Black Panther offers the
Richard Aoki, Kumasi Aguila, Alex Papillon, Melvin Newton, John most comprehensive documentation of the ideas, actions, and projec-
Seale, Tom Hayden, and dozens of others. The hundreds of hours we tions of the Party day to day, week to week. Under our editorial direc-
spent talking about the Party and working with former members on tion, the Alexander Street Press digitized this collection, made the text
related historical projects provided invaluable insight into life inside the searchable, and published the documents online as part of its Black
Party and the crucial concerns of the leadership at various junctures. Thought and Culture collection, in collaboration with Huey Newton’s
When we began the project in the late 1990s, we conducted formal widow, Fredrika Newton, and the Huey P. Newton Foundation.35
interviews with Bobby Seale and a range of others, expecting that these In our second major archival project, we collaborated with the H. K.
conversations would be the main source of data for the project. But the Yuen family to recover, preserve, and index (a good portion of) the H. K.
more interviews we conducted, the clearer the limits of that medium Yuen collection, which contains thousands of fliers and pamphlets and
 Introduction | 11 12 | Introduction

over thirty thousand hours of audio recordings on the Panthers and ited, even illusory. Especially for young urban blacks in the North and
other social movements in the Bay Area from the 1960s and 1970s. West, little improved. The wartime jobs that drew the black migration
As a doctoral student at Berkeley, in 1964, H. K. Yuen began collect- had ended, much remaining industry fled to the suburbs along with
ing every movement flier and pamphlet circulated on the Berkeley cam- white residents, and many blacks lived isolated in poor urban ghettos
pus, and he recorded every meeting and rally in the Bay Area that he with little access to decent employment or higher education and with
could. Yuen dropped out of school and made a career of this collection minimal political influence. Municipal police and fire departments in
for almost two decades. He also set up an apparatus to record almost cities with large black populations employed few if any blacks. And
all shows about social movements broadcast on Bay Area radio sta- many cities developed containment policing practices—designed to iso-
tions. Working with his son, Eddie Yuen, we recovered this extensive late violence in black ghettos rather than to keep ghetto residents safe.
collection from boxes overflowing the Yuen family basement and then Although black people were formally full citizens, most remained ghet-
preserved and indexed the contents and facilitated donation of the col- toized, impoverished, and politically subordinated, with few channels
lection, which auditors value at several million dollars, to the Bancroft for redress.
Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Starting in 1966, young blacks in cities across the country took up
This collaborative work thus resulted from a series of joint scholarly the call for “Black Power!” The Black Power ferment posed a question:
projects led by Bloom. As first author, Bloom did the lion’s share of the how would black people in America win not only formal citizenship
research, writing, and analysis. As coauthor, Martin contributed sub- rights but actual economic and political power? Dozens of organiza-
stantially to the research, writing, and analysis. In the end, each author tions sprang up seeking to attain Black Power in different ways. More
contributed crucially to all phases of the making of this book. a question than an answer, Black Power meant widely different things
to different people. Despite the belief among many young blacks that
their mobilization as black people was the key, no one knew how to
BL AC K AGA INS T EMPIRE
mobilize effectively. 37
Civil rights activists nonviolently defied Jim Crow, demanding full citi- Into this vacuum, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale advanced a black
zenship rights. Their insurgent Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s anti-imperialist politics that powerfully challenged the status quo yet
dismantled legal segregation and expanded black enfranchisement in the was difficult to repress. Drawing on the nationalist ideas of Malcolm
United States. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act X, Newton and Seale declared the Black Panther Party steward of
codified their inspiring victories. But once there was little legal segrega- the black community—its legitimate political representative—stand-
tion left to defy, the insurgent Civil Rights Movement fell apart.36 ing in revolutionary opposition to the oppressive “power structure.”
In the late 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee But unlike many black nationalists, the Panthers made common cause
and Congress of Racial Equality, two organizations that led much of with the domestic antiwar movement and anti-imperialist movements
the nonviolent civil disobedience, imploded. The Southern Christian abroad. The Panthers argued that black people constituted a “colony
Leadership Conference declined. But the broader vision of black liber- in the mother country.” With an unpopular imperial war under way
ation that had motivated civil rights activists remained salient. Many in Vietnam, popular anti-imperialist movements agitating internation-
black people, having won a measure of political incorporation, orga- ally, and a crisis of legitimacy brewing in the Democratic Party, they
nized to win electoral political power. Many sought economic advance- posited a single worldwide struggle against imperialism encompass-
ment. Moderate civil rights organizations, such as the National Asso- ing Vietnamese resistance against the United States, draft resistance
ciation for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, against military service, and their own struggle to liberate the black
turned their attention to the hard work of civil rights enforcement. community. In the face of brutal repression, the Black Panther Party
Countless activists continued to chip away at racial discrimination in forged powerful alliances, drawing widespread support not only from
jobs, education, and housing. moderate blacks but also from many nonblacks, as well as from anti-
For many blacks, the Civil Rights Movement’s victories proved lim- imperialist governments and movements around the globe.
 Introduction | 13 14 | Introduction

The Black Panthers’ crucial political innovation was not only ide- the conditions in which they found themselves—that proved so conse-
ational but practical. At the center of their politics was the practice of quential. They created a movement with the power to challenge estab-
armed self-defense against the police. While revolutionary ideas could lished social relations and yet—given the political context—very dif-
be easily ignored, widespread confrontations between young armed ficult to repress. Once the Black Panther Party developed, until the
black people and the police could not. The Panthers’ politics of armed conditions under which it thrived abated, some form of revolutionary
self-defense gave them political leverage, forcibly contesting the legiti- anti-imperialism would necessarily persist. Had government hiring and
macy of the American political regime. In late 1968, Bobby Seale and university enrollment remained inaccessible to blacks, had black elec-
David Hilliard shifted the Party’s focus to organizing community pro- toral representation not expanded, had affirmative action programs
grams such as free breakfasts for children. In 1969, every Panther chap- never proliferated, had the military draft not been scaled back and then
ter organized community services, and these programs soon became repealed, and had revolutionary governments abroad not normalized
the staple activity for Party members nationwide. By that summer, relations with the United States, revolutionary black anti-imperialism
the Party estimated it was feeding ten thousand children free break- would still be a powerful force in the United States today. While the
fast every day. The Black Panther Party’s community programs gave Black Panther Party might have been repressible as an organization, the
members meaningful daily activities, strengthened black community politics the Panthers created were irrepressible so long as the conditions
support, burnished Party credibility in the eyes of allies, and vividly in which they thrived persisted.
exposed the inadequacy of the federal government’s concurrent War From 1968 through 1970, the Black Panther Party made it impossi-
on Poverty. Community programs concretely advanced the politics the ble for the U.S. government to maintain business as usual, and it helped
Panthers stood for: they were feeding hungry children when the vastly create a far-reaching crisis in U.S. society. The state responded to the
wealthier and more powerful U.S. government was allowing children to destabilizing crisis with social concessions such as municipal hiring of
starve. The more the state sought to repress the Panthers, the more the blacks and the repeal of the military draft. Because history is so com-
Party’s allies mobilized in its defense. The Black Panther Party quickly plex, we cannot isolate all influences and precisely predict what would
became a major national and international political force. have happened if Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and many others had
Individuals created the Black Panther Party. Without their specific not created the Black Panther Party. But we do know that without the
efforts and actions, the Party would not have come about, and there is Black Panther Party, we would now live in a very different world.
little reason to believe that a powerful black anti-imperialist movement
would have developed in the late 1960s. Yet the Black Panther Party The parts of this book analyze in turn the major phases of the politi-
was also specific to its times. The times did not make the Black Panther cal development of the Black Panther Party. Part 1, “Organizing Rage,”
Party, but the specific practices of the Black Panthers became influ- analyzes the period through May of 1967, tracing the Party’s develop-
ential precisely because of the political context. Without the success ment of its ideology of black anti-imperialism and its preliminary tactic
of the insurgent Civil Rights Movement, and without its limitations, of policing the police. Part 2, “Baptism in Blood,” analyzes the Party’s
the Black Power ferment from which the Black Panther Party emerged rise to national influence through 1968, during which time it reinvented
would not have existed. Without widespread exclusion of black peo- the politics of armed self-defense, championed black community self-
ple from political representation, good jobs, government employment, determination, and promoted armed resistance to the state.
quality education, and the middle class, most black people would have Part 3, “Resilience,” and part 4, “Revolution Has Come!” analyze
opposed the Panthers’ politics. Without the Vietnam War draft and the the period through 1969 and 1970 when the Party was at the height of
crisis of legitimacy in the Democratic Party, few nonblack allies would its power, proliferating community service programs and continuing to
have mobilized resistance to state repression of the Party. Without expand armed resistance in the face of the state’s intensified repression.
powerful anti-imperialist allies abroad, the Panthers would have been We unpack the dynamics of repression and response in three cities—
deprived of both resources and credibility. Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Haven—showing how the Panthers
It was not simply what the Black Panthers did—but what they did in attracted support from multiracial allies at home and from revolution-
 Introduction | 15

ary movements and governments abroad and explaining why Black

Panther insurgent practices were irrepressible.
Part 5, “Concessions and Unraveling,” analyzes the demise of the
Black Panther Party in the 1970s, showing how state concessions and
broad political transformations undercut the Party’s resilience. During
this period, the Black Panthers divided along ideological lines, with
neither side able to sustain the politics that had driven the Party’s
development.
The concluding chapter sums up our findings and explores their
implications for three broader contemporary debates about the his-
tory of the Black Liberation Struggle and about social movements
generally. Finally, we consider the history of the Black Panther Party
in light of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of revolution, illuminating the
political dynamics by which social movements become revolutionary
and explaining why there is no revolutionary movement in the United
States today.