Barbecue is served at the Free Huey Rally in De Fremery Park in Oakland on July 14, 1968. (NMAAHC, photograph by Ruth-Marion Baruch, © 2011 Pirkle Jones Foundation)
“AS THE ISSUE OF POLICE BRUTALITY AGAINST BLACK AND BROWN PEOPLE COMES TO THE FORE IN WALES, THE COMMUNITY DEFENCE TACTICS OF THE BLACK PANTHERS ARE STILL AS RELEVANT AS EVER. BUT THEIR LEGACY GOES MUCH FURTHER. THE REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS OF THE PANTHERS, AND THE WAY IN WHICH THEY ORGANISED AMONG BLACK AND POOR COMMUNITIES, LINKING DIFFERENT GROUPS IN STRUGGLE, PROVIDES ESSENTIAL LESSONS FOR ALL WHO BELIEVE CAPITALISM HAS FAILED. “
PICKING UP WHERE MALCOLM LEFT OFF
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in 1966 by two young men, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in Oakland, California. During the late sixties and early seventies it was to become one of the most influential socialist and black organisations in American history. It’s impact was global.
As the largest black revolutionary socialist organisation that has ever existed, the Black Panthers enjoyed at their peak 5,000 members, almost 50 chapters across the United States and a newspaper with weekly sales of quarter-of-a-million copies. Surveys at the time suggested the party had majority support or sympathy among the black population in the major cities where two-thirds lived in ghettos.
The Panthers would rapidly build a base through militant confrontation with the state. Picking up where Malcolm X left off, during the transition from the Civil Rights to Black Power era, the party argued for armed self-defense. Their first campaign was ‘policing the police’ in Oakland which involved exercising a constitutional right to carry arms while following police patrols and monitoring incidents where any black people were stopped. Alongside guns activists carried lawbooks.
From the start the Black Panthers argued that racism was a product of capitalism, and therefore race struggle must be combined with class struggle. Bold challenges to police brutality – and authority – were the lightning rod for new recruits to flood into the party in order to confront and take on the state.
TEN POINT PROGRAM
The founding 10-point program of the Black Panther Party is still so relevant today because all of its demands address racism in terms of institutional and state power: Full employment; The right to decent housing; Radical reform of the education system so it addresses key issues such as racism, colonialism and capitalism; An end to unjust policing; prison reform and abolition and stopping military recruitment using oppressed communities as cannon fodder.
Employment. Housing. Education. Police. Prisons. The military…. These are all key institutions of capitalist rule – but unlike The Panthers, many modern activists seem to shy away from confronting the state and institutional power along its key faultlines.
SURVIVAL PROGRAMS (PENDING REVOLUTION)
The legacy of the Black Panther Party has been distorted and reduced to clichés and stereotypes of the black male with a gun, beret and leather jacket. By the early 1970s over half of party members were women, and the leader of the party was a woman, Elaine Brown. A major focus was developing a strategy of community organising that would meet the basic unmet needs of the community. These were called ‘Survival Programs (Pending Revolution)’
In his book, To Die For The People, Huey P Newton wrote about the survival programs,
‘All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but are not solutions to our problems. That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution. We say that the survival program of the Black Panther Party is like the survival kit of a sailor stranded on a raft. It helps him sustain himself until he can get completely out of that situation. So the programs are not answers or solutions, but they will help us to organize the community around a true analysis and understanding of their situation’
The Free Children’s Breakfast Program provided tens of thousands of young African-Americans with a nutritious meal in the morning. It was revealed that Black revolutionary socialists were feeding more hungry children in California than the state, and their anti-poverty activism forced states to address child hunger and poverty and develop their own breakfast programs.
The Free Health Clinics were tremendously important in a country that still has no NHS. In this area, once again Panther activism led to changes in government policy. The party pioneered national screening programs for genetic disorders, most notably for sickle cell anaemia, a genetic disease that was virtually ignored by the health establishment as it mainly afflicted those of African descent. The party catapulted the issue on to the national agenda when John Lennon invited party chairman Bobby Seale to join him on national TV where he raised the issue and forced the government to pump resources into addressing sickle cell anaemia.
The Black Panther Party also pioneered the use of alternative medicine and practices such as acupuncture in the context of community health and social action, particularly in treatment of drug addiction having picked up on it during a visit of party leaders to China, due to their Maoist leanings.
Today in Wales it is unfortunate that while many grassroots groups support those hit hard by austerity such as the homeless – for example, distributing hot food, clothes, coats and resources – they rarely do this in a similarly political way to the Panthers, exposing the political causes of the housing crisis and raising the political consciousness of the community.
RAINBOW COALITION
The ‘Rainbow Coalition’ – the multiracial alliance of poor sections of the black, white, Latino, native American and other communities initiated by Fred Hampton and the Chicago Black Panthers – has been too little remembered.
The rainbow included the Young Lords, who started off life as a Puerto Rican teenage street gang, before one of its jailed members came into contact with the Black Panthers in prison and they transformed into a revolutionary socialist organisation.
Some of their high-profile direct actions included occupying the First Spanish Methodist Church in Harlem who they indicted for delivering no programs to support the community. During the sit-in they renamed it ‘The People’s Church’ and made it a base for a free children’s breakfast program, a clothes-bank, free health clinic and centre of arts and cultural performance.
Another action protesting the poor sanitation conditions that Latino communities were forced to live in, ‘The Garbage Offensive’, involved a mass clean-up of their neighbourhood collecting huge amounts of garbage which they assembled in one spot before burning.
Other direct actions included ‘The Lead Offensive’, where they worked with left wing nurses to do door-to-door medical home visits in poor neighbourhoods, raising demands on the state for lead-poisoning tests for kids, resulting in laws banning lead-paint in tenements.
The Young Lords were part of a coalition with the Panthers and left-wing health-workers who occupied a hospital setting up the first drug detox programme in the Bronx pioneering progressive approaches such as ‘harm reduction’ that they named ‘The People’s Detox’.
Former heroin addicts formed a revolutionary socialist organisation named ‘White Lightning’ who undertook activism around recognising the role of capitalist oppression around their addictions, and recognising the drug industry as a capitalist industry.
A group of poor White Appalachians living in Chicago called the Young Patriots also formed an alliance with the Black Panthers drawing up a program modelled on its ten-point program and doing similar free breakfasts, there were arguments over their flying of the confederate flag but it was agreed it could continue if they explicitly condemned racism which they did arguing that the South would rise again – but this time in solidarity with their black brothers and sisters, not against them.
The idea that the most militant and combative sections of the black community could become the vanguard and inspiration for the most marginalised sections of the white community terrified the establishment.
LGBT+ EQUALITY
It is rarely acknowledged that revolutionary socialists of colour were often in the vanguard of the movement for LGBT+ equality and against other oppressions. For example, in 1970 Huey Newton issued a statement on behalf of the Black Panther Party attacking homophobia at a time when most white-led revolutionary socialist organisations still dodged or refused to show solidarity. The Young Lords were one of the first radical organisations to have a Lesbian and Gay section, and one of their members Trans rights activist Sylvia Rivera alongside many other people of colour were key protagonists in the 1969 Stonewall Riots.
REPRESSION
The Black Panthers would be ripped apart by state repression. The FBI relentlessly targeted the party through infiltrators and undercover agents, harassment, psychological warfare, smearing party members using forged documents and planting false reports in the media to sew division in the party, jailing most of the party’s most prominent leaders, violence and assassination: Around 40 Panthers were killed by the state. Fred Hampton, their charismatic Chicago organiser, would be murdered while in his bed.
But it was not only external repression. The party suffered from seeing one party states such as China, North Korea, Algeria and Cuba as perfect models of socialism. This justified an authoritarian, top-down and unaccountable model of party leadership which ultimately weakened the organisation. Democracy is not just the icing on the socialist cake. It is the cake – or there is no socialism worth fighting for.
The party also mostly built its base in the community, neglecting building power in workplaces. The ability of organised workers to withdraw their labour power in strikes and stoppages has always been a huge source of potential power to grind the wheels of the system to a halt.
Ground down, the Black Panthers drifted away from militant confrontation with the state towards electoral politics and community projects, and an ultimate decline in influence well before its formal dissolution in the early 1980s.
POLICING THE POLICE
Recently a London-based activist Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Group who has been helping the Justice For Christopher Kapessa and Free Siyanda campaigns in South Wales has spoken about how he took inspiration from the Black Panthers,
“The idea of monitoring police violence and actions came from the work of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in the United States. At that time, members of the Black Panther Party would follow police cars to observe the policing of black neighbourhoods. So, we took the concept of a monitoring group from the Black Panthers, and that is what we meant by monitoring. It is not the monitoring of data and analysis, but the monitoring of police racism, violence and misconduct. Also, the Black Panther Party’s efforts to link up with the poorest sections of the community, and to represent them politically, were a big influence on us. We learnt from their ten-point programme, and from their food programme, which showed us the importance of connecting political struggle with providing a service that could deal with daily effects of poverty as well as racism. The emergence of black politics and anti-racist
mobilisation in Britain coincided with seismic political upheaval in South Asia, the struggles of which were also very prominent for us.”
The Black Panther Party will continue to be a point of reference in the battle against racism, and capitalism which breeds racism.
