BY THE MIDDLE 1970S the Black Panther Party had reached a cross-roads. Just as the civil rights movement associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., had been forced to reassess its purpose following its landmark legislative victories in the 1960s, the Black Panthers found that portions of our platform had been integrated into the American political mainstream.
As this closing section suggests, Intercommunalism was Huey’s defining ideology throughout the latter years of the Black Panther Party. Both “Who Makes U.S. Foreign Policy”? and “The Dialectics of Nature” underscore his ever-increasing interest in the United States “empire,” especially its organized methods for crushing political dissension. Additionally, Huey’s writings of this period begin to assume an explicitly academic tone new to his body of work. Whereas flashes of rhetoric often predominate in his early pieces, Huey’s readings in the areas of philosophy and natural sciences inspired a series of intellectually dense considerations of issues such as gender and human evolution.
Further research in this area was interrupted, however, in 1974 when, in order to avoid prosecution on charges of pistol-whipping his tailor and murdering a prostitute, Huey and party comrade and later wife Gwen Fountaine fled to Cuba. Acquitted of all charges in 1977, Huey entered the University of California, Santa Cruz, upon his return home. His doctoral dissertation, “War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America,” became the most detailed summation of the FBI’s campaign to end the Black Panther Party ever published when it was printed posthumously as a book in 1996. The Freedom of Information Act made formerly classified government documents available to the general public of the post-Watergate era. Huey thereby accessed over eight thousand 250-page volumes of never-before-released “intelligence” reports to chronicle J. Edgar Hoover’s fifteen-year “war” on the Panthers. As the excerpted “Response of the Government to the Black Panther Party” demonstrates, the Bureau’s intention was to criminalize the politics of dissent at all cost.
Although War Against the Panthers is the last book of Huey’s writing produced during his lifetime, he remained politically active during the 1980s. He lectured frequently on the black liberation movement and global affairs, as well as participating in various grassroots social-justice causes until his death in 1989.