Following her acquittal, Angela Davis embarked on a worldwide tour. She spoke to adoring crowds in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and New York City, then traveled throughout the Soviet Union, with stops in Russia, Central Asia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, and Chile.1
The state bureaucracies in the communist nations, which had previously sent “a million roses for Angela,” assembled the masses in her honor, with fifty thousand welcoming her to East Berlin2 and hundreds of thousands celebrating her in Havana, where she delivered a speech in tandem with the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.3 In Moscow, Davis lavished praise on the Soviet system of government and its treatment of racial minorities. “The possibility of seeing with my own eyes the practical realization of Lenin’s ethnic policy will be of tremendous help in our own struggle of resolving the ethnic problem in the United States,” she said. “Everything we have seen in the Soviet Union will inspire us in our own struggle. Our devotion to Marxism-Leninism and Communism and our own ideological convictions have been greatly strengthened.”4
At the same time, Davis had also become a symbol of the left-wing revolution at home. She spoke on college campuses and published a bestselling memoir, An Autobiography, which framed her life story as the “neo-slave narrative” of her time.5 In her lectures to students, she advanced the idea that racism was the great invisible power and warned that the United States was spiraling toward a fascist future. “We can look back over the last four years as we try to predict what we are going to face these next four years. And what I’ve tried to do is try to understand what happened in Germany prior to the Nazi seizure of power,” she said to students at California State University, Fullerton, in 1972. “And I notice some very, very frightening parallels between the deterioration of the judicial system in pre-Nazi Germany—I’m stressing this, pre-Nazi Germany—before Hitler seized power. There are some very frightening parallels between what was going on there then, and what is going on here now.”6
For Davis, these dire conditions served as justification for the revolution—and nearly any transgression that carried it forward. She argued that minority criminals, such as the San Quentin Six, who were accused of murdering three prison guards during an escape attempt;7 Ruchell Magee, who had participated in the Marin courthouse kidnapping-murder;8 and Ricardo Chavez Ortiz, who had hijacked an airplane to “save America and the whole world,”9 were driven to commit these crimes by a racist society and should, therefore, be considered “political prisoners”—victims worthy of liberation, rather than perpetrators worthy of condemnation.
At her lecture in Fullerton, Davis illustrated this principle with a story about Emily Butler, a twenty-four-year-old black woman who worked at the Internal Revenue Service office in Atlanta and, after a conflict with her colleagues, retrieved a .22 revolver and shot her white supervisor four times at point-blank range, standing over the dead woman’s body and telling her, “I hate you so bad, I hope I killed you.”10 But for Angela Davis, the culprit was not Butler, who had emptied the revolver into her supervisor, but the society that had left her no choice but to kill. “We have to realize that Emily Butler is not guilty,” Davis told the cheering students. “It is racism that pulled that trigger. Racism. And if anybody needs to be indicted and imprisoned, it’s the reincarnation of racism himself, Richard Nixon.”11
Despite her appeals to Kant and Hegel, the real ideology of Angela Davis was simple: total war against American society, justifying any atrocity, from the prison camps of the Soviet Union to the cold-blooded murder of an IRS manager—all in the name of the revolution.
And she wasn’t alone. There was an entire movement behind her. The Marxist-Leninist prison gangs, the Black Panther Party, and, later, the Black Liberation Army were busy organizing the ghettos, assembling an arsenal of weapons, and, modeling themselves on the Third World liberation armies, preparing for urban guerrilla war.
“America must learn that black people are not the eternal sufferers, the universal prisoners, the only ones who can feel pain,” they warned. “The season of struggle is our season.”12
* * *
The person who most embodied the life and spirit of the black Marxist revolution was a man named Eldridge Cleaver.
Cleaver’s personal biography contains the entire arc of the revolution: he was radicalized in the California prisons, served as the Black Panther Party’s minister of information, and led the movement down its final, apocalyptic path. He was the masculine, hot-blooded complement to Angela Davis’s feminine, cold-blooded intellectualism.
He had fought, written, and ravaged with his bare hands.
Like many of the figures in the black liberation movement, Cleaver’s awakening began in the prison system. He had spent long stretches of his youth in juvenile detention and, as an adult, was sent to San Quentin after a conviction for rape and assault with intent to murder.
While incarcerated, Cleaver sought his own transvaluation of values, recasting his crimes as a mechanism of liberation. In his bestselling memoir, Soul on Ice, he recounted his descent into madness as a young man—“For several days I ranted and raved against the white race, against white women in particular, against white America in general”—and then his rejection of “the white man’s law” and creation of his own moral universe, in which all transgressions were permitted.
“I became a rapist,” he wrote. “To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of the day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey.”13
But the rape of white women, he insisted, was not personal, but political. Through the act of physical domination, the black man could transform himself from the low-status “supermasculine menial” into a high-status sexual revolutionary.
“Rape was an insurrectionary act,” Cleaver wrote. “It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spreads outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race.”14
Cleaver recanted while in prison, claiming that he had transcended the anti-morality of rape and found salvation in Marxism-Leninism. But these initial themes—violence, revenge, hatred, madness—pervaded Cleaver’s life, and the black nationalist movement it represented, from its sordid origins to its catastrophic conclusions.
Angela Davis, who supported Cleaver in the early days,15 provided the intellectual framework for overthrowing the American state. Cleaver, who had a hot-and-cold opinion of Davis over the years,16 revealed its depraved and vengeful heart.
After his release from prison, Cleaver joined the Black Panther Party and, working closely with its founder, Huey P. Newton, cobbled together the ideology of the black militant movement. Cleaver was a gifted writer who combined high-minded rhetoric with gangster-style exhortations, publishing a long sequence of essays and articles in the pages of the Black Panther newsletter and the Black Scholar, a radical academic journal that served as the hub for revolutionary and postcolonial studies. “The ideology of the Black Panther Party is the historical experience of Black people and the wisdom gained by Black people in their 400 year long struggle against the system of racist oppression and economic exploitation in Babylon, interpreted through the prism of the Marxist-Leninist analysis by our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton,” he wrote. “Essentially, what Huey did was to provide the ideology and the methodology for organizing the Black Urban lumpenproletariat. Armed with this ideological perspective and method, Huey transformed the Black lumpenproletariat from the forgotten people at the bottom of society into the vanguard of the proletariat.”17
Cleaver’s theory represented a departure from orthodox Marxism, which dismissed the lumpenproletariat—the criminal, the vagrant, the drifter, the unemployed—as utterly incapable of revolution. As Marx and Engels described it in The Communist Manifesto, the lumpenproletariat was “the ‘dangerous class,’ the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society” that “may be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution” but, ultimately, could not achieve the necessary consciousness or sustained action required for overthrowing the ruling class.18
Cleaver, on the other hand, arguing that “there is much evidence that Marx and Engels were themselves racists,” maintained that the founding fathers of Marxism had put undue faith in the white working class and underestimated the black underclass.19 Echoing Marcuse’s conclusions in Counterrevolution and Revolt, Cleaver argued that, in fact, the industrial working classes had become a conservative, even reactionary force—or, in his words, “the House Niggers of Capitalism.”20 Therefore, Cleaver believed that his task as the ideologist of the Black Panthers was to develop a unique dialectic for the black underclass and to “manifest its rebellion in the University of the Streets.”21
The ultimate goal, he said, was not to achieve “equality in Production, which is the Marxist view and basic error, but equality in distribution and consumption.”22 That is, the black lumpenproletariat might not be able to operate the factories, but it could commandeer a steady stream of material benefits from the men who could.
The Black Panther Party’s propaganda and organization-building efforts were built on this ideological foundation. Beginning in the Bay Area and then expanding to dozens of cities across the United States, the Panthers aggressively recruited gang members, pimps, prostitutes, felons, dropouts, and drug dealers, luring them into the party with the glamor of the gun.23 “To recruit any sizable number of street brothers, we would obviously have to do more than talk,” Huey Newton wrote in his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide. “We needed to give practical applications of our theory, show them that we were not afraid of weapons and not afraid of death. The way we finally won the brothers over was by patrolling the police with arms.”24
The Panthers raised money by selling copies of Mao’s Little Red Book,25 purchased firearms, and then bought leather jackets, black berets, and ammunition belts to complete the aesthetic. They quickly raised their profile by following, monitoring, and intimidating police officers assigned to black neighborhoods.
The Panthers’ manifesto, the “Ten-Point Program,” translated Newton and Cleaver’s Marxist-Leninist synthesis into a tangible political agenda, demanding that the federal government provide blacks with cash reparation payments, guaranteed monthly income, free high-quality housing, racialist ideology in schools, an end to police brutality, and the immediate release of all black men held in the nation’s jails and prisons.26 The movement’s official publication, the Black Panther, carried official party proclamations, news of the revolution, and, partly because of low literacy rates in the ghettos, large, graphic illustrations depicting armed urban resistance and the execution of police officers.
Newton and Cleaver returned to these violent themes again and again, revealing an obsession with killing law enforcement officers, which, they believed, could spark the revolution. “When the masses hear that a gestapo policeman has been executed while sipping coffee at a counter, and the revolutionary executioners fled without being traced, the masses will see the validity of this type of approach to resistance,” wrote Newton.27 “A revolution is not a game, it is a war,”28 echoed Cleaver, who promised in his public speeches to put police officers “against the wall when the shooting starts,” to “beat that punk California Governor Ronald Reagan to death,” and to burn down the Nixon White House.29
Like their comrade Angela Davis, the leaders of the Black Panther Party did not merely talk the talk. They walked the walk of their revolution.
In 1967, during a traffic stop in Oakland, Newton engaged in a shoot-out with police that left two officers wounded and one dead. He was initially convicted of voluntary manslaughter, then, after a court reversal and two hung juries, was freed.30 The following year, Cleaver and a group of Panthers plotted to ambush the police and, after Cleaver was spotted urinating in the street by a patrol unit, they haphazardly executed the plan and found themselves in a gunfight. Cleaver and the Panthers fired 157 shots through the police cruiser, with a barrage of bullets hitting an officer in the arm and back. Cleaver and his comrade Bobby Hutton fled into the basement of a nearby house and exchanged gunfire with a detachment of police, who eventually flushed them out with tear gas, killed Hutton, and arrested Cleaver.31
By 1970, the Black Panther Party’s inflammatory rhetoric and low-grade guerrilla war had inspired violence across the country. Police departments in New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Detroit reported massive increases in assaults against officers, which, in the words of one official, were largely driven by the Panthers’ “rhetoric of violence” and the “widespread availability” of their newspaper, which “constantly pressed” the incitement to wield “the gun” and “Kill the Pigs.” The chief of police in Los Angeles warned that America was facing “a revolution on the installment plan” that threatened to destabilize national government.32 The Panthers, meanwhile, expanded their operations and bragged publicly that they had assembled an armory with pistols, rifles, explosives, machine guns, and grenade launchers.33
But despite the outward bravado, behind the scenes, the black revolutionaries were in disarray. As Angela Davis had observed, the radical organizations were vulnerable to infighting, division, and internal purges. In addition, the FBI was rapidly infiltrating the ranks of the Black Panther Party, which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had called “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”34 By the end of 1969, federal law enforcement agents had raided Panther offices across the country and arrested more than two hundred of its members, including thirty Panthers who faced capital punishment and forty who faced life in prison.35
During this period of turmoil, the most significant fissure within the ranks of the Black Panther Party was between the factions of Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton.
Following his arrest for the police shoot-out, Cleaver had jumped bail and fled abroad, visiting the friendly left-wing regimes in Cuba, North Korea, and, finally, Algeria, where he set up the international headquarters of the Black Panther Party and ran its American operations from exile.36 Smoking hashish and working the telephones from a two-story villa in Algiers,37 Cleaver continued to push the Marxist-Leninist line and encouraged his soldiers to escalate the urban guerrilla war and achieve “revolution in our lifetime.”38 Meanwhile, Newton watched chaos, death, and infiltration decimate his ranks in Oakland and advocated a shift in strategy toward peaceful organizing and political activism.
The FBI, too, played a role, intentionally sowing distrust between the two leaders, who, in 1971, ended their relationship with a vicious public feud, accusing each another of treason and splitting the Black Panther Party in two—the West Coast Panthers remained loyal to Newton, while a smaller contingent of East Coast Panthers pledged allegiance to Cleaver and his vision for total war.39
With this, the Black Liberation Army was born. Cleaver gave directions to this new faction and edited its official newspaper from exile. His fifty or sixty followers in New York went underground and began plotting how to secure funds, recruit members, plan operations, and turn the rhetoric about “killing the pigs” into reality.40
Cleaver and his men distilled their new ideology to a simple list of negations: “We are anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist”; “we must of necessity strive for the abolishment of these systems”; “in order to abolish our system of oppression we must utilize the science of class struggle.”41
In Algiers, Cleaver’s right-hand man, Field Marshal Don Cox, put together a manual for organizing urban guerrilla units, advised the urban revolutionaries to organize into autonomous cells, and offered detailed instructions for the use of pistols, rifles, shotguns, grenades, dynamite, and time bombs. “Since the year 1619 when the first slave ship landed with human cargo from Africa, to toil as slaves in the New World, innumerable methods have been used to gain our freedom and liberation,” Cox wrote. “When a guerrilla unit moves against this oppressive system by executing a pig or attacking its institutions, by any means, sniping, stabbing, bombing, etc., in defense against the 400 years of racist brutality, murder and exploitation, this can only be defined correctly as self-defense.” As inspiration, it included black-and-white photographs of the Marin courthouse siege and other attacks against law enforcement.42
Then the assassinations began.
In the spring of 1971, the BLA launched its first offensive, strafing two New York City policemen with a machine gun, leaving them in critical condition.43 Later that night, the group sent a communiqué to the New York Times and a Harlem radio station claiming credit for the attack and warning “the fascist state pig police” that “the domestic armed forces of racism and oppression will be confronted with the guns of the Black Liberation Army.”44 Two nights later, BLA gunmen ambushed two patrolmen, instantly killing the first, a black man, with a shot to the back of the head, and slowly killing the second, a white man, who was hit with thirteen shots to the body and bled out as a radio car rushed him to the hospital.45
Over the next two years, the BLA would unleash a reign of terror: the militants assassinated five more police officers,46 robbed a series of banks,47 kidnapped and ransomed a bar owner,48 orchestrated multiple prison escapes,49 hijacked commercial airplanes,50 and ran a series of criminal enterprises, ranging from drug-running to street robbery.
Their grisliest crime, however, was the murder of two NYPD officers—Rocco Laurie, a white man, and Gregory Foster, a black man—in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. On January 27, 1972, as part of their second “spring offensive,” members of the BLA’s so-called George Jackson Squad gunned down the two men at point-blank range, then shot Laurie in the groin and Foster in the eyes, splattering their genitalia, cranial bones, and brain tissue across the pavement.51 After mutilating the bodies, one of the BLA gunmen performed a Yoruban-style war dance over the corpses.52
There was a theory behind the carnage. As its leaders wrote in a series of newspapers, pamphlets, and communiqués, the Black Liberation Army saw itself as “an embryonic form” of the National Liberation Armies that had gained power in Africa and Latin America. Cleaver and his men believed that they were the “revolutionary class” of fighters and propagandists that could “lead the masses of black people into a higher degree of revolutionary consciousness” and, catching headlines with audacious robberies and assassinations, wake the black lumpenproletariat out of its slumber and into armed revolt against the power structure.
The black ghetto would serve as the initial foco, then move outward into general society. “Once the center of action has been initiated,” the BLA declared, “the theory goes it will be the moving force of the revolution and the masses of oppressed people will pick up the gun and fight until final victory.”53
It was a theory that failed.
The public quickly recoiled from the bloodshed. Even in black neighborhoods, where the BLA had hoped to build support, the movement alienated residents. The “revolutionary executions”54 of black police officers was met with horror. And although the BLA officially adopted an “anti-heroin interdiction” policy in black communities,55 robbing and murdering drug dealers in a purported effort to protect residents,56 the group’s leaders often succumbed to addiction and warlordism themselves,57 replacing, rather than eliminating, the gangsters on the street corner.
Meanwhile, the FBI’s counterinsurgency operation went into high gear. During the height of the BLA terror campaign, between 1971 and 1973, law enforcement agencies killed seven suspected BLA fighters and captured another eighteen of its leaders, reducing the group to a handful of die-hards who retreated to the tenements and back alleys of New York City.58
By 1974, the movement was exhausted. The Algerian government had pushed Eldridge Cleaver out of the country59 and the majority of his soldiers in the United States were dead, strung out, or locked up. Police had captured and indicted a large group of BLA militants involved in the revolutionary violence.60 Two of the suspects in the murder of Rocco Laurie and Gregory Foster died in shoot-outs with law enforcement.61 In the final years, some BLA cells were consuming mountains of cocaine, robbing stores, pushers, and banks to feed their habit, which had become insatiable.62 Their West Coast counterparts returned to a life of petty crime, extortion, pimping, thieving, and violence.63
Their political theory had dissipated and their visions of the revolution had collapsed.
Despite all of Eldridge Cleaver’s ideological posturing, Marx might have been right after all. The lumpenproletariat—the “thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society”—might have been too undisciplined, violent, hedonistic, and easily manipulated, and, thus, incapable of becoming the true subject of the revolution.64 As the BLA soldier Sundiata Acoli lamented, the media was able to highlight the movement’s “lumpen tendencies,” including “lack of discipline, liberal use of alcohol, marijuana, curse words, loose sexual morals, a criminal mentality, and rash actions,” in order to discredit the group from the outset. In the words of another soldier, the origins of the BLA were always more criminal than revolutionary. “We went deep off into the ghetto” to find recruits, he said. “Them niggas had been shooting their pistols Friday and Saturday night anyway . . . so we’d get them and politicize them.”65
But this wasn’t enough. Cleaver’s original conviction, that “the correct ideology is an invincible weapon against the oppressor in our struggle for freedom and liberation,” turned out to be an empty slogan.66 Shooting a police officer in the back of the head, executing an innocent shopkeeper for thirty dollars,67 engaging in drug-fueled robberies—these were not the acts of principle, but pathological cruelty, nihilism, and despair.
One by one, the leadership of the black liberation movement succumbed to their vices. Huey Newton fell into a life of addiction, crime, violence, and desperation. He embezzled funds,68 was suspected in the murder of a prostitute,69 and spent his time in the crack cocaine dens of the Oakland ghettos. Eventually, a dealer affiliated with the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang shot him in the head outside a drug house and left him to die in a pool of his own blood.70
Cleaver contemplated suicide and, with a gun in his hand, had a mystical vision of his face superimposed on the moon, while the faces of his old heroes—Castro, Mao, Marx, and Engels—disappeared into smoke. He abandoned his faith in Marxism-Leninism and dashed through a series of religious conversions, from evangelicalism to Mormonism to doomsday cultism to his own synthetic religion, Christlam, which combined Christianity and Islam.71 But the demons were always at his heels. Like Newton, he became a crack addict in the gritty neighborhoods of Oakland and, after his health slowly failed, died of a heart attack.72
Angela Davis, too, followed the black liberation line to its grim conclusions. Throughout the 1970s, she cheerleaded for the entire lineup of revolutionaries who stood trial for their crimes, including the Soledad Brothers, the San Quentin Six, and Assata Shakur, the “mother hen” of the Black Liberation Army,73 who was convicted of the murder of the New Jersey state trooper and eventually escaped prison and fled to Cuba. Davis raised funds, wrote pamphlets, and organized rallies for her comrades, insisting that they were “freedom fighters” and “political prisoners.”74 But as the trials dried up and the nation ended its fascination with the urban guerrillas, Davis lost much of her appeal. Her style was passé; her rhetoric had become repetitive; her message fell on deaf ears.
In 1979, when Davis announced her campaign for the vice presidency of the United States on the Communist Party ticket, nobody was listening. The campaign barely registered in the national press and, after the ballots were counted, Ronald Reagan, her old nemesis from the California days, had earned nearly 44 million votes. Davis and her running mate, Gus Hall, had garnered a total of just 45,000.
The revolution, it seemed, was finished.