Chapter eleven
The Black Panthers and DRUM
The radicalization of the Black struggle in the late 1960s was mirrored by a similar growth of opposition throughout U.S. society. The civil rights movement inspired a generation of young people—Black and white—to become active politically. The overall character of U.S. society and particularly the war in Vietnam pushed a section of students and youth in the United States to move sharply to the left. At the same time, the radicalization was not confined to students. In fact, the Black struggle found its most radical manifestations in the ghettos of the North and in the auto plants of Detroit and other manufacturing centers. The two organizations that most embodied this radicalization were the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM).
These organizations captured the best of Black radical and nationalist ideas of the late 1960s and, for a brief period, influenced many thousands of activists. Thousands more knew of them. Marxism also influenced the BPP and DRUM since both saw the need for a radical reconstruction of capitalist society. Though each looked to different social forces and argued for different strategies on how to change the world, they reflected the maturation and evolution of the struggle that had lasted for more than a decade when they emerged.
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party in 1966. Seale and Newton had met while they were students in a community college in Oakland, California. The Panthers were to gain notoriety a year later because of their activities in countering police brutality in Oakland by organizing patrols to monitor the police.1 Their monitoring activities included carrying unconcealed weapons and observing police arrests, which was perfectly legal—but needless to say, it was not well received by the police department. Soon, the California legislature took steps to adopt legislation to outlaw the Panthers’ armed patrols. On May 2, 1967, the Panthers responded by organizing a delegation of armed members to march into the state capitol building, proceed to the visitors’ gallery of the legislative chambers, and read out a statement.2 This action catapulted the Panthers into the national limelight. Overnight, the Black Panther Party became a national phenomenon.
The Panthers were not just a police brutality monitoring organization. The ten-point program the party adopted consisted of a set of demands and political positions. These demands combined a set of immediate demands as well as some reforms that questioned the whole basis of the system:
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our Black Community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society.
We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our Black Community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self defense.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black Community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black Community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
And as our major political objective, a United Nations- supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the Black colony in which only Black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of Black people as to their national destiny.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.3
The Black Panther Party became the most influential of the radical Black formations of the late 1960s. The politics of the BPP were a mixture of radical Black nationalism, Third World Marxism, and community service politics. The most successful of the community service programs the Panthers developed was their free breakfast program for school children, organized by Bobby Seale. In October 1968 the party newspaper placed an ad for volunteers to help serve the breakfasts. Within a year, at the end of 1969, the free breakfast program was operational in nineteen cities. Nationally, an estimated 20,000 children received a free breakfast through the Panther program before going to school.4
The Panthers saw themselves as revolutionaries and believed that the capitalist system needed to be overthrown. They sought to make alliances with those whom they perceived shared a common interest, including whites. They were also quite hostile to those forces in the Black movement who, they believed, claimed to stand for Black freedom, but in reality wound up supporting the continued existence of capitalism. So, for example, while labeling themselves Black nationalists, they were sharply critical of the cultural nationalists. Huey P. Newton summarized the views of the BPP:
There are two kinds of nationalism, revolutionary nationalism and reactionary nationalism. Revolutionary nationalism is first dependent upon a people’s revolution with the end goal being the people in power. Therefore to be a revolutionary nationalist you would by necessity have to be a socialist. If you are a reactionary nationalist you are not a socialist and your end goal is the oppression of the people.
Cultural nationalism, or pork chop nationalism, as I sometimes call it, is basically a problem of having the wrong political perspective. It seems to be a reaction instead of responding to political oppression. The cultural nationalists are concerned with returning to the old African culture and thereby regaining their identity and freedom. In other words, they feel that the African culture will automatically bring political freedom. Many times cultural nationalists fall into line as reactionary nationalists.5
Newton linked the fight against racism to the fight against capitalism: “The Black Panther Party is a revolutionary Nationalist group and we see a major contradiction between capitalism in this country and our interests. We realize that this country became very rich upon slavery and that slavery is capitalism in the extreme. We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.”6
After a brief merger between the Panthers and SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, who was appointed Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party, resigned from the organization. In responding to his resignation, Eldridge Cleaver, BPP minister of information, wrote:
The enemies of Black people have learned something from history even if you haven’t, and they are discovering new ways to divide us faster than we are discovering new ways to unite. One thing they know, and we know, that seems to escape you, is that there is not going to be any revolution or Black liberation in the United States as long as revolutionary Blacks, whites, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Chinese and Eskimos are unwilling or unable to unite into some functional machinery that can cope with the situation. Your talk and fears about premature coalition are absurd, because no coalition against oppression by forces possessing revolutionary integrity can ever be premature. If anything, it is too late, because the forces of counterrevolution are sweeping the world, and this is happening precisely because in the past people have been united on a basis that perpetuates disunity among races and ignores basic revolutionary principles and analyses.7
Destroying capitalism was a task beyond the grasp of the 11 percent of the population that the Black population represented. Therefore, the Panthers recognized the need to ally with the oppressed and exploited of all racial and ethnic groups to fight against a common enemy. Or as Bobby Seale put it: “Working class people of all colors must unite against the exploitative, oppressive ruling class. Let me emphasize again—we believe our fight is a class struggle not a race struggle.”8
Although they pledged support to the ideas of Marxism, a distorted form of Marxism—Maoism—influenced many of the Panthers. Maoism was especially prevalent among radicals in the United States because it had a number of characteristics that made it attractive to a younger generation. Maoism, the ruling ideology of the “communist” People’s Republic of China, gained ground for two main reasons: first, it offered a general identification with Third World liberation movements, like the one in Vietnam; and second, it fit with the lack of confidence in indigenous working-class forces as the catalyst for change in the U.S. that many radicals felt. A perceptive analysis of this process explained it this way: “[T]he unevenness of the radicalization process in its effect on the various sectors of the American population has faced the radical movement...with a growing sense of isolation. In the context of this sense of isolation from the bulk of the American people, under the impact of a great hunger for political identity, the affinity felt by most SDSers [Students for a Democratic Society] for revolutionary leaderships in the Third World was increasingly transformed into a primary identification.”9 Many radicals even tried to imitate the style and practice of what they perceived to be the practice of Chinese radicals. During its most radical period, that of the “Cultural Revolution” in China, the Maoists built up a grotesque personality cult around their leader, Chairman Mao Zedong. Mao’s hagiographers turned him into a virtual god. Transferring this to the BPP in the United States, Huey Newton asserted that: “A revolutionary must realize that if he is sincere, death is imminent due to the fact that the things he is saying and doing are extremely dangerous. Without this realization, it is impossible to proceed as a revolutionary. The masses are constantly looking for a guide, a Messiah, to liberate them from the hands of the oppressor. The vanguard party must exemplify the characteristics of worthy leadership.”10 This was a far cry from Karl Marx’s warning that “the educators must be educated,” a point he made in arguing against elitist forms of socialism delivered by a savior.
Yet, there was no denying the massive sympathy (if not outright support) that existed in Black communities for the Black Panthers. A January 13, 1970, Wall Street Journal front page story was headlined: “Panther Supporters” and the subhead read: “Many Black Americans Voice Strong Backing for Defiant Militants.” The reporters concluded that the Panthers had a large base of support. In fact, they wrote, “a clear majority of Blacks [in San Francisco, New York, Cleveland, and Chicago] support both the goals and methods of the Black Panthers. An even larger percentage believes, moreover, that police officials are determined to crush the party by arresting or killing its key officials.”11
The success and growth of the Black Panther Party was a great cause for concern for the U.S. government. Beginning in 1967, the FBI launched COINTELPRO—a massive covert program of disruption and repression against the movement. An FBI memorandum expanding the program described COINTELPRO’s goals as:
1. Prevent the coalition of militant Black nationalist groups....
2. Prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify and electrify the militant nationalist movement...Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position....
3. Prevent violence on the part of Black nationalist groups....
4. Prevent militant Black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability by discrediting them....
5. ...prevent the long-range growth of militant Black nationalist organizations, especially among youth.12
The Black Panther Party was not among the original “Black Nationalist” targets as defined by the FBI in 1967. By September 1968, however, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Panthers as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The BPP, claimed Hoover, is “schooled in the Marxist-Leninist ideology and the teaching of Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung” and it spreads “their gospel of hate and violence not only to ghetto residents, but to students in colleges, universities and high schools as well.”13
By July 1969, the Black Panthers had become the primary focus of the program, and were ultimately the target of 233 of the total authorized “Black Nationalist” COINTELPRO actions. The Church Commission report states unambiguously:
Although the claimed purpose of the Bureau’s COINTELPRO tactics was to prevent violence, some of the FBI’s tactics against the BPP were clearly intended to foster violence, and many others could reasonably have been expected to cause violence.14
The FBI’s program to destroy the Black Panther Party included a concerted effort to muzzle Black Panther publications—to prevent Panther members and persons sympathetic to their aims from expressing their views, and to encourage the mass media to report stories unfavorable to the Panthers. These tactics also involved disseminating inflammatory or false information, promoting dissent within the BPP and between the BPP and other organizations.
In May 1970, FBI headquarters ordered the Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, New Haven, New York, San Diego, and San Francisco field offices to advance proposals for crippling the BPP newspaper, the Black Panther. Immediate action was deemed necessary because: “The Black Panther Party newspaper is one of the most effective propaganda operations of the BPP.... Distribution of this newspaper is increasing at a regular rate thereby influencing a greater number of individuals in the United States along the Black extremist lines.”15
The degree of government repression against the Black Panthers or its effects in sending a chilling message to all activists should not be underestimated. And this repression was not limited to the BPP. COINTELPRO was applied to any groups or movements that were seen as a threat—whether real or imagined. But the BPP and the radical wing of the Black liberation movement were not only stopped by government violence and infiltration. There were also limitations in the politics, strategy, and tactics of the Panthers that contributed to their decline. One of the most important among those weaknesses was their acceptance of a semi-militaristic notion of politics (following Mao Zedong’s slogan, “power flows from the barrel of a gun”). Furthermore, they believed that the source of revolutionary change and social power lay in the dispossessed and marginalized—the urban “lumpen proletariat”—rather than the mass of workers. The emphasis on “picking up the gun” was more exaggerated by some Panther leaders than others, but it was firmly part of the culture of the party.
The Panthers’ focus on organizing the lumpen proletariat flowed from their understanding of the dynamics of the class structure in the U.S. Blacks formed an internal colony, they argued, and, therefore, they were fighting a struggle for national liberation likened to the guerrilla movements in Algeria, Cuba, or Vietnam. The emphasis on organizing the most dispossessed and marginalized—analogous to the peasantry from which Third World guerrillas drew their support—made the Panther organization unstable. It meant that the organization found it difficult to establish consistent routines, a problem exacerbated by the influx of thousands of raw recruits into the party in the late 1960s. This instability made the party more easily infiltrated. The emphasis, more with some members than others, on the “gun” allowed the U.S. government to isolate and “outgun” the BPP. A concerted campaign of government repression along with the party’s own internal weaknesses led to its effective demise as a coherent force by the early 1970s.16
Unfortunately, although large numbers of working-class Blacks (and others) identified with the Panthers, the Panthers’ focus on the lumpen proletariat led them away from their potentially most powerful allies, radicalized workers. Eldridge Cleaver, who could argue against Stokely Carmichael on the need to have a non-racial outlook, could at the same time describe the working class in the United States in the following terms: “In reality, it is accurate to say that the Working Class, particularly the American Working Class, is a parasite upon the heritage of mankind, of which the Lumpen has been totally robbed by the rigged system of Capitalism which in turn, has thrown the majority of mankind upon the junkheap while it buys off a percentage with jobs and security.”17
The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, on the other hand, was an organization that based itself on Black industrial workers. The organization grew out of a 1968 wildcat strike in Detroit’s automobile factories. The significance of DRUM lay in the simple fact that the movement had gone from organizing in the streets, in communities, and was now organizing at workplaces—at the very heart of capitalism. As Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin point out in their history of DRUM, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying:
No less an authority than the Wall Street Journal took them very seriously from the day of the first wildcat, for the Wall Street Journal understood something that most of the white student radicals did not yet understand: the Black movement of the sixties had finally arrived at one of the most vulnerable links of the American economic system—the point of mass production, the assembly line.18
Unlike the Black Panthers, the leaders of DRUM believed that Black workers, not the urban unemployed, were the decisive and potentially most powerful social group to organize. DRUM believed that because of their vital role in some of the United States’ most important industries, Black workers had a key role to play in changing society.
DRUM assigned to Black workers the role of being the vanguard of the working class. White workers in the United States could not be considered a reliable ally in a united working-class struggle. As Mike Hamlin, one of DRUM’s leaders, put it: “Whites in America don’t act like workers. They don’t act like proletariat. They act like racists. And that’s why I think Blacks have to continue to have Black organizations independent of whites.”19
DRUM not only organized against the auto companies, but also targeted the United Automobile Workers (UAW) because of its complicity with management, its failure to represent its Black members, and the virtual absence of Blacks within the leadership of the union. Within months of the formation of DRUM, other Revolutionary Union Movements, “RUM”s, were formed in other Detroit workplaces, notably at Ford and General Motors plants, and at United Parcel Service.
The RUMs were to come together to form the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1969. The leadership of DRUM aimed to coordinate the various workplace organizations under a central leadership, and to reach out to the Black community in Detroit as well as nationally. As Georgakas summarizes the significance of DRUM and the League:
That the League was built around workers and not students or street people or welfare mothers or other sectors of society was not accidental. The people who created the League were Marxists. They believed that you organized workers, not because of some mythical notion of workers’ nobility, but because workers have real power. Workers are the nexus of the means of production. When they take action, everyone is affected. If workers exert political power, anything is possible. It does not follow that students are not important, that welfare mothers should not be organized, that some street people may not indeed become more than fickle lumpen proletarians. The League simply pointed out that no other class formation was strong enough to lead a mass movement. Moreover, workers have families. Thus, you automatically plug into education, health, and housing issues.
At that time, Detroit was the most industrialized city in the United States, and one out of six American jobs were linked, directly or indirectly, to the auto industry. The League soon received calls, telegrams, and visitors from all over the country wanting to create similar groups. There was contact with an ongoing movement at the Ford plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, and with a GMC plant in Fremont, California. Other queries came from steelworkers in Birmingham, Alabama, and autoworkers in Baltimore, Maryland. The League realized that these and similar groups could be fused into a Black Workers Congress (BWC) that would operate nationally to unite workers. So, the Wall Street Journal was right to be worried.20
The League rode the wave of radicalization that swept across U.S. society. Like the Panthers, the organization initially grew in leaps and bounds, capturing the mood of the time and filling an enormous vacuum created by the unwillingness of the unions or the traditional Black organizations to meet their concerns and needs. But the very success of the League would raise political and strategic questions that its leadership could not answer. Eventually, these questions would lead them to part ways. It was one thing, for example, to lead a successful wildcat—and quite another to build an organization capable of withstanding victimization, repression, and cooptation.
Like the Black Panther Party, the League was a Black-only organization, and saw white workers as part of the problem, rather than potential allies. This, of course, was understandable given the historical context and should not be an argument to detract from the accomplishments of the League. But it is one thing to understand and support the political necessity of organizing an excluded and oppressed minority, and another to conclude that this method of organizing is the only way of achieving liberation. As significant a percentage as Black workers represented in the auto plants—indeed, in Detroit as a whole—there was no way to organize a successful opposition to the auto companies (let alone to overthrow capitalism) without finding a way to win over white workers. This is not to say that DRUM should not have organized; or that one of its main tasks was to recruit white workers to the cause of Black liberation. But if Marxism was their inspiration, a multiracial class strategy should have followed.
Moreover, the question of power, that is, how to transform the whole of society, had to take up questions outside the auto plants. The League split in 1971 over differences of how to move forward. The split is often described as one between the nationalists, who wanted to orient to the Black ghettos of Detroit, and the “Marxists,” who wanted to expand the League outside Detroit and to bring it into alliance with other forces. In truth, the political lines of the split were not so clear-cut. Both sides accepted ideas of Black nationalism and never broke out of that frame of reference. DRUM collapsed “for all the reasons all the organizations of that period ultimately failed. These included the inevitable personality problems, financial pressures, sheer fatigue, and the counter-thrust from the other side”21 as the auto companies moved to victimize DRUM activists in the plants. More specifically, DRUM activists, who had succeeded in forming the organization after years of work together, found it hard to adjust to a new situation:
The situation arose that one group wanted to continue in the manner that had brought success in the past, with an emphasis on local resources, while the other wanted to continue in the manner that had brought success in the past but with activists that included politically tested non-Detroiters. Each essentially was relying on a strategy that had previously succeeded without paying sufficient attention to the new details of the developing political dynamic.22
In DRUM and the Black Panther Party, the Black movement had produced some of the most effective revolutionaries and socialists in two generations. These leaders had real mass influence. But in the end the movement was stymied. The system proved to have more flexibility and room for reform than the revolutionaries believed was possible. In part, this was because the system fought so hard against any concessions. But faced with the choice of a real challenge to its power and granting some reforms, those in power chose the latter. While jailing, harassing, exiling, and assassinating the Black Power movement’s more radical sections (like the Black Panthers), the Democratic Party machine set out to co-opt the mainstream section of the movement, with considerable success.
The 1967 urban rebellions and the prospects of more militant activity prodded the Democratic Party machines, particularly in Northern urban centers, to make concessions to Black sentiment. Radical commentator Robert L. Allen explained in 1969, “from the liberal point of view, some concessions must be made if future disruptions such as the 1967 riot are to be avoided.” The election of Black politicians would not change the conditions of Black people’s lives in their jurisdictions, yet “[B]lack people were supposed to get the impression that progress was being made, that they were finally being admitted through the front door.... The intent is to create the impression of real movement while actual movement is too limited to be significant.”23
Thousands of Black radicals realized the need to break from the Democrats in this period, identifying their political outlook with radical groups like the Black Panther Party and DRUM. But powerful forces worked against them. As the 1970s wore on, the postwar economic boom slowed. It crashed into recession in 1974–75. This made reforms harder to win as the government looked to cut back on spending. As the movement saw its opportunities to win concrete gains contract, its goals contracted as well. Thus, the goal of transforming society from below gave way to electoralism in the Democratic Party.