Deep into their forty-minute set, the Lumpen take control of the audience and deliver the core of their message. Bandleader William Calhoun counts off the time and the band cracks into their hit single, the driving number on the 45 rpm single being sold in the lobby as “Free Bobby Now.” Sales of the single were not appreciable, but the group had their own version of a hit, a song that drove the climax of their act, and they played the notion up as any legitimate rhythm and blues act would.
As the groove begins, an intense, chopping rhythm guitar drives against a pulsing bass and drum pattern, while long soaring horn riffs arch above the groove to create a cacophonous high-velocity funk from the bottom to the top. The Lumpen singers, spinning through the first bars of the song, step in rhythm to the mics and begin the background chants, anticipating William Calhoun’s lead vocals from his seat by the electric piano.
Aah, get it
Woo woo - woo woo / woo woo - woo woo
woo woo - woo woo / woo woo - woo woo
We say, he walked the streets and carried a gun, now now
To save his people and family, hear us
From those who’ve killed us for four hundred years
BOBBY MUST BE SET FREE,
We’re talkin’ ‘bout
BOBBY MUST BE SET FREE / yaa—yeah!
Calhoun and the other singers invoke the time-tested techniques of rhythm and blues performance: the religious invocation; the improvised, ad-libbed, percussive vamps and chants; and the call-and-response techniques. As the background whoops continue, Calhoun ad-libs in-between each background chant:
Woo woo - woo woo / Let me tell the people
Woo woo - woo woo / Good God, now
The dancing singers—Torrence, Mott, and Bailey—take turns on verses that explain their allegiance to their Party chairman and to their cause while reaching out to their audience.
They say that he killed a brother
But this we know it just can’t be, yea
He’s proven his love for his people
We say, BOBBY MUST BE SET FREE
We’re talkin’ ‘bout / BOBBY MUST BE SET FREE
Good god almighty / Sing it brother
How many more brothers must die / Before we all finally see
That the oppressor has no rights we are bound to respect
That’s why BOBBY MUST BE SET FREE, yea yea yea
We’re talking ‘bout BOBBY MUST BE SET FREE
One one one more time
Woo woo - woo woo / woo woo - woo woo
We won’t sacrifice our chairman
‘Cause his life means our destiny, yeah
Cause if we must we’ll hold back the night
(group) BOBBY MUST BE SET FREE / We’re talking ‘bout
BOBBY MUST BE SET FREE / We want our chairman free
BOBBY MUST BE SET FREE / We’re talking bout
BOBBY MUST BE SET FREE
BOBBY want him home now
BOBBY we’re talking ‘bout
BOBBY we’re talking ‘bout
BOBBY bring it on down now
BOBBY bring it on down now
BOBBY bring it on down now
As the band churns the groove along, William Calhoun takes control of the show and brings the audience inside the message in the music:
Lookit here / Bobby!
As we—as you know / Bobby!
This song is uh, called “Bobby Must Be Set Free” / Bobby!
It’s all about our National Chairman Bobby Seale / Bobby!
Who is being held as a political prisoner in New Haven, Connecticut, tonight / Bobby!
We sing this song in the spirit / Bobby!
That we believe the people want Bobby Seale to be set free / Bobby!
If you join with us in that feelin’ this evening / Bobby!
I want everybody in this house to clap your hands / Bobby!
Good god, everybody! / Bobby!
Want you to sing along with us if you would / Bobby!
The audience claps in unison and chants “Bobby” along with the background singers. As party members recall, members of the audience were standing, dancing in the aisles, and moving to the groove of this revolutionary rhythm and blues experience. Calhoun then invites the audience to provide the chorus of the song together:
You’ve got it so you know the words—all you say is: Bobby Must Be Set Free! Say it now / (Crowd singing along) Bobby Must Be Set Free!
A little bit louder / Bobby Must Be Set Free!
I can’t hear ya / Bobby Must Be Set Free!
Yea yaeea yea / Bobby Must Be Set Free!
Let ‘em hear you in Sacramento tonight / Bobby Must Be Set Free!
Let ‘em hear you in San Francisco tonight / Bobby Must Be Set Free!
Let ‘em hear you in Winston-Salem tonight / Bobby Must Be Set Free!
Let ‘em hear you in New Haven, Connecticut, tonight / Bobby Must Be Set Free!
Tell the world about it / Bobby Must Be Set Free!
The rousing number ends with a crash and an eruption of audience applause, as the audience is awash in the moment and the message of the music. Like any polished R&B act, the Lumpen organized their entire performance around their best-known song, leading songs up to it and gradually winding down their show after the rousing experience.1
It should come as no surprise to fans of black popular music, particularly the music of the late 1960s, that the most compelling, most energetic, and most involving song by the group is also the one with the most meaning. All but the most disconnected black entertainer of this time was bound to infuse their performance with some social commentary, and it was expected to come at the climax of their act. At this time, in late 1970, Aretha Franklin was touring with her all-star band, and the climax of her set was—and continues to be—”Respect,” while James Brown was working with Bootsy Collins and ending his show with “Soul Power.” The ethos, the aesthetic of soul, was to put one’s most important point into their most appealing work, and “Free Bobby Now” was an example of that.
The Lumpen were not by any measure the most popular aspect of the Black Panther Party, but they had their moments. This chapter discusses the presence of the Black Panther Party at the flashpoint of black rage in the late 1960s, and its impact on the popular consciousness and the popular culture.
The original song the Lumpen performed so adroitly in concert was one of the original two Calhoun compositions the Lumpen played at their first performance on the flatbed truck in the Fillmore District in the spring of 1970. It was side A of the 45 rpm single released by the Party in the summer of 1970 and sold at BPP events. It was also prominently advertised in the back pages of the Black Panther, which published the lyrics to the song in the September 26, 1970, issue.
With a record in their hands, members of the Lumpen set about their own promotion and went to both of the black Bay Area radio stations (KSOL and KDIA) seeking airplay. “We went to KDIA, and the DJ—I forgot his name—was sweating like a pig.” Michael Torrence recalls. “He told us there was no way that record was going to get played. He would lose his job and all kinds of things would happen.” But the group members gave it a shot. “We did the circuit trying to promote that thing,” Calhoun says. For an unknown rhythm and blues act to get rejected by a radio station DJ was a common occurrence. However, the Lumpen were trying to bridge two worlds at once, and the stakes of their gambit were far higher.
The lyrics of the song interspersed other Panther-influenced ideas from bandleader Calhoun. When the Lumpen use the phrase “the oppressor has no rights we are bound to respect,” a number of historical threads are invoked. The verse is a signifier of the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the Virginia-born slave Dred Scott sued for his family’s freedom on the basis that he and his owner had traveled the frontier and Scott had lived in free states. After a series of appeals, the US Supreme Court rendered a decision far beyond the scope of the case and denied all citizenship rights for African Americans, stating that Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” It was the Dred Scott decision that polarized the nation and rendered inevitable the conflicts that led to the American Civil War four years later. Thus, to turn the phrase on its head is both a timely militant slogan and a recognition of the century-old Civil War resistance that essentially transformed the nation through violent upheaval. The updated phrase was frequently used in Panther discourse. Eldridge Cleaver used the phrase in his speeches. Huey Newton wrote it in an essay, “In Defense of Self Defense,” that appeared in the July 3, 1967, issue of the Black Panther, where Newton stated:
The point of departure is the principle that the oppressor has no rights that the oppressed is bound to respect. Kill the slave master, destroy him utterly, move against him with implacable fortitude. Break his oppressive power by any means necessary. Men who have stood before the Black masses and recommended this response to the oppression have been held in fear by the oppressor.2
Newton employed the phrase to justify the revolutionary actions of Panther members and to upturn the discourse of the criminalization of black males. “Free Bobby Now” was an exciting song that worked well with a live audience, but writer William Calhoun’s words were as serious as his Party leaders’ message. The refrain “We won’t sacrifice our chairman ‘cause his life means our destiny” was delivered as a rallying cry from the Party itself to galvanize its audience members and supporters to sacrifice their lives if necessary for Bobby Seale. “If we must, we’ll hold back the night / Bobby Must Be Set Free!” Like an uplifting political speech, the chorus resonated throughout the auditorium, in a crescendo of forceful voices, an explosion of political soul power.
The hard-driving rhythms of “Free Bobby Now” were instantly recognizable as reflections of the James Brown aesthetic of aggressive rhythm and exhilarating shout-singing that was expected of legitimate R&B acts at the time. The Lumpen could chant a revolutionary slogan, chant another one in a different cadence from the first, then repeat the process, with the singers and the band subtly improvising around the rhythms with vocal grunts and accents from the rhythm section keeping the energy level sustained but the sound never feeling repetitive. The horns would lock everything together for a moment, then let go like a fist opening up for the rest of the rhythm to flow through.
It was still somewhat of a contradiction that the Lumpen utilized the many tropes of soul music to further their militant mission. Here was a popular sound and style associated with love, unity, and pride. To some extent, the Lumpen were showing these themes as well. The Panthers sought to convey the love of the revolution, the unity of the community, and pride in the power of the people. They conspicuously avoided the racially explicit approach of black radical jazz contemporaries associated with the cultural nationalists. Other forms, such as folk, rock, or the piano ballads performed by Elaine Brown were not as accessible to their intended audience. Soul worked for the Panthers as an idiom ideally suited to their recruitment needs. Only the lyrics needed to be amended.
The role and relationship of the Black Panther Party to the larger society was and remains a riddle that has followed the legacy of the Black Panthers. “Free Bobby Now” was a deliberate effort to reach the people on their own terms. On a few occasions, such as Eldridge Cleaver’s insistence that he photograph Huey Newton in a rattan chair with a spear in his hand, there were deliberate efforts to popularize the Party. But as it turns out, the Black Panthers, by their actions and public pronouncements, had a spectacular impact on the popular consciousness, one that affected public policy, social discourse, style, fashion, film, and the sensibility of the street.
The Panthers played a social role that had been dwelling in the American imagination since the days of American chattel slavery: the dreams of slaves and the nightmares of slave owners that one day blacks would rise up and free themselves through the very forces of violence that had imprisoned them. There were prophetic renderings of a racial apocalypse from earlier leaders such as Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad, and many believed the time had come to bring the conflagration about. The apocalyptic black art of the day fueled the fires of outrage as folks chanted “Burn, baby, burn” and black radical public figures such as H. Rap Brown and Eldridge Cleaver actively condoned political violence in their speeches.
The Panthers’ public image was exhilarating to young blacks in search of a model of resistance that they could participate in. The relentless violence of American government, from forced conscription (the Vietnam War draft that threatened to claim all males over eighteen) to the state-sponsored repression of marchers and rioters gave rise to the Panther, a militant rebel, one that organized in military fashion against the American power structure itself. The Panthers were heady stuff.
Their early image struck nationwide upon news of their disciplined march into the Sacramento capitol in May 1967. By the end of the next year, dozens of Party chapters had been established and more were on the way. After the horrors of 1968 it would become clear that law enforcement had targeted the Panthers. The relentless police attacks on Panther offices and the disciplined and determined responses to police violence earned a measure of respect from others seeking to dismiss the Panthers as a band of California-based hotheads.
Throughout 1969 the Black Panther Party stood for many as a viable counter to the power structure. The Survival Programs were having an impact on a local level. Panther leaders were in the national news, constantly addressing the media and appearing at speaking engagements (typically to drum up money for legal costs). By 1970 the Panthers’ image was accomplishing as much as their actions. The Party was providing what many felt was a necessary image of the strong black soldier staring down the gun barrel of his oppressor, but the reality was the organization was fraught with internal dissention and disruption that would not allow it to survive as a national entity much longer. As Safiya Bukhari recalled, “We felt we had two major enemies, we had the other side of the Party and the state apparatus.”3 The Party was struggling to maintain its effectiveness, especially on the East Coast. The work of the Lumpen (mid-1970 to mid-1971) took place at the last moments of the Panthers’ effective nationwide operation.
The black power movement in New York City in the 1960s was the epicenter of radicalism on multiple levels. It can best be understood as a whirlwind of conflicting groups, ethnic affiliations, political ideologies, tactics, and historical viewpoints. The city had been at the forefront of black cultural and political activity since the early twentieth century with the founding of the NAACP in 1909 and the emergence of Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanist organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1910s, and the literary and intellectual accomplishments of Harlem Renaissance luminaries such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes as well as entertainers such as Fats Waller and Josephine Baker in the 1920s.
From early in the twentieth century, Harlem was recognized as the black capital of the world because of its great arts, unique opportunities for success, and lasting examples of black brilliance in literature, drama, music, and black radical thought. As the jazz capital of the world, Harlem represented a creative zenith for aspiring black musicians and entertainers pursuing a musical vision of freedom while operating in a segregated musical economy and environment. Thus, great black bandleaders such as Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington were seen as successful even when they performed in the segregated Cotton Club on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue.
The emergence of Malcolm X in the 1950s on the streets of Harlem reenergized a process of militant black consciousness raising, one that led to the enormous growth and influence of the Nation of Islam and many other black militant groups that shared the same geographical space. The work Malcolm X and others did to popularize new and defiant ideas of blackness was also a great inspiration to the artists of the Black Arts movement, which led to a storm of black radical activity in the region. Different factions overlapped, complemented, and sometimes competed for the hearts and minds of members of the region’s black and brown populations.
The Nation of Islam was the largest Black Nationalist organization in the country, and especially in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. Their years of work rehabilitating blacks, their organizational stability, and their steadfast critique of white institutions and white supremacy were highly respected in the community. However, after the death of Malcolm X and the subsequent conviction of two NOI members for the shooting (despite the strong sense that Malcolm’s murderers had not been brought to justice), the NOI suffered a severe image problem in the black radical community. Upon his death, Malcolm X had become the most popular black radical in America, but the Nation and its leaders at the time treated him as an outcast who had met his ignoble fate. Factions, spinoffs, and defections abounded from the phalanx of radicals from this point.
In this respect, the Black Panther Party was not the first, most important, or most popular black radical organization to come to New York. The first Black Panther Party branch in the area was established by David Brothers in Brooklyn in the summer of 1968, and in the fall, Lumumba Shakur set up the Harlem chapter. The New York Panther offices did not enjoy the singular status as vanguards of the revolution. In addition to their typical recruitment of young brothers on the block and idealistic college students and community members, Party membership included veterans of other radical organizations, members of all types of West Indian ethnic groups, African nationals, and a steady supply of agent provocateurs. As a result, Party offices, despite the disciplined activity of many dedicated Panthers, were often hectic and chaotic, and adherence to Party rules and decrees from distant Oakland headquarters were not always followed with regularity.
Eventual popular music superstar Nile Rodgers was a member of the New York chapter. Rodgers recalled his own controversial entrée into the Party:
The way I got into the Party, I was actually running with renegades. I didn’t know that they weren’t real Panthers. I was running with these guys who were shaking down little grocers in the neighborhood. They would go to the little delis and there would be the old mom and pop guys and they would come in and say, “We’re the Black Panthers, give us some money.”4
It would not be until Rodgers arrived at the Harlem chapter and met Jamal Joseph that Rodgers learned that the hustlers he first encountered were not Panthers. Rodgers was enamored of the way Joseph was able to recruit youth who were excited about the “equipment” Panthers would use, and instead of a gun, Joseph would produce a book for them to read. Rodgers would become a subsection leader of the Lower Manhattan branch of the Party. “I thought I was going to be a serious revolutionary à la Che Guevara,” he recalls. Rodgers’s Panther chapter was a diverse one (South Asians and Puerto Ricans were members), and eventually the interethnic friction caused a confrontation between Rodgers and a nationalistic Party member who did not see the presence of nonblacks in the same way. The interethnic friction in his Panther chapter and the general disillusionment toward the movement in 1969 inspired the guitarist Rodgers to move on and start his musical career, which would take him to superstardom as leader of the disco band Chic and as one of the greatest popular music producers of all time.
Afeni Shakur, sister of the exiled black revolutionary Assata Shakur and mother of rapper Tupac, was also drawn to the power of the Panthers in 1968. Her entrée into the organization had more to do with her own self-reclamation after watching Bobby Seale speak about the Ten Point Program in Harlem:
Bobby Seale saying that right there with passion, with intelligence. The way he said those ten points made me want that more than anything. So there I was wrapped in my Africanness. For the first time, loving myself and loving, now that there was something I could do with my life. There was now something I could do with all this aggression, and all this fear. Because up until this point, I wasn’t shit.5
Afeni Shakur emerged quickly as a leader of the Harlem chapter, and her “aggression” became legendary in the Party as a Panther and in her volatile relationship with Party leader Lumumba Shakur. “I needed for people to know I was bad and strong,” Afeni Shakur revealed to Jasmine Guy in a 2004 memoir: “I was quick to speak out and volunteer for shit. So I would beg to be sent out on missions. I got sent on one once and I caused complete havoc. I still don’t know how I survived. I shot at a man in a tollbooth because I wanted to rob something to show I’m so big and bad…. Give me a gun and let me go.” Everything would change for Afeni and Lumumba Shakur when they both were arrested in April 1969.
By the spring of 1969 law enforcement had developed a working plan against the Panthers and initiated raids on Panther offices, arresting Panther Party officials with regularity in every major city. The process of harassment and taxing use of Party resources in court trials and bail hearings would exact a toll on the organization. The most ambitious law enforcement siege took place on April 2, 1969, two days before the one-year anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. In a sweep across the New York region, twenty-one Panthers, including Sundiata Acoli, Michael (Cetewayo) Tabor, Richard (Dhoruba) Moore, Jamal Joseph, Ali Bey Hassan, JoAnne Chesimard (Assata Shakur), Afeni Shakur, and Lumumba Shakur were arrested and charged with dozens of conspiracy charges, alleging that the twenty-one were “plotting terrorist acts” and planning to blow up Bloomingdale’s, bomb a local police station, and even target the Bronx Botanical Gardens. The extent of the charges was outrageous. The scope of the charges in a sense was a reflection of the bombast of other Panthers and supporters who often boasted—in bouts of hyperbole—of doing outrageous things to the power structure.
The New York 21 trial would be the longest trial in the state’s history, involving more than 150 felony counts for the thirteen Panthers who eventually went to trial. Afeni Shakur was released on bail early in 1970, and in addition to developing her own legal defense, she made the most of her (brief) time on the outside:
I got pregnant while I was out on bail. I never thought that I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in jail. I was never getting out and that’s why I wanted to have this baby. Because I wanted to leave something here. I was going to jail for three hundred and twelve years. That’s what I was facing. But my sister [Assata] was out. If I thought I was getting out, I never would have had the baby. I probably would have gotten an abortion.6
During a prolonged trial preparation, according to Afeni Shakur, two Panthers out on bail absconded with the remaining bail money and left the country, forcing her and others to return to prison until the entire group of twenty-one was acquitted on May 13, 1971, after forty-five minutes of jury deliberation. Afeni gave birth to Tupac on June 16. While the entire trial was a fiasco that humiliated the New York Police Intelligence Unit (BOSSI) responsible for the arrests, the drain on the state’s resources was minor compared to the drain on the Panther Party’s stability. Huey Newton had purged the Panther 21 in the midst of trial preparations, and by the end of the trial the Panthers’ power in New York was effectively gutted. This was the context in which Bobby Seale’s indictment in New Haven came about.
“Free Bobby Now” was written because Bobby Seale was on trial for the murder of Alex Rackley in New Haven, Connecticut. Rackley was a twenty-four-year-old member of the New York Panther chapter who was kidnapped and taken to the New Haven Party headquarters on May 19, 1969. He was tortured for two days, shot in the head twice, and dumped into the swamps of Coginchaug River thirty miles north, near Middletown, allegedly upon the orders of Panther leadership. The instigator of the crime was George Sams, who identified himself to the New York Panthers as “national field marshal” and claimed the authority to dispense justice to alleged informants such as Rackley. Many Panthers have since stated that Rackley was an honest and dedicated rank-and-file Panther member. But the chaos surrounding the recent roundup of the New York 21 left doubts swirling around the Black Panther organization nationwide. Curtis J. Austin explained the in-flux situation surrounding Sams and how he was able to deceive so many Panthers and infiltrate the organization:
The New York Twenty-one had recently been arrested and the chapter was in disarray. Sams told unsuspecting New York Panthers, who did not bother to check his credentials with the Oakland headquarters, that he had come to straighten out the chapter and to find out who framed the Panther leaders. While he was there, he beat some members, raped a female Panther, and openly carried a loaded weapon while drinking and smoking heavily. All these activities were against party rules. Had the New York Panthers contacted Oakland, they would have discovered that Sams, introduced to the Party by Stokely Carmichael, had been expelled for being the fool he was.7
When Sams heard that Panthers were coming from the West Coast to investigate the situation, Sams took Rackley and went to New Haven, perpetrating the same ruse. In New Haven, Sams accused Rackley of being an informant and ordered Rackley to the basement, where he was bound, pistol-whipped, scalded, and tied with coat hangers. After two days of this ordeal, Sams appeared to have relented and released Rackley, only to drive Rackley upstate and order two Panthers—Lonnie McLucas and Warren Kimbro—to shoot him.
Law enforcement was “given a tip,” and found Rackley’s body on May 21, 1969. The next day they indicted twelve Panthers, including Party leaders Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale. While McLucas, Kimbro, and Sams testified that they participated in the crime, Sams claimed that he gave the orders to the other Panthers at the request of Bobby Seale. By turning State’s evidence, Sams had his conviction reduced to manslaughter and a life sentence. He was later placed under the witness protection program and served only four years of his sentence.8
Seale was arrested three months later in Oakland. Seale and Huggins were tried as conspirators. Their trial lasted six months, went through more than fifteen hundred jurors, and was the longest and most expensive in Connecticut history. As Donald Freed wrote: “The Black Panther Party was on trial too, and not just before white people but to the almost 70 percent of the black population (cited in ‘white’ polls) that supported their program of ‘survival pending revolution.’ “9 Massive demonstrations of support for Seale and Huggins took place during the trial in the spring of 1970. A Yale student walkout to protest the Panthers’ trial on May 1, 1970, effectively ended classes that semester. Yale president King-man Brewster Jr. issued the statement, “I personally want to say that I’m appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass that I am skeptical of the ability of Black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the U.S.”10 A Yale law student at the time, Hillary Rodham was one of the courtroom monitors, representing the ACLU.
After doubts about Sams’s testimony surfaced, and after months of negative publicity in the local and national press surrounding the obviousness of the faked charges, the government dropped the charges against Seale and Huggins. But the damage had been done. Seale, perhaps the most engaging public speaker of all of the Panthers, had been dragged through the most violent underworld of alleged Panther justice, and by the time he was released in late May 1971, the Party was a shell of its original self.11
For Newton and Seale, growing up among the urban underclass—as lumpenproletariat—incarceration was a regular presence in their lives. Once the Black Panther Party became nationally known, constant legal harassment and incarceration was the rule and not the exception. From their May 1967 march through the California state capitol building to the February 1971 party fracture between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party enjoyed its greatest popularity and influence. During those four years, Bobby Seale was incarcerated more than half of that time, and Newton and Seale were only free together for the first three months following the Sacramento event.
Bobby Seale seemed to be targeted for jail once the Black Panther Party made its public demonstration. His was the first name published worldwide as the representative of the Black Panther Party that had “stormed the state capitol.” After Watts exploded in the summer of 1965, the general public began to realize that the civil rights movement had not quelled black anger in the cities. The radicalization of SNCC under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael in 1966—under the banner of black power—was openly challenging Martin Luther King Jr. for leadership of the black struggle. In the spring of 1967 Dr. King went public with his opposition to the Vietnam War, connecting the moral imperative of civil rights with the failed morality of the military escapade in Southeast Asia. The action drew Dr. King closer to the position of the popular militants and radicals and solidified his national leadership for a time. Yet there were many candidates capable of becoming the next national black leader, something law enforcement was extremely wary of. Seale was a clear target.
That summer of 1967—the summer of “’Retha, Rap, and Revolt”—would become the most violent in urban America, spurred in part by the Panthers’ bold Sacramento display. Within days of that event there were violent antiwar confrontations with civilians and police at Texas Southern University in Houston and at Jackson State in Mississippi, and hundreds of students were arrested. In Newark on July 11, police attempted to arrest a black cab driver on a traffic violation outside of a local precinct house, causing a melee. When a rumor spread that the cab driver had been killed, a mob stormed the police station, and the riot was on. Looters charged into local department stores and black snipers fired at police from rooftops. After five days of chaos, twenty-six people had died, one thousand were injured, and almost fourteen hundred were arrested (among them, LeRoi Jones). On July 23 in Detroit, a late-night police raid on a local bar sparked a disturbance that led to massive riots that left 42 people dead, 386 injured, and over 5,000 arrested. Similar but smaller disturbances took place in more than fifty black communities that summer.12 The events turned up the rhetoric from the Black Nationalist leaders. Shortly after Detroit, SNCC leader H. Rap Brown spoke to an audience of students in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and said: “Detroit exploded, Newark exploded, Harlem exploded! … It is time for Cambridge to explode, baby. Black folks built America. If America don’t come around, we’re going to burn America down, brother. We’re going to burn it if we can’t get our share of it.”13 H. Rap Brown’s rhetoric was both satirical and scathing. Brown understood the mood of the moment in his community and reflected the desperation and hostility of the times. But he also placed a target on this back.
A sense of seizing the moment was in the air, and black radicals were making their case to the entire nation. The anti-Vietnam War movement took its cue from the black protest movement. An October 15, 1967, series of “stop the draft week” protests in Oakland, California, turned violent as police attacked protestors, bystanders, and media members in downtown Oakland, effectively radicalizing the antiwar movement. Two weeks later, photographs of a wounded and beaten Huey Newton in an Oakland hospital, surrounded by Oakland police officers, set a new tone for the movement.
In the foggy early hours of Saturday, October 28, 1967, on the streets of West Oakland, Huey Newton was involved in a fatal altercation with Oakland police officer John Frey, in which Newton was wounded and Frey died of gunshot wounds from a police revolver. Questions abounded about the nature of the altercation, who initiated the gunfire, and who in fact was with Newton in the car at the time. Newton survived the shooting and was taken to the county hospital, but he was chained to the gurney and intermittently beaten by OPD officers on that fateful night.
News of Newton’s incarceration and treatment caused a firestorm of outrage, public sympathy for the Panthers, and organizational activity. Bobby Seale, however, was still in jail, and the responsibility for publicizing the case fell on Eldridge Cleaver who, for all his critics (which included Newton), was very media savvy and helped to broadcast Newton’s plight worldwide. Cleaver and his brilliant wife, Kathleen, organized rallies, brought together coalitions of rival black organizations, addressed the media frequently and in quotable terms, and publicized the Black Panther Party and the plight of Huey Newton in ways no one else could. Reginald Major explained Eldridge Cleaver’s crucial contribution:
Right up to the moment he left the country, Cleaver was a mainstay of the Party, a leader, an order giver, an organizer with talent, drive and inexhaustible energy, and an orator who combined wit, blasphemy and revolutionary messages in an unpredictable mélange that always made a lot of sense and constantly delights his audiences.14
Eldridge Cleaver was enamored of Newton early on. After serving a nine-year sentence at Soledad Prison for a rape conviction in the early 1960s, Cleaver’s published prison essays (which would later become his book Soul On Ice) made him a black radical celebrity in his own right. Cleaver worked as a writer for Ramparts magazine upon his release in 1966 and frequented the Black Nationalist scene in San Francisco. He observed the power struggle between rival black radical organizations that wanted to escort Sister Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, to San Francisco for her first public interview since Malcolm’s death two years earlier. On February 21, 1967, Newton’s Panthers escorted Sister Shabazz from the San Francisco airport to the Ramparts office for the interview. As the Panther-Shabazz entourage was leaving the Ramparts offices, Cleaver witnessed Newton’s confrontation with a San Francisco police officer in which Newton dared the officer to draw his gun. It was clear to Eldridge Cleaver at that point that Newton and the Black Panther Party meant business. Bobby Seale recalled Cleaver’s reverence for Newton’s nascent organization:
Eldridge said that when he saw all us brothers with guns, all ready and organized, it didn’t take him any time at all to relate to that … so he just started moving with the Party, going everywhere, making the scenes. He was relating to it and functioning, but he still had some reservations….
Eldridge just couldn’t understand how it could happen—how we pulled this shit off or why niggers would be crazy enough to go out there in the streets. It looked unbelievable. Eldridge said it scared him, that’s what it did. Scared Eldridge! He said that when Malcolm was teaching, he was just dealing with rhetoric about how we had to organize a gun club, we had to do this, we had to have these guns, etc. He said it was abstract and he couldn’t visualize it. Or if he did visualize it, he visualized a whole army, the black race armed. But then, when he saw us out there in the process of organizing, he saw about ten, twelve dudes with some guns, and he saw all those pigs. It looked like we didn’t have a chance, it looked hopeless, but then many times it looked so beautiful and inspiring, that he just had to relate to it.15
Both Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver dedicated themselves to engineering the public cause for the freeing of Huey Newton. They supported an alliance with the fledgling white-led Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), which was seeking signatures to run anti-Vietnam War candidates in the 1968 presidential election. The BPP sought a commitment to their Ten Point Program and other concessions to their leadership of the coalition. While their issues did not entirely overlap, the awkward coalition served each organization greatly at first: the PFP ran candidates in the national election (with Eldridge Cleaver running for president, Jerry Rubin for vice president, and Kathleen for state assembly); the BPP secured thousands of recruits to the “Free Huey” cause.
The Cleavers and other Party leaders also spearheaded coalitions with competing black radical groups. By 1967 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had adopted a Black Nationalist stance and was developing a far more militant position under the guidance of younger leaders Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and SNCC veteran James Forman. Panther leaders sought to merge SNCC with the Black Panther Party, and on June 29, 1967, in an executive mandate, Newton drafted Carmichael into the BPP. After some crosscountry negotiations, and with Newton’s blessing, the Panthers installed H. Rap Brown as minister of justice, Forman as minister of foreign affairs, and Carmichael as “prime minister” of the BPP for a brief time. All of these fiery orators appeared at the February 17, 1968, “birthday rally for Huey” at the Kaiser Convention center near downtown Oakland. At the rally, Eldridge Cleaver announced their new titles and the “SNCC-Black Panther Party merger” to an enthusiastic crowd of thousands. Despite the contradictory statements regarding the role of whites and the movement, and the fact that the SNCC leaders didn’t call it a merger, the show of solidarity across the black radical movement that day was striking.
Each black radical leader spoke, trying to outdo the next one with bravado and confrontational rhetoric. H. Rap Brown claimed: “Huey Newton is our only living revolutionary in this country today. He has paid his dues…. How many white folks did you kill today?” James Forman took the rhetoric even further:
We must serve notice on our oppressors that we as a people are not going to be frightened by the attempted assassination of our leaders. For my assassination—and I’m a low man on the totem pole, I want 30 police stations blown up, one southern governor, two mayors and 500 cops, dead. If they assassinate Brother Carmichael, Brother Brown … Brother Seale, this price is tripled. And if Huey Newton is not set free and dies, the sky is the limit!16
“The sky’s the limit” carried resonance at this critical moment. Forman’s preposterous challenge became one of the famous Panther chants, which in light of the Watts, Newark, and Detroit revolts was a chilling echo for those in fear of a black uprising. After years of urban unrest, the galling claim to escalate the confrontation captured the imagination of the country. Huey Newton had reached a mythic status among the restless and disaffected masses.
It was ironic that the new “SNCC Panthers” out-rapped Panther leaders Cleaver and Seale that afternoon; but pomp and bravado was the order of the day. Newton rose as a symbol of inspired black defiance, as well as a representation of unrelenting white violence against the black community. The potential energy harnessed with Huey’s case, the publication of his political analyses from jail, the seemingly constant violence against the Panthers perpetrated by US law enforcement (effectively branded as inept pigs by the Panthers), and the threat of Huey’s death by the gas chamber created a moment of well-channeled outrage by the BPP. Their warrior chants during marches and rallies could be heard on the nightly news nationwide:
Revolution has come / Off the Pigs!
Time to pick up the gun / Off the Pigs!
Black is beautiful / Free Huey!
Set our warrior free / Free Huey! 17
“Free Huey” became a black radical rallying cry that swept across a generation of young activists. It also served whites and other supporters who could chant, march, organize, and wear buttons in solidarity with the Black Panthers without any presumption of influence over the organization. White liberals and celebrities, including Hollywood movie stars Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, and Marlon Brando, became public Panther supporters. The organization came to symbolize the entirety of the Black Nationalist movement, while by most estimates the BPP never had more than five thousand members.
During the three and a half years Newton was imprisoned, the Black Panther Party enjoyed its greatest rise and its largest influence as the most feared and respected black radical organization in the country. While the Free Huey movement galvanized the Black Panther Party and increased its supporters, Chairman Bobby Seale was developing into a leader in his own right. Seale served four months for the Sacramento event, and when he was released on December 8, 1967, he immediately began to work to free Huey Newton. Seale crisscrossed the country doing speaking engagements and drumming up support for Newton and the Panther cause nationwide. Seale’s efficacious demeanor and serious commitment to the Party vision made him an irresistible attraction at college campuses and with the media.
Over the spring and summer of 1968, the country was again gripped by violence. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, in Memphis was followed by a series of shootouts with Panthers even before Dr. King had been buried. King’s death had broken the hearts of a generation and caused riots in over one hundred cities across the country. Yet Oakland was relatively quiet. It was as if the city were waiting for a response from the Panthers. Eldridge Cleaver was one of many Panthers who felt that the time had come to take the “confrontation to another level” as a result of Dr. King’s murder. “Non-violence has died with King’s death,” Cleaver told David Hilliard on that day.18 On April 6 Eldridge Cleaver urged other Panthers, including seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton, to engage with Oakland police. Cleaver organized carloads of Panthers—many of whom went reluctantly—to search out police and “start something.” According to Hilliard, at one point in the awkward caravan, Eldridge “had to pee” and got out of his car. Immediately Oakland police surrounded the group while Eldridge was still outside the car. The shootout that ensued ended with Cleaver and Hutton surrendering from a hiding place in a basement. While unarmed and surrendering, Hutton stumbled and was shot multiple times. Hutton was the first Panther recruit, and was designated as the first Panther killed in action. Cleaver was wounded during the original shootout but survived. Media accounts billed the disorganized confrontation as a Panther assault on the police, and the Black Panther announced the failed ambush as a police assault on the Panthers; 1968 was going to be a long year.19
By midsummer 1968, mainstream politics had become just as violent. On June 6, the morning after the California Democratic primary election, the winner and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy, was shot in the head and back three times during the victory party, ostensibly by a loner named Sirhan Sirhan. The resulting political confusion rendered the popular New Left movement and the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects in ruins. The chaos would become evident at the Democratic National Convention that August in Chicago.
Bobby Seale was one of the speakers at a series of rallies and protests that coincided with the Chicago convention. Chicago mayor Richard Daley had announced that there would be no disruptions in his city. Nevertheless, protesters and bystanders were attacked by Chicago police upon orders of Mayor Daley, and the confusion (and tear gas fumes) spilled into the convention hall itself. In the following days, a number of activist leaders were arrested. Bobby Seale was one of the eight arrested and was charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot outside of the convention. Released on bail, Seale was celebrated as one of the Chicago Eight activists that were arrested on inflated charges in order to disrupt their organizing work. Seale’s case was separated from the others, who became known as the Chicago Seven.
Seale managed to stay out of jail and serve the Party for almost a year until his arrest in the Rackley case in Oakland on August 19, 1969. Seale posted a $25,000 bond and was then rearrested for the Chicago charge before he left the building. Seale was then tried for the Chicago case while awaiting trial in the New Haven case. It appeared that the government was going to try everything to keep Seale in jail and put him in the electric chair, if possible. In Chicago, Judge Julius Hoffman refused to allow a continuance for Seale’s lawyer (Charles Garry, who was having gallbladder surgery), and when Seale demanded to represent himself, the judge again refused. Unwilling to be silenced over the blatant quashing of his rights, Bobby Seale was ordered bound and gagged by Judge Hoffman and forced to watch the proceedings tied to a chair with his mouth taped shut. Eventually both cases would be dismissed. However, the toll taken on the Party and the black radical movement was enormous.
The entire Chicago episode did a great deal of damage to the notion of alliances with whites as well, as Seale found himself isolated from the indicted white protestors who some felt did not commit to his cause of unjust incarceration and treatment in the manner Seale had committed to their antiwar and antigovernment protests. Reginald Major summed up the frustration of many black radicals who saw the folly in Seale’s Chicago romp:
Bobby had been indicted, tried, placed in chains, and was subsequently sentenced to four years in jail for contempt of court as the result of a casual speechmaking excursion into a scene of hippie-involved political mayhem…. If … his fellow defendants were really the revolutionaries they claimed to be they would have closed ranks and stood on their conspiratorial constitutional rights when Bobby Seale was denied the right to represent himself, and if necessary force the court to chain them all. It didn’t happen.20
The Panthers had an even greater obstacle than the contradictions involving white allies—the actions of oppressive law enforcement placing the Black Panther Party directly within their sights.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, a well-known opponent of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was virulent against the Black Panther Party from the outset. By the summer of 1967, the FBI had the Black Panther Party in its direct line of fire. In February 1968, less than two weeks after the massive Free Huey rallies that brought together the best-known black radical leaders, the FBI produced an internal memo outlining the steps to neutralize the situation. Clayborne Carson discussed the memo in his book, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s:
An FBI memorandum written on February 29, 1968, bluntly stated the Bureau’s intentions regarding “militant black nationalists.” It announced that the goals of COINTELPRO were “to prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups, prevent the rise of a leader who might unify and electrify these violence-prone elements, prevent these militants from gaining respectability and prevent the growth of these groups among American’s youth.” To indicate the kind of activities FBI offices might undertake, the memorandum cited the tactics used the previous summer against RAM, a black militant group in Philadelphia. The group’s leaders were “arrested on every possible charge until they could no longer make bail” and “as a result [the leaders] spent most of the summer in jail and no violence traceable to [the group] took place.”21
Within days of the memo, Bobby Seale was arrested in his Oakland home at two o’clock in the morning as police charged into his home on a claim of a “disturbance in the area,” pulling their guns on him and his wife, Artie, when the night was quiet and nobody was on the streets. Seale later opined that the entire ruse was to set an exorbitant bail (which was $6,000) in order to drain the Party funds. Oakland judge Lionel Wilson (who would later become Oakland’s first black mayor) dropped the charges and had Seale released.
On June 15, 1969, J. Edgar Hoover engaged in his own brand of outlandish rhetoric in a report presented to Congress that stated that: “The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”22 While the threat may not have been as great as Hoover stated, the announcement gave permission for local law enforcement to continue to engage in the further disruption of Party functions, using all means at their disposal to do so.
While the BPP had its share of underground activities, illicit economies, strong-arm activities, and such, their extralegal actions appear to pale in comparison to the methods utilized by the federal government to neutralize the group. The COINTELPRO program shall go down in history as one of the most effective—and lawless—law enforcement programs in modern history. A series of violent assaults on Panther offices, on breakfast for children programs, on classroom students, on individuals and their families, was backed up by a bewildering array of misinformation, forged letters, incendiary cartoons, false phone calls, and memos designed to foster suspicion, doubt, despair, and incitement to violence that the FBI could then use to discredit and destroy the participants.
Many dedicated Panthers found themselves facing the bleak task of negotiating their release from jail on trumped-up charges simply because they were Panthers. Ward Churchill summarized the impact of Hoover’s efforts:
The Black Panther Party was savaged by a campaign of political repression that in terms of its sheer viciousness has few parallels in American history. Beginning in August 1967 and coordinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of its then-ongoing domestic counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), which enlisted dozens of local police departments around the country, the assault left at least twenty-eight Panthers dead, scores of others imprisoned after dubious convictions, and hundreds more suffering permanent physical or psychological damage. The Party was simultaneously infiltrated at every level by agents provocateurs, all of them harnessed to the task of disrupting its internal functioning. Completing the package was a torrent of disinformation planted in the media to discredit the Panthers before the public, both personally and organizationally, thus isolating them from potential support.23
The US law enforcement community was particularly serious about their engagement with the Black Panther Party. In one COINTELPRO report, it was noted that of the 295 counterintelligence operations conducted against black activists, 233 of them were aimed at the Black Panthers.24 There were other factions in the black radical movement, and they were targeted as well, but the US government clearly had made its determination as to who was Public Enemy Number One.
How could an organization of poor black youth from inner-city Oakland, California, have induced such a wrath from the state? What set the Black Panther Party apart from the other idealistic and militant black radical groups and individuals in the late 1960s in the United States?
Although the BPP made serious errors, it also gained a considerable measure of success and made several significant new contributions to the BLM [Black Liberation Movement]. The final judgment of history may very well show that in its own way the BPP added the final ingredient to the Black Agenda necessary to attain real freedom: armed struggle and that this was the great turning point which ultimately set the Black Liberation Movement on the final road to victory. —Sundiata Acoli25
One reason the Panthers were targeted with such zeal is because they professed a comprehensive plan for black liberation. Their plan was anticapitalist, antiracist, and not owned or influenced by any particular group. Huey P. Newton was the chief theoretician of the Party, as well as its most fearless and ruthless street fighter. Not only did he develop ideas that supported the notion that the poorest of the poor could become the engine of the revolution, he practiced what he preached.
The idea that it was possible for members of the black underclass, the lumpenproletariat, to become leaders of a class revolution was vividly represented by Newton, who like so many other radicalized black youth at the time had looked to Malcolm X for inspiration. Malcolm X was also a member of the lumpenproletariat who had transformed himself (in prison) into a fearless black revolutionary. Newton and Seale, as well as Eldridge Cleaver, saw themselves as direct heirs to the legacy of Malcolm X. The vision and subsequent martyrdom of Malcolm X served as the central inspiration for these black men and others. Eldridge Cleaver was particularly impressed with Newton and witnessed the connection to Malcolm X. David Hilliard wrote of Cleaver’s admiration for Huey: “Cleaver saw Huey as the highest personification of Malcolm and his ideas. He saw Huey as the heir and successor of Malcolm’s ideology. If Malcolm predicted the coming of the gun to the black liberation movement, then it was Huey who picked up the gun and used it.”26 Huey Newton and Malcolm X shared similar economic backgrounds and both came from large families, which provided stability and various types of support over the years. In addition to family, both men found a home on the streets. Huey Newton found strength in his associations with the brothers off the block and had little problem associating with them and their cultural priorities. Bobby Seale wrote of Huey’s preferred brand of Panther:
Huey wanted brothers off the block—brothers who had been out there robbing banks, brothers who had been pimping, brothers who had been peddling dope, brothers who ain’t gonna take nothing, brothers who had been fighting pigs—because he knew that once they get themselves together in the area of political education (and it doesn’t take much because the political education is the ten point platform and program), Huey P. Newton knew that once you organize the brothers he ran with, he fought against, who he fought harder than they fought him, once you organize those brothers, you get niggers, you get black men, you get revolutionaries who are too much.27
Huey’s predilection for the street-tough brothers is what set the Black Panther Party in motion, yet his intellectual and theoretical imagination proved uniquely suited to the environment from which he came and to where he took the black struggle. To be sure, a combination of forces contributed to the rise of the BPP, not the least of which was the charisma and energy of Bobby Seale and Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver. They early on championed Huey’s cause and rose above the fray to portray the myriad ideals of the Black Panther Party to the nation and the world when Huey Newton was still a mystery and a myth.
Early on in their development as Black Nationalists, Newton and Seale frequented black study groups and Black Nationalist organizations in the Oakland area. During their formative period of study at Merritt College in the early and mid-1960s, they explored the many theories and rationales for revolution being enacted throughout the world. They did their homework.
They studied the works of Robert F. Williams (Negroes With Guns) of North Carolina, who advocated the use of armed self-defense against white terror in the South and was expelled from the NAACP for his position. Williams would leave the country and continue to write in exile in support of armed resistance in the United States. Seale and Newton studied the works of Che Guevara (Guerilla Warfare) of Cuba, who clarified many of the tactics and theoretical advantages of guerilla warfare employed by an outnumbered group. They studied Kwame Nkrumah’s philosophical and economic ideas that fused indigenous ideas of communalism with the prevailing Marxism-Leninism and Maoism that was being spread by white radicals at the time. They read Marx, Lenin, and Mao. And they read Fanon. They wanted to follow along with other movements for national liberation calling for freedom for the black nation. They understood that black people needed to unite in their cause, thus the blacks-only caveat for the Black Panther Party. However, they saw a larger picture in their revolutionary vision.
Newton and Seale initially saw socialism as the correct approach to their work, as it challenged the capitalist apparatus of industry and profit that put blacks at the bottom and created an impoverished working class and a lumpenproletariat unable to contribute to the economy. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale had a unique understanding of the ideas of Marx and Lenin and applied their own experience to the class-based analysis of traditional Marxism. Newton and Seale understood that beyond the Marxian notion that there are going to be vagrants and social outcasts who simply “can’t function” within the economic organization of industrial capitalism, there is also the fact of racism creating a new form of lumpen, someone socially outcast due to race as well as economically outcast due to lack of work prospects. And they understood that this dual combination creates a subclass of social outcasts placed upon the fringes of society essentially on account of their race. They felt the words of Fanon resonated with their own experience:
It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpenproletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the lumpenproletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.28
Newton and Seale saw the political transformation of the lumpenproletariat as their unique mission and the most practical approach for reaching the final victory.
The primary example used by Newton and Seale of their position was that of Malcolm X. Born Malcolm Little, Malcolm X was a top student in middle school in Lansing, Michigan, and was elected class president in the eighth grade. According to Malcolm X’s autobiography, things unraveled when he told his teacher, Mr. Ostrowski, of his ambition to become a lawyer. As Malcolm X recalled, Mr. Ostrowski’s response was: “You’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer, that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. You’re good with your hands, making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry?” Malcolm X struggled with the meanings of those words at the time, although it wasn’t entirely clear to him. “The more I thought about it afterwards the more uneasy it made me. It just kept treading around in my mind,” he recalled. Malcolm X mused repeatedly on that moment, as if everything he was unconsciously trying to make out of himself was deflated in that instant.29
As he explained in his autobiography, his subsequent spiral into socially deviant behavior resulted from his disillusionment with the social system imposed upon him and was not a result of some innate nihilistic tendency or psychological inability to behave responsibly. It was rather as a result of a racial caste system enforcing itself directly upon his being, upon his self-worth, and upon his aspirations as a human being. If one extrapolates that this type of enforced “lumpenization” was and is still taking place a thousand times a day upon unsuspecting and ambitious black and brown youth who are regularly confronted with rejections of their humanity and the enforced limitations of their natural ambitions, then their reactions can and will fall into the ever-so-familiar path of self-destructive lumpen behavior.
Newton and Seale understood that blacks coming out of prison had been hardened to withstand the rigors of life under those circumstances, and they reasoned that if these new recruits could reclaim their humanity, the subject’s innate sense of worth and justice would emerge, just as Malcolm X’s had. To Newton and Seale this involved a transformation in which one’s natural survival instincts were harnessed and put to use in a political context. It also involved a social transformation into the behaviors required of a Panther. Thus, the Party initiated a set of codes of conduct for the daily behavior of Panther members. This was done in concert with the political education, self-defense training, and daily work regimen that was imposed upon new recruits.
In the abstract, this approach made sense to Newton and Seale. With many new recruits coming from the discipline of a military background (due to the Vietnam War draft), the socially conforming nature of other black cultural nationalist groups such as the Nation of Islam, or even the self-regulating environment of prison, Newton and Seale saw revolutionary potential in every ex-convict, Vietnam veteran, and unemployed brother or sister on the block.
To say the Black Panther Party, even in its early stages, was an organization composed entirely of lumpen would be inaccurate. Despite their emphasis on the gun early on, the difficulties they had with student groups, and their initial efforts at patrolling the police, the Party membership included young blacks of all walks of life from the very beginning of the Party’s existence. As former New York Panther Sundiata Acoli recalled,
It can be safely said that the largest segment of the New York City BPP membership (and probably nationwide) were workers who held everyday jobs. Other segments of the membership were semiproletariat, students, youths, and lumpen-proletariat. The lumpen tendencies within some members were what the establishment’s media (and some party members) played-up the most. Lumpen tendencies are associated with lack of discipline, liberal use of alcohol, marijuana, and curse words; loose sexual morals, a criminal mentality, and rash actions. These tendencies in some Party members provided the media with better opportunities than they would otherwise have had to play up this aspect, and to slander the Party, which diverted public attention from much of the positive work done by the BPP.30
In many appraisals of the Panthers, “lumpenism” is frequently examined as a primary cause of the organization’s demise. In The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), Chris Booker wrote an essay titled “Lumpenization: A Critical Error of the Black Panther Party,” in which he stated that “Panther leaders emphasized the revolutionary potential of the Black lumpen as a whole without giving adequate attention to the dangerous tendencies of various sectors within this class. This crucial oversight would prove detrimental for Party fortunes.”31 Booker asserted that the Panthers “Lumpen behavior also made the organization susceptible to government repression”:
The Black Panther attitude and practice with respect to violence stands out in their uniqueness from all preceding organizations in African American history. On the one hand, the Panthers announced that they opposed spontaneous violence, including rioting, and called for disciplined tactical use of violence within the framework of a long term strategy. However, in reality, as evidenced by their own documents, the Black Panther party, generally indirectly, encouraged spontaneous violence against representatives of the government, especially the police.32
The Panthers, for all of their disciplined behavior, reveled in their rhetoric of confrontation. This was part of the process of demystifying the power of the gun—the gun possessed by the white man in power—and as such, brazen affronts such as “off the pigs” were part and parcel of destroying blacks’ fear of the police and of “the Man.” The brash, in-your-face rhetoric was the raw material that attracted so many young, aggressive, and dedicated (and perhaps not-so-dedicated) new members to the Party in the early years.
Newton in particular was a diligent wordsmith, and understood the power of words and images. The party developed the term pig as a deliberate means of demystifying the power of the police in uniform. It would be easier, Newton reasoned, for Party members to shed their fears of “the Man,” and stand up to a “filthy farm animal,” as opposed to a potential killer in uniform. The appellation was a success, and pig became one of the most popular additions to the lexicon of the movement.
Much of the over-the-top rhetoric of the Party invoked a degree of “tricksterism,” an element of black language in which the bombastic statement must be seen in the outrageous context in which it is presented. Eldridge Cleaver had a little bit of “signifying monkey” in him when he stated that if he were elected president, he would not have entered the White House but “would have burned it down and turned it into a museum of a monument to the decadence of the past.” In black vernacular, this was not seen as a literal threat to the White House. Indeed, the Panthers saw much of their rhetoric as political theater. Law enforcement did not. NAACP leader Roy Wilkins elaborated: “A bunch of black guys sitting around drinking in the middle of the night, yelling about how mean white folks are and what they’d like to do to them, is part of the catharsis. But the [FBI] was not equipped to deal with black hyperbole.”33
The confrontational rhetoric of the Black Panthers often served as justification for law enforcement harassment. The Panthers’ lumpen tendencies were then played up in the media as examples of the typical nature of Party members. This was the image that remained in the public consciousness. Booker summarizes by stating:
The experience of the Black Panther Party strongly suggests that its survival, development, and institutionalization were undermined by the ascendancy of the criminal element of the lumpen of the Party. The reckless, erratic, and often violent behavior associated with this sector served to alienate many people from the organization, chronically destabilize it, and render it more vulnerable to the FBI-police onslaught….
Abandoning its lumpen emphasis would have been necessary for the organization to resume its initial development and growth. Instead, the Black Panther Party declined as a national political formation by mid-1971.34
To a certain extent, Huey Newton’s decision to emphasize the Party’s Survival Programs and community service after his 1970 release from prison can be construed as an attempt to do just as Booker suggested: retreat from the lumpen orientation of the organization. As Newton and his followers would discover, this would ultimately prove more difficult than expected.
The organizational approach of the Black Panther Party strode a delicate balance between tapping into the outrage and aggressiveness of young urban blacks and harnessing the social energy for the essential needs of the black community. Newton and Seale understood their task regarding their lumpen recruits. They understood that it involved a political transformation as well as a social transformation into the behaviors required of a Panther. This was not unlike the requirements of the Nation of Islam or the US Organization, which required a great deal of sacrifice and discipline and a total transformation of the subject. Newton and Seale saw themselves as providing a more direct and accessible method of transformation, one that did not directly negate or deny many of the cultural aspects of a recruit’s pre-Panther lifestyle.
The most labor-intensive aspect of Black Panther life was the maintenance of the Survival Programs that the Party began in 1969. Early on in Newton’s writings, the idea of serving the people was part of the organizational structure, and it expanded exponentially as the organization exploded. Newton made it clear that
the original vision of the Party was to develop a lifeline to the people by serving their needs and defending them against their oppressors, who come to the community in many forms, from armed police to capitalist exploiters. We knew that the strategy would raise the consciousness of the people and also give us their support. Then, if we were driven underground by the oppressors the people would support us and defend us.35
The idea was that the Party would initiate “Survival Programs pending revolution.” This enabled diverse aspects of the black community to participate in the real work of sustaining and supporting the people. The first was the breakfast for children program. Utilizing donations from local merchants and labor from Panther members and their supporters, neighborhood children were fed a hot breakfast before going to school. Saint Augustine’s Episcopal Church, on Twenty-Ninth Street in Oakland, under the pastorship of Father Earl Neal, was the location of the first breakfast for children program, which began on January 20, 1969. The idea spread rapidly. As a result of his time spent with Bobby Seale, James Mott brought the idea to Sacramento and instituted what he claims was the second breakfast for children program initiated in the country.
And I know we were feeding quite a few children here in Sacramento, and everything we got were donations from the businesses in the community. And they would donate willingly, and the premise was, you give back to your community, its going to increase your business. White businesses or Asian business, mom-and-pop operations. You draw churches together, you draw businesses together behind a common goal.36
In addition to the breakfast for children program, the Party established “Liberation Schools” in many chapters. There was also the People’s Free Medical Clinic in Oakland, and in various cities free clothing programs, free food giveaways, free busing to prisons programs, sickle cell anemia testing programs, free shoe programs, a free pest-control program, and, in 1974, a free ambulance program. These activities were administered by Party members, with professionals donating their time and nonprofessionals dedicating their labor. In many cases these programs were huge successes and a point of contention for law enforcement, which looked shameful setting fire to boxes of breakfast cereal during raids on Panther offices.
The Survival Programs were an integral component of the history of the Black Panther Party and constituted its greatest liaison to the greater community. Thousands of people worked in these organizations, and even more in the community were served by them. The workload was immense on Panther regulars, but they took it on. Contrary to the issues of black masculinity and gender divisions within the BPP, rank-and-file men and women in the major Party chapters participated in all of the “Serve the People” projects. All of the Lumpen members spent hours cooking for the children, cleaning up, driving people around, and generally doing what might be considered domestic work. In the central locations, men and women both shared the risks and duties of security, guarding the party offices and facilities at night. Clark Bailey recalls a typical day as a Lumpen member and BPP revolutionary:
Let’s see: wake up, first off we always had breakfast program, that started at like four thirty in the morning. We had to get up, start preparing food for the kids. They would start getting in there from six to about nine. Then we had to get out and start selling papers because that was the basic way that we were able to function. That would be maybe four or five hours worth of work, selling papers. Then we would come back to the office and feed the kids that were there and then off to practice, where we would practice and shower and braid our hair up and get ready for the show. And then when we finished, we had to go back to the office and pull security.37
Despite the glamorous recitations of the militant black revolutionary in popular accounts, as far as the daily life in the Black Panther Party was concerned, there was a great deal of taxing, unrecognized labor required of all organizational members. The Party would have lasted only a few months at best were it not for the sacrifices of many people from all walks of life engaging in mundane service as rank-and-file Party members.
As a social organization, the party continued to evolve as well. In August 1970, only days after his release from prison, Huey Newton published one of his most far-reaching decrees. In the essay “The Women’s Liberation Movements and the Gay Liberation Movements,” he declared that “homosexuals are not the enemy of the people.” Newton decreed that “when we have revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations, there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women’s liberation movement. Some groups might be more revolutionary than others. We should not use the actions of a few to say that they are all reactionary or counterrevolutionary, because they are not.” Newton did not simply decree that homophobia did not belong in the revolution, he communicated it in a direct way to his audience, in the Black Panther on August 15, 1970, that dealt with their misgivings about the issue:
As we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the woman or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.38
Newton’s proclamations had a far-reaching impact on the New Left and drew many new supporters to Party fund-raisers and rallies. Just weeks after Newton’s statement, the Party sponsored a massive conference in Philadelphia to “draft a new constitution providing authentic liberty and justice for all.” Thousands of delegates from progressive organizations worldwide came to the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention (RPCC) to participate and to draft forward-thinking visions of a just society. The white activist George Katsiaficas could not contain his praise for the event: “Although seldom even mentioned in mainstream accounts, this self-understood revolutionary event came at the high point of the 1960s movement in the United States and was arguably the most momentous event in the movement during this critical period in American history.”39 (Katsiaficas was equally as disappointed when the follow-up convention in Washington, DC, in November ended in failure, as a venue could not even be secured, and the most the delegates got was a performance of the Lumpen outdoors on the Howard University campus.)
In essence, the RPCC, the Survival Programs, and, to a degree, the emergence of the Lumpen band were all examples of how far Newton’s Party had gone to distance itself from the paramilitary actions and rhetoric of their early years. Newton was, in effect, “abandoning the lumpen emphasis” of the Party in order to change with the times. While the Party earned a degree of respect in the community, it also created a tremendous amount of internal dissention that eventually ruptured the Party.
At the time of Huey Newton’s release from prison after the charges for manslaugher in the killing of Officer Frey were dismissed on August 5, 1970, Bobby Seale had been in prison defending himself in two trials since August 1969 and Eldridge Cleaver had been in exile since November 1968. During Newton’s incarceration, the Party witnessed the killings of two Los Angeles chapter leaders, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins in January 1969, and the murders of two Chicago chapter leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in December 1969. Newton’s choice to run the Party during this time was childhood friend David Hilliard, whom Newton gave the title of chief of staff. Hilliard, however, was not the charismatic speaker or compelling leadership figure that Panther followers had come to expect. In the absence of Newton, Seale, and Cleaver, the Party had difficulty maintaining the tenuous relationships between disparate Party chapters, other social-service groups, other black militants, white radicals, mainstream white supporters, and the media.40 Despite the fact that the Black Panther Party was a household name, or perhaps because of it, at the end of the 1960s the BPP struggled to provide leadership to the black radical community.
When it was announced that Huey Newton would be released in early August 1970, the excitement was tempered by the realization that the Party Newton founded was in shatters, and Huey’s mythic status as a fearless guerilla warrior was already being contradicted by his many decrees from prison. Nevertheless, the August 5 release of Huey Newton was a remarkable event. Never at a loss for political theater, Newton emerged from the Alameda County Courthouse in downtown Oakland to a phalanx of disciplined Panthers and thousands of joyous community members. Newton stood upon a car and addressed “his people”—and removed his shirt to the delight of the crowd—yet there was nothing he could say or do that could have filled their revolutionary expectations. Not the fiery orator like Eldridge, nor the sassy humorist like Bobby, Huey’s voice was high pitched and his language contained abstractions that didn’t play on the rhythms of the audience he and his mythos had generated. The revolutionary hero Huey was out of jail, but it appeared to some that the revolution was no closer than the day before.
On August 7, two days after Newton’s release, Jonathan Jackson, the younger brother of incarcerated BPP member George Jackson, initiated an assault on the Marin County Courthouse to demand the release of his brother. Jonathan Jackson freed BPP members William Christmas and James McClain and held Judge Harold Haley and two female jurors hostage, demanding his brother’s release. All four men, including Judge Haley, were killed by police as the Panthers attempted to drive away from the courthouse.
The aftermath of the Jonathan Jackson assault sent deep emotional rifts through the organization. The younger Jackson was martyred by many supporters as a man-child of the highest revolutionary spirit, garnering praise from those who saw such activity as a necessary action of the times. Elaine Brown wrote a song in praise of Jackson’s spirit, “Jonathan,” on her second album in 1973. Other Panthers and their supporters believed that Jonathan Jackson’s actions should be met with an escalation of guerilla activity. A month after Jackson’s Marin County Courthouse raid, members of the white radical group the Weathermen bombed the same courthouse, claiming solidarity with Jackson.41
Jonathan Jackson’s actions in support of his brother were an inspiration to those who felt that the time for the use of the gun for black liberation had arrived. However, the repercussions for the organization were profound that summer of 1970. The brazen raid damaged the reputation of the Party within the mainstream black community and reinforced the Party’s public reputation among frightened whites and others as a terrorist organization bent on lawlessness.
Newton had to navigate his Party’s need to publicly honor and commemorate the courage of Jonathan Jackson while steering the organization away from such activities, which Newton calculated would only serve to cause more death and isolate his Party further from the mainstream black community. Newton believed that the broader community was not prepared to engage in or support guerilla activity for their liberation and that a level of sustained support and education to alleviate their suffering was a necessary step before any presumed action against the state could take place.
The organization had reached a turning point. On February 26, 1971, Panther Party leaders Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver (still in exile in Algeria) agreed to speak by phone on a local television program broadcast, ostensibly as a show of Party unity. However, instead of providing a public show of solidarity, the two wound up denouncing one another, exposing and cementing the divide that had been festering behind the scenes for some time. Newton and Cleaver expelled each other from the Party. That fateful phone call was the public acknowledgement of the growing rift between Newton’s notion of a socialist-leaning, politically engaged Panther Party and Cleaver’s notion of a guerilla warfare oriented Party. Within hours, Newton expelled Eldridge Cleaver and his followers from the Party, pushing a large number of committed revolutionaries underground from the very organization that had sustained them and their revolutionary dreams.
The resulting internal warfare damaged the organization even further and a regional rift developed, with many New York Panthers aligning with the Eldridge Cleaver faction and West Coast Panthers aligning primarily with the Huey Newton faction. The roots of the conflict involved far more than just tactics. Personalities, egos, COINTELPRO-fueled suspicions, cocaine-driven paranoia, and strategic desperation all played a role.
Because Huey Newton had the purse strings, access to white financial and structural support, the massive propaganda outlet of the weekly Black Panther paper, and the loyalty of hundreds, if not thousands, of dedicated Panthers and supporters doing the daily work of the Survival Programs and party business, the organization lived on, although the revolution did not.
The Lumpen were planning a second tour of the East Coast when the split went down. All of a sudden, what was shaping up to be a triumphant event for the Lumpen members became another example of the hazardous duties of Panther life. James Mott recalls:
I remember I was at central [headquarters] and I got a call from some of our people in New York that were still loyal to the Party. People called it a Party civil war. They said, “James, James, you guys can’t come back here right now. They have your pictures on a target and they’re shooting holes in the Lumpen’s pictures.” These were people candidly calling us from home. “Man, you guys can’t come back now.” We were just about to kick off the second tour. Everything had been lined up. It was going to be bigger and better than the first one. Everything fell apart at that time.42
The crises that befell the organization were not conducive to the production of rhythm and blues concerts, no matter how ideologically aligned they may be. But it wasn’t because the group did not have supporters. As William Calhoun recalls, there were plans in the works for more tours: “There almost was three [tours] until Eldridge and Huey split up. Eldridge was going to bring us to Algiers, but then that blew up.”43
A Lumpen performance in Africa might have been an event worth attending. African national politics and culture were in full bloom on the continent at this time. In August 1969 the government of Algeria sponsored the first Pan African Cultural Festival in Algiers, which included a massive display of revolutionary spirit and pomp. With state-level proclamations of the efficacy of African culture and the presence of the “international wing of the Black Panther Party,” the US black power delegation was formidable. Eldridge Cleaver, in hiding for almost a year, chose the event of the festival to announce his location publicly. Other Party leaders made the trek to Africa, including Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, Party Chief of Staff David Hilliard, and former SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael and his wife, South African singer Miriam Makeba. Iconoclastic jazz greats Archie Shepp and Clifford Thornton performed there with their groups, as well as with African musicians on the same stage. It would have certainly been an interesting scene if the Lumpen were able to perform at one of these festival events. The Lumpen, however, and the Party in general, were dealing with myriad conflicts at home, both ideological and personal, that were becoming increasingly difficult to overcome.
The Black Panther Party never recovered from the split that took place in February 1971. A tragic sequence of factionalized violence resulted from the rift, and the Party disintegrated over the split allegiances of those involved. Some Eldridge faction Party members went underground to join the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and continue the guerilla war they had joined the Panthers in order to fight. The BLA was an underground black radical guerilla organization with goals to destroy the American government and liberate blacks. If the practical goals appeared unreachable, some of the most determined and disciplined Panthers, such as Elmer “Geronimo ji-Jaga” Pratt and Assata Shakur, joined the BLA and continued to follow their revolutionary dreams.
Huey Newton saw the massive dissention in his organization as unmanageable and initiated a nationwide purge of membership. Newton ordered many Panther offices closed and consolidated operations in Oakland with those whom he believed were loyal. The purges, the sweeping proclamations, the lush penthouse apartment he was given upon his release, the cocaine addiction, and Newton’s late-night carousing around the city became problematic even for Newton’s most ardent supporters. (Eventually Newton’s cautious tactics and cocaine-driven paranoia merged, and even Bobby Seale was eventually expelled from Newton’s operation in 1974.)44
Ultimately, the chaos of the Party activities on a national scale; the infiltration, disinformation, detainment, and disruption by law enforcement; and the subsequent disillusionment of so many who had vested in radical change took its toll on the Panthers and the black radical movement in general. Many people retreated to lives of disengagement, drug addiction, and quiet sacrifice for family and the causes they still believed in. Meanwhile dozens of former Panthers and other black radicals remain in prison as political prisoners—still prisoners of a time.
The rift with Eldridge Cleaver was only the beginning of a breakdown of the Panther Party as the 1970s began. The primary issue revolved around Huey Newton’s cult of personality and how it became solidified in Oakland, if nowhere else. After his release from prison, Newton was given a penthouse apartment overlooking Lake Merritt, the downtown lake that is part of Oakland’s secret charm. The penthouse caused a great deal of consternation from the faithful, who understood and believed Huey Newton to be their selfless guerilla warrior. Outside critics justifiably labeled the luxurious apartment as an ideological, materialist contradiction and capitulation to a self-absorbed cocaine addict, not a selfless revolutionary. Despite the contradictions, or perhaps because of them, Newton was able to maintain ties across a broad spectrum of society, from the drug dealers on the streets to public officials and wealthy entertainers and supporters. Elaine Brown, Newton’s lover and lieutenant at the time, described the unique talents displayed by the Supreme Servant:
A visit to the penthouse had become an awesome experience. It was where truth was both explored and extracted, the house of redemption or damnation. When the men with cocaine came, Huey laughed with them and snorted with them, for as long as they could stand it. When the intellectuals came, he wound them up with hours of debate. When the women came, he addressed their loneliness and his. When the rich came, he gave them absolution in return for their contributions to the party. When the few party members came, he offered enlightenment, sometimes with the back of his hand, or worse.45
Most confounding for many was Newton’s penchant for cocaine and irrational behavior, frequently resulting in violence, and the obligatory rationales dispensed upon the Party faithful and the waning public. When Newton appeared in public in the 1970s it was with an aura of a larger-than-life force of nature, still revered and still feared, like a local mob boss. “When Huey would come into my father’s shoe store,” Oakland resident Kevin Foster recalls, “the customers would separate like the parting of the Red Sea, and give Huey the run of the place.” It happened in business after business, throughout black East Bay. Huey had the cache and comic/tragic/fearsome credibility of a Mafia don. It appeared to many that in a few short years Huey P. Newton, the visionary, the urban guerilla unafraid to use the gun against his oppressors, had devolved into a maniacal godfather of sorts, dispensing decrees at his whims. “He kind of got a vision of making the Black Panther Party into some sort of black mafia,” Lumpen singer Michael Torrence recalls. “You know, he had made it mandatory for all Party members to go see The Godfather.”
You know, they’d set up operations at the Lamppost where they had some of the sisters working the bar and then they were going around leaning on the drug dealers and sticking up after-hour joints and he’s beating people up and I’m out there trying to sell papers and I got people running up on me talking about, “Your chairman’s in the penthouse and he beat up my cousin last night,” and I don’t know nothing about it, you know.46
It was around this time that Newton became a popular party guest for the entertainers. To be seen around Newton was the height of radical chic for some and an inspiration for others seeking to redefine themselves as allies to a revolution. The legendary black comedian Richard Pryor was one of Newton’s cohorts for a brief time. Pryor lived in Berkeley in 1970 and 1971 and soaked up the radical politics as well as the extreme recreational lifestyles of the black Bay Area. In his memoir Pryor Convictions, Pryor tells of sharing cocaine and women with Huey Newton. In the 1973 documentary film Wattstax, Pryor refers to his years in Oakland and Berkeley when he “got ultra-black for a while.” Newton provided the inspiration for both extremes.
The Panthers’ image as gun-toting black revolutionaries has remained with the organization despite Newton’s efforts to abandon the lumpen emphasis. As black power engendered the growth of cultural productions that reflected and responded to the black militant identities that emerged from black radical movements, a new genre of entertainment emerged: fictionalized cinematic narratives of working-class black anti-heroes from the streets, with varying stages of social consciousness, sticking it to “the Man” or just getting over by themselves. Some films were insightful explorations of the black underclass, while others were shallow fetishizations of black anger, sexuality, and emotion. In terms of technique, they were not cinematically sophisticated, yet they were extremely popular.
The first wave of blaxploitation films can be seen as variations on a Panther theme of giving agency to blacks, but with a twist. In the spring of 1971 Melvin Van Peebles released his tome to survivalism in the ghetto entitled Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. The central character, “Sweetback,” utilizes his guile and his inherent bond with his community to evade a series of legal and extralegal snares. Newton himself wrote a lengthy praise for the film for its “revolutionary qualities”:
It is the first truly revolutionary black film made and it is presented to us by a Black man…. Sweet Sweetback blows my mind every time I talk about it because it is so simple and yet so profound. It shows the robbery which takes place in the Black community and how we are the real victims. Then it shows how the victims must deal with their situation, using many institutions and many approaches. It demonstrates that one of the key routes to our survival and the success of our resistance is unity….
Sweet Sweetback does all of this by using many aspects of the community, but in symbolic terms. That is, Van Peebles is showing one thing on the screen but saying something more to the audience. In other words he is signifying, and he is signifying some very heavy things.47
What is also fairly visible in the film is that the character of Sweet-back, played by Van Peebles, in terms of his look, his language, his dress, style, and vocabulary, bears a strong resemblance to the public image of Bobby Seale. That a Panther can be placed into the narrative of the black antihero that is freed by the community served to ingratiate and inspire Newton.
Similarly, the next two most famous blaxploitation films, Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972), appropriated the iconography of the Panther leadership for their own respective characters. The rough and rugged black cop, John Shaft, played by Richard Roundtree (and reprised by Samuel L. Jackson in 2000), with his dark, slender, foreboding physique, is a signifier on Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver, the menacing Panther in dark shades and black leather, was a skilled orator who was capable of inciting fear, excitement, or humor as he verbally confronted the power structure. However Shaft, the film that offers us a tall, dark, mysterious, sexually promiscuous crime fighter with a gun, shrewdly depicts an “Eldridge” working for “the Man.” The lead character is the enigmatic loner John Shaft, who is an undercover policeman operating in the streets of New York. Similarly, the streetwise drug dealer “Priest,” played by Ron O’Neal in the 1972 film Superfly, has the fair skin, effeminate features, and mysterious, menacing aura of potential violence that Huey Newton became famous for in the public presentation. It was as if the Panthers became the imagistic template for black street narratives in Hollywood. The imagery of black women was similar. In her essay “Restaging Revolution,” Leigh Raiford asserts that the lead female character in Foxy Brown (1973) played by Pam Grier is a depoliticized representation of Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver. As Raiford writes:
Blaxploitation simultaneously championed and cartooned Black Power; it made use of the language and impulse of Black Power while containing its force…. Furthermore, this transition reduced black feminist activist-intellectuals like Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver to the hypersexual, constantly dressed and undressed, body of Pam Grier in particular.48
The reduction of black radicals into mere fashion statements, or even worse, enemies of their own causes, was a tragic counterpoint to the impression made by black radicals on the national psyche in the late 1960s. Before the advent of black action films, a dazzling array of vibrant, authoritative, charismatic black activists capable of putting forward insightful social critiques were commonplace in the public discourse, in the news, at public events, and to an extent, in the music. Their efforts—those of the Panthers and all of the other black radicals—to assert themselves onto the national scene, the national body politic, and the national culture, with a few memorable exceptions did not translate into filmic representations in a meaningful way.
The 1973 film The Mack, filmed in Oakland, California, features the story of the pimp “Goldie,” played by Max Julien, who navigates the urban terrain of Oakland by overcoming rival pimps, a crime lord, two white cops, and Goldie’s brother “Olinga,” played by Roger E. Mosely, who is a black activist trying to rid the streets of Goldie’s trade. Some of the scenes, including the infamous “Players Ball” involving a series of pimps and players strutting in high ghetto style, involved many real pimps and prostitutes playing themselves.
The actual production of the film carried its own intrigue. According to the film’s producers, they sought permission from local black crime boss Frank Ward to film parts of the urban street life in their own setting. Because of the friction between the Ward brothers and the efforts of the Panthers to clean up the community, the filmmakers were caught in the crossfire. The producers claimed that the Black Panthers threatened them and harassed their efforts to make the film. Frank Ward was killed, shot in the head while sitting in his Rolls-Royce shortly before the film was completed, leading to speculation that Newton’s Panthers were somehow involved.49
The Mack also showcased a lead character with very Newton-like facial features and demeanor. Quiet and passive to a point, and then unabashedly violent at a moment’s notice, Goldie is the epitome of street savvy. Goldie is seen as the hero of the streets, while his own brother, the revolutionary, while seen as a sympathetic character, is in many ways a lost idealist. In the film, Olinga, Goldie’s brother, asks his brother to give up the drugs and pimping life, and is rebuked.
OLINGA: You really don’t understand, do you? Hey man, don’t you realize in order for us to make this thing work, man, we’ve got to get rid of the pimps and the pushers and the prostitutes and then start all over again clean.
GOLDIE: Hey look, nobody’s pushing me anywhere; not you, not the cops, nobody, man. I mean, you want to get rid of the pushers I’ll help you. But don’t send your people after me.
OLINGA: Come on, John. Can’t you see that we can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the other? We got to come down on both of them at the same time in order for this whole thing to work for the people.
GOLDIE: Look, nobody’s closing me out of my business.50
In this process, the Hollywood culture machine addresses and yet negates the work of the black activists, the ones who had literally opened up the door to the struggles of the black underclass only to watch them become commodified aspects of popular entertainment. Hollywood managed to neutralize the most potent counterhegemonic black male images into apolitical, accommodationist operatives of the state or greedy thugs content to live on the margins of society as unrepentant lumpenproletariat. The immense popularity of these films cemented their imagistic permanence in the American imagination. Generations later, the West Coast G-funk or gangsta rappers went out of their way to celebrate the aesthetic qualities of these film characters, further solidifying their space in the American imagination.
Many of these iconic characters were taken from the pantheon of Panther imagery, in which young men and women gave their lives to create an image of strength and defiance against the dehumanizing situation facing their people. Within a few years of the popular medium of film, the Panthers had been overrun—not by “the Man,” but by Hollywood.
The valorization of lumpen lifestyles had come full circle, to the point where by 1973 the idea of a politicized lumpen was no longer legitimate, no longer cool, and no longer imaginable. Are the Panthers to blame for this? Or did they capture a recurrent theme—white America’s fetishization of the black body, black sex, and black death—and turn it on its head for a brief moment?
Within a few short years the Party was decimated by internal and external pressures and its own ideological contradictions. Yet their presence in the American imagination continues to be a compelling element of the black experience. The nature of the legacy of the Panthers is subject to constant debate. Their militarism, their social consciousness, their lawlessness, their street associations, and their impact on the popular culture continue to swirl as each generation posits a new revision to the narrative.