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From the issue dated March 2, 2007
New Views of The Black Panthers Paint Shades Of Gray
Scholars re-examining the violent legacy of the party and the black-power movement find greater nuance
By PETER MONAGHAN
Forty years ago, about two dozen members of the Black Panthers did something now unthinkable in our era of terrorism and heightened security. They paraded into the California State Capitol on May 2, 1967, brandishing rifles and pistols and wearing uniforms — black berets, leather jackets, and turtlenecks. Ostensibly, they were demanding their right to bear unloaded arms, but their presence was intended to signal something much larger: a sea change in race relations.
That demonstration, which resulted in arrests but no violence, burned an indelible image of the Black Panthers and black power into the public consciousness. But the message carried that day — resistance to racial oppression, often through angry words and violent deeds — has long been the public legacy of the Black Panther Party, which formed in 1966.
Until recently, historians have not given much attention to the Black Panthers, except to note the perceived detriment to the broader civil-rights movement that their rise and fall created. On that larger canvas, the Panthers' story is a series of dramatic political gestures and violent confrontations with the law that conclude with the Panthers and their supporters either dead, imprisoned, or discredited. (See timeline, Page A14.)
Only a string of manifestos and powerful memoirs, such as H. Rap Brown's 1969 book, Die Nigger Die!, and Huey P. Newton's autobiographical Revolutionary Suicide (1973), remained behind to commemorate the movement. As recently as 2001, one prominent historian of the group noted that while an occasional book has appeared about the Panthers, "there has been no Panther history."
"Sure, there were autobiographies, memoirs, and score-settling pieces," says Judson L. Jeffries, a professor of African-American and African studies at Ohio State University. "But never a significant body of scholarship. You could probably count on two hands the number of scholarly books on the Black Panther Party."
In the last few years, books on the Black Panthers, including three by Mr. Jeffries, have sprung up as rapidly as the movement itself did in the turbulent 1960s. (See book list, Page A16.)
Some researchers seem intent on burnishing the group's reputation, in part by conveying the whole scope of its activities, including community development. Others are debating the overall influence of the black-power movement, which the Panthers helped create.
"It's a very powerful and compelling story that hasn't been properly told," says Peniel E. Joseph, an associate professor of Africana studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, whose Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America appeared last year. "People are trying to find out what happened, with as much evidence as possible — FBI files, testimony from people who are still alive, scouring different archives."
Image vs. Message
Researchers offer several explanations for why studies of the Black Panthers and black power are being written now.
Many note that the organization can be seen more clearly after four decades, and that the Panthers' demands for better treatment of America's minority populations — black and other — remain valid.
In fact, the first decade of the 21st century bears some similarities to the era in which black power flourished, says Jeanne Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College, who is editing a series of essay collections on black power. "People are looking back at the 60s, which was a time of turmoil, a painful time for the country, and they are seeing that some similar things are happening today, with the Iraq war and immigration debates that deal with issues of race and ethnicity," she says. "And there's an uncertainty about the country's future that mirrors the anxiety of the 1960s."
Younger researchers, she adds, are looking back without prejudice at the goals of the Panthers, in part because the researchers have not been raised in a culture that "so doggedly and bitterly opposed black power's claims."
Untangling the Panthers' violence and bombast from their social manifestoes and larger achievements is difficult. Indeed, the most famous image of the group captures that knot of competing claims for attention. The photograph shows Huey P. Newton, a recent Bay area community-college student at the time he and his fellow student, Bobby G. Seale, formed the party. Newton sits in an oversized cane chair that resembles an African throne. He wears the party's signature black turtleneck, beret, and leather jacket, and a bandoleer is tight across his chest. In one hand, he holds an African spear. He grasps a rifle in the other.
It is a militant image, but Newton pointed a reporter to the shield on the floor next to the wicker chair. "No one sees the shield there next to me," he said. "The shield explains us best." The Panthers, he claimed, intended "to shield our people from the brutalities visited upon them by the police and other racist institutions in the society."
Few observers have found that claim wholly convincing. Yet the party did go out of its way to provide uplift with its defiance. At its formation, it published a 10-Point Program whose demands were reasonable: decent housing, education, and employment, and an end to police brutality in black communities.
The document also stressed the need for black Americans to determine their own destiny and to secure self-defense "by whatever means necessary."
Even a less strident manifesto would have been too much for mainstream America in 1966, and the cold war made the political sympathies of the Panthers suspect, too. Newton taught that oppressed populations were linked, regardless of national borders. The Black Panthers embraced Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, both as an inspirational text and, via street sales, as a fund-raising device.
They extolled the independence struggles of African nations. They called for the freedom of all black men in U.S. prisons. And as the Vietnam War raged, they argued that black men should be exempt from military service.
The war, proclaimed the Panthers, was at home.
Violence or Self-Defense?
That violence reverberates through the Panther era is not in dispute. Violence permeated the movement, be it through internal party discipline or attacks on local business owners and residents who opposed the Panthers. But researchers are showing that it had roots and objectives.
For starters, say some scholars, the Panthers' hostility should surprise no one: Many party members grew up with violence and grinding poverty in their neighborhoods, and the party recruited street-toughened gang members. And, researchers note, violence was done to them, a fact reflected in the group's original name, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
The brutal suppression of the group by the police and federal agents included the use of fists, batons, and firearms, says Curtis J. Austin in Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party.
In 1967, J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, called the Black Panthers "the greatest single threat to the nation's internal security" and redirected the counterintelligence program dubbed Cointelpro to focus on black-power groups. Of its 295 operations, 233 were directed against the Black Panthers.
The campaign included smear tactics designed to induce internal tension and hostility among rival organizations. The Panthers engaged, as a result, in violent conflicts both internally and with groups like the black cultural-nationalist Us Organization of Maulana Karenga.
The FBI planted disinformation, often to turn party members against one another. In a particularly notorious possible outcome, Black Panther members in 1969 tortured and killed a suspected informant in New Haven, Conn. Those events, and the tumultuous impact they had on New Haven and Yale University, are described in great detail in last year's Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer, which Douglas W. Rae, a professor of political science at Yale, wrote with a New Haven reporter, Paul Bass.
Not content with pursuing actual criminality within Panther ranks, police frequently laid false charges against Panthers, and in several cities killed Panthers outright. And Hoover paid a price for his zeal. In 1976, Congress disparaged his campaign as based on great exaggeration.
But the Black Panther Party paid a far higher price. By the time Congress ruled on Hoover's action, the party was in complete disarray, divided by disagreements over philosophy and tactics, and crippled by the sad state of leaders like Huey Newton, once fearless and reckless, but by that time overwhelmed and addicted to cocaine. His own end (he was eventually shot dead, in 1989, in a drug deal) has stood, in the eyes of many observers of 1960s radicalism, as emblematic of the Panthers' misdirection.
Scholars note, however, that a far different image of the Panthers emerges from their community projects. Some have been well publicized, such as their free breakfasts for inner-city children. But there were many others, including free clinics, food giveaways, schools, voter-registration drives, community patrols and monitoring of police behavior (with rifles, for a brief time), and even ambulance services.
With all that, it would be myopic to consider only the violence of the Panthers, suggests Mr. Austin, author of Up Against the Wall and an associate professor of history and co-director of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi. The Panthers, he writes in his book, "were not the angels their ardent supporters, in an attempt to rewrite history and to excise the seamy side of things, insist they were. Neither were they the demons their detractors portrayed them as, or the gun-toting thugs they are popularly shown as in mainstream history texts."
Just as Worthy
In fact, some researchers assert that, over the long haul, black power has effected just as much change as less controversial forms of civil-rights protest.
The Black Panthers were, from the outset, impatient with the civil-rights movement. In their view, the goal of using nonviolence to win equality based on integration — Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream — was far too conciliatory.
The civil-rights movement framed its claims around an "insistence on black worthiness," says Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. He says that the Panthers and other black-power advocates objected to that as a weak claim because it was a statement of the obvious — a claim on the inalienable.
But that dominant narrative in the quest for racial equality in the United States has obscured the goals and accomplishments of figures who took other tacks, says Mr. Ogbar, and vilified confrontational black leaders, "figures who might be considered bad guys."
History has re-evaluated many such figures, he says, including Nat Turner, the leader of a 19th-century slave rebellion, and Paul Robeson, the outspoken black Communist entertainer of the mid-20th century. He suggests that their reputations benefited when, over time, notions of acceptable political action in the United States evolved, and helped historians take fuller stock of those people's achievements.
Scholars are also exploring the idea that black-power activists had far more in common with nonviolent civil-rights reformers than was apparent at the time. New studies demonstrate that "there fundamentally was a unified vision across the African-American activist community from the 1930s on," says Karen Ferguson, an associate professor of history at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia.
Certainly, she says, Martin Luther King Jr.'s rhetoric and strategy differed greatly from those of varied figures like Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Huey Newton and his Panther comrades. Still, she contends, the commonalities in their visions were greater than the differences. She says that all advocated militant activism to forge change, and all continued a tradition of defiant protest that long predated them.
"But the scholarship hasn't until now uncovered those continuities," she says. "Now it is doing that, and that is really exciting."
Such new perspectives have opened up only because black power's forceful arguments and actions have changed the landscape of American race relations, Mr. Ogbar believes. The evolution has occurred on many fronts, he says. For example, the mid-1970s campaigns for public office of Black Panther leaders like Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown ushered in an era in which black candidates win election to offices around the country.
Mr. Ogbar suggests that black power led to the emergence of black-studies programs, which were created over the staunch objections of civil-rights leaders, who believed that the programs discouraged integration. It also led to a fundamental change in the "racial etiquette" of global societies, he says. "It is now OK around the world to express outrage at your oppressor," he says. "This has been widely embraced, and it's something you can't enforce by law."
Waves of Change
William L. Van Deburg, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says he, too, sees much resonance of black power in contemporary America. The new crop of scholars often cite his pioneering 1992 study of the cultural legacy of black power, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (University of Chicago Press), as an influence on their work.
"My position," he says, "is that cultural and psychological change is the most important legacy of black power. It was the Panthers' major contribution to what black personhood could be."
Both he and Mr. Ogbar have written about the reformist as "bad guy" — Mr. Van Deburg in his 2004 study, Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life (University of Chicago Press), and Mr. Ogbar in his Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. They agree that this cultural type has now morphed into the spirit of confrontation found in rap and hip-hop, musical genres that now claim about 15 percent of the global market.
While Mr. Ogbar finishes a book about hip-hop's historical links and associations with black power (rapper Tupac Shakur's mother, Afeni Shakur, was a prominent Panther), other researchers revisit the roles that community activists, intellectuals, and others played during the black-power era.
Given both the initial hostility to black power and the prolonged indifference toward its story, it is no surprise that the new research has provoked skepticism. Much of the criticism is prefaced by "I was there, and I can tell you."
One such critic is Robert J. Norrell, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He is the author of an acclaimed synthesis of race relations in the 20th century, The House I Live In: Race in the American Century (Oxford University Press, 2005). The new studies, he charges, are "more than generous in their judgment to the black-power movement." That continues a long trend: "The black-power effort was romanticized at the time, and it has been romanticized very consistently since."
He grants the cultural impact of groups like the Panthers, but says, "I came to the assessment that the overall impact of the black-power movement on race relations and more particularly its effect on the round of reforms after 1965 — the next level of reform that was called for [after the passage of such measures as the Voting Rights Act of 1965] — was to severely undermine them."
But, he says, academe "tilts so far to the left that even in this very conservative country, there is a tendency to make heroes of people who seem to me didn't really advance black interests very far and to some extent fueled a white backlash that in the political arena, at least, hurt the cause of civil rights and race reform."
Claude A. Clegg III, an associate professor of history at Indiana University at Bloomington and the author of An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (St. Martin's Press, 1997), has a different view. Echoing many black-power researchers, he argues that the forward momentum of the civil-rights movement had stalled by the time black power stepped forward.
"Civil rights had achieved what it set out to achieve — franchise, the end of statutory racial discrimination," he says. "It was a triumph. However, some of the more difficult questions, such as economic equity, basic attitudes, and the empowerment of the inner cities, remained. They were left on the table after 1965."
In any case, he says, the Black Panthers and their ilk raised more fundamental questions, such as whether American capitalism could ever, ultimately, be fair. They also asked why the United States was in Vietnam. In that, they joined the New Left movement. So, too, did Martin Luther King Jr., the more radical King, in a phase of his public life that overtaxed the tolerance of many liberal supporters and has been given short shrift ever since.
Mr. Clegg and others say the scholarly impulse to dismiss and ignore black-power organizations was fundamentally flawed. But Mr. Clegg says scholars of those movements must undertake the hard slog of scouring records and archives, talking to activists and law-enforcement officers who remain alive, and even tracing the way the movement inspired indigenous-rights movements in many far-flung countries.
"The response so far has been very good," says Mr. Joseph, of Stony Brook, of the recent work. "The books are critical histories of the period, not attempts at hagiography. They chronicle the epic, and like any good epic, it has heroes and villains and many types in between."
LOOKING BACK AT THE BLACK PANTHERS
A surge of scholarly interest in the Black Panther Party, and in the larger question of black power's role in the struggle for civil rights, has led to recent works that include:
* Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party, edited by Judson L. Jeffries (Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2008)
* Framing the Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon, by Jane Rhodes (New Press, forthcoming 2007)
* The Black Panthers in the Midwest, by Andrew R. Witt (Routledge, 2007)
* Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party, by Curtis J. Austin (University of Arkansas Press, 2006)
* Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer, by Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae (Basic Books, 2006)
* Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, by Matthew J. Countryman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)
* Target Zero: A Life in Writing, by Eldridge Cleaver, edited by Kathleen Cleaver (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
* Black Power in the Belly of the Beast, edited by Judson L. Jeffries (University of Illinois Press, 2006)
* Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, by Peniel E. Joseph (Henry Holt & Company, 2006)
* The Black Panthers, photographs by Stephen Shames (Aperture, 2006)
* In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, edited by Jama Lazerow (right) and Yohuru Williams (Duke University Press, 2006)
* Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy, by Nikhil Pal Singh (Harvard University Press, 2005)
* Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, by Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)
* American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, by Robert O. Self (Princeton University Press, 2003)
* Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist, by Judson L. Jeffries (University Press of Mississippi, 2002)
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
