Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party

A New Look at the Black Panthers and their Legacy

Kathleen Cleaver, George Katsiaficas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135298395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This fascinating book gathers reflections by scholars and activists who consider the impact of the Black Panther Party, the BBP, the most significant revolutionary organization in the later 20th century.

PART ONE

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Revisiting the Liberation Struggle

1

Repression Breeds Resistance

The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party

Akinyele Omowale Umoja

The Black Panther Party (BPP) was one of the most significant radical movements in American history. As an organized political organization, the BPP existed from 1966 to 1982. Many activists and scholars argue that the BPP only existed as a revolutionary organization from 1966 until 1971, in the initial period of its existence. In these years the BPP emphasized armed resistance as a primary means of achieving social change. After 1971, historians of the BPP argue, the organization dropped its revolutionary, pro-armed resistance agenda to pursue reformist politics.¹ For example, Charles Hopkins's study “The Deradicalization of the Black Panther Party” argues that governmental repression was a central factor in transforming of the organization from radicalism to reformism: “The result of the interaction between the Panthers and the government from 1966 through 1973, was the transformation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) from a black radical organization to a deradicalized social protest group.”² While governmental repression led to the ascendancy of a reformist agenda for one faction of the BPP, this was not the only organizational response. Some BPP members committed themselves to involvement in or support of clandestine military resistance, which accelerated the development of the armed movement called the Black Liberation Army (BLA).

Some accounts of the Black Liberation Army argue that “the BLA grew out of the B.P.P. and its original founders were members of the Party.”³ The BLA is often presented as a result of the repression of the BPP and the split within the Panthers.⁴ Other participants in the Black revolutionary movement give a different perspective to the BLA and its relationship to the Panthers. For example, former political prisoner and Black revolutionary Geronimo ji Jaga suggests that the BLA as a movement concept pre-dated and was broader than the BPP. Ji Jaga's perspective is that several Black revolutionary organizations contributed to the ranks of the Black underground collectively known as the Black Liberation Army.⁵ Consistent with the view of ji Jaga, BPP and BLA member Assata Shakur asserts in her autobiography that “the Black Liberation Army was not a centralized, organized group with a common leadership and chain of command. Instead there were various organizations and collectives working together out of various cities, and in some larger cities there were often several groups working independently of each other.”⁶ Given the character of the BLA as a movement of autonomous clandestine units, one can understand the different interpretations of its origins and composition. While acknowledging the positions of ji Jaga and Shakur, this paper argues that the intense repression of the BPP did replenish the ranks of the Black Liberation Army. Since the BPP was the largest revolutionary nationalist organization of the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and '70s, its membership contributed greatly to the BLA. Panther participation in the BLA represented a continuation of the radical legacy of the BPP and was a response to the counterinsurgency strategy to destroy the Party and the Black liberation movement.

The role of the underground and the armed struggle was a critical issue in the split that occurred within the BPP in 1971. In the split, BPP chapters in Los Angeles and New York, the International Section of the Party, and other members were expelled by the national hierarchy led by Huey P. Newton. These factions of the BPP all supported armed resistance and viewed themselves, not the national hierarchy, as the sustainers of the revolutionary legacy of the BPP.

This study focuses on the influence of BPP members and supporters on the revolutionary armed movement, the Black Liberation Army. This aspect of the legacy of the BPP has not been emphasized in previous scholarly studies, an omission that reflects the willingness of scholars and popular accounts of the BPP to narrow its existence to the national leadership in Oakland. In the introduction to his recently published book The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, Charles E. Jones argues that the Oakland-based BPP existed sixteen years (1966-1982).⁷ This study asserts that the activity of the radical faction of the BPP, in the guise of the BLA, lasted just as long as that of the Oaklandbased Panthers, perhaps even longer, since it has current manifestations.

Scholarly research on the BLA is a challenging endeavor. Most books that focus on this organization have been journalistic or biographical.⁸ The journalistic texts have primarily relied on police or prosecution records. American newspapers have also reported on BLA activities based upon information offered to the media to support police investigations and prosecutions of Black radicals.⁹ The journalistic literature on the BLA is usually written from a perspective that is uncritical of American law enforcement and its counterinsurgency tactics. Since the BLA is a radical clandestine movement, its activities by their very nature are illegal, making it difficult for scholars to interview its members. Facts are often omitted from biographies and BLA statements to protect incarcerated or indicted members of the movement. The nature of the organization also does not provide the researcher with organizational archives. This study will utilize public documents of the BLA and other movement literature and statements and autobiographies from incarcerated BLA members, as well as from former BLA militants and supporters, as a balance to police and prosecutor-oriented literature and records.

The Black Underground and the Black Freedom Movement

A clandestine insurgent military force has existed in different periods of the Black freedom struggle in North America. The insurrections and attempted uprisings of enslaved Africans utilized secret, conspiratorial organizations. Insurgent Africans certainly could have brought with them a tradition of secret societies (e.g., Egungun, Oro, and Ogboni among the Yoruba peoples, Zangbeto in Dahomey, Poro in Sierra Leone). Conspiratorial networks were established to connect African fugitive communities with those on the plantation with the objective of creating a general uprising. Northern Blacks also created secret societies to aid the escape of fugitives and to plan for general insurrection.

In 1919, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) emerged as a radical Black secret society in American urban centers. The ABB advocated that Black people “organize in trade unions, build cooperatively owned businesses, and create paramilitary self-defense units.”¹⁰ The ABB dissolved as an organization in the late 1920s as its members decided to become the Black cadre of the American Communist Party.

In the 1950s and '60s, in several southern towns and rural locations, armed clandestine networks protected civil rights activists and activities, retaliated in response to acts of white supremacist violence, and served as an accountability force within the Black community during economic boycotts of white-owned business districts.¹¹ The secretive, paramilitary Deacons for Defense and Justice, considered by many to be the armed wing of the southern civil rights movement from 1965 through 1969, never identified the majority of its membership or revealed the size of its organization. Deacons selectively recruited, and its members understood that revealing organizational secrets could result in death.¹² In 1969 activists in the southern movement formed a clandestine paramilitary organization to retaliate against white supremacists who committed heinous acts of violence on southern Blacks.

The early 1960s saw the emergence of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) as a radical clandestine organization within the Black liberation movement. RAM was initiated in 1962 by northern Black radicals who defined themselves as “revolutionary Black nationalists” seeking to organize an armed struggle to win national liberation for the “colonized Black nation” in the United States.¹³ In 1963, due to political repression, the RAM cadre decided to “go underground.” In 1964 RAM members involved in Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) projects in the Mississippi Delta worked with SNCC field staff to develop armed self-defense units to defend the project. In the spring of 1964 RAM chairman Robert Williams, a political exile in Cuba, published an article titled “The USA: The Potential for a Minority Revolt.” Williams stated that in order to be free, Black people “must prepare to wage an urban guerrilla war.”¹⁴ During the fall of the same year, RAM organizers presented a twelve-point program to Black youth at the National Afro-American Student Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, including “development of Liberation Army (Guerrilla Youth Force).”¹⁵ The RAM cadre were active in urban guerrilla warfare during the urban uprisings occurring from 1965 through 1968.¹⁶ In his work Black Activism, Black political scientist Robert Brisbane stated that RAM's objective was “to build a black liberation army consisting of local and regional groups held together under a tight chain of command.”¹⁷ In 1967 RAM began to organize Black urban youth into a paramilitary force called the Black Guards. A RAM document, titled “On Organization of Ghetto Youth” projected developing the Black Liberation Army: “ In the early stages of the mobilization of Black ghetto youth we must prepare for the ultimate stage, a protracted war of national liberation; therefore the type of organization that must be established is a paramilitary organization.”¹⁸ This document referred to the paramilitary organization as the Black Liberation Army or BLA.¹⁹ Due to intensive federal and state counterinsurgency campaigns, in 1968 RAM decided to disband the organization and function under other names, including the Black Liberation Party, Afrikan Peoples Party, and the House of Umoja.

The above-mentioned efforts preceded the 1971 split within the Black Panther Party and the subsequent identification of the BLA by state and federal police. While often omitted from the historiography of the Black freedom movement, the concept of armed struggle and a Black underground has a long history and is a legacy that would influence the early development of the Black Panther Party.

The Black Panther Party and the Black Underground

The question of the underground was a principal issue for the Black Panther Party from its inception. Prior to founding the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense with Huey Newton, Bobby Seale was a member of the Revolutionary Action Movement, but Seale did not share RAM's insistence on the revolutionary vanguard being clandestine. RAM preferred primarily to interact with the public through mass front organizations; RAM structure, membership, meetings, and other activities were secret.

While Seale and Newton disagreed with RAM's clandestine posture, the BPP organized an underground from its earliest days. By developing an underground wing, the BPP leadership prepared for the possibility that its political activities would not be allowed to function in the public arena. In this context, the BPP envisioned a clandestine guerrilla force that would serve as the vanguard of the revolution. In 1968 Newton stated, “When the people learn that it is no longer advantageous for them to resist by going into the streets in large numbers, and when they see the advantage in the activities of the guerrilla warfare method, they will quickly follow this example When the vanguard group destroys the machinery of the oppressor by dealing with him in small groups of three and four, and then escapes the might of the oppressor, the masses will be overjoyed and will adhere to this correct strategy.”²⁰

The Panther underground was not openly referred to or publicly acknowledged; it was decentralized, with autonomous cells in different cities that were referred to by different names at different times. Some large cities contained several autonomous units. These underground units were all part of a movement concept called the Black Liberation Army (BLA). The BLA was broader than the BPP, representing the underground military forces of the revolutionary nationalist Black movement.²¹ By 1968 the official rules of the BPP stated “No party member can join any other army force other than the Black Liberation Army.”²² Besides serving as an urban guerrilla force, the Panther underground included an underground railroad to conceal comrades being sought by federal and state police. Clandestine medical units were also developed to provide care to BLA soldiers or Panther cadre wounded in combat.²³

The Southern California chapter of the BPP had an underground almost from its inception. Former Los Angeles gang leader Alprentrice “Bunchy” Carter virtually brought a military force into the BPP when he joined in 1967. Carter was the leader of the Renegades, the hard core of the Slausons. In the early 1960s, the 5,000-strong Slausons were the largest street force in Los Angeles. The same social forces (the desegregation struggle in the South, African independence, other anticolonial struggles, and so on) that were politicizing tens of thousands in their generation began to radicalize members of the Slausons, including Carter. Many of the Slausons and other street force organizations engaged in guerrilla attacks on police and nati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One Revisiting the Liberation Struggle
• Part Two Understanding the Fight for Freedom
• Part Three Envisioning the Imagination of the Movement
• Part Four Continuing the Resistance
• Appendices
• About the Authors
• Index