Framing the Black Panthers

The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon

Jane Rhodes

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780252099649
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

A potent symbol of black power and radical inspiration, the Black Panthers still evoke strong emotions. This edition of Jane Rhodes's acclaimed study examines the extraordinary staying power of the Black Panthers in the American imagination. Probing the group's longtime relationship to the media, Rhodes traces how the Panthers articulated their message through symbols and tactics the mass media could not resist. By exploiting press coverage through everything from posters to public appearances to photo ops, the Panthers created a linguistic and symbolic universe as salient today as during the group's heyday. They also pioneered a sophisticated version of mass media activism that powers contemporary African American protest. Featuring a timely new preface by the author, Framing the Black Panthers is a breakthrough reconsideration of a fascinating phenomenon.

1

FORTY YEARS IN HINDSIGHT: THE BLACK PANTHERS IN POPULAR MEMORY

In an early scene from the 1995 motion picture Panther, a small group of young, restless members of the Black Panther Party find themselves in an ugly confrontation with the Oakland, California, police as they attempt to monitor law enforcement activities in their neighborhood. They display all of the expected signifiers—afros, black berets, leather jackets, and scowling expressions. The rifle-bearing revolutionaries calmly line up as they resist the efforts of police officers to make them move and to disperse the growing, restive crowd of onlookers. In a particularly tense moment, Marcus Chong, the actor portraying Huey Newton, calls out to the crowd:

This is your business. Stay right here. You don't have to leave. The man is trying to run his usual fascist bullying tactics on you. The law book says as long as you are a reasonable distance—and reasonable is defined as eight to ten feet to be exact—you've got a right to observe the police carrying out their duties.¹

A voice from the throng answers, “Talk that good shit, brothers.” Another yells, “Amen to that.” As the standoff continues, the policeman in charge comes within inches of Newton and demands, “What do those guns mean?” The Black Panther leader responds: “They mean, pig, that the Black Panther Party declares that if you try to brutalize our community we are going to shoot you.” The crowd goes berserk, cheering and clapping to Newton's bravado. The victory belongs to the Panthers. The police, stunned and intimidated, slink back into their patrol cars and drive away.

The film, written by Melvin Van Peebles and directed by his son Mario Van Peebles, captures the spirit and texture of many African Americans’ collective memories about the revolutionary black nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s. Central to this memory are visions of direct, physical black resistance to white power; a resurgent black masculinity that protects family and community; a radical discourse that transforms the nation's democratic principles to serve the needs of the aggrieved; and a gleeful episode of triumph, no matter how fleeting nor at what cost. For a brief moment, these memories suggest, black folks were actually winning the war against white supremacy as embodied in the police. After watching the above scene, one black New York viewer repeated a line in the film and exclaimed, “Sweet Jesus, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” Black cultural critic Kristal Brent Zook took this sentiment even further when she declared, “Everyone I know loves Panther…. For a generation with no personal recollection of such a movement, Panther provides its viewers with the euphoria of possibility.” Similarly, another black writer waxed poetic about the film's impact, calling it “a truly inspirational film that illumines a history that hasn't been taught to young people, while reminding older audiences what their generation accomplished with its protest.” Panther was more than a film—it was an antidote to historical amnesia.²

This ecstatic response from a segment of the black audience suggests the powerful effect of recovering the memory of the Black Panther Party. To celebrate the image of the Panthers as heroes is an act of assertion and empowerment for many black Americans; to reclaim the Panthers is to return to a time when black rage openly identified and confronted the oppressor. Director Mario Van Peebles, like many African Americans of his generation, chose to create a nostalgic version of the Panthers and delivered this image to an audience eager to find hints of glory from the past. These memories draw on African Americans’ history and their present, on African Americans’ cultural productions as well as those from mainstream mass media.³

The act of remembering the Black Panthers is both individual and collective; people shape memories from their own subject position and from their exposure to images, words, and ideas. Collective memory is profoundly shaped by mass culture, which acts as the place where these memories emerge and make new meanings. Thus, collective memory is produced through the process of representation, and technologies including film, photography, and the printing press dominate how we remember. These technologies of memory, as Marita Sturken notes, can act as a screen by blocking out other memories that are difficult to represent. The prevailing memories of the Black Panther Party have been shaped by the images produced in the news media, art, and literature that circulated widely during the 1960s and 1970s and remain staples of contemporary culture.⁴

Cultural products in the last two decades, such as the film Panther, have been a force for producing countermemories—recollections that oppose or contradict the narratives produced by dominant culture. Often, dominant or official memories are those disseminated by historians, public officials, and journalists who establish themselves as authoritative chroniclers of the past. Groups on the margins of society—political, racial, and economic minorities—seek to refute mainstream interpretations and insert their own voices into how things are remembered. This is indeed the case for the Black Panther Party, whose legacy, according to two scholars, has been tarnished by inaccuracies and misconceptions that present the organization as anti-white, infantile leftist, controlled by a criminal underclass, and largely a creation of the mass media. Numerous writers, filmmakers, musicians, and other black cultural workers such as Mario Van Peebles rely on myth and history in the telling of the Panthers’ story but “retain an enduring suspicion of both categories,” in the words of George Lipsitz. These texts force a rewriting of history by calling on the audience's common experience with oppression and difference.⁵

Memory is manifest in many forms. It exists in oral histories and folklore, mass culture and government documents, built memorials and popular reenactments. Communities intentionally create archives, celebrations, monuments, and other sites of memory, or lieux de mémoire, to ensure that events and people are not forgotten. These popular texts and structures are open to endless uses and interpretations; they act at the intersection between history and memory and offer opportunities for catharsis and healing, or for inspiration and veneration.⁶

Since the 1990s, the Black Panther Party has been the subject of numerous memorializing projects—by those nostalgic for its brand of black nationalism, by those anxious to repudiate the excesses of the 1960s, and by those trying to find a middle ground between reification and condemnation. The prevailing sentiment of these memories is that the Black Panthers and their moment should not be forgotten. This is an impulse that resides deep within African American history. Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth-century freedom fighter and statesman, spent the last third of his life exhorting the nation not to forget the era of slavery and the trauma of the Civil War. In 1884 he said, “It is not well to forget the past. Memory was given to man for some wise purpose. The past is…the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines of the future, and by which we may make them more symmetrical.” In this sense, reclaiming memory is a radical act, a powerful political tool.⁷

The motion picture Panther begins as a historical narrative via black-and-white newsreel segments that juxtapose Martin Luther King Jr. against rabid white southerners, then move to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy and on to images of random police brutality. The opening sequence establishes the Panthers as black America's logical response to the chaos of the era. The film tells the story of the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party through the eyes of a fictional character, Judge, a Vietnam veteran who joins the group in his search for meaning and political action. Within the dramatic story line, the film follows the key people and events in the Black Panthers’ early days, from the founding of the organization by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale through the episodes of violent and sometimes fatal encounters with police and the protests to free Newton from prison that captured widespread media attention.

Panther's filmmakers also inject a sequence of events that emphasize government counterintelligence efforts to destabilize and eliminate the group. The local police and the FBI are portrayed as uniformly racist, corrupt, and inept. The film ends with the premise that a vast government conspiracy led to the introduction of crack cocaine in urban black America as part of a deliberate attempt to weaken the black power movement. Folklorist Patricia Turner, among others, has found that such conspiracy theories are part of the series of rumors that regularly circulate in African American communities. Turner notes that throughout history African Americans have embraced “the familiar notion that the dominant culture remains intent on destroying blacks—one body at a time,” a perspective that resonates throughout Panther. The fact that scholars and journalists have uncovered ample evidence of the government's agenda against the Black Panther Party gives African Americans a reason to find such conspiracy theories plausible.⁸

Just as the Black Panthers are constructed as the embodiment of black radicalism in the 1960s, the film Panther itself is representative of a revived expression of black rage in the 1990s. Mario Van Peebles was one of many black filmmakers of the period who sought to capture the anger and restlessness brimming in urban communities through the experiences of heroic black male subjects. Directors such as Spike Lee, Bill Duke, and John Singleton all deployed some version of this government drug conspiracy motif as their films stimulated a boom in “ghetto-action cinema.”⁹

These filmmakers were motivated by a desire for political expression and financial gain. In 1991 Mario Van Peebles spent $8 million and earned $47.6 million with his hit film New Jack City, an urban black gangster film that evoked the blaxploitation era with a hip-hop underpinning. This initial commercial success enabled him to land a major studio deal for Panther, which he made on a budget of $9 million. Hollywood hoped Van Peebles would produce another moneymaking venture that capitalized on the increasingly popular themes of black resistance and urban street life. His reputation for turning a profit also gave Van Peebles the power to negotiate the content of the film. “It took my previous movies to give me what they call, ‘the juice’ and the studio wanted a Mario Van Peebles’ movie,” he told one black newspaper. “[T]he most important element as a director was to have final cut because that is your film.”¹⁰

Van Peebles, like his counterpart Oliver Stone, who directed the docudrama JFK (1991), presented his film as an authoritative version of the past that offered a counternarrative to prevailing assumptions about the Black Panthers. In keeping with the era, JFK also advanced a complex conspiracy theory, in the process contradicting the authority of journalists and historians who had previously established the “facts” of the Kennedy assassination. Van Peebles did precisely the same thing by appropriating the deeply politicized images and rhetoric fashioned by mass media during the 1960s to establish the realist texture of his film. Panther mixed original television news footage of key moments in the black freedom struggle with invented scenes that mimicked realism down to the actions, words, and dress of actual Black Panthers. This blurring of fact/fiction and history/memory is a common cinematic technique; it allowed Van Peebles to create a historical text that established a kind of cultural authority in which he spoke for the generation of African Americans who came of age after the 1960s. This self-authorization was the filmmaker's effort at shaping America's collective memory about the Black Panthers through the lens of black masculinity. He counted on the power of popular culture to circulate this perspective, in the process mobilizing and validating a form of African American memory.¹¹

In this text the Black Panthers are remembered as carrying out a noble yet dangerous quest. They were valiant rebels who were unjustly silenced or murdered. The film deliberately attempts to preserve a particular interpretation of black protest in the sixties, and in so doing to shape the era's legacy. This underscored Van Peebles’ political aspirations. As one reviewer commented, “Panther represents a call to consciousness much more than a call to arms—a message as applicable to nineties youth as it was to sixties ones.” Mario Van Peebles told one national publication that his goal was to valorize his subjects. “We take the position that the heroes were common Black folks,” he said. “We've had plenty of time to see their heroes; when are we going to canonize us?” In another interview, he added that he wanted to reach contemporary urban youth who lacked the political ideology of activists in the sixties.¹²

But it was the involvement of Mario Van Peebles’ father, Melvin, that gave Panther its strongest and most strategic link with the black power era. The elder Van Peebles wrote the screenplay, based on his novel of the same name, and was deeply involved in marketing and promotion. Melvin Van Peebles looked back to the sixties as a pivotal moment in black history and identified the Panthers as “a living, breathing, all-American Rorschach test” about the problem of race. His authority on the subject can be traced to his 1971 independent hit film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which many view as the catalyst for the blaxploitation era. Melvin Van Peebles was the author, director, and star. Sweetback, deemed a “maverick breakthrough,” cost only $500,000 to make but grossed $10 million, attracting huge black audiences across the nation. The protagonist, Sweetback, was a defiant, hypersexualized black hero who spends most of the film fleeing from the police in a series of daring and shocking escapades. Sweetback was an underclass icon, using his street smarts and sexual prowess to fight against white supremacy, characteristically represented by the police. That year, Van Peebles told Life magazine that Sweetback “tells you about black life like it is—not like the Man wants to hear it is…. For the black man, Sweetback is a new kind of hero. For the white man, my picture is a new kind of foreign film.”¹³

Sweetback captured the imagination of young and working-class black audiences anxious for expressions of resistance. Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton hailed the film in a lengthy article in the Black Panther newspaper, saying it was “the first truly revolutionary Black film made and it is presented to us by a black man.” Van Peebles was not a member of the Panthers and didn't know any of the Panther leadership, but his work was quickly embraced as representative of a burgeoning radical black aesthetic. In 1999, Van Peebles reminisced that because of the film, he was accorded serious black nationalist credentials. “Sweetback was just the nail to hang my political coat on,” he said. Sweetback was successful in constructing a new category of black American cinema in part because of its ability to produce racially polarized audiences, thus setting the stage for a specifically black or white identification with the story and with the hero. One analysis found that white reviewers for both mainstream and leftist publications generally condemned the film for being exploitive and offensive, while black periodicals offered cautious support. The Van Peebleses, father and son, employed similar strategies in Panther by producing heroes that only some could love.¹⁴

Indeed, Panther contributed to, and was part of, a 1990s revival of popular interest in black power and radical protest. Prior to the film's release, the press heralded the resurgence of “Panthermania,” a term first coined by journalist Gail Sheehy in 1971. “The black cat is back,” announced a headline in Essence magazine, while the San Francisco Chronicle called new Black Panther organizations the “reincarnation of radicalism.” Publishers released a flurry of books that highlighted the group from the perspectives of both insiders and outsiders—among them Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power, David Hilliard's This Side of Glory, and Hugh Pearson's The Shadow of the Panther. An accomplished black actor named Roger Guenveur Smith opened his one-man play about Huey Newton at a well-known independent theater in Los Angeles. Smith's A Huey P. Newton Story eventually made its way into the theatrical mainstream, with performances at the New York Shakespeare Festival and a film version on cable television directed by Spike Lee. The simultaneous appearance of these varied cultural products was mutually advantageous for all—readers of the Black Panther memoirs were a natural audience for A Huey Newton Story, while the play's program carried an advertisement for the film Panther with the provocative claim “There is a Black Panther born in the ghetto every 20 minutes.” Implicit in this campaign to market the Black Panthers was a sense that the social and political conditions that were the catalyst for widespread black rebellion in the 1960s were producing another generation of the angry and disenfranchised.¹⁵

This resurgent interest in the Black Panther Party occurred during a period when urban communities of color across the United States boiled over with discontent, as starkly epitomized by the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. In the early 1990s, significant segments of the black population were gripped by economic disparity and decline. The black middle class increased significantly during the 1980s, with many moving to the suburbs, but the majority of African Americans were left out of this prosperity. The black-white income gap worsened after two decades of improvement, with college-educated black men earning about 80 percent of what their white colleagues made, and black unionized workers earning 85 percent of whites’ wages. Meanwhile, one-quarter of young black males were caught up in the criminal justice system, and their life expectancy actually declined, leading scholars to conclude that life chances for African Americans were getting worse rather than better. By the mid-nineties, cities across the nation were displaying the disastrous effects of deindustrialization, with significant white flight, the loss of stable, well-paying jobs, declining public schools, and a political climate that allowed abuses by law enforcement agencies to go unchecked. This economic restructuring occurred against the backdrop of a lack of political leadership....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface to the New Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Forty Years in Hindsight: The Black Panthers in Popular Memory
• 2. Black America in the Public Sphere
• 3. Becoming Media Subjects
• 4. Revolutionary Culture and the Politics of Self-Representation
• 5. Free Huey: 1968
• 6. A Trial of the Black Liberation Movement
• 7. From Campus Celebrity to Radical Chic
• 8. Servants of the People: The Black Panthers as National and Global Icons
• 9. The Rise and Fall of a Media Frenzy: The 1970s
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author