The United States in the World

Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War

Sean L. Malloy

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501712708
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Out of Oakland offers a wonderful case study in the possibilities and limitations of transnational organizing. ? Diplomatic History

In Out of Oakland, Sean L. Malloy explores the evolving internationalism of the Black Panther Party (BPP); the continuing exile of former members, including Assata Shakur, in Cuba is testament to the lasting nature of the international bonds that were forged during the party's heyday. Founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP began with no more than a dozen members. Focused on local issues, most notably police brutality, the Panthers patrolled their West Oakland neighborhood armed with shotguns and law books. Within a few years, the BPP had expanded its operations into a global confrontation with what Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver dubbed "the international pig power structure."

Malloy traces the shifting intersections between the black freedom struggle in the United States, Third World anticolonialism, and the Cold War. By the early 1970s, the Panthers had chapters across the United States as well as an international section headquartered in Algeria and support groups and emulators as far afield as England, India, New Zealand, Israel, and Sweden. The international section served as an official embassy for the BPP and a beacon for American revolutionaries abroad, attracting figures ranging from Black Power skyjackers to fugitive LSD guru Timothy Leary. Engaging directly with the expanding Cold War, BPP representatives cultivated alliances with the governments of Cuba, North Korea, China, North Vietnam, and the People's Republic of the Congo as well as European and Japanese militant groups and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

In an epilogue, Malloy directly links the legacy of the BPP to contemporary questions raised by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Chapter 1

“Every Brother on a Rooftop Can Quote Fanon”

Black Internationalism, 1955–1966

In November 1964, Robert F. Williams addressed an audience in Hanoi in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Williams, a former U.S. marine, had been the head of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) before fleeing into exile after an armed confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan resulted in federal charges. Arriving in Cuba in 1961, he operated under the protection of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government while publishing a newspaper (the Crusader) and hosting a radio show (Radio Free Dixie) in which he blasted white supremacy and promoted black unity with the Third World. Williams also traveled extensively in Asia, and it was on one of these trips that he arrived in Hanoi in 1964 to deliver a message of solidarity. Describing African Americans as a “captive people” suffering under “mainland American colonialism,” Williams ridiculed the 1964 Civil Right Act as “a farce of the first magnitude” while endorsing “the right of all oppressed people to meet violence with violence.” Following the example set by “our brothers of Vietnam, Cuba, the Congo, Mozambique, and throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America,” he declared, “our oppressed people are turning the streets of racist and imperialist America into battlegrounds of resistance.”1

Williams’s Hanoi declaration predated the events most commonly associated with the rise of black militancy in the United States, including the 1965 Watts rebellion in Los Angeles, the June 1966 “March Against Fear,” which heard Stokely Carmichael’s rallying cry of “Black Power,” and the formation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) in Oakland in October of that year. It also took place at a time when few in the United States were openly opposing the Vietnam War, much less endorsing “the right of our brothers of Vietnam to defend themselves against the armed aggression, repression and tyranny of U.S. imperialism.”2 Williams’s journey, which took him from North Carolina to Havana, Hanoi, and Beijing during the first half of the 1960s, provided inspiration to other black activists who would expand upon his efforts to link the black freedom struggle in the United States to the Third World and the expanding Cold War in Asia. It also represented the culmination of trends that had begun in the aftermath of World War II and continued to develop throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

This chapter explores the intersection of the domestic and international developments that shaped the creation of black-led movements that looked beyond the borders of the United States for support and legitimacy in the 1960s. By the mid-1960s, the notion that black Americans should seek solidarity with the Third World rather than looking to Washington for help had attracted advocates ranging from Williams to Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Vicki Garvin, Harold Cruse, and groups such as the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). The successes—and failures—of these pioneering figures helped pave the way for a new generation of activists, including key figures in the birth and development of the BPP. The meteoric rise of the Black Panthers to national and international prominence in the latter half of the 1960s was in large part made possible by the development of links between the Third World and black America in the preceding decade.

“Two, Three, or Many Vietnams”: The Evolution of Third World Anticolonialism

From nineteenth-century abolitionist Martin R. Delany’s sojourn in Africa through W. E. B. Du Bois’s involvement in pan-African conferences, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and the left-leaning anticolonialism of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) in the 1920s and the Council on African Affairs (CAA) during the 1940s, African American activists had long sought to link their struggles in the United States to the international realm.3 Du Bois’s 1903 declaration that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” set the tone for a global program of analysis and activism.4 Black internationalism, however, was never a monolithic phenomenon, and it underwent significant changes over time. With most of Africa and Asia in the grips of colonial rule during the first half of the twentieth century, there were relatively few opportunities for black Americans to seek effective allies outside the United States. In part because it was disproportionally represented by diasporic elites based in the United States or Europe, pan-Africanism prior to World War II was often tinged by the paternalistic attitude of Western advocates who hoped to “civilize” and “uplift” the mother continent.5 The rapid spread of decolonization in the wake of World War II and the emergence of an independent Third World in the 1950s changed this dynamic, shifting the leadership of the anticolonial movement toward indigenous nationalist leaders in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The term “Third World,” identifying those nonaligned states outside the U.S.- or Soviet-led Cold War blocs, was coined in 1952 by French demographer Alfred Sauvy.6 It was the Asian-African (or Bandung) Conference, however, that gave substance to the notion of a new group of nations with their own agenda independent of the superpowers. Like the sprawling nation of islands that played host to the conference, Indonesia, the twenty-nine states that gathered in Bandung in April 1955 were defined by their diversity. Representing some 1.5 billion people, these African, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations encompassed a dizzying variety of languages, religions, cultures, and forms of government. There were, however, several themes that not only united the participants at Bandung but also potentially linked them to communities of color in the United States.7 Opposition to the linked forces of white supremacy and colonialism was the keynote of the conference. Many of the assembled states represented, including the five conference organizers (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Burma, and Ceylon—now Sri Lanka), were less than a decade removed from winning their independence after a prolonged period of European colonial rule. Even nations such as China, which had remained at least nominally independent, had spent much of the century struggling to maintain their dignity and territorial integrity in the face of repeated colonial encroachments. The common experience of racialized colonialism provided a potential link between otherwise disparate nations and peoples. “We are united,” exclaimed Indonesian president Sukarno in his opening address, “by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism.”8 Historian Cary Fraser has asserted, “The Afro-Asian conference was midwife to an international order in which the politics of race was an essential factor in the calculus of power.”9 In fact, race had long been an “essential factor” in the international colonial order created by the West. Bandung’s contribution was to not only acknowledge this reality, but also to explicitly challenge the racial ideology of white supremacy that sustained colonialism. Among the ten principles formally adopted by the conferees on April 24, 1955, was the “[r]ecognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.”10 Enunciated at Bandung by independent states that combined to account for more than half the world’s population, this combination of anticolonialism and antiracism offered people of color around the world an alternative lens with which to view their place on the world stage.

The post-Bandung landscape was dominated not by loose transnational coalitions of diasporic anticolonial activists, but rather by postcolonial national governments in the Third World. “As a naked celebration of diplomatic protocol and the elevated status of its participants,” historian Jeffrey James Byrne observed, “the [Bandung] conference suggested that statesmanship was the ultimate expression of individual and national liberation. The organizers’ formalization of Third World relations introduced a new sense of hierarchy to the anti-imperialist scene.”11 This shift posed both opportunities and dangers for African Americans. Nations led by former colonial subjects and fellow victims of white supremacy and now boasting their own borders, armed forces, communications networks, and seats at the United Nations could make for powerful allies. It remained unclear, however, if these newly independent states were willing to go beyond rhetorical support for colonized peoples still struggling for their freedom. Many Third World nations had their own internal problems with ethnic minorities and were reluctant to set the precedent that anticolonial solidarity or racial affinity should trump national sovereignty, particularly if it meant directly challenging an economic and military superpower such as the United States. And unlike the early days of the pan-African movement, when figures like Du Bois had operated on equal footing with fellow black internationalists, in a post-Bandung world African Americans would be approaching these new nations as supplicants.

The repressive domestic atmosphere of the 1950s initially hampered the ability of African Americans to even attempt to navigate the postcolonial landscape. In the decade that followed, however, the rapid spread of decolonization combined with developments in the Cold War to provide new potential allies and models in the Third World. Of particular relevance to the evolution of the U.S. Black Power movement was the emergence of revolutionary governments in Cuba and Algeria. The triumph of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution in 1959 and the victory of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in its war for independence from France two years later offered a new template for Third World liberation. In both cases guerrilla warfare campaigns brought to power governments that were committed not only to a form of socialism at home, but also to exporting anticolonial insurgency. The anticolonialism and antiracism enunciated at Bandung remained central in the 1960s, but in Cuba and Algeria these values found new and more aggressive champions willing to directly confront First World colonial powers. In the process they provided both practical and ideological support for a new generation of black activists in the United States.

Though Cuban foreign policy oscillated considerably during the 1960s, a recurring theme in the early years of Castro’s government was that its survival depended on the success of other revolutions in the Western Hemisphere and beyond. This doctrine, epitomized in Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s call for “two, three or many Vietnams … throughout the world,” went beyond rhetoric to include material support for insurgencies from Bolivia to the former Belgian Congo. The combination of Guevara’s foco theory of guerrilla warfare, which held that small groups of committed rebels could successfully initiate a revolutionary struggle without waiting for a mass popular uprising, and Castro’s willingness to commit his government to providing direct assistance in support of this proposition, pushed the boundaries of Third World anticolonialism much further than had been contemplated at Bandung.12 Among the first recipients of aid from the new Cuban government was the Algerian FLN. After successfully ousting the French in 1962, the new Algerian government under Ahmed Ben Bella went on to offer material support and a base of operations to groups ranging from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to the African National Congress (ANC) and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF).13 By the latter half of the 1960s, Cuba and Algeria would become important destinations for the Black Panthers and other African American revolutionaries seeking shelter and support.

Beyond their practical contributions to a more militant strain of anticolonialism, the Cuban and Algerian revolutions also led to a sharpened focus on the links between race, culture, nationalism, and revolution in both the Third and First Worlds. Although its domestic record when it came to confronting the legacy of white supremacy in Cuban society was mixed, internationally Castro’s government enthusiastically expanded on the antiracism of Bandung by linking its support for revolution in Africa and Latin American to a solidarity rooted in the experience of racialized Western colonialism.14 Nor were Cuban efforts to link race, revolution, and anticolonialism confined to the Third World. From Castro’s dramatic visit to Harlem in September 1960 (where he and the Cuban delegation to the UN stayed at the Hotel Theresa) to hosting a range of African American dissidents and exiles, the new revolutionary government actively cultivated links to the black freedom struggle in the United States throughout the first half of the 1960s.15

While less directly relevant to the situation of African Americans, the Algerian revolution ended up producing arguably the single most important statement on race, identity, and decolonization in the twentieth century. The Martinique-born and French-educated psychiatrist Frantz Fanon authored several landmark studies on race and colonialism in the 1950s and early 1960s. His most influential work, and the one that won him the attention of Black Power advocates in the United States, was born of his experience fighting with the FLN in Algeria. The Wretched of the Earth, published shortly before Fanon’s death in 1961, linked the struggle for Third World independence to a decolonization of the mind among racialized colonial subjects. As part of this process, Fanon argued, violence against colonial oppressors was “a cleansing force” that “rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude.”16 Anticolonial violence was not new—the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, for example, had attracted international attention and divided the civil rights community in the United States during the 1950s.17 Nor did Fanon uncritically celebrate violence as a solution to all of the problems ailing the colonized world. But in linking the willingness to forcefully confront racialized oppression to an exploration of the psychological effects of colonialism and white supremacy on its victims, Fanon provided a potential bridge between decolonization in the Third World and the struggles of people of color in the First World. He also challenged Marxist notions that the industrial working class was the sine qua non of revolution. Fanon highlighted not only the rural peasantry but also the lumpenproletariat, “the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “Theory with No Practice Ain’t Shit”
• 1. “Every Brother on a Rooftop Can Quote Fanon”: Black Internationalism, 1955–1966
• 2. “Army 45 Will Stop All Jive”: Origins and Early Operations of the BPP, 1966–1967
• 3. “We’re Relating Right Now to the Third World”: Creating an Anticolonial Vernacular, 1967–1968
• 4. “I Prefer Panthers to Pigs”: Transnational and International Connections, 1968–1969
• 5. “Juche, Baby, All the Way”: Cuba, Algeria, and the Asian Strategy, 1969–1970
• 6. “Gangster Cigarettes” and “Revolutionary Intercommunalism”: Diverging Directions in Oakland and Algiers, 1970–1971
• 7. “Cosmopolitan Guerrillas”: The International Section and the RPCN, 1971–1973
• 8. The Panthers in Winter, 1971–1981
• Epilogue: “Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us”: From Oakland to Ferguson
• Notes
• Index