The following speech was delivered on the 59th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party and is reprinted here with minor edits. You can listen to the original speech on episode 21 of Naptown People’s Radio.
Introduction
The Black Panther Party, as we’ve come to know it, was formally founded on October 15, 1966, 59 years ago today. The Panthers are often either romanticized or subjected to disproportionate and often ahistorical scrutiny on the left. Both errors stem from a superficial understanding of the material conditions that birthed the organization, defined its context, and posed the immediate obstacles against which they struggled in their pursuit of achieving “All Power to the People.”
In this presentation, I want to take the perhaps outsized role the Panthers play in the left’s imaginary today as an opening to delve more deeply into the conditions of their formation and their ideological and political contributions to the struggle—all lessons we can draw on today.
The Party’s formation
As working-class students at Merritt College in Oakland, California in the early 1960s, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale were both deeply entrenched in the theories and daily reality of the Black community. Born in Louisiana in 1942, Newton was the youngest of seven children who could hold his own in a fight, with drug dealers and hustlers and, after learning to read and write, on a university stage. While his father, a Minister at the Bethell Baptist Church, never encouraged his children to fight, “he taught us to play fair,” something that only got him so far on the street. Each proved invaluable. Each brought different benefits and consequences. Fighting hurt and built friendships, it’s even how Huey met David Hilliard, who would go on to become a leading theoretician of the Party [1]. It hurt but only temporarily.
From the hustlers he got affirmation of his spontaneous resistance to the laws of white supremacy and capitalism. Huey first supported the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro, as well as Paul Robeson, because his high school teachers opposed them [2]. They also imparted in him the confidence to pursue education on his own terms.
Nothing was more fundamental than his commitment to teach himself to read and write over the course of two years. By then, he realized the hustlers had only false solutions. While the pain from fights went away, Newton said, “the shame” from being illiterate wouldn’t. The benefits never left, either. He started studying his older brother, Melvin’s, poetry books, and then Plato’s Republic [3]. “It was my studying and reading in college,” which he started in 1959, “that led me to become a socialist [4].
During a college protest against the U.S. Blockade against Cuba in 1962, Newton met Bobby Seale. During a discussion afterwards, the younger Huey (who was five years the junior of Bobby) won Bobby over to supporting the Cuban revolution and the limitations of the mainstream civil rights organizations [5].
Seale came from Texas and a working-class family. He always had a sense of justice and often the fortitude to act on it, even spontaneously. After high school, he drifted until joining the air force before a racist attack ended that stint. Both from the working and oppressed classes, they were dissatisfied with the emerging Black radical groups at the time because they were generally disconnected from the people and confined themselves to the realm of ideas and rhetoric. Seale and Newton were organizing in their communities, by contrast.
A formative year in the Black struggle
The formation of the Black Panther Party came toward the end of a pivotal year for this iteration of the Black struggle. Earlier that year, on June 16, 1966, then-Stokely Carmichael, a Black radical activist born in the Caribbean, had graduated from Howard University and was the newly-appointed Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), uttered the words “Black Power” to a surprising effect. Carmichael’s speech was part of the “March Against Fear,” initiated by James Meredith and, at first, opposed by the SNCC. Soon after, as detailed below, circumstances forced the SNCC to join the ranks of the March along with others.
As the sun started setting on June 16, Carmichael and others scouted ahead to begin preparing for the encampment at the Stone Street Elementary Negro School in Greenwood, Mississippi. Despite its name and location, the school was under the control of the local white ruling class who utilized their police force to “protect” it from the peaceful marchers. Because Carmichael didn’t hesitate in the face of the police he was arrested. Released hours later, he walked out of jail to a crowd of about 1,500 people. Walking up to the microphone, Carmichael reaffirmed his defiance against the white cops. The cheers magnified as he called on others to do the same. He stated it was time for “Black Power.”
It’s unlikely Carmichael knew that this particular vocalization of Black Power as a rallying cry would almost immediately become a central feature, inspiration, and site of contestation in the Black community and the Black liberation struggle in the U.S., provoke terror in the white power structure, and traverse the globe to guide the struggles of the oppressed for self-determination and socialism worldwide. As it reverberated globally, it would even transcend racial categories, let alone outlast Carmichael’s life, well after he took the name Kwame Ture. This wasn’t the first time these two words were put together in this order. Richard Wright wrote a book with the title the previous decade. As Rhonda Y. Williams writes, Carmichael’s SNCC comrade Willie Ricks “had begun testing out the phrase ‘Black Power’ in the community” [6].
On June 5, while enrolled at Columbia University law School, James Meredith initiated a 220-mile one-man walk throughout Mississippi to mobilize Black voters. Given the notoriously racist extra-state and state-sanctioned violence of the state, Meredith asked for, but did not receive, any federal protections. On the second day of the March, white vigilante Aubrey James Norvell shot Meredith in an assassination attempt that put Meredith in the hospital. The racist attack provoked a counterreaction, with SNCC deciding to join. Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joined the march. As Fred Powledge noting how the domineering presence of Dr. MLK Jr. was barely audible as the press covering the recommenced march increasingly listened “to a catchy phrase that was being shouted by SNCC Field Secretary Willie Ricks: ‘Black Power” [7]!
SNCC’s previous Chairman was John Lewis, who shared a history of militant struggle in the organization along with Carmichael. Under Lewis’ leadership, SNCC drafted an incisive and politically powerful speech for the famous “March on Washington” in 1963. The original draft linked Black oppression to capitalist exploitation to demand more than “equality” under the existing order:
We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. They have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all…. What is there in this bill to ensure the equality of a maid who earns $5 a week in a home whose income is $100,000 a year? [8]
Dissatisfied with the limitations of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Lewis articulated SNCC’s position clearly, saying “Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets” but “we must say to the politicians that there won’t be a ‘cooling-off’ period” [9].
Thus, the typical framing we hear of nonviolent vs. violent or Malcolm vs. Martin or even integration vs. segregation does not capture the essence of the Black Liberation struggle during this period. It was in fact the passage of legislation that let loose the full militancy of what we might call the attempt at a Second Reconstruction in the U.S.
Two Panther Parties
In August 1966, a Black Panther Party formed in New York City, attracting veterans like Audley Moore and Adam Clayton Powell. However, a debate over boycotting Harlem Schools ultimately led to a poisonous factionalism that rendered the group irrelevant far too soon.
But both Black Panther Parties—in NYC and Oakland—got their symbol from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an SNCC project spearheaded by Carmichael. That Carmichael’s “Black Power” originated in a reformist strategy of the U.S. electoral system speaks to the slogan’s openness and Carmichael’s own politics at the time.
Back in Oakland, however, Newton’s legal knowledge served him well. He beat several petty cases with his knowledge. He would then use that knowledge to organize the Black Panther Party for Armed Self-Defense, as it was originally named.
They first recruited Bobby Hutton, who was there for their first public display of armed Black Power. Newton, Seale, and Hutton were driving around North Oakland on police patrol when they started tailing a police car. All three men were armed with weapons and a law book. The guns were clearly visible, and they got into a heated exchange with the cops after being pulled over. People rushed out of their homes to watch three young Black men wield the white man’s law in their favor. The cops eventually left, but not without writing Seale a ticket for improperly securing his license plate [10].
For several months, their armed patrols continued and attracted a small but dedicated cohort of recruits. New recruits procured weapons and they sold Mao’s Little Red Book to raise funds for them.
The next two years the Panthers grew rapidly. Its recruits were attracted not so much by their ideology but by their actions, specifically their boldness when confronting the police. Black Panther Party members staged a dramatic demonstration by walking into the California State House with shotguns to bring attention to their Ten-Point Program, they were catapulted into the national spotlight. Over the next two years, the Black Panthers developed into a major national organization with thousands of members. Within three years they had 35 chapters across the country, including inside prisons.
At the same time, various other groupings, including the Republic of New Afrika were formed. None were more hunted than the Black Panthers however, making their relatively short lifespan all the more impressive.
Black Power is people’s power
While Carmichael, who joined the Panthers a brief period, never presented a clear articulation of what Black Power was, how to get it, or for what purposes to wield it, the Panther’s did. In an interview with the Movement, Huey said:
Black Power is really people’s power. The Black Panther Program, Panther Power as we call it, will implement this people’s power… Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny. We advocate and we aid any people who are struggling to determine their destiny. This is regardless of color. The Vietnamese say Vietnam should be able to determine its own destiny. Power to the Vietnamese People. [11]
They could give a clear articulation because they had a clear worldview.
As David Hilliard, Chief of Staff and also a main Party ideologue who played a key role in their political education programs wrote: “The ideology of the Black Panther Party is the historical experiences of Black people in America translated through Marxism-Leninism” [12]. This was, of course, while the Party was growing and before Newton tried articulating a new theory of intercommunalism.
Survival programs: Tactics for larger project
Earlier I said that their recruits were attracted by their actions, but their actions were ideologically informed. They were above all popular educators. Their various community and survival programs were educational tactics; they weren’t a charity. Fred Hampton is explicit about this: As Fred Hampton put it:
Our Breakfast for Children program is feeding a lot of children. We sayin’ something like this—we saying that theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit. You got to have both of them… We have a theory about feeding kids free. What’d we do? We put it into practice. That’s how people learn. A lot of people don’t know how serious the thing is. The Breakfast for Children program is run in a socialistic manner. People came and took our program, saw it in a socialistic fashion not even knowing it was socialism. [13]
The Panthers were a revolutionary Party striving to be a vanguard in the revolution. How does the free breakfast program fit into such a project? Many on the left attacked it (along with their 10-Point Program) as “reformist” by underground and ultra-leftist groupings.
In a polemic against the Revolutionary Action Movement, Newton stated the simple truth that you can’t go underground without first learning from, educating, working with, and earning the trust of the people:
Many would-be revolutionaries work under the fallacious illusion that the vanguard party is to be a secret organization that the power structure knows nothing about, and the masses know nothing about, except for occasional letters that come to their homes by night. Underground parties cannot distribute leaflets announcing an underground meeting. These are contradictions and inconsistencies of the so-called revolutionaries. [14]
This is why we refer to Indy Hope Packages as political direct-aid and why it’s organized around a 10-Point Program [15]. It’s socialism in practice; people taking care of each other but without the illusion that any program or any number of programs can replace revolution. They are tactics to learn from and teach people, including Hope Packages volunteers and recipients, that the state doesn’t care about working and poor people. We build solidarity through struggle.
From revolution to counterrevolution
Too often, the Panthers are situated within the domestic context only. That’s important, but as Marxists, we stress the primacy of the international situation. The Panthers arose during the era of global revolution, where almost 3/5 of the world was living under socialist governments or anti-colonialist governments. They saw themselves as a domestic manifestation of that global class struggle. And because they had the program, the support, and most of all a grouping of real organic leaders—like Hampton, Huggins, and others—they were the “greatest threat” according to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI and CIA told the Justice Department to wipe them out by the end of the 1960s, and they engaged in assassinations, infiltration, harassment, arbitrary arrests, false propaganda, and more to do just that.
According to one federal snitch, “there were so many informants and provocateurs” working for the feds that they frequently ratted each other out [16]. By the end of the decade, the government killed at least 19 Panther leaders. Many fled to seek asylum in Cuba or the People’s Republic of China.
Huey P. Newton, arrested on trumped up charges of murder and assault, sought asylum in Cuba between 1974-1977. When he returned, he was acquitted twice and had his charges dismissed.
But by then, the era of global revolution was nearing its end. The domestic counteroffensive by the U.S. ruling class was going international with a full-court press on the Soviet Union, and as the 1980s set in the era of global counterrevolution was in full swing.
There are myriad reasons the Panthers legacy was so short, some subjective and others objective. But what matters is how many rich lessons this short legacy holds for us today, those of us still dedicated to making a revolution in the belly of the beast.
References
[1] Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Penguin Books, 1973/2009), 21-22.
[2] Ibid., 50.
[3] Ibid., 55.
[4] Ibid., 70.
[5] Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 21.
[6] Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2015), 128.
[7] Fred Powledge, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made it (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1992), 355.
[8] John Lewis, Walking with the Wind (New York: Hartcourt and Brace, 1998), 217.
[9] Ibid., 218.
[10] Bloom and Martin Jr., 45-46.
[11] Huey P. Newton, The Black Panthers Speak, ed. P.S. Foner (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1970/2014), 61.
[12] David Hilliard in Ibid., 122.
[13] Fred Hampton, “Speech by Fred Hampton,” The Movement 5, no. 12 (1970): 12.
[14] Huey P. Newton, “The Correct Handling of a Revolution,” The Black Panther 2, no. 3 (1968): 21.
[15] Hope Packages, “Neither Charity nor Mutual Aid: Hope Packages’ New 10-Point Program Articulates a Realizable Political Vision,” Indianapolis Liberator, 26 October 2023 (available here).
[16] See Eugene Puryear, Shackled and Chained: Mass Incarceration in Capitalist America (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2013).
Featured image: Black Panther Party artwork. Credit: Black Panther Party (Public Domain).