Black Panther Party - The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution

The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution
Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams (eds)
Nation Books
2016
272 pp

The Black Panthers: Portraits From an Unfinished Revolution features photos of members of the Black Panther Party's rank and file. The subjects are profiled with a biography describing their post-Panthers work, and a brief interview where the subject describes the circumstances of their joining the party and the work they did as Panthers. Many of the former Panthers speak about the party's community work: their food programs and medical services, like the Winston-Salem NC Black Panther ambulance service. Not surprisingly, after the party's collapse, many of the Panthers went into community development, social work, and education.

The book features a couple of higher profile Panthers; Emory Douglas, the primary illustrator of the Black Panther newspaper, and some of the participants in the better known prison and court cases such as the Angola 3 and the Panther 21.

Black Panther Party - comic - 2011 - Portland's Black Panthers

Portland’s Black Panthers
Sarah Mirk
Khris Soden (illustrator)
The Dill Pickle Club
2011
Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party is a collection of scholarly essays on the histories of a number of Black Panther chapters outside of Oakland. While Comrades features the BPP in a number of mid-sized American cities such as Indianapolis and Winston-Salem, there was no essay on the Black Panthers chapter in Portland Oregon. A small organization devoted to publishing materials about Portland history called The Dill Pickle Club (now called Know Your City) has published a small (quarter-size) comic book titled Portland’s Black Panthers (available on their website and also through Pioneers Press) that gives a brief, illustrated history of that particular, less acknowledged and celebrated, chapter of the party.  

The story of the Portland Panthers follows a similar pattern to the chapters of other cities as discussed in Comrades. Founders Kent Ford, Percy Hampton, and others came together to protect the local black community from police harassment and relentless racism, and struggled to provide a variety of social service (including breakfast programs for children and testing for illnesses) to the poor.  While Portland’s Black Panthers does detail a large degree of conflict with local law enforcement, FBI, and the political establishment of the city, it also more or less portrays the chapter as fairly successful in achieving its goals of improving the conditions of Portland’s black community.

As far as I can tell from their respective websites author Sarah Mirk and illustrator Khris Soden’s interest lies in telling the (forgotten) history of the city of Portland through the comics form. Portland’s Black Panthers is one volume of a set of ten comics about different aspects of Oregon’s history, other topics include the state highways and voting rights for women. Each set is written by Mirk and illustrated by a different artist. Soden’s drawing style for Portland’s Black Panthers is very crisp and linear with little to no use of shading throughout the publication.

black power - book - 2006 - Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America
Peniel E. Joseph
Henry Holt & Company
2006
399 pages

Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour is a historical survey of ‘black power’, an umbrella term applicable to social movements dedicated to empowering black communities in 20th century United States.  The book charts a path from figures such as the pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey to the millenarian Nation of Islam, through to the American Civil Rights movement (and the specific organizations that constituted it) up to the Black Panthers.  Author Peniel E. Joseph (a professor of history working at Tufts University in Massachusetts) is as thorough as possible with his material charting the splintered path each leader and organization takes to their conclusion.  His narrative peters out as it moves into the 80s when it focused mostly on mainstream political figures such as Jesse Jackson (who was, himself, a civil rights activist as a young man), as a kind of apotheosis to the far more radical past that allowed figures such as him to move closer to the moderate centre.

Of course, the narrative is dominated by all of the figures that would be expected: Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr, Stokely Charmical, and finally the Black Panther leadership (Cleaver, Seale, Newton, etc).  There are, of course, a large number of other important figures but these are the names that drive Joseph’s (and possibly any) narrative of American black activism.  There are also a number of binaries at play in Joseph’s narrative: Marxist vs protestant influence, separatist vs integrationist, non-violent civil disobedieance vs armed resistance/violent struggle.  One thing that I hadn’t quite noticed until after completing the book is that it is primarily focused on the radical edge of black social movements.  Figures such as W.E.B. DuBois and organizations like his NAACP are discussed, of course, but are given far less attention than groups like the SNCC or the Black Panthers.  Also, the book has a detailed bibliography subdivided into publication type and the index is structured so that subtopics of major topics are indexed.

black panther party - book - 2007 - Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party

Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party
Judson L. Jeffries (ed.)
Indiana University Press
2007
310 pages

The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in late 1966 in Oakland California by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale as a means of providing protection to that city’s impoverished black population from police abuse and harassment.  The Oakland Panthers, including Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, quickly became celebrities of the American radical left, and their Aantics formed the image of the BPP that lived in the national imagination.  The Black Panther Party were not strictly local to Oakland, however, and charters in numerous large and midsized cities across the US were founded by black radicals in similar social settings. It’s these other BPP chapters that Judson L. Jeffries’  book Comrades focuses on.  

Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party is a collection of seven essays, each detailing the history of a different, non-Oakland, chapter of the Black Panthers.  Cities include Baltimore, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Winston-Salem N.C.  These chapters are contributed by a number of different scholars from a variety of institutions, although the editor dominates the book as one chapter is wholly written by Jeffries and he co-wrote three others.  These essays are quite detailed in their discussions although they combine to describe an overall pattern of external harassment that contributed heavily to the fall of each the individual Black Panther Party chapters. That is the pattern of stems from something Jefferies reveals in the introduction, that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had named the Black Panthers the most significant threat to the well being of the United States despite the fact that there were likely less than 400 members nationwide.  Each chapter discusses a specific Black Panthers chapter forming out of a need to organize for the black communities in those cities in the face of unchecked and rampant poverty.  In each city, the Panthers organize breakfast programs for children, testing programs for sickle-cell anemia and other forms of illness, and other community oriented programs.  Then, the local police department and judicial apparatus harasses the chapter out of existence, sometimes in a hail of gunfire (as occured in Los Angeles), sometimes simply through repeated raids and arrests on minor charges, as in Winston-Salem, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.



Comrades shows the Black Panthers, not as the purveyors of armed black power theatre they were often represented as (discussed in detail in Jane Rhodes excellent book Framing the Black Panthers), but as a radical group that showed a genuine concern for their local communities.  The histories of the various local chapters of the Black Panther Party as presented in Comrades display a side to the Party’s story that is, in fact, often washed away by a riptide of stories about police shootouts.  Converse to that, Comrades also investigates how those dramatic episodes at the heart of the BPP were used as justification by local police for the neutralization of the peripheral chapters (which were also prone to their own episodes of violence, albiet often in the face of relentless harassment by law enforcement).  Comrades tells the stories of these other, peripheral, chapters and in so doing, returns the organization’s image as one with the needs of its immediate community back to the centre of how the Panther’s representation.  

new left - book - 1989 - Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s

Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ‘60s
Peter Collier and David Horowitz
Summit Books
1989
352 pages

The suburban square-dom represented on the television series, MadMen, may represent what was actually the predominant mode of being for American's during the 1960s.  That was the world of the man in the grey flannel suit, one-dimensional man, organization man, the air conditioned nightmare, the mechanical bride, the paranoid style of American politics, these were the metaphors used to describe the prevailing social conditions by the sharpest critics of the era.  With some exceptions, popular culture has most frequently represented the socio-cultural features of that era produced in reaction against the dominant cultural order.  A new counterculture emerged to react to the suburbs, professional life, valorization of the military, religious and social tradition, family structure and political structures.  The era also gave us the term “counterculture”, invented by historian Theodor Roszak in 1968.  Roszak's term extends to social movements well beyond the 1960s, however that period has become the centre with all other aspects of countercultural history trapped in its orbit.  

Peter Collier and David Horowitz were there, in the 1960s, as active participants in the New Left.  Specifically, they were editors at Ramparts magazine which was one of the premiere leftist periodicals of the era.  Since the 1960s the pair have moved to the right, to the far right actually, and this book represents a look back upon their radical activities from their newfound ideological perch.  David Horowitz is now best known as a neoconservative bigot whose website, FrontPageMagazine.com is a popular purveyor of anti-Muslim ideas and rhetoric.  Horowitz (and to a lesser extent, Collier) is a practitioner of the paranoid style of American politics which can be read in his recent work that shows a failure to distinguish between radical Muslim groups and any other form of being for America’s tiny Muslim population, and also in his view that America is in danger of infiltration by radical Muslims who are uncritically supported by American leftists and academics.  Horowitz’s view is a paranoid fantasy that has less ground in reality than that old cold war fear that the US was in danger of communist takeover from the inside.  

Horowitz current project, as exemplified by the content on FrontPageMagazine.com is to construct America’s Muslim population as a threat to the United States for the purpose of creating a cultural climate that is dangerous to America’s Muslim population.  Horowitz’s FrontPageMag.com recently published commentary on the attacks in Norway by right-wing anti-immigration extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, suggesting that ‘The Left’ is already cynically  using this atrocious event to criticize anti-immigrant hate-bloggers for binding Islam to terrorism in their rhetoric.  The issue, clearly, is that these bloggers construction of terrorism as a Muslim (or leftist, alternatively) phenomena is threatened by Breivik’s rampage and therefore they must scramble to defend their chief weapon in the campaign to intimidate a tiny religio-ethnic population through symbolic violence.

The reason why I mention any of this is in part because its timely, Breivik’s day-long terror campaign has brought Horowitz’s name into my news feeds, but also because the roots of Horowitz’s bigotry and lack of intellectual consideration (despite an impressive education) can be found in Destructive Generation.  Some aspects of the book are quite interesting.  The first essay, titled ‘Requiem for a Radical’, about a lawyer named Fay Stender who dedicated her career to working with prisoners, and was particularly focused on the case of late Black Panther Party leader, George Jackson was especially fascinating.  Stender was a ‘movement lawyer’ focused on changing a corrupt political system through the courts.  Ultimately, however, a follower of Jackson shot her five times during a home invasion, and Horowitz and Collier represent the situation as the lawyer’s leftist values turning on her.  The authors extend this principle values gone awry to Stender’s milieu of movement lawyers who came to her defense when someone representing the people they helped almost killed her.  ‘Requiem for a Radical’ tells a story of the values of the sixties destructively colliding into one another and exploding across the new spaces created by the short-lived radical culture.  

The second essay ‘Doing It’ treads across nearby thematic ground to ‘Requiem for a Radical’.  It focuses on leftist values gone wrong, this time by examining the phenomena of the ultra-left group Weather Underground, an ultra-left group that broke from the larger national leftist organization, Students for a Democratic Society.  Horowitz and Collier provide details for the inner-workings of the group, describing how the WU's efforts to smash state power were frustrated by internal power struggles.  Furthermore, the authors describe behavior that, in their telling, the Weathermen considered subversive even though it was merely boorish.  An example was their description of a scene on an airplane where WU leader ‘J.J.’ (probably referring to Weatherman John Jacobs) while flying with Weatherwoman Bernadine Dohrn, began walking up and down the aisle to take food from other passengers.  Horowitz and Collier quoted Dohrn as stating “They (passengers) didn’t know we were Weathermen, they just knew we were crazy.  That’s what we’re about - being crazy motherfuckers and scaring the shit out of honkey America.”  This sentiments of the previous statement are not exactly revolutionary although they may echo through the actions and statements of a myriad of contemporary activist movements.  Horowitz and Collier successfully argue that the Weather Underground’s commitment to violence brings them into contact with the spirit of their book title.

After its first two essays, Destructive Generation becomes an articulate but mean spirited series of anti-left rants.  The book was published during the denouement of the Cold War era and it appears to speak about the 1960s as though they had never ended, as though the legacy of the 60s radical-left/commie-sympathetic zeitgeist was at a high-point during the 1980s.  In reality, those sentiments were never dominant although history has caused them to loom larger in the social memory.  Horowitz and Collier's rantings exemplify the paranoid style - their assertion that the spirit of the sixties was a continued threat during the Reagan years, despite America's fierce turn to the right during that decade, is made repeatedly by the authors.  ‘The sixties’ has become such a huge field in the study of counterculture, holding everything else in its orbit, that I appreciate when I find a text that is not purely laudatory of the period.  The authors 'critique' is seldom more than conspiracy theory as they speak of the left as an eternally unified movement that is fixed solely on the destruction of the United States - meanwhile they managed to grow up into people with changed perspectives.  They speak of the left as a social phenomena that is a threat to American freedom while never explaining what is threatening about it, which indicates that they were writing for a readership that already takes the dangers of the left for granted.  Furthermore, in an essay titled ‘McCarthy’s Ghost’ the authors argue that McCarthy was, current to their writing, being exploited by leftists who evoke the term ‘McCarthyism’ as a means of shutting down dialogue pertaining to a socially relevant issue.  This essay gives a glimpse into the ideological perspective of the authors, as anyone who has ever witnessed the evocation of Commie persecutor Senator Joseph McCarthy’s name in argument knows that it is always brought up in defense against an effort to shut down communication.  Horowitz and Collier end ‘McCarthy’s Ghost’ by arguing that many of McCarthy’s victims were genuine communists, and therefore the senator was doing good work.  The authors printed this statement without explaining why the ideals American freedom could not accommodate an American who was also a communist.

Destructive Generation is not so much a critique of the radical sixties as it is a work of Cold War era propaganda, against leftist political activity, that gives the surface appearance of being a wide-ranging critical-historical study.  Horowitz and Collier use their status as former New Left insiders to invest their neo-conservative anti-communist rantings with the credibility of people who have been there.  While they, at times, cite the criticisms American leftists had of the Soviet Union, for example, they mostly attempt to lead the reader to believe that American leftists were unified in their unquestioning support of the USSR’s struggle with the United States for global dominance.  Horowitz cites his own father’s break with the Soviet Union despite his lifelong adherence to Marxism, however everyone else on the political left is a secret soldier waiting for activation orders from Moscow.  The willingness to associate all leftists with America’s enemies, shown by Horowitz, is repeated in his current work where he and his editorial colleagues at FrontPageMagazine.com put all leftists, academics, and Muslims in league with radical Muslim terrorists.  It is such loose and acritical study of the flows of political sympathies that gives Horowitz his current status as a neo-conservative bigot.

My comments above are only a sampling of the contentious issues found in Horowitz and Collier’s book.  Destructive Generation is teeming with racist undertones, paranoid ravings, contradictions, historical distortions, and just a general meanness that indicates Horowitz and Collier have at least preserved a sense of humourless self-righteousness from their radical-left days.  This book is not a critique of the radical past to be read by other former radicals, instead it is a thin reminder to the people who voted for Regan that leftism is wrong, performed from a stage set with distorted figures and objects that resemble the forms of the 1960s.  Overall the book is not really useful as a history of 1960s radicalism although it is interesting as a study of attitudes towards the 1960s and of neoconservative attitudes towards leftist politics.

black panther party - book - 2007 - Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon

Jane Rhodes
Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of A Black Power Icon
The New Press
2007
404 pages


Jane Rhodes is, as of the time of this writing, the presiding Dean of for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Professor, and Department Chair at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnessota.  Much of her work focuses on black activism and the media representation of people of colour.  Judging from a quick survey of her publication titles, she often combines these two interests, which is the case with Framing the Black Panthers.  In this text, Rhodes charts a history of the Black Panther Party as it appeared in media of all kinds.

Rhodes begins her text with an analysis of the 1995 film Panther, directed by Mario Van Peebles.  Panther was a film by a black director that represented the Panthers positively as fighters for black freedom. In some sense Van Peeble's film is the cinematic culmination of a legacy of the Panther as a romantic revolutionary figure for the post-modern world of media and image driven politics.  After a lengthy analysis of Van Peebles’ film (and some other films that represent a black power ethos from the same period, including Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, and a brief mention is given to Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump).  Following her study of Van Peeble’s cinematic portrayal of the radical organization,  Rhodes proceeds to a comprehensive historical analysis of media and the Black Panther Party.

Framing the Black Panthers can be read as a microcosm of how radical politics appeared in the media during the 1960s.  At the first appearance of the Black Panthers in 1967, newspapers reacted immediately to the party with an oppositional, hostile tone. The BPP was founded in Oakland CA, where the two nearest major newspapers, The Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner, both immediately began attacking the Panthers in print following the emergence of the radical group.  These two publications consistently representing them as militant thugs without any coherent political platform perpetually on the edge of violence.  Incidentally, in the 1989 book Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties by former New Left leader, David Horowitz’s, the Panthers are remembered with the same venom that they were characterized with by their contemporary mainstream press. During the late 60s, however, the Panthers were discussed positively from a flourishing underground press and also began their own party newspaper (which is archived online here). The offices of the BPP became a target for police repression, as media consistently represented party as a paramilitary mob.  Through the dissemination of their own newspaper however, the Panthers entrenched themselves into the communities which they sought to defend (and elevate).  Furthermore, the popularity of their newspaper within poor black communities meant that the Panthers political program was read and understood by the people the BPP was reaching out to.

Rhodes investigates how the Panthers became accomplished media figures over the course of their careers in radical politics.  One particular photograph, a representation of Black Panthers co-founder Huey Newton enthroned in a large wicker chair with a Kalashnikov rifle in one hand and a spear in the other, became one of the iconic images of the late 1960s.  

The image was originally published in Ramparts magazine, but it developed a life of its own and was frequently used in the Panther’s own propaganda.  Rhodes described the Panther’s as an organization that was constantly concerned with the image it presented, with combating negative or racist portrayals, and with finding the widest possible audience for their messages.

Rhodes presents the Panthers as a force in radical politics that was always operating on two seemingly contraposed fronts: grassroots community organizing and the widespread dissemination of their ideas via media.  One of the most interesting chapters in Rhodes book is Servants of the People: The Black Panthers as National and Global Icons, which described how the Black Panther Party influenced subaltern nationalist groups, and Marxist revolutionary factions around the world.  Their ideas were influential, but so was their quasi-military all-black fashion and their mix of Marxist jargon and street talk.  The BPP were so influential because they were so successful in entering the realm of media, as Rhodes points out.

A final short note about Rhodes book.  A survey of her bibliography (which is divided into types of materials) shows a large number of books about the Black Panthers published in the decade before her own book's time of publication.  Rhode's book is relevant as the Panthers have entered another phase of media portrayals - representation in academic literature.

martin luther king jr, civil rights movement - book - 2008 - King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop

King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop
Harvard Sitkoff
Hill and Wang
2008
288 Pages

Greetings, I borrowed King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop from the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.

Harvard Sitkoff is an American Historian who taught at the University of New Hampshire where he is currently serving as professor emeritus.  Sitkoff is a scholar of the American Civil Rights movement and he has written a number of books on that subject.  King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop is his most recent book, and his only biography of a movement figure.  

King is a short biography of the celebrated Civil Rights leader.  Many scholars have devoted an enormous amount of energy describing King’s life, and if a researcher does not require a highly detailed account of a segment of King’s life then Sitkoff’s concise biography is probably sufficient.  This volume devotes the last seven pages of its text to the Sanitation Worker's strike in Memphis, for example, which was the issue King was dealing with at the time of his assassination.  Meanwhile the book Going Down Jericho Road by Michael K. Honey, a text that deals solely with the events pertaining to the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike, is over 400 pages in length.  While Sitkoff’s text is quite strong, my only grievance with the book is that he presents the bibliography as a ‘bibliographic essay’, where the references are strung together in paragraphs rather than listed as individual entries.  I find this form of referencing to be irritating to search through as the biblographic essay is much more dense, textually, than the traditional form of listed bibliographic references.

King: Pilgrimage to the Mounaintop depicts King as a man who realized his talent for speaking, and was thrust by his parishioners into the spotlight.  Sitkoff creates the sense that King was one of those men who was created by history, he had the talents to deal with the issues of his time, but it was his time that formed him into the leader he was.  One of the primary value of the book is that it depicts King as a man whose life was fraught with failures.  King was motivated to try, the success of his endeavours was never assured, and it was often blocked by circumstance.  Despite his Nobel laureate status and his ascension to the position of an unofficial founding father for the current age, King’s life was not a string of relentless success.  Sitkoff instead presents King as a man who did not falter in his path, despite occasional failure, towards an egalitarian vision of social harmony.

King adopted Gandhi’s principles of non-violent resistance and applied them to the struggle to attain equal rights for poor blacks in the United States.  King worked directly with many impoverished black communities, with varying degrees of achievment, although it was his early work in Selma and Montgomery Alabama that brought him the most success and attention.  The civil rights leader’s later successes came from not wavering from his dedication to non-violence.  Sitkoff presents King’s voice as diminishing towards the end of the 1960s, as the rise of a black power radicalism emerged with the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, and other radical factions.  Converse to King and many of the early civil rights groups, the radical organizations and leaders held much more liberal attitudes towards violence, often preaching it as an unwelcome but necessary part of the racial struggle in America.  King developed rhetoric to demonstrate a sympathetic understanding of a black will to violence, but he never condoned such action.  According to Sitkoff, however, King was constantly criticized for his proximity to the pro-violent groups, King was still the major figure of the movement even though his adherence to peaceful resistance was losing ground within the overall movement. Shortly before his death, King was held responsible for a march turned riot in Memphis that resulted in the death of a teenager.  King was accused by a white media establishment of failing to keep the peace, but King simply could not contain the anger of the poor communities he was trying to organize.

Sitkoff portrays King as an individual who was constantly feeling the tension between the constraining power of the establishment, the detractions of other civil rights factions, the white opposition, and the needs of the poor.   Furthermore, Sitkoff presents King as a man who was given to vice as a coping mechanism for dealing with the stresses of his position.  The leader’s life was fraught with fear, as King frequently received death threats, and Sitkoff tries to represent the inner battle King must have fought to overcome these terrors.  In so doing, Sitkoff creates a glimmer of the sense of what the experience of being a leader of history, may actually feel like.

In current popular culture, King's life has primarily been reduced to the speech he delivered in Washington DC in 1963.  Perhaps his image has been flattened further, to merely the line "I have a dream!"  When isolated, that line is merely a statement of desire for a boundless future, and can be inserted into a history of such expressions.  The line is depoliticized when its isolated from the rest of the speech, and decontextualized when, for example, no one has to remember that, several days after that speech was delivered, a bomb exploded in a predominantly African-American church in Burmingham Alabama, killing four little girls.  Now, in popular culture, the moment that line was delivered is almost cast as the moment racial tension broke and race was transcended in America.  Media apparitions such as the far-right mouthpiece, Glenn Beck freely appropriate King’s image for their own purposes.  Sitkoff’s brief biography is unlikely to successfully compete for dominance with any pop-culture constructions of the historic leader, but it still works to return depth to King’s image.