Click on the title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the Black Panther Party for background information on that at one time important organization in the black liberation struggle.
February Is Black History Month
Free Mumia! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party
A Book by Mumia Abu-Jamal
A Review by Paul Cone
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 834, 15 October 2004.
“FOR ME, POLITICAL life began with the Black Panther Party.
“When an older sister named Audrea handed me a copy of The Black Panther newspaper around the spring of 1968 my mind was promptly blown. It was as if my dreams had awakened and strolled into my reality.
“I read and reread the issue, tenderly fingering each page as if it were the onion-skinned, tissue-like leaf of a holy book. My eyes drank in the images of young Black men and women, their slim and splendid bodies clothed in black leather, their breasts bedecked with buttons proclaiming rebellion, resistance, and revolution.
“I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I scanned photos of armed Black folks proclaiming their determination to fight or die for the Black Revolution.
“It would be some months before I would formally join something called the Black Panther Party, but, in truth, I joined it months before, when I saw my first Black Panther newspaper.
“I joined it in my heart.
“I was all of fourteen years old.”
We Want Freedom is a firsthand account of life in the Black Panther Party (BPP) by death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The story Jamal tells is that of the Panthers’ foot soldiers, the very young men and women, like himself, who devoted their lives to the cause of revolutionary struggle against black oppression. Jamal dedicates this book in part “To those young idealistic souls who wore the black and the blue. To those who sold papers in the dead of night, in smoky bars, and in the freezing grips of the wind (especially in the East). To those loving women and sensitive men who rose from their beds at five a.m. to prepare hot breakfasts for schoolchildren from coast to coast.”
Jamal’s book captures the finest qualities that are embodied in militant fighters for the oppressed and exploited. Mumia recalls:
“The days were long.
“The risks were substantial.
“The rewards were few.
“Yet the freedom was hypnotic. We could think freely, write freely, and act freely in the world.
“We knew that we were working for our people’s freedom, and we loved it.
“It was the one place in the world that it seemed right to be.”
Thanks to this book, the many young black men and women whom the FBI warned about “succumbing to revolutionary teachings” are no longer “nameless” and “faceless” as the racist exploiters have tried to make them.
We Want Freedom tells the story of the Black Panther Party’s origins and subsequent destruction less than a decade later through the vicious COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) campaign, inflamed by internal factionalism. Jamal gives personal reminiscences of the Philadelphia chapter, of which he was a founding member and Lieutenant of Information. Jamal describes with pride and passion the free breakfast and other community programs with which the Panthers sought to “serve the people.” He tells of how the Black Panthers defied the racist rulers by expressing solidarity with the Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, including their bold offer to send troops to fight alongside the Vietnamese against bloody U.S. imperialism.
Most compelling in this powerful book are Jamal’s accounts of the young men and especially women, born of poverty in the hellish American ghettos, who joined the fight for black freedom. There was Regina Jennings, a drug-addicted 16-year-old who after hopping a plane in Philadelphia stormed into the Oakland office demanding to join the party—which took her in a few days later, when she was sober, and helped her kick her habit. Jamal quotes Naima Major, who as a 17-year-old National Negro Scholar shunned college to travel to Oakland to join the Panthers. “Devoted to the black revolution and the ten point program, I commenced with baby in sling to doing the hard community work required of all Panthers, organizing poor women like myself, planning and supporting free schools, writing letters for people who couldn’t write, demanding decent housing for people who were afraid of the landlord, helping get the newspaper out, health cadres, food cadres, you name it. Did some dangerous work too, and studied Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Mao like a religious zealot.”
We Want Freedom provides a riveting account of the campaign of terror leveled at Jamal and his comrades by the FBI and cops, who were determined to destroy the Panthers by any means necessary. Mumia devotes a chapter to the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO, noting, “The Bureau used its enormous power, influence, and contacts to intimidate politicians. It used the omnipresent press to hound people out of their jobs. It sabotaged allegedly free elections. It destroyed marriages. It shattered families. It fomented violence between political and social adversaries.”
With characteristic modesty Jamal says not a word about his own fight for life and freedom against the racist frame-up that keeps him in the shadow of death on Pennsylvania’s death row. Yet on every page of We Want Freedom the reader can see why the government has targeted this man for so long. Jamal was convicted in 1982 on frame-up charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981. From the moment of his arrest, the prosecution sought to hang Jamal with his BPP background. The cover photograph of We Want Freedom comes from a January 1970 Philadelphia Inquirer interview with Jamal, then a 15-year-old Black Panther Party spokesman. The interview was used by the prosecution as exhibit number one for Jamal’s execution. As Jamal recalled in the 1990 Partisan Defense Committee video, From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal, “The word Black Panther means different things to different people, depending on their perspective, depending on their history, depending on their political orientation. The prosecutor knew that exceedingly well.... I saw when it hit the jury, it was like a bolt of electricity.”
To secure the death sentence for Jamal, prosecutor Joseph McGill inflamed the nearly all-white jury with the grotesque lie that Jamal’s membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he was a committed cop killer who had been planning to kill a cop for 12 years. As readers of this book will see, and as confirmed by Mumia’s own COINTELPRO files, it was the kill-crazy Feds and Philly cops who planned to get Jamal “all the way back then”—i.e., from 1 May 1969, when he and his comrades made their first public appearance in a rally outside the State Building in Philadelphia to demand freedom for imprisoned Panther leader Huey P. Newton.
The Frame-Up of Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man! His case is a textbook example of a classic racist political frame-up. For three years both Pennsylvania state courts and federal courts have refused to even consider testimony from Arnold Beverly that he, not Jamal, shot and killed officer Faulkner, as well as a mountain of supporting evidence. They have also rejected evidence discovered over two years ago: the sworn account of court stenographer Terri Maurer-Carter of a conversation she overheard in the courthouse where Mumia was tried. In that conversation, judge Albert Sabo, who sentenced Jamal to death, declared in regard to Jamal’s case, “I’m going to help ’em fry the n----r.”
With this vulgar promise, “king of death row” Sabo speaks not just for himself but for this country’s racist rulers, who waged a bloody war of disruption, frame-up and extermination against the Panthers and other radical black activists. A directive from FBI headquarters advised its agents that since the “purpose ...is to disrupt...it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.” In 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover vowed, “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” Under the ruthless COINTELPRO vendetta 38 Panthers were killed and hundreds more railroaded to scores of years in prison hellholes.
The young men and women Mumia describes lived with the awareness that every day could be their last. After Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated in a hail of bullets in the early morning hours of 4 December 1969, Mumia was one of a contingent of Philadelphia Panthers who drove to Chicago for the commemoration. Jamal recalls: “When we arrived at the office, we were walked over to the apartment and saw the holes making the walls look like Swiss cheese. We saw the mattress, caked with blood, where Fred and his fiancée lay that fateful night, the bullet holes lining the walls, tactile markers of government hate.”
Four days later the cops raided BPP headquarters in Los Angeles, bombarding the Panthers with thousands of rounds of ammunition over five hours. The cops especially wanted to kill Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). A decorated Vietnam vet, Geronimo’s military knowledge had saved his life and his comrades—and the FBI and California rulers would make him pay. Before his release in 1997, Geronimo spent 27 years in prison on the lying testimony of a cop informant, Julius Butler, for a killing in Santa Monica, California that the cops and FBI knew Geronimo didn’t commit. FBI wiretap logs showed Geronimo was 400 miles away from the scene of the shooting, at a Black Panther Party leadership meeting in Oakland. From the prosecutors’ office, to the august judges’ chambers up to the governor’s mansion, many high-ranking California officials in the 1970s-80s built and maintained their careers on the war against the Panthers and the frame-up of Geronimo, who was then America’s foremost class-war prisoner.
Jamal quotes Philadelphia Panther leader Reggie Schell describing one of the cop raids on the Philly Panther offices. Mumia recalls his arrest and days in jail for jaywalking on his way to sell the Black Panther newspaper in the streets of Oakland; how the Feds were waiting for him as he was about to board a plane for California, only to be frustrated when their search revealed he had nothing that could even be claimed to be a weapon. (Jamal was once reprimanded by a Panther cadre for falling asleep during guard duty.) Mumia also cites an account by L.A. Panther Flores Forbes of frequent “faux attacks” by the LAPD, complete with hovering police helicopters designed to shatter the nerves of individual Panthers: “The house started to rattle. The trees in our yard and across the street started to swirl.” And, as Jamal describes, the cops had their own special targets. One of those in L.A. was Paul Redd, a talented artist whose highly praised work graced the pages of the Black Panther newspaper. When the LAPD realized who he was upon arrest, they broke the fingers of his right hand.
Without doubt Jamal, identified in the FBI files as one of the top three leaders in the Philadelphia BPP, was a prime target of Frank Rizzo’s racist thugs in blue. The Feds decided to open a dossier on Jamal when he participated in the 1 May 1969 “Free Huey” demonstration. From that day on a steady stream of memoranda, letters, “airtels” and “nitels” between FBI headquarters and its field agents tracked Mumia’s every political move.
Even with much of the text blacked out and many documents withheld outright, over 700 pages of FBI files obtained for Jamal by the Partisan Defense Committee make it clear that the FBI and cops were on a mission to use any “dirty trick” to silence the man who would become known as the “voice of the voiceless.” Using its wiretaps, its informants and police spies, the government relentlessly pursued him at demonstrations, newspaper sales, political meetings and fund-raisers—even at picnics. They knew when he was to leave town and when he was to return, intercepting him as he boarded a flight and engaging in physical observation of returning flights. The Feds interrogated school officials, contacted employers, harassed Jamal’s mother.
In one typical four-week period in the summer of 1969, the FBI files include: a memorandum dated August 11 reporting that Jamal spoke at a Hiroshima Day rally in Philadelphia; a Civil Disobedience Unit (CDU) report on the same rally, also dated August 11; two “airtels” to the FBI director, dated August 14; an August 14 “FBI Notice”; an August 19 “Government Memorandum,” again on the Hiroshima Day rally; and a September 4 FBI report on a Socialist Workers Party campaign rally where Mumia “spoke against the ‘pigs’,” followed by a cover note dated September 5 specifically identifying “Wesley Cook, aka Wes Mumia.”
The files are replete with clippings of Black Panther articles written by Jamal and reports of his public speeches. It was Jamal’s noticeable talent as a young revolutionary journalist and propagandist that attracted so much FBI attention. A 24 October 1969 report on Jamal urged that he be placed under high-level surveillance: “In spite of the subject’s age (15 years), Philadelphia feels that his continued participation in BPP activities in the Philadelphia Division, his position in the Philadelphia branch of the BPP, and his past inclination to appear and speak at public gatherings, the subject should be included on the Security Index.”
Jamal was targeted for more than surveillance. His name was placed on two government hit lists: The FBI’s Security Index (SI) of those deemed a “threat” to “national security” and the Administrative Index (ADEX) of those to be rounded up and thrown into concentration camps in case of a “national emergency.” Many of the documents bear the notation “Smith Act,” the notorious “thought crimes” legislation under which first Trotskyists and then Communist Party members were sent to prison for “advocating” revolution.
Despite the FBI’s acknowledgement that Jamal “has not displayed a propensity for violence” and was not once found with a gun throughout this period of intense surveillance, the files regularly labeled him “Armed and Dangerous”—a license for the cops and G-men to shoot first and ask questions later. And they finally did shoot him, in the early morning of 9 December 1981. History is not a conspiracy, but there are conspiracies in history. We are not saying that the cops who were at the scene the night of 9 December 1981 knew Jamal was going to be there. But they were there and had the chance they had long awaited. The subsequent trial, conviction and death sentence was a political frame-up pure and simple, the culmination of a decade of efforts to “neutralize” Jamal.
The FBI records are only the tip of the iceberg. During the 1960s and ’70s the Philly cops kept their own voluminous files—none of which have been made available—on some 18,000 people! There was extensive collusion between the FBI and Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia Police Department. Document after document in the FBI files lists as its source unidentified cops from the CDU or Intelligence Division. According to Rizzo’s biographer, S.A. Paolantonio, the Philadelphia CDU led by George Fencl “had a steady stream of informers paid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In fact, when the FBI began its counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), the agency used Fencl’s CD squad as a model.”
Though COINTELPRO supposedly ended in the mid 1970s, the government vendetta against Geronimo, Dhoruba bin Wahad, Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter, Mtulu Shakur, Sekou Odinga, Delbert Orr Africa and many others never ended. As much as the prosecutors, Democratic and Republican governors, press corps and judges try to pass off Jamal’s case as a simple criminal trial, its real basis is captured in a brief exchange in the trial transcript. Anyone who has sat through a criminal trial is aware that it is highly irregular for the judge to stop the proceedings to answer the phone. In June 1982, when Jamal was on trial for his life, the proceedings were interrupted just as the prosecution’s key witness, prostitute Cynthia White, was about to testify:
“THE COURT: Just a minute. Fencl is on the phone.
“MR. McGILL: Off the record.
“(A discussion was held off the record.)
“THE COURT: Did you work it out?
“MR. McGILL: There’s no problem.”
As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in a special Jamal campaign issue of Class-Struggle Defense Notes (No. 10, April 1989):
“The death sentence for Mumia is the long arm of COINTELPRO terror reaching into the courtroom. This time they got him. Mumia has been sentenced to death because of his political beliefs, because of what he wrote, because of what he said, because of who he ‘associated’ with—and because of who he is.”
The capitalist rulers want to see Mumia dead because they see in this eloquent journalist, MOVE supporter and former Panther spokesman the spectre of black revolution, defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. They seek to execute Jamal in order to send a chilling message to all those who challenge vicious cop repression in the ghettos, who stand up for labor’s rights on the picket lines, who protest imperialist mass murder from the Balkans to Iraq. Trade unionists, opponents of racist oppression and all opponents of the Jim Crow death penalty must mobilize to Free Mumia Now!
The Best of a Generation of Black Militants
“The average young man or woman in the Black Panther Party was between seventeen and twenty-two years old, lived in a collective home with other Panthers, worked long and hard days (and sometimes nights) doing necessary Party work without pay, and owned nothing.... The average Panther rose at dawn and retired at dusk and did whatever job needed to be done to keep the programs going for the people, from brothers and sisters cooking breakfast for the school kids, to going door-to-door to gather signatures for petitions, to gathering clothes for the free clothing program, to procuring donated supplies from neighboring merchants.”
We Want Freedom is a must read, not only as a necessary aid in mobilizing support for Jamal’s fight for freedom. We pay tribute to this book on the only radical black organization in our times that didn’t crawl to the capitalist oppressors. At the same time, we state our fundamentally counterposed proletarian revolutionary program as distinct from even the most “just” nationalism, as V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, put it.
The Black Panther Party represented the best of a generation of black militants who courageously stood up to the racist ruling class and its kill-crazy cops. They embodied the hopes and aspirations for black freedom of an entire generation who sought to strip away the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness of the oppressed black masses, particularly in relation to the impunity of the cops in gunning down blacks on the streets of Oakland, and throughout America. But, from its inception, the BPP was based upon a contradiction: on the one hand, a subjective identification with the most oppressed black people (the working poor, the unemployed, welfare recipients, etc.), whose fundamental oppression under capitalism clearly could not be solved or even much alleviated by a few small and reversible liberal reforms; and on the other hand, the ideology of black nationalism, which denied the class basis of society and social struggle and opened the door to the BPP becoming merely another pressure group seeking to play the ethnic politics game of competing for a bigger “slice of the pie” within the status quo.
Black people in the U.S. are not a nation. They are an oppressed race-color caste segregated at the bottom of society, while forming a strategic part of the working class. The fight for black freedom is the strategic question of the American revolution. There will be no social revolution in this country without the united struggle of black and white workers led by their multiracial vanguard party.
As revolutionary Marxists we stand on the perspective of revolutionary integration. Counterposed to liberal integration —the false view that blacks can achieve social equality within the confines of racist American capitalism—revolutionary integrationism is premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. As we elaborated in “Black and Red —Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” adopted at the founding conference of the Spartacist League in 1966:
“The vast majority of black people—both North and South—are today workers who, along with the rest of the American working class, must sell their labor power in order to secure the necessities of life from those who buy labor power in order to make profit.... Ultimately their road to freedom lies only through struggle with the rest of the working class to abolish capitalism and establish in its place an egalitarian, socialist society.
“Yet the struggle of the black people of this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class.... Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution.”
— reprinted in Spartacist No. 10, May-June 1967
The Black Panther Party
Formed in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP was a direct response to the failure of the liberal, pro-Democratic Party civil rights movement to seriously challenge the nature of black oppression when that movement went North in the mid ’60s. It was clear to all that the ghetto uprisings of the mid 1960s marked the end of the old civil rights movement, with the most militant blacks embracing the call for “Black Power” seeking to find a way out of the racist hell of American capitalism. Jamal is explicit: “The Black Panther Party came into existence, not to support or supplement the major civil rights organizations, but to supplant them.” He describes “ghetto youth who had simmered under the glare of overtly racist cops. They longed to join the swelling Civil Rights movement, but had not because they could not bear to join any group which would meekly submit to racist violence, as demanded by some civil rights organizations.” Many of these militants were inspired by Malcolm X. Although not a Marxist basing himself upon working-class struggle, Malcolm advocated armed black self-defense against racist attacks, and opposed the deceitful, venal and treacherous Democratic and Republican politicians.
The Panthers gained notoriety for their armed police monitoring patrols, in which Panthers bearing loaded weapons, law books, cameras and tape recorders would approach traffic stops to make sure the cops didn’t brutalize their black victims and that the latter were informed of their rights. In April 1967, the Panthers held an armed rally in Richmond, California, to protest the killing of 22-year-old Denzil Dowell by a white deputy sheriff and faced the cops down. National attention came later that year when, demonstrating their defiance of the racist bourgeois order, the Panthers showed up armed at the California state capitol in Sacramento. The Panthers came to protest the Mulford Bill, which was referred to in the local press at the time as the “Panther bill.” Before that it was legal in California to carry a loaded weapon in public as long as it wasn’t concealed.
Uncertain of how much support the Panthers had in the ghetto, the cops at first demured. But beginning with the wounding and jailing of Newton in October 1967, and gaining steam with the killing of Bobby Hutton in April 1968, local cops and the FBI, operating in many cases with the assistance of “cultural nationalist” groups (for example, the 1969 murder of Los Angeles Panthers by members of Ron Karenga’s US organization), launched a coordinated national campaign to wipe out the Panthers. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover labeled the Panthers the “greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.” To kill Panthers the FBI revived COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program that was originally implemented in 1956 against the Communist Party, and unleashed the most savage and systematic campaign of racist state terror in modern American history. Some 233 of 295 COINTELPRO actions against black organizations were against the Panthers.
In comparison to other black nationalist organizations of the 1960s, the Panthers sought to organize independently of the Democrats and Republicans. But as eclectic and contradictory radical nationalists, their outlook was variously influenced by the teachings of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao—a grab bag from which to choose when it suited their current appetites. They were shaped by a unique historical conjuncture both within the U.S. and internationally—a period that saw African nations winning their formal independence, Castro’s peasant guerrilla forces toppling the U.S. puppet Batista regime and the heroic Vietnamese battlefield victories against the American military behemoth.
In their public and internal communications, the Panthers compared themselves to Mao’s peasant-based guerrilla army in the Chinese civil war and to the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front. In particular, they looked to the writings of Frantz Fanon, a West Indian intellectual and champion of the Algerian independence struggle. Fanon’s emphasis on the cathartic role of violence became for the Panthers the basis of their talk of urban guerrilla warfare. Jamal quotes Kathleen Cleaver: Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth became essential reading for Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their thinking. Fanon’s analysis seemed to explain and to justify the spontaneous violence ravaging Black ghettoes across the country, and linked the incipient insurrections to the rise of a revolutionary movement.”
Rather than recognizing the ghetto outbursts for what they were—the final spasm of frustration and fury in the wake of a movement that had raised great hopes and activated enormous energy only to accomplish little—wishful-thinking leftists saw in the ghetto-police battles the beginning of mass revolutionary violence which presumably had merely to be organized to be made effective. The notion that the ghetto was a base for urban guerrilla warfare was common not only among black nationalists, but was accepted by most of the left. What distinguished the Panthers was their willingness to face jail and even death for this theory.
The ghetto uprisings did not give the black masses a sense of their own power. They did just the opposite. It was black peoples’ own homes that were burned down. The cops went on a killing rampage. These proved that police brutality was not an isolated injustice that could be eliminated through militant action. The cops are an essential part of the armed force of the capitalist state; if defeated locally, they came back with the National Guard or Army. To drive and keep out the cops from the ghettos is equivalent to overthrowing the American state. As long as the majority of white workers remained loyal or only passively hostile to the government, black activism could not liberate the ghetto.
Fanon’s writings played a significant part in the Panthers’ belief that the lumpenproletariat, especially street-wise ghetto youth, were the vanguard of the American revolution. We warned at the time that “a political movement which isolates itself in a social milieu hostile to normal work-a-day society must become irresponsible, individualistic, and ultimately cynical and contemptuous of the mass of working people” (“Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era,” WV No. 4, January 1972). In the end, the Panthers were destroyed not only by police terror from without but a murderous internal factionalism inflamed by COINTELPRO provocations.
The Panthers never found the only road leading to the destruction of the racist bourgeois order—the multiracial proletariat. As self-described “revolutionary nationalists” the Panthers shared with the predominantly white New Left a rejection of the centrality and strategic social power of the integrated labor movement in the struggle against brutal racial oppression and imperialist war as well as capitalist exploitation.
There was a palpable basis to link the ghetto to the factories to wage a militant struggle against the killer cops. This required a class-struggle leadership of the labor movement. In 1970 the postal workers had the first national strike against the federal government. Auto plants were seething with rebellions. In 1969, the Panthers briefly formed a caucus at the Fremont, California GM plant and even put out a few issues of a plant newspaper. Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard had been a longshoreman for a while, and his brother June, a party member, was a city bus driver. The Panthers knew there were white workers at a union oil facility whose heads were being beaten by the scabherding cops, workers who took up the Panthers’ characterizations of the cops as “pigs.” But, instead, the Panthers turned to “community work”—local programs which seek at best to partially ameliorate some of the deprivations of ghetto life without challenging the material basis for black oppression—a substitute for the fight to win the working class to take up the struggle for black freedom. In doing so, they ceded the terrain to the reformist black misleaders and the labor lieutenants of capital, the trade-union bureaucracy.
The genuine radicalism and personal courage of many Panthers were combined with illusions in the reformability of the racist capitalist system. One example is the 1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, a meeting in Philadelphia called to bring together a variety of left organizations and activists to adopt a “constitution that serves the people, not the ruling class.” Jamal attributes its “failure” to the fact that white radicals weren’t prepared to make a revolution. Mumia asks: “Were millions of white youth, no matter what they claimed their political or ideological persuasions, really ready to embark on a revolution, one that did not prize whiteness?” This notion of white skin privilege, which was the common coin for the New Left’s rejection of the American proletariat as a revolutionary factor, wears pretty thin after 25 years of attacks on the living standards of all workers in the U.S., ushered in by the firing of the entire PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981, and exemplified by the imprisonment of steel worker Bob Buck and coal miner Jerry Dale Lowe.
The Panthers’ ten-point program of mildly liberal reforms called on the government for reparations, wanted the educational system to teach the “true history” of black and oppressed people in this country, and expressed the Panthers’ illusions in the United Nations den of imperialist thieves and their victims. Just a few years after the UN’s well-known dirty role in the assassination of Congo nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba, the Panthers’ program called for a UN-supervised plebiscite for black people to determine “their national destiny.” The Panthers also called for an end to police brutality and petitioned for community control of the police, combining liberal illusions over the nature of the bourgeois state with black nationalist illusions that the oppression of black people can be ended through “control” of ghetto institutions.
Even if it could be accomplished, black “control” of the impoverished ghettos could not put an end to the endemic poverty, joblessness, crime, dilapidated housing, broken-down schools and drug addiction born of despair. This requires a massive reallocation of resources and wealth, which is only possible with the expropriation of the bloodsucking capitalist class as a whole and the creation of a workers state in which those who labor rule—a workers state where production is based on human need, not profits. This can only be accomplished through a socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist order and its state, which exists to defend the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And only the multiracial working class has the power to do that. Based on its role in producing the wealth of this society, it is only the industrial proletariat which has both the social interest and power to bring down this rotten capitalist order.
The crackdown on the Panthers did not provoke mass ghetto rebellions, but a rapid lurch to the right. Isolated, with repression bearing down on them, the Panthers shifted their focus to legal defense work in an effort to gain the broadest possible support. The Panther alliances with white radicals were not motivated by the realization that American society could only be revolutionized by an integrated working-class movement, but because they sought support for their defense campaign. In 1968 Eldridge Cleaver ran for president on the liberal Peace and Freedom Party ticket. A key role in the rightward degeneration and demise of the BPP was played by the cynical operators of the Communist Party (CP). Beginning in 1969, the CP influenced the Panther leadership in launching a “united front against fascism,” an attempt to create an alliance of everyone to the left of the Nixon-Agnew administration on an essentially civil libertarian basis. A few years later, Newton & Co. were talking about the relevance of the black church and black capitalism. In 1973 Bobby Seale ran for mayor as a Democrat and in 1976 Newton joined the NAACP.
In 1971 the Panthers suffered a split between the more overtly reformist, pro-Democratic majority Newton wing and the urban guerrilla warfare Cleaver wing —a split characterized by murderous internal factionalism, and inflamed by COINTELPRO provocations. Both of the factions sent their supporters onto the streets to murder each other. Jamal’s book cites Panthers who went underground for safety not just from the state, but from other Panthers.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party to Fight for a Workers Government!
Though the Panthers self-consciously fashioned themselves as a vanguard party, they were not. The Panthers were New Left sectoralists. Their program was that blacks would liberate blacks, Hispanics would liberate Hispanics, and so on. As opposed to sectoralism, which is a strategy for dividing the ranks of the future proletarian army fighting for state power, a Leninist vanguard party is a tribune of the people, which fights against all aspects of social oppression on the basis of an internationalist revolutionary program.
Jamal describes the Panthers as a woman’s party, and gives compelling portraits of women who played leading roles and were the key to running the party in various capacities in spite of the obstacles in their way. However, just because Newton issued a proclamation of the necessity for women’s and gay liberation didn’t mean that the Black Panther Party was a tribune of the people. The Panthers were heavily influenced by lumpen ideology. Some women chose to leave the Panthers because the male chauvinism was suffocating. This is not to deny the heroic role played by women who chose to remain in the ranks of the Panthers and function as leaders no matter what.
It is impossible to have a program for the liberation of women divorced from a proletarian revolutionary program to abolish the roots of women’s oppression: the system of private property in the means of production. The Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky were intransigent fighters for women’s liberation as an indispensable part of the fight for the emancipation of the working class from exploitation. The material basis of women’s oppression lies in the institution of the family. Without an energetic and implacable struggle for women’s equality the proletarian struggle against the rule of capital cannot succeed.
With their military posturings, the Panthers were easy pickings for the mass murderers of U.S. imperialism. You cannot build a revolutionary party on the basis of hero-worship and glorification of a street-gang mentality. It is tragic that the Panthers were destroyed by bloody state repression, and there was no revolutionary party sizable enough to win the best of these radical black youth. We tried. In the late ’60s and early ’70s the Panthers were so sacrosanct in radical circles that any criticism of them was met with shrill accusations of racism. In the face of the widespread hero-worship of Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and other leaders, the Spartacist League polemicized against the Panthers’ notion of lumpen vanguardism and argued that black nationalism, even in its most radical form, was a utopian dead end. We also denounced the physical gangsterism against other leftists and challenged the BPP’s rightward plunge into the Democratic Party. In an “Open Letter to the Ranks of the Black Panther Party on the Oakland Elections” (WV No. 18, April 1973), we wrote that we could not give electoral critical support to the Panthers, asking, “How is it that your party, which once claimed to seek a revolutionary transformation of society, can now support candidates who are members of the Democratic Party—the party of war, racism and repression—and run as Democrats yourselves?” We offered that if the BPP broke with both the parties of capital and its own policies of class collaboration we could offer critical support for their election campaign: “We hope that you comrades will recognize the disastrous right turn of the Black Panther Party and will struggle to replace the present BPP line of support for black Democrats, black churches, black cops and black capitalists with a revolutionary working-class perspective.”
Despite our political differences, we defended the Panthers against state repression—including after their left cheerleaders had long jumped ship—and we continue to do so today. The Partisan Defense Committee provides monthly stipends to Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter and Mumia, for whom we have waged a 17-year campaign for his life and freedom, producing pamphlets and a video and introducing his case to unions around the world. We seek to build the revolutionary party that will lead the working class to power through smashing this decrepit, racist capitalist system. In an American workers state, We Want Freedom will be given the highest honor in the people’s libraries and classrooms. Read this book.
Click below to listen to Stanley Nelson
speak about his latest documentary –The Black
Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air on NPR (Sept 24, 2015)
February Is Black History Month
Free Mumia! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!
We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party
A Book by Mumia Abu-Jamal
A Review by Paul Cone
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 834, 15 October 2004.
“FOR ME, POLITICAL life began with the Black Panther Party.
“When an older sister named Audrea handed me a copy of The Black Panther newspaper around the spring of 1968 my mind was promptly blown. It was as if my dreams had awakened and strolled into my reality.
“I read and reread the issue, tenderly fingering each page as if it were the onion-skinned, tissue-like leaf of a holy book. My eyes drank in the images of young Black men and women, their slim and splendid bodies clothed in black leather, their breasts bedecked with buttons proclaiming rebellion, resistance, and revolution.
“I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I scanned photos of armed Black folks proclaiming their determination to fight or die for the Black Revolution.
“It would be some months before I would formally join something called the Black Panther Party, but, in truth, I joined it months before, when I saw my first Black Panther newspaper.
“I joined it in my heart.
“I was all of fourteen years old.”
We Want Freedom is a firsthand account of life in the Black Panther Party (BPP) by death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The story Jamal tells is that of the Panthers’ foot soldiers, the very young men and women, like himself, who devoted their lives to the cause of revolutionary struggle against black oppression. Jamal dedicates this book in part “To those young idealistic souls who wore the black and the blue. To those who sold papers in the dead of night, in smoky bars, and in the freezing grips of the wind (especially in the East). To those loving women and sensitive men who rose from their beds at five a.m. to prepare hot breakfasts for schoolchildren from coast to coast.”
Jamal’s book captures the finest qualities that are embodied in militant fighters for the oppressed and exploited. Mumia recalls:
“The days were long.
“The risks were substantial.
“The rewards were few.
“Yet the freedom was hypnotic. We could think freely, write freely, and act freely in the world.
“We knew that we were working for our people’s freedom, and we loved it.
“It was the one place in the world that it seemed right to be.”
Thanks to this book, the many young black men and women whom the FBI warned about “succumbing to revolutionary teachings” are no longer “nameless” and “faceless” as the racist exploiters have tried to make them.
We Want Freedom tells the story of the Black Panther Party’s origins and subsequent destruction less than a decade later through the vicious COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) campaign, inflamed by internal factionalism. Jamal gives personal reminiscences of the Philadelphia chapter, of which he was a founding member and Lieutenant of Information. Jamal describes with pride and passion the free breakfast and other community programs with which the Panthers sought to “serve the people.” He tells of how the Black Panthers defied the racist rulers by expressing solidarity with the Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, including their bold offer to send troops to fight alongside the Vietnamese against bloody U.S. imperialism.
Most compelling in this powerful book are Jamal’s accounts of the young men and especially women, born of poverty in the hellish American ghettos, who joined the fight for black freedom. There was Regina Jennings, a drug-addicted 16-year-old who after hopping a plane in Philadelphia stormed into the Oakland office demanding to join the party—which took her in a few days later, when she was sober, and helped her kick her habit. Jamal quotes Naima Major, who as a 17-year-old National Negro Scholar shunned college to travel to Oakland to join the Panthers. “Devoted to the black revolution and the ten point program, I commenced with baby in sling to doing the hard community work required of all Panthers, organizing poor women like myself, planning and supporting free schools, writing letters for people who couldn’t write, demanding decent housing for people who were afraid of the landlord, helping get the newspaper out, health cadres, food cadres, you name it. Did some dangerous work too, and studied Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Mao like a religious zealot.”
We Want Freedom provides a riveting account of the campaign of terror leveled at Jamal and his comrades by the FBI and cops, who were determined to destroy the Panthers by any means necessary. Mumia devotes a chapter to the FBI’s deadly COINTELPRO, noting, “The Bureau used its enormous power, influence, and contacts to intimidate politicians. It used the omnipresent press to hound people out of their jobs. It sabotaged allegedly free elections. It destroyed marriages. It shattered families. It fomented violence between political and social adversaries.”
With characteristic modesty Jamal says not a word about his own fight for life and freedom against the racist frame-up that keeps him in the shadow of death on Pennsylvania’s death row. Yet on every page of We Want Freedom the reader can see why the government has targeted this man for so long. Jamal was convicted in 1982 on frame-up charges of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on 9 December 1981. From the moment of his arrest, the prosecution sought to hang Jamal with his BPP background. The cover photograph of We Want Freedom comes from a January 1970 Philadelphia Inquirer interview with Jamal, then a 15-year-old Black Panther Party spokesman. The interview was used by the prosecution as exhibit number one for Jamal’s execution. As Jamal recalled in the 1990 Partisan Defense Committee video, From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal, “The word Black Panther means different things to different people, depending on their perspective, depending on their history, depending on their political orientation. The prosecutor knew that exceedingly well.... I saw when it hit the jury, it was like a bolt of electricity.”
To secure the death sentence for Jamal, prosecutor Joseph McGill inflamed the nearly all-white jury with the grotesque lie that Jamal’s membership in the Panthers as a teenager proved he was a committed cop killer who had been planning to kill a cop for 12 years. As readers of this book will see, and as confirmed by Mumia’s own COINTELPRO files, it was the kill-crazy Feds and Philly cops who planned to get Jamal “all the way back then”—i.e., from 1 May 1969, when he and his comrades made their first public appearance in a rally outside the State Building in Philadelphia to demand freedom for imprisoned Panther leader Huey P. Newton.
The Frame-Up of Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man! His case is a textbook example of a classic racist political frame-up. For three years both Pennsylvania state courts and federal courts have refused to even consider testimony from Arnold Beverly that he, not Jamal, shot and killed officer Faulkner, as well as a mountain of supporting evidence. They have also rejected evidence discovered over two years ago: the sworn account of court stenographer Terri Maurer-Carter of a conversation she overheard in the courthouse where Mumia was tried. In that conversation, judge Albert Sabo, who sentenced Jamal to death, declared in regard to Jamal’s case, “I’m going to help ’em fry the n----r.”
With this vulgar promise, “king of death row” Sabo speaks not just for himself but for this country’s racist rulers, who waged a bloody war of disruption, frame-up and extermination against the Panthers and other radical black activists. A directive from FBI headquarters advised its agents that since the “purpose ...is to disrupt...it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge.” In 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover vowed, “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.” Under the ruthless COINTELPRO vendetta 38 Panthers were killed and hundreds more railroaded to scores of years in prison hellholes.
The young men and women Mumia describes lived with the awareness that every day could be their last. After Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated in a hail of bullets in the early morning hours of 4 December 1969, Mumia was one of a contingent of Philadelphia Panthers who drove to Chicago for the commemoration. Jamal recalls: “When we arrived at the office, we were walked over to the apartment and saw the holes making the walls look like Swiss cheese. We saw the mattress, caked with blood, where Fred and his fiancée lay that fateful night, the bullet holes lining the walls, tactile markers of government hate.”
Four days later the cops raided BPP headquarters in Los Angeles, bombarding the Panthers with thousands of rounds of ammunition over five hours. The cops especially wanted to kill Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt). A decorated Vietnam vet, Geronimo’s military knowledge had saved his life and his comrades—and the FBI and California rulers would make him pay. Before his release in 1997, Geronimo spent 27 years in prison on the lying testimony of a cop informant, Julius Butler, for a killing in Santa Monica, California that the cops and FBI knew Geronimo didn’t commit. FBI wiretap logs showed Geronimo was 400 miles away from the scene of the shooting, at a Black Panther Party leadership meeting in Oakland. From the prosecutors’ office, to the august judges’ chambers up to the governor’s mansion, many high-ranking California officials in the 1970s-80s built and maintained their careers on the war against the Panthers and the frame-up of Geronimo, who was then America’s foremost class-war prisoner.
Jamal quotes Philadelphia Panther leader Reggie Schell describing one of the cop raids on the Philly Panther offices. Mumia recalls his arrest and days in jail for jaywalking on his way to sell the Black Panther newspaper in the streets of Oakland; how the Feds were waiting for him as he was about to board a plane for California, only to be frustrated when their search revealed he had nothing that could even be claimed to be a weapon. (Jamal was once reprimanded by a Panther cadre for falling asleep during guard duty.) Mumia also cites an account by L.A. Panther Flores Forbes of frequent “faux attacks” by the LAPD, complete with hovering police helicopters designed to shatter the nerves of individual Panthers: “The house started to rattle. The trees in our yard and across the street started to swirl.” And, as Jamal describes, the cops had their own special targets. One of those in L.A. was Paul Redd, a talented artist whose highly praised work graced the pages of the Black Panther newspaper. When the LAPD realized who he was upon arrest, they broke the fingers of his right hand.
Without doubt Jamal, identified in the FBI files as one of the top three leaders in the Philadelphia BPP, was a prime target of Frank Rizzo’s racist thugs in blue. The Feds decided to open a dossier on Jamal when he participated in the 1 May 1969 “Free Huey” demonstration. From that day on a steady stream of memoranda, letters, “airtels” and “nitels” between FBI headquarters and its field agents tracked Mumia’s every political move.
Even with much of the text blacked out and many documents withheld outright, over 700 pages of FBI files obtained for Jamal by the Partisan Defense Committee make it clear that the FBI and cops were on a mission to use any “dirty trick” to silence the man who would become known as the “voice of the voiceless.” Using its wiretaps, its informants and police spies, the government relentlessly pursued him at demonstrations, newspaper sales, political meetings and fund-raisers—even at picnics. They knew when he was to leave town and when he was to return, intercepting him as he boarded a flight and engaging in physical observation of returning flights. The Feds interrogated school officials, contacted employers, harassed Jamal’s mother.
In one typical four-week period in the summer of 1969, the FBI files include: a memorandum dated August 11 reporting that Jamal spoke at a Hiroshima Day rally in Philadelphia; a Civil Disobedience Unit (CDU) report on the same rally, also dated August 11; two “airtels” to the FBI director, dated August 14; an August 14 “FBI Notice”; an August 19 “Government Memorandum,” again on the Hiroshima Day rally; and a September 4 FBI report on a Socialist Workers Party campaign rally where Mumia “spoke against the ‘pigs’,” followed by a cover note dated September 5 specifically identifying “Wesley Cook, aka Wes Mumia.”
The files are replete with clippings of Black Panther articles written by Jamal and reports of his public speeches. It was Jamal’s noticeable talent as a young revolutionary journalist and propagandist that attracted so much FBI attention. A 24 October 1969 report on Jamal urged that he be placed under high-level surveillance: “In spite of the subject’s age (15 years), Philadelphia feels that his continued participation in BPP activities in the Philadelphia Division, his position in the Philadelphia branch of the BPP, and his past inclination to appear and speak at public gatherings, the subject should be included on the Security Index.”
Jamal was targeted for more than surveillance. His name was placed on two government hit lists: The FBI’s Security Index (SI) of those deemed a “threat” to “national security” and the Administrative Index (ADEX) of those to be rounded up and thrown into concentration camps in case of a “national emergency.” Many of the documents bear the notation “Smith Act,” the notorious “thought crimes” legislation under which first Trotskyists and then Communist Party members were sent to prison for “advocating” revolution.
Despite the FBI’s acknowledgement that Jamal “has not displayed a propensity for violence” and was not once found with a gun throughout this period of intense surveillance, the files regularly labeled him “Armed and Dangerous”—a license for the cops and G-men to shoot first and ask questions later. And they finally did shoot him, in the early morning of 9 December 1981. History is not a conspiracy, but there are conspiracies in history. We are not saying that the cops who were at the scene the night of 9 December 1981 knew Jamal was going to be there. But they were there and had the chance they had long awaited. The subsequent trial, conviction and death sentence was a political frame-up pure and simple, the culmination of a decade of efforts to “neutralize” Jamal.
The FBI records are only the tip of the iceberg. During the 1960s and ’70s the Philly cops kept their own voluminous files—none of which have been made available—on some 18,000 people! There was extensive collusion between the FBI and Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia Police Department. Document after document in the FBI files lists as its source unidentified cops from the CDU or Intelligence Division. According to Rizzo’s biographer, S.A. Paolantonio, the Philadelphia CDU led by George Fencl “had a steady stream of informers paid by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In fact, when the FBI began its counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), the agency used Fencl’s CD squad as a model.”
Though COINTELPRO supposedly ended in the mid 1970s, the government vendetta against Geronimo, Dhoruba bin Wahad, Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter, Mtulu Shakur, Sekou Odinga, Delbert Orr Africa and many others never ended. As much as the prosecutors, Democratic and Republican governors, press corps and judges try to pass off Jamal’s case as a simple criminal trial, its real basis is captured in a brief exchange in the trial transcript. Anyone who has sat through a criminal trial is aware that it is highly irregular for the judge to stop the proceedings to answer the phone. In June 1982, when Jamal was on trial for his life, the proceedings were interrupted just as the prosecution’s key witness, prostitute Cynthia White, was about to testify:
“THE COURT: Just a minute. Fencl is on the phone.
“MR. McGILL: Off the record.
“(A discussion was held off the record.)
“THE COURT: Did you work it out?
“MR. McGILL: There’s no problem.”
As the Partisan Defense Committee wrote in a special Jamal campaign issue of Class-Struggle Defense Notes (No. 10, April 1989):
“The death sentence for Mumia is the long arm of COINTELPRO terror reaching into the courtroom. This time they got him. Mumia has been sentenced to death because of his political beliefs, because of what he wrote, because of what he said, because of who he ‘associated’ with—and because of who he is.”
The capitalist rulers want to see Mumia dead because they see in this eloquent journalist, MOVE supporter and former Panther spokesman the spectre of black revolution, defiant opposition to their system of racist oppression. They seek to execute Jamal in order to send a chilling message to all those who challenge vicious cop repression in the ghettos, who stand up for labor’s rights on the picket lines, who protest imperialist mass murder from the Balkans to Iraq. Trade unionists, opponents of racist oppression and all opponents of the Jim Crow death penalty must mobilize to Free Mumia Now!
The Best of a Generation of Black Militants
“The average young man or woman in the Black Panther Party was between seventeen and twenty-two years old, lived in a collective home with other Panthers, worked long and hard days (and sometimes nights) doing necessary Party work without pay, and owned nothing.... The average Panther rose at dawn and retired at dusk and did whatever job needed to be done to keep the programs going for the people, from brothers and sisters cooking breakfast for the school kids, to going door-to-door to gather signatures for petitions, to gathering clothes for the free clothing program, to procuring donated supplies from neighboring merchants.”
We Want Freedom is a must read, not only as a necessary aid in mobilizing support for Jamal’s fight for freedom. We pay tribute to this book on the only radical black organization in our times that didn’t crawl to the capitalist oppressors. At the same time, we state our fundamentally counterposed proletarian revolutionary program as distinct from even the most “just” nationalism, as V.I. Lenin, leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, put it.
The Black Panther Party represented the best of a generation of black militants who courageously stood up to the racist ruling class and its kill-crazy cops. They embodied the hopes and aspirations for black freedom of an entire generation who sought to strip away the sense of powerlessness and hopelessness of the oppressed black masses, particularly in relation to the impunity of the cops in gunning down blacks on the streets of Oakland, and throughout America. But, from its inception, the BPP was based upon a contradiction: on the one hand, a subjective identification with the most oppressed black people (the working poor, the unemployed, welfare recipients, etc.), whose fundamental oppression under capitalism clearly could not be solved or even much alleviated by a few small and reversible liberal reforms; and on the other hand, the ideology of black nationalism, which denied the class basis of society and social struggle and opened the door to the BPP becoming merely another pressure group seeking to play the ethnic politics game of competing for a bigger “slice of the pie” within the status quo.
Black people in the U.S. are not a nation. They are an oppressed race-color caste segregated at the bottom of society, while forming a strategic part of the working class. The fight for black freedom is the strategic question of the American revolution. There will be no social revolution in this country without the united struggle of black and white workers led by their multiracial vanguard party.
As revolutionary Marxists we stand on the perspective of revolutionary integration. Counterposed to liberal integration —the false view that blacks can achieve social equality within the confines of racist American capitalism—revolutionary integrationism is premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. As we elaborated in “Black and Red —Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” adopted at the founding conference of the Spartacist League in 1966:
“The vast majority of black people—both North and South—are today workers who, along with the rest of the American working class, must sell their labor power in order to secure the necessities of life from those who buy labor power in order to make profit.... Ultimately their road to freedom lies only through struggle with the rest of the working class to abolish capitalism and establish in its place an egalitarian, socialist society.
“Yet the struggle of the black people of this country for freedom, while part of the struggle of the working class as a whole, is more than that struggle. The Negro people are an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class.... Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution.”
— reprinted in Spartacist No. 10, May-June 1967
The Black Panther Party
Formed in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP was a direct response to the failure of the liberal, pro-Democratic Party civil rights movement to seriously challenge the nature of black oppression when that movement went North in the mid ’60s. It was clear to all that the ghetto uprisings of the mid 1960s marked the end of the old civil rights movement, with the most militant blacks embracing the call for “Black Power” seeking to find a way out of the racist hell of American capitalism. Jamal is explicit: “The Black Panther Party came into existence, not to support or supplement the major civil rights organizations, but to supplant them.” He describes “ghetto youth who had simmered under the glare of overtly racist cops. They longed to join the swelling Civil Rights movement, but had not because they could not bear to join any group which would meekly submit to racist violence, as demanded by some civil rights organizations.” Many of these militants were inspired by Malcolm X. Although not a Marxist basing himself upon working-class struggle, Malcolm advocated armed black self-defense against racist attacks, and opposed the deceitful, venal and treacherous Democratic and Republican politicians.
The Panthers gained notoriety for their armed police monitoring patrols, in which Panthers bearing loaded weapons, law books, cameras and tape recorders would approach traffic stops to make sure the cops didn’t brutalize their black victims and that the latter were informed of their rights. In April 1967, the Panthers held an armed rally in Richmond, California, to protest the killing of 22-year-old Denzil Dowell by a white deputy sheriff and faced the cops down. National attention came later that year when, demonstrating their defiance of the racist bourgeois order, the Panthers showed up armed at the California state capitol in Sacramento. The Panthers came to protest the Mulford Bill, which was referred to in the local press at the time as the “Panther bill.” Before that it was legal in California to carry a loaded weapon in public as long as it wasn’t concealed.
Uncertain of how much support the Panthers had in the ghetto, the cops at first demured. But beginning with the wounding and jailing of Newton in October 1967, and gaining steam with the killing of Bobby Hutton in April 1968, local cops and the FBI, operating in many cases with the assistance of “cultural nationalist” groups (for example, the 1969 murder of Los Angeles Panthers by members of Ron Karenga’s US organization), launched a coordinated national campaign to wipe out the Panthers. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover labeled the Panthers the “greatest threat to the internal security of the U.S.” To kill Panthers the FBI revived COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program that was originally implemented in 1956 against the Communist Party, and unleashed the most savage and systematic campaign of racist state terror in modern American history. Some 233 of 295 COINTELPRO actions against black organizations were against the Panthers.
In comparison to other black nationalist organizations of the 1960s, the Panthers sought to organize independently of the Democrats and Republicans. But as eclectic and contradictory radical nationalists, their outlook was variously influenced by the teachings of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao—a grab bag from which to choose when it suited their current appetites. They were shaped by a unique historical conjuncture both within the U.S. and internationally—a period that saw African nations winning their formal independence, Castro’s peasant guerrilla forces toppling the U.S. puppet Batista regime and the heroic Vietnamese battlefield victories against the American military behemoth.
In their public and internal communications, the Panthers compared themselves to Mao’s peasant-based guerrilla army in the Chinese civil war and to the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front. In particular, they looked to the writings of Frantz Fanon, a West Indian intellectual and champion of the Algerian independence struggle. Fanon’s emphasis on the cathartic role of violence became for the Panthers the basis of their talk of urban guerrilla warfare. Jamal quotes Kathleen Cleaver: Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth became essential reading for Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their thinking. Fanon’s analysis seemed to explain and to justify the spontaneous violence ravaging Black ghettoes across the country, and linked the incipient insurrections to the rise of a revolutionary movement.”
Rather than recognizing the ghetto outbursts for what they were—the final spasm of frustration and fury in the wake of a movement that had raised great hopes and activated enormous energy only to accomplish little—wishful-thinking leftists saw in the ghetto-police battles the beginning of mass revolutionary violence which presumably had merely to be organized to be made effective. The notion that the ghetto was a base for urban guerrilla warfare was common not only among black nationalists, but was accepted by most of the left. What distinguished the Panthers was their willingness to face jail and even death for this theory.
The ghetto uprisings did not give the black masses a sense of their own power. They did just the opposite. It was black peoples’ own homes that were burned down. The cops went on a killing rampage. These proved that police brutality was not an isolated injustice that could be eliminated through militant action. The cops are an essential part of the armed force of the capitalist state; if defeated locally, they came back with the National Guard or Army. To drive and keep out the cops from the ghettos is equivalent to overthrowing the American state. As long as the majority of white workers remained loyal or only passively hostile to the government, black activism could not liberate the ghetto.
Fanon’s writings played a significant part in the Panthers’ belief that the lumpenproletariat, especially street-wise ghetto youth, were the vanguard of the American revolution. We warned at the time that “a political movement which isolates itself in a social milieu hostile to normal work-a-day society must become irresponsible, individualistic, and ultimately cynical and contemptuous of the mass of working people” (“Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the Black Power Era,” WV No. 4, January 1972). In the end, the Panthers were destroyed not only by police terror from without but a murderous internal factionalism inflamed by COINTELPRO provocations.
The Panthers never found the only road leading to the destruction of the racist bourgeois order—the multiracial proletariat. As self-described “revolutionary nationalists” the Panthers shared with the predominantly white New Left a rejection of the centrality and strategic social power of the integrated labor movement in the struggle against brutal racial oppression and imperialist war as well as capitalist exploitation.
There was a palpable basis to link the ghetto to the factories to wage a militant struggle against the killer cops. This required a class-struggle leadership of the labor movement. In 1970 the postal workers had the first national strike against the federal government. Auto plants were seething with rebellions. In 1969, the Panthers briefly formed a caucus at the Fremont, California GM plant and even put out a few issues of a plant newspaper. Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard had been a longshoreman for a while, and his brother June, a party member, was a city bus driver. The Panthers knew there were white workers at a union oil facility whose heads were being beaten by the scabherding cops, workers who took up the Panthers’ characterizations of the cops as “pigs.” But, instead, the Panthers turned to “community work”—local programs which seek at best to partially ameliorate some of the deprivations of ghetto life without challenging the material basis for black oppression—a substitute for the fight to win the working class to take up the struggle for black freedom. In doing so, they ceded the terrain to the reformist black misleaders and the labor lieutenants of capital, the trade-union bureaucracy.
The genuine radicalism and personal courage of many Panthers were combined with illusions in the reformability of the racist capitalist system. One example is the 1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, a meeting in Philadelphia called to bring together a variety of left organizations and activists to adopt a “constitution that serves the people, not the ruling class.” Jamal attributes its “failure” to the fact that white radicals weren’t prepared to make a revolution. Mumia asks: “Were millions of white youth, no matter what they claimed their political or ideological persuasions, really ready to embark on a revolution, one that did not prize whiteness?” This notion of white skin privilege, which was the common coin for the New Left’s rejection of the American proletariat as a revolutionary factor, wears pretty thin after 25 years of attacks on the living standards of all workers in the U.S., ushered in by the firing of the entire PATCO air traffic controllers union in 1981, and exemplified by the imprisonment of steel worker Bob Buck and coal miner Jerry Dale Lowe.
The Panthers’ ten-point program of mildly liberal reforms called on the government for reparations, wanted the educational system to teach the “true history” of black and oppressed people in this country, and expressed the Panthers’ illusions in the United Nations den of imperialist thieves and their victims. Just a few years after the UN’s well-known dirty role in the assassination of Congo nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba, the Panthers’ program called for a UN-supervised plebiscite for black people to determine “their national destiny.” The Panthers also called for an end to police brutality and petitioned for community control of the police, combining liberal illusions over the nature of the bourgeois state with black nationalist illusions that the oppression of black people can be ended through “control” of ghetto institutions.
Even if it could be accomplished, black “control” of the impoverished ghettos could not put an end to the endemic poverty, joblessness, crime, dilapidated housing, broken-down schools and drug addiction born of despair. This requires a massive reallocation of resources and wealth, which is only possible with the expropriation of the bloodsucking capitalist class as a whole and the creation of a workers state in which those who labor rule—a workers state where production is based on human need, not profits. This can only be accomplished through a socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist order and its state, which exists to defend the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And only the multiracial working class has the power to do that. Based on its role in producing the wealth of this society, it is only the industrial proletariat which has both the social interest and power to bring down this rotten capitalist order.
The crackdown on the Panthers did not provoke mass ghetto rebellions, but a rapid lurch to the right. Isolated, with repression bearing down on them, the Panthers shifted their focus to legal defense work in an effort to gain the broadest possible support. The Panther alliances with white radicals were not motivated by the realization that American society could only be revolutionized by an integrated working-class movement, but because they sought support for their defense campaign. In 1968 Eldridge Cleaver ran for president on the liberal Peace and Freedom Party ticket. A key role in the rightward degeneration and demise of the BPP was played by the cynical operators of the Communist Party (CP). Beginning in 1969, the CP influenced the Panther leadership in launching a “united front against fascism,” an attempt to create an alliance of everyone to the left of the Nixon-Agnew administration on an essentially civil libertarian basis. A few years later, Newton & Co. were talking about the relevance of the black church and black capitalism. In 1973 Bobby Seale ran for mayor as a Democrat and in 1976 Newton joined the NAACP.
In 1971 the Panthers suffered a split between the more overtly reformist, pro-Democratic majority Newton wing and the urban guerrilla warfare Cleaver wing —a split characterized by murderous internal factionalism, and inflamed by COINTELPRO provocations. Both of the factions sent their supporters onto the streets to murder each other. Jamal’s book cites Panthers who went underground for safety not just from the state, but from other Panthers.
For a Revolutionary Workers Party to Fight for a Workers Government!
Though the Panthers self-consciously fashioned themselves as a vanguard party, they were not. The Panthers were New Left sectoralists. Their program was that blacks would liberate blacks, Hispanics would liberate Hispanics, and so on. As opposed to sectoralism, which is a strategy for dividing the ranks of the future proletarian army fighting for state power, a Leninist vanguard party is a tribune of the people, which fights against all aspects of social oppression on the basis of an internationalist revolutionary program.
Jamal describes the Panthers as a woman’s party, and gives compelling portraits of women who played leading roles and were the key to running the party in various capacities in spite of the obstacles in their way. However, just because Newton issued a proclamation of the necessity for women’s and gay liberation didn’t mean that the Black Panther Party was a tribune of the people. The Panthers were heavily influenced by lumpen ideology. Some women chose to leave the Panthers because the male chauvinism was suffocating. This is not to deny the heroic role played by women who chose to remain in the ranks of the Panthers and function as leaders no matter what.
It is impossible to have a program for the liberation of women divorced from a proletarian revolutionary program to abolish the roots of women’s oppression: the system of private property in the means of production. The Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky were intransigent fighters for women’s liberation as an indispensable part of the fight for the emancipation of the working class from exploitation. The material basis of women’s oppression lies in the institution of the family. Without an energetic and implacable struggle for women’s equality the proletarian struggle against the rule of capital cannot succeed.
With their military posturings, the Panthers were easy pickings for the mass murderers of U.S. imperialism. You cannot build a revolutionary party on the basis of hero-worship and glorification of a street-gang mentality. It is tragic that the Panthers were destroyed by bloody state repression, and there was no revolutionary party sizable enough to win the best of these radical black youth. We tried. In the late ’60s and early ’70s the Panthers were so sacrosanct in radical circles that any criticism of them was met with shrill accusations of racism. In the face of the widespread hero-worship of Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and other leaders, the Spartacist League polemicized against the Panthers’ notion of lumpen vanguardism and argued that black nationalism, even in its most radical form, was a utopian dead end. We also denounced the physical gangsterism against other leftists and challenged the BPP’s rightward plunge into the Democratic Party. In an “Open Letter to the Ranks of the Black Panther Party on the Oakland Elections” (WV No. 18, April 1973), we wrote that we could not give electoral critical support to the Panthers, asking, “How is it that your party, which once claimed to seek a revolutionary transformation of society, can now support candidates who are members of the Democratic Party—the party of war, racism and repression—and run as Democrats yourselves?” We offered that if the BPP broke with both the parties of capital and its own policies of class collaboration we could offer critical support for their election campaign: “We hope that you comrades will recognize the disastrous right turn of the Black Panther Party and will struggle to replace the present BPP line of support for black Democrats, black churches, black cops and black capitalists with a revolutionary working-class perspective.”
Despite our political differences, we defended the Panthers against state repression—including after their left cheerleaders had long jumped ship—and we continue to do so today. The Partisan Defense Committee provides monthly stipends to Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter and Mumia, for whom we have waged a 17-year campaign for his life and freedom, producing pamphlets and a video and introducing his case to unions around the world. We seek to build the revolutionary party that will lead the working class to power through smashing this decrepit, racist capitalist system. In an American workers state, We Want Freedom will be given the highest honor in the people’s libraries and classrooms. Read this book.
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