From The Archives From The Partisan Defense Committee- Black Panther Leader And Former Class-War Prisoner Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) Passes

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)  

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/442801731/director-chronicles-the-black-panthers-rise-new-tactics-were-needed

Workers Vanguard No. 982
10 June 2011

Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt)

1947–2011

Geronimo ji Jaga, a former leader of the Black Panther Party (BPP) in Los Angeles, died at his home in Tanzania on June 3 at the age of 63. The cause of death is not known at this time. From 1970 to 1997, Geronimo was America’s foremost class-war prisoner, trapped in prison hell after being framed up by the LAPD and FBI for a murder they knew he did not commit. Eight of his 27 years in prison were spent in solitary confinement. Throughout his imprisonment, Geronimo remained unbroken and committed to the cause of freedom for the oppressed.

Born Elmer Gerard Pratt, Geronimo grew up in KKK-infested southern Louisiana. He told WV: “The Klan killed a friend of mine. I think we were about nine or ten, swimming in the Atchafalaya River” (“Geronimo Pratt Speaks from San Quentin,” WV No. 382, 28 June 1985). His first jailing came at age 11 or 12, “for speaking to a white woman,” which “I didn’t even do because I grew up down there. I knew the rules.” With few job opportunities, at age 17 Geronimo joined the Army, serving two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he became a highly decorated paratrooper. After his first tour, Geronimo was sent to Detroit to help put down the 1967 ghetto rebellion. He recalled that his unit, 60-70 percent black, was supportive of the besieged ghetto, so “immediately they pulled us out of there.” He was then sent back to Vietnam.

Like many veterans, Geronimo was radicalized by the Vietnam War. After returning to racist America, he sought in the Panthers the vehicle to place his military experience at the service of the black freedom struggle. Along with Robert F. Williams and the Deacons for Defense, the Panthers rejected the turn-the-other-cheek pacifism of Martin Luther King Jr. and advocated armed self-defense. Geronimo immediately became a prime target of the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), in which 38 Panthers were killed and hundreds more imprisoned on trumped-up charges. One FBI memo spelled out, “Operation Number One is designed to challenge the legitimacy of the authority exercised by ELMER GERARD PRATT, BPP Deputy Minister of Defense.” On 8 December 1969, over 140 LAPD cops attacked the Panther headquarters where Geronimo lived. He survived the five-hour barrage but was later convicted on a minor weapons charge.

Geronimo was subsequently charged with the 1968 murder of Caroline Olsen in Santa Monica. He was convicted in 1972 on the perjured testimony of Julius Butler, an informant for the LAPD, FBI and District Attorney’s office, and sentenced to life in prison. Geronimo was nowhere near the scene of the killing. As early as 1985, former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen revealed the existence of wiretaps showing that when Olsen was killed, Geronimo was 400 miles away in Oakland, attending a heavily surveilled and wiretapped BPP leadership meeting. But because of bloody factional division fueled by COINTELPRO, no Panther leader except for Kathleen Cleaver testified on his behalf.

For refusing to confess guilt to a crime he did not commit, Geronimo was denied parole 16 times. To justify one such rejection, L.A. prosecutor Diane Vezzani declared that Geronimo was “still a revolutionary.” In the late 1980s, Geronimo played a pivotal role in enlisting the support of other former Panthers in the fight for freedom for death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, which helped publicize Mumia’s case more broadly. In 1999, Geronimo endorsed the Partisan Defense Committee-initiated anti-KKK mobilization in New York City. In 2002, he endorsed an Oakland united-front protest against the USA Patriot Act and Maritime Security Act that was initiated by the PDC and Labor Black League for Social Defense.

The Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee long fought for Geronimo’s freedom. Geronimo epitomized our characterization of the Black Panther Party as the best of a generation of black militants who sought a revolutionary road to black equality. But the Panthers’ black nationalist perspective and program doomed them to isolation in the ghetto, cut off from the only road out of the nightmare of racist American capitalism: integrated working-class struggle led to victory by a revolutionary vanguard party.

Geronimo was able to find some years of contentment after settling in Tanzania. But we are bitter that over half his adult life was stolen from him, spent in prison under conditions that undoubtedly exacerbated his health problems and likely contributed to his untimely death. He will be missed!

Donald Cox, 1936-2011:The beauty of the moon and the passion of the Black Panthers-By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 15, 2011

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)  

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/442801731/director-chronicles-the-black-panthers-rise-new-tactics-were-needed

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)  

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/442801731/director-chronicles-the-black-panthers-rise-new-tactics-were-needed

Donald Cox, 1936-2011:
The beauty of the moon
and the passion of the Black Panthers

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 15, 2011

It was sad news that former Black Panther, Don Cox, died in France, February 19, 2011, at the age of 74, but I had to laugh at The New York Times obituary by Bruce Weber that described the Panthers as “the socialist movement founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Calif., in 1966.” True, the Panthers were founded by Newton and Seale in 1966 in Oakland, but they were not a socialist movement, not by any stretch of the imagination.

They did for a time provide breakfast for children and they did want community control of institutions, such as police departments and schools, in black neighborhoods, but they did not advocate socialism.

They were part of the Black Nationalist movement that made allies with young, radical whites, and they also shared optimism and the political tactics of the anti-colonial upsurges that spread across the Third World in the 1960s.

I met Donald Cox -- “DC” as we called him -- and got to know him, briefly, in Algiers in 1970. I had gone to Algiers with a group of Yippies to meet Eldridge Cleaver and Timothy Leary, both of whom were wanted by U.S. authorities and were living in exile.

DC was the mellowest. DC was the coolest, and much less of a megalomaniac or egomaniac than Cleaver or Leary. In fact, he wasn’t a megalomaniac or an egomaniac at all. He didn’t want to change the world with guns or LSD and he didn’t want to run it either. Like Cleaver and Leary, he was also wanted by the FBI and considered “dangerous,” but he seemed wistful to me.


From left, Black Panthers Big Man, Don Cox, and June Hilliard at Panther national headquarters, Oakland, California, 1970. Image from gothamist.

In Algiers, he was concerned about the security of the Panthers and their Embassy because CIA agents monitored their activities. He was also a gracious host who took us -- Stew Albert, Anita Hoffman, Brian Flanagan, Jennifer Dohrn, Marty Kenner and me -- on a tour of the city, pointing out historical landmarks. He brought us one afternoon to the Place du Martyrs and explained that the French had executed suspected Algerian guerrillas here and then dumped their bodies into the harbor.

He turned to Jennifer Dohrn and asked her, “What color is that water?” She looked down. I looked down. We all did. “It’s reddish-blue,” Jennifer said. And indeed it was. It looked like the sea was awash in blood. “The Algerians say that it’s their blood that gives it that color,” DC explained. “The red blood of the guerrillas changed the color of the Mediterranean.”

At a feast at a seafood restaurant, DC was our official host and sat at the opposite head of the table from Cleaver. He ordered food for everyone -- shrimp and fish and white wine. DC was also made uneasy by two African Americans at the bar who said they were from San Francisco, and whom he suspected worked for the CIA. Sekou, one of the Panthers, spoke softly.

“I got us all covered,” he said. And indeed he did. I looked under the table and saw that he had a gun in his hand. I was confident he’d use it if need be. He had hijacked an airplane at gunpoint to get to Algiers.

DC didn’t have a gun in Algiers. I never saw him with one, either under a table or on his own person, though I did see Cleaver with an AK-47 in his lap. In 1970, DC expressed concern about living in exile. He hoped that he would not have to remain for the rest of his life outside his own native country. He missed San Francisco.

He did live in exile for the next 40 years of his life; his widow noted that before his death, exile had begun to wear on him. I’m sure it did and yet what strikes me most about DC now is his longevity. He lived longer than many of the Black Panthers, such as Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver, who became a born-again Christian, a Republican, and a crack-head in the 1990s in Oakland.

DC never turned his back on his ideals, his passion for justice or his appreciation of beauty.

One night, we all looked up at the moon and admired its beauty.

“In Babylon, you can’t appreciate the moon’s beauty,” DC told us. “But here you have the time and space to dig on it.” That’s the way I’d like to remember DC, the Black Panther Field Marshal, who lived more than half his life in exile, and who learned in exile to appreciate the beauty of the moon.

[Jonah Raskin teaches at Sonoma State University and is the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman.]

The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 9:57 AM
Labels: Algeria, American History, Black Liberation Movement, Black Panthers, Don Cox, Jonah Raskin, Leftists, Rag Bloggers, Sixties

3 Make/read comments:
b.f. said...
With regard to whether or not the BPP advocated for socialism in the 1960s and early 1970s, in his introduction to the 1970 book that he edited, "Black Panthers Speak", U.S. labor historian Philip Foner wrote that "one should add that the Black Panthers, while by no means the first blacks in the United States to oppose the capitalist system and espouse the cause of Socialism, were the first to do so as a separate organization...The Black Panthers, though favoring Socialism and coalitions with other oppressed groups, retain their separate identity as a revolutionary movement..."

And in February 1970, the Black Panther Party's national office also issued a statement to the U.S. "Guardian" radical newspaper which stated:

"The Black Panther Party stands for revolutionary solidarity with all people fighting against the forces of imperialism, capitalism, racism and fascism...

"In the words of the party's chairman, Bobby Seale, we will not fight capitalism with black capitalism; we will not fight imperialism with black imperialism; we will not fight racism with black racism. Rather we will take our stand against these evils with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism..."

Mar 15, 2011 1:33:00 PM
"John MF" said...
Marx taught that control of the "means of production" was the path to power, i.e. socialism on the way to what Engels called the "withering away of the state."

Since the means of production were virtually absent in the black communities, the Panthers, and particularly DC, espoused control of the institutions of society, the means of "serving the people" with defense (police powers), access to food and shelter (welfare and community food centers), and the voice of information (the people's media).
Home-grown, locally-controlled and self-defended may equal "socialism" in the streets, and solidarity with the international movements for freedom, justice and equality, but there was nothing academic about the pragmatism of the Field Marshall and his friends.

Mar 15, 2011 11:04:00 PM
Positive Quotes said...
We will take our stand against these evils with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism.

Mar 16, 2011 3:25:00 AM

*From The Pen Of Mumia Abu-Jamal-"We Want Freedom: A Life InThe Black Panther Party (2005)

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.

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)  

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/442801731/director-chronicles-the-black-panthers-rise-new-tactics-were-needed

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.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY (From 2007)

Click on the title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee Web site.

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

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/442801731/director-chronicles-the-black-panthers-rise-new-tactics-were-needed

 

COMMENTARY

BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM!

FEBRUARY IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Recently I posted on this site an article passed on from the Partisan Defense Committee protesting the recent arrest of some former Black Panthers for crimes allegedly committed in the early 1970’s. Apparently, when the government gets you in its sights you are there forever, especially if you are black. That article got me to thinking back to the days when we of the white left were head over heels in love with the Black Panthers as the epitome of revolutionary manhood (and it was mainly men) and of revolutionary struggle. Well, as we are all painfully aware, those days are long gone although the goals fought for in those days are still desperately in need of completion. Thus, some thoughts about the ups and downs of the Black Panther experience, the most militant and subjectively revolutionary part of the black liberation movement of the 1960’s, and its role in the history of black liberation is in order.

It is extremely improbable that the phenomenal rise of the Black Panthers in California, and later elsewhere, would have occurred had it not been for the tidal wave of the black civil rights struggle in the South in the early 1960’ s and the various ghetto uprisings in the mid-1960’s. The victories achieved in the civil rights struggle, limited as they were, taught masses of blacks how to organize around their own interests. That those victories were limited became apparent with the hardheaded and hard-learned experience that those problems were only the tip of the iceberg for the black community as the struggle moved North and West. This contradiction played itself out internally in the black liberation movement and eventually caused a profound political collision between the liberal integrationist, pacific wing epitomized by Martin Luther King and the separatist, nationalist, self-defense oriented Malcolm X wing , of which the Panthers were the heirs. A shorthand way of putting this is the black liberation variant of the age-old tension between revolutionary and reformist strategies for social change. The Black Panthers throughout their rise and fall never did successfully overcome that tension, to the detriment of militant leftists, black and white.

As any photograph taken of the Panthers from the period would demonstrate the Panthers and particularly the central leadership, Huey Newton, Bobby Searle, Eldridge Cleaver among others were not adverse to little provocative demonstrations or shock-value publicity. The FBI, however, early on had other plans for them and they were not pretty. If J. Edgar Hoover saw the placid Martin Luther King-led branch of the civil rights movement as some kind of communist conspiracy then he turned apoplectic at the thought of armed black men asserting their right to bear arms. Since early slavery times that possibility had always been the fear of whites and the response was no different this time. Over a very short period the Hoover-orchestrated federal and state drive against the Panthers left most of the key leaders and cadre dead, in jail, on bail or in hiding, This was not the first time a perceived leftist threat had been deal with this in this way. One can think of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) in the World War I period, the Communist and Anarchist ‘red scare’ raids and deportations after that war and more recently the anticommunist witch hunts of the 1950’s. With this difference, however, in the case of the Panthers there was a concerted effort to kill off every one they could get their hands on.

The repression of the Panthers became so intense that in many ways they became a de facto legal defense organization. That was quite a difference from the wild, revolutionary black nationalist days when they believed that they could go it alone on the streets with a cadre of black street militants in an American version of a ‘third world’ guerrilla warfare- driven national liberation front. Their nationalism initially alienated them from the black community (except, perhaps in their home base of Oakland, California) as until very late the ordinary black worker could not relate to the Panther political line despite the fact that even then the East Bay and other locales where the Panthers had influence were solidly working class areas. In short, they were looking in the streets not in the factories to organize the revolution.

The state repression also caused a shift in strategy as a matter of self-defense. However, the price the Panthers would pay for this was a capitulation to Democratic Party reformism through the vehicle of the Communist Party’s legal defense organizations, which they latched onto out of desperation. I have personal experience of this change. A fair number of blacks I had known from various earlier political struggles drifted into the Panther revolutionary nationalist orbit in revulsion against Martin Luther King’s non-violent strategy for social change, the incessant racism of American society and the barely hidden paternalism of the white liberal establishment and a fair part of the left. For a period in the late 1960’s it was almost impossible for white radicals and revolutionaries to talk or to socialize with many Panthers, especially the rank and file. On more than one occasion I was snubbed by, or threatened, by Panthers for attempting to argue for an integrated black and white alliance around a common program to fight the beast of American imperialism. Then in the very early seventies all of a sudden I was invited to various Panther support meetings and social affairs. Obviously the line had changed (through the concept of the so-called united front against fascism) and now I was a comrade again. Curious, right?

Even a cursory glance at the current American class structure points out that blacks (and more recently Hispanics) are heavily concentrated in the working class so that in order to be successful the struggle for socialism will have to deal with the fact that blacks will be a central component in the leadership of, and the struggle for, those goals. This is where the sad lessons of the demise of the Panthers between the rock of black nationalism and the hard place of democratic reformist politics is especially important. Looking back at the history of the 1960's black liberation struggle one can see little turning points where if hard communists had had enough forces they could have shifted the axis of the struggle way from black nationalism and democratic reformism. A working class program to break from the Democratic Party and struggle independently for a workers party could have gained a cadre. Do you not think that such a program would have not gotten a hearing from the landless rural workers in the South and the black industrial proletariat of the North and West? That, dear readers, is the ultimate tragedy of the demise of the Black Panthers. Enough said.

*From The "Bob Feldman 68" Blog- The 40th Anniversary Of The Murder of Fred Hampton (2010)

Click on the headline to link to a "Bob Feldman 68" blog entry marking the 40th anniversary of the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.

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)  

http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/442801731/director-chronicles-the-black-panthers-rise-new-tactics-were-needed

Markin comment:

The late "Gonzo" journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, once noted in his madman escapades posing as a novel, "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas", that at some point in the late 1960s the high water mark of the counter-cultural revolutionary possibilities had been met and thrown back. From then on the tide receded. We can quibble over exact dates and events but one of the clearest ones for me politically was the murders in Chicago of Black Panther leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in late 1969. To be black, especially a black man, or to be different hereafter in any out of the sort way from mainstream politics or culture put one at grave risk. Maybe not the kind of fiendish risk that Fred Hampton faced but risk of some degree nevertheless. And we of the left are still paying for those defeats forty years later.

February Is Black History Month-The Truth-teller-Malcolm X on Racist America

Markin comment:

Read the entries below. Does that first entry sound like a man who was on the same page politically as "DeLawd," Martin Luther King? To pose the question is to give the answer. As close as I was to the King-led movement in those days Malcolm X could still stir me in a way King with all his obvious eloquence could never do. Truth to power-no question.

Malcolm X on Racist America

The text of this telegram to Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, was read aloud by Malcolm X at a public rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unitv in Harlem on January 24. 1965.

Public Notice to George Lincoln Rockwell

"This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense—by any means necessary."

Discussion with American Ambassador in Africa

"He said, 'As long as I'm in Africa, I deal with people as human beings— For some strange reason color doesn't enter into it at all.'

"He said, 'But whenever I return to the United States and I'm talking to a non-white person, I'm conscious of it, I'm self-conscious, I'm aware of the color differences.'

"So I told him, 'What you're telling me, whether you realize it or not, is that it is not basic in you to be a racist, but that society there in America, which you all have created, makes you a racist.' This is true, this is the worst racist society on this earth. There is no country on earth in which you can live and racism be brought out in you— whether you're white or black—more so than this country that poses as a democracy. This is a country where the social, economic, political atmosphere creates a sort of psychological atmos¬phere that makes it almost impossible, if you're in your right mind, to walk down the street with a while person and not be self-concious, or he or she not be self-conscious— But it's the society itself."
*******
From Spartacist- May-June 1964

MALCOLM X

Of all the national Negro leaders in this country, the one who was known uniquely for his militancy, intransigence, and refusal to be the liberals' front-man has been shot down. This new political assassination is another indicator of the rising current of irrationality and individual terrorism which the decay of our society begets. Liberal reaction is predictable, and predictably disgusting. They are, of course, opposed to assassination, and some may even contribute to the fund for the education of Malcolm’s children, but their mourning at the death of the head of world imperialism had a considerably greater ring of sincerity than their regret at the murder of a black militant who wouldn't play their game.

Black Muslims?

The official story is that Black Muslims killed Malcolm. But we should not hasten to accept this to date unproved hypothesis. The New York Police, for example, had good cause to be afraid of Malcolm, and with the vast resources of blackmail and coercion which are at their disposal, they also had ample opportunity, and of course would have little reason to fear exposure were they involved. At the same time, the Muslim theory cannot be discounted out of hand because the Muslims are not a political group, and in substituting religion for science, and color mysticism for rational analysis, they have a world view which would encompass the efficacy and morality of assassination, a man who has a direct pipeline to God can justify anything.

No Program

The main point, however, is not who killed Malcolm, but why could he be killed? In the literal sense, of course, any man can be killed, but why was Malcolm particularly vulnerable? The answer to this question makes of Malcolm's death tragedy of the sharpest kind, and in the literal Greek sense. Liberals and Elijah have tried to make Malcolm a victim of his own (non-existent) doctrines of violence. This is totally wrong and totally hypocritical. Malcolm was the most dynamic national leader to have appeared in America in the last decade. Compared with him the famous Kennedy personality was a flimsy cardboard creation of money, publicity, makeup, and the media. Malcolm had none of these, but a righteous cause and iron character forged by white America in the fire of discrimination, addiction, prison, and incredible calumny. He had a difficult to define but almost tangible attribute called charisma. When you heard Malcolm speak, even when you heard him say things that were wrong and confusing, you wanted to believe. Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing-his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful, and terribly incomplete. It is useless to speculate on how far it would have gone had he lived. He had entered prison a burgler, an addict, and a victim. He emerged a Muslim and a free man forever. Elijah Muhammad and the Lost-Found Nation of Islam were thus inextricably bound up with his personal emancipation. In any event, at the time of his death he had not yet developed a clear, explicit, and rational social program. Nor had he led his followers in the kind of transitional struggle necessary, to the creation of a successful mass movement. Lacking such a program, he could not develop cadres based on program. What cadre he had was based on Malcolm X instead. Hated and feared by the power structure, and the focus of the paranoid feelings of his former colleagues, his charisma made him dangerous, and his lack of developed program and cadre made him vulnerable. His death by violence had a high order of probability, as he himself clearly felt.

Heroic and Tragic Figure

The murder of Malcolm, and the disastrous consequences flowing from that murder for Malcolm's organization and black militancy in general, does not mean that the militant black movement can always be decapitated with a shotgun. True, there is an agonizing gap in black leadership today. On the one hand there are the respectable servants of the liberal establishment; men like James Farmer whose contemptible effort to blame Malcolm's murder on "Chinese Communists" will only hasten his eclipse as a leader, and on the other hand the ranks of the militants have yet to produce a man with the leadership potential of Malcolm. But such leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike ad a heroic and tragic figure* in & dark period of our common history. •

Bay Area Spartacist Committee, 2 March, 1965

On Martin Luther King Day-HONOR THE MEMORY OF ROBERT F. WILLIAMS-BLACK LIBERATION FIGHTER

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for black liberation fighter Robert F. Williams. This is a classic case of a liberation fighter getting in the cross-hairs of the ruling class and paying the price. We will remember that hard lesson as we struggle for liberation. Thanks, Brother Williams.
******
Originally posted on the American Left History blog on February 23, 2007

COMMENTARY

FOR BLACK LIBERATION THROUGH THE FIGHT FOR SOCIALISM

In this space I have attempted to introduce the new generation of militants and others to some of the historic events and people who have rendered service to the international working class and their allies. Obviously, such figures as John Brown, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm X and others need no introduction to most thoughtful militants. However, there are lesser historical figures, many half-forgotten, whose lives and struggles cry out for recognition and study. The late civil rights activist and black liberation militant Robert F. Williams is just such a figure.

For those who have either forgotten or are too young to remember Robert F. William was the leader of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, with this different. Unlike the mainly professional blacks (and their white supporters) who formed the core of NAACP membership the Monroe chapter through Williams’ recruitment drive was composed mainly of working class militants. More importantly, when the Klu Klux Klan rained hell down in Monroe, unlike in other Southern civil rights encounters, they were confronted with blacks armed and prepared to defend themselves.

The fear of a modern day Nat Turner or John Brown has always driven whites, and not only in the South, to wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Yes, that is a very different kind of civil rights story from most of the confrontations in the South, led by preachers and at, least tactically, committed to non-violent resistance. In the end Williams had to pay for his militancy by fleeing first to Cuba and then to China when the inevitable frame-up by the government came. In this case it was trumped up charges of kidnapping a white couple he tried to shelter in his home during a Klan/militant confrontation that he eventually beat.

The life story of Robert F. Williams is however more than that of a militant black ready to defend his home and kin. Military service in both World War II and Korea probably made him less afraid than others to advocate self-defense. I do not believe that it is an accident that many of the most militant blacks in the early civil rights movement and later those around the revolutionary black nationalist Black Panther Party were veterans of military service. A whole separate story could be written about such activists. Williams’ leadership capacities, moreover, extended beyond formal organizational leadership in Monroe. His now classic book Negroes With Guns (well worth reading)is an important contribution to black liberation literature. In exile in Cuba he edited a newspaper and ran a radio station called Radio Free Dixie directed at civil rights militants in the struggle in America.

Robert F. Williams life story also demonstrates the limitations of a blacks-only struggle for liberation. He proclaimed himself, on more than one occasion, a revolutionary black nationalist, and I believe he was sincere in that belief. Williams firmly believed that his natural allies, white workers, had been bought off by the ‘system’. On the face of it, at that time, that was probably not a far-fetched practical way to view the political world of the United States. Unfortunately, it was also a political dead end.

Nevertheless, within those self-imposed political limitations militants today can honor Robert F. Williams as a courageous black liberation fighter. Let me put it another way; Robert F. Williams is the kind of cadre necessary if there is ever to be socialism in this country. I would argue further that no revolution will occur here without such black militants leading the way. I will put it even more bluntly; I will take one fighter like Robert F. Williams for a hundred Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and Obama the “Charma's” who today claim to lead the struggle for black rights. They can step back, way back.

On Martin Luther King Day- The Truthteller-Malcolm X on Racist America

Markin comment:

Read the entries below. Does that first entry sound like a man who was on the same page politically as "DeLawd," Martin Luther King? To pose the question is to give the answer. As close as I was to the King-led movement in those days Malcolm X could still stir me in a way King with all his obvious eloquence could never do. Truth to power-no question.

Malcolm X on Racist America

The text of this telegram to Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, was read aloud by Malcolm X at a public rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unitv in Harlem on January 24. 1965.

Public Notice to George Lincoln Rockwell

"This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense—by any means necessary."

Discussion with American Ambassador in Africa

"He said, 'As long as I'm in Africa, I deal with people as human beings— For some strange reason color doesn't enter into it at all.'

"He said, 'But whenever I return to the United States and I'm talking to a non-white person, I'm conscious of it, I'm self-conscious, I'm aware of the color differences.'

"So I told him, 'What you're telling me, whether you realize it or not, is that it is not basic in you to be a racist, but that society there in America, which you all have created, makes you a racist.' This is true, this is the worst racist society on this earth. There is no country on earth in which you can live and racism be brought out in you— whether you're white or black—more so than this country that poses as a democracy. This is a country where the social, economic, political atmosphere creates a sort of psychological atmos¬phere that makes it almost impossible, if you're in your right mind, to walk down the street with a while person and not be self-concious, or he or she not be self-conscious— But it's the society itself."
*******
From Spartacist- May-June 1964

MALCOLM X

Of all the national Negro leaders in this country, the one who was known uniquely for his militancy, intransigence, and refusal to be the liberals' front-man has been shot down. This new political assassination is another indicator of the rising current of irrationality and individual terrorism which the decay of our society begets. Liberal reaction is predictable, and predictably disgusting. They are, of course, opposed to assassination, and some may even contribute to the fund for the education of Malcolm’s children, but their mourning at the death of the head of world imperialism had a considerably greater ring of sincerity than their regret at the murder of a black militant who wouldn't play their game.

Black Muslims?

The official story is that Black Muslims killed Malcolm. But we should not hasten to accept this to date unproved hypothesis. The New York Police, for example, had good cause to be afraid of Malcolm, and with the vast resources of blackmail and coercion which are at their disposal, they also had ample opportunity, and of course would have little reason to fear exposure were they involved. At the same time, the Muslim theory cannot be discounted out of hand because the Muslims are not a political group, and in substituting religion for science, and color mysticism for rational analysis, they have a world view which would encompass the efficacy and morality of assassination, a man who has a direct pipeline to God can justify anything.

No Program

The main point, however, is not who killed Malcolm, but why could he be killed? In the literal sense, of course, any man can be killed, but why was Malcolm particularly vulnerable? The answer to this question makes of Malcolm's death tragedy of the sharpest kind, and in the literal Greek sense. Liberals and Elijah have tried to make Malcolm a victim of his own (non-existent) doctrines of violence. This is totally wrong and totally hypocritical. Malcolm was the most dynamic national leader to have appeared in America in the last decade. Compared with him the famous Kennedy personality was a flimsy cardboard creation of money, publicity, makeup, and the media. Malcolm had none of these, but a righteous cause and iron character forged by white America in the fire of discrimination, addiction, prison, and incredible calumny. He had a difficult to define but almost tangible attribute called charisma. When you heard Malcolm speak, even when you heard him say things that were wrong and confusing, you wanted to believe. Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing-his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful, and terribly incomplete. It is useless to speculate on how far it would have gone had he lived. He had entered prison a burgler, an addict, and a victim. He emerged a Muslim and a free man forever. Elijah Muhammad and the Lost-Found Nation of Islam were thus inextricably bound up with his personal emancipation. In any event, at the time of his death he had not yet developed a clear, explicit, and rational social program. Nor had he led his followers in the kind of transitional struggle necessary, to the creation of a successful mass movement. Lacking such a program, he could not develop cadres based on program. What cadre he had was based on Malcolm X instead. Hated and feared by the power structure, and the focus of the paranoid feelings of his former colleagues, his charisma made him dangerous, and his lack of developed program and cadre made him vulnerable. His death by violence had a high order of probability, as he himself clearly felt.

Heroic and Tragic Figure

The murder of Malcolm, and the disastrous consequences flowing from that murder for Malcolm's organization and black militancy in general, does not mean that the militant black movement can always be decapitated with a shotgun. True, there is an agonizing gap in black leadership today. On the one hand there are the respectable servants of the liberal establishment; men like James Farmer whose contemptible effort to blame Malcolm's murder on "Chinese Communists" will only hasten his eclipse as a leader, and on the other hand the ranks of the militants have yet to produce a man with the leadership potential of Malcolm. But such leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike ad a heroic and tragic figure* in & dark period of our common history. •

Bay Area Spartacist Committee, 2 March, 1965

Former Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies - by Stephen Lendman

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late Black Panther leader, Geromino Pratt (ji-Jaga)

Sunday, June 05, 2011
Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies

Former Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies - by Stephen Lendman

Reporting his death, AP said:

"Former Black Panther Party leader Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt" died at age 63 in a small (Tanzania village) "where he had lived for at least half a decade, a friend of Pratt's in Arusha, former Black Panther Pete O'Neal, said."

He lived a peaceful life in Tanzania, O'Neal explained, adding:

"He's my hero. He was and will continue to be. Geronimo was a symbol of steadfast resistance against all (he) considered wrong and improper. His whole life was dedicated to standing opposition to oppression and exploitation....He gave all that he had and his life, I believe, struggling, trying to help people lift themselves up."

His lawyer and longtime friend, Stuart Hanlon, who spent years working for his release, also announced his death, saying:

"What happened to him is the horror story of the United States. This became a microcosm of when the government decides what's politically right or wrong. The COINTELPRO program was awful. He became a symbol for what they did."

He had southern, rural roots, and hardworking parents who sent all their kids to college. "He (went) to the military, (fought) and (was awarded two Bronze Stars, a Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts) in Vietnam, (came) home, (and became) a football star in college. That would be an American hero. It was different because he was black and he became a Panther and then the road went the wrong way."

Calling Pratt one of his closest friends, Hanlon said his case "defined me as a lawyer."

David Hilliard helped recruit Pratt to provide leadership for the Los Angeles Panther chapter. "He symbolized the best human spirit," he said. "His spirit of endurance, his strength, his service to his people. He (was) very positive and a real example for young people who want to look into the direction of Che Guevara, Malcolm X and the leader of our party, Huey P. Newton. He (was) one of the true heros of our era. He dedicated his life to (serve) his people. There is nothing more honorable than that."

On June 3, Los Angeles Times writer Robert Lopez headlined, "Former Black Panther whose murder conviction was overturned dies at 63," saying:

He became "a symbol of racial injustices during the turbulent 1960s....a cause celebre for a range of supporters, including elected officials, activists, Amnesty International, clergy and celebrities, who believed he was framed by Los Angeles police and the FBI" because he was Black and a Panther member.

In fact, he was under FBI surveillance in Oakland when the murder he was convicted of happened in Santa Monica, hundreds of miles south. Nonetheless, he was unjustly framed and served 27 years until freed.

In 1970, he was arrested and falsely charged with Caroline Olsen's murder, a Los Angeles teacher. In 1968, she and her husband Kenneth were attacked on a Santa Monica tennis court by two Black men. Three years later, Kenneth said Pratt was one of the assailants, pressured to name him after first identifying three other suspects from LAPD photos. In 1972, he was falsely convicted.

In fact, Pratt was framed, victimized by LAPD authorities working with the FBI's illegal COINTELPRO counterintelligence program against political dissidents, including communists; anti-war, human and civil rights activists; the American Indian Movement; and Black Panther Party members, among others.

In their book "Agents of Repression," Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall said:

"(T)he term came to signify the whole context of clandestine (mostly illegal) political repression activities, (including) a massive surveillance (program via) wiretaps, surreptitious entries and burglaries, electronic devices, live 'tails' and....bogus mail" (to induce paranoia and) foster 'splits' within or between organizations."

Other tactics included black propaganda, disinformation or gray propaganda, rumor spreading, manufactured evidence, harassment arrests on bogus charges, and assassinations, notably against Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969 by Chicago police while they slept.

In Pratt's case, Julius Butler was the prosecution's main witness, an FBI/LAPD informant, expelled from the Panthers by Pratt for advocating violence. At trial, he falsely claimed Pratt confessed to the killing.

Later, when Butler was outed as an informer, paid to lie, LA authorities denied Pratt a retrial, keeping him imprisoned wrongfully for another 20 years.

Moreover, according to former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen, Los Angeles Panther headquaters wiretap information showed Pratt was in Oakland when it happened, also confirmed by agency surveillance evidence there. Pratt's defense wasn't told. In addition, in both cities, tapes and other evidence were destroyed to keep an innocent man wrongfully imprisoned for 27 years, eight in solitary confinement, as well as parole denied 16 times.

Delayed Justice Finally Achieved

On May 29, 1997, Judge Everett W. Dickey (an Orange County Reagan appointee), in a sharply worded opinion, reversed Pratt's conviction, ruling prosecutors suppressed evidence to unjustly imprison him in ordering a new trial. At the time, he was America's longest held political prisoner, yet to be fully exonerated.

Over 30 years later in February 1999, it came in a four paragraph Los Angeles County District Attorney, Gil Garcetti, statement, saying:

"We accept the decision of the court of appeals. The murder at issue in this case occurred over 30 years ago. Most of the witnesses to the case are deceased. It would be virtually impossible to retry this case. In our professional judgment, there would be no reasonable likelihood of conviction."

Omitted was any admission of FBI, LAPD, or prosecutorial wrongdoing. In fact, Hanlon at the time said Garcetti fought him and fellow Pratt attorney Johnnie Cochran, Jr. "every step of the way," trying to keep him wrongfully imprisoned.

In May 2000, in a civil rights lawsuit, a federal judge awarded Pratt $4.5 million for false imprisonment, but couldn't return his 27 lost years, or undo the toll it took even on someone with his inner strength.

Journalist and author Jack Olsen wrote about Pratt's ordeal in his book titled, "Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt," recounting his southern roots, loving parents, self-reliance and dedication to right over wrong.

At UCLA, in fact, his awareness of police brutality and racial injustice inspired him to join the Panthers at a time FBI and local police harassed the organization nationally to undermine its solidarity by neutralizing its leaders. As a result, Pratt became a prime target, culminating in his arrest and wrongful conviction, nearly keeping him imprisoned for life.

While there, Olsen explained, he spent years in solitary confinement, his only toilet a hole in the floor that routinely backed up. In addition, he got only three hours of daylight a week, and was routinely harassed, beaten, drugged, moved from one "dungeon" to another, targeted for assassination at times, and falsely accused of other offenses, including attempted murder of guards, inciting riots, planning mass escapes, and masterminding Patty Hearst's kidnapping.

Only his inner strength saved him, using meditation, chanting, astral projection and yoga, along with studying law and other self-help practices to survive despite everything prison authorities threw at him to destroy him. They couldn't, but at age 63 he passed, a major loss to those who loved him, but not his spirit inspiring others to fight the good fight against injustice affecting anyone.

A Final Comment

In October 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. It was progressive, activist, militantly for ethnic justice, racial emancipation, and real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines. Radical ideas then and now, the party's ten-point program stood for:

(1) freedom and "power to determine the destiny of our black community;"

(2) full employment for Black people and everyone;

(3) "an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black community;"

(4) decent housing;

(5) education to expose "the true nature of this decadent American society (and teach) us our true history and our role in the present-day society;"

(6) for "all Black men to be exempt from military service" at a time they were drafted for foreign wars;

(7) "an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people;"

(8) "freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails;"

(9) for Black people in court "to be tried....by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities;" and

(10) "land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace."

They also added words from the Declaration of Independence, saying:

-- "all men are created equal";

-- "to secure (their) rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;"

-- "that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute a new government;"

-- "to throw off (despotism), and to provide new guards for (peoples') future security."

They believed in rule of law principles, published a newspaper with 250,000 readers, and articulated fundamental wants and needs. They also practiced what they preached with:

-- nutritious breakfasts for poor children;

-- food for needy families;

-- free clinics for medical care;

-- a free ambulance service;

-- help for the homeless;

-- free legal aids and bussing to prisons;

-- after-school and summer classes teaching Black history; and

-- Black voter registration drives.

They helped elect Oakland's first Black mayor, Lionel Wilson, in the city where the Panthers were founded.

They were young and idealistic, willing to put their lives on the line for their beliefs and activism. Their goal - to make the world a better place for Black people and everyone.

They were revolutionaries for justice, hostile to repression. In Huey Newton's words, they were "never a group of angry young militants full of fury toward the 'white establishment.' "

The Party, in fact, advocated love for Black people, not hate for Whites. They fought for change from over 30 branches throughout the country with over 2,000 members at their peak.

They wanted redress of longstanding grievances, including slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, discrimination, neglect and abuse. Practicing what Jefferson preached, they were targeted viciously and illegally for destruction, an agenda still ongoing against other activists and dissident groups to make America safe for wealth and power at the expense of beneficial social change, what heroic Panthers and others like them fought and died for and still do. What better reason to do it for than that.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

posted by Steve Lendman @ 1:09 AM