Newton and Seale canvassed their community asking residents about issues of concern. The ten points are:. However, despite its militant stance, the BPP also provided free breakfast for school children, sickle cell anemia screening, legal aid, and adult education.
Most of these records are textual records, but there are also motion pictures, sound recordings, and photographs. She met and married Donald L. In addition to leading the Oakland chapter, they also worked in the New York and Philadelphia chapters as well. After Donald was accused of conspiracy to murder a Panther who was found to be an informant, the couple fled to Algeria and then to North Korea. Many members have also written memoirs of their experience in the group.
For ones available through Enoch Pratt Free Library, search the catalog. The library subscribes to several databases that may be helpful in your research. You will have to login with your library card in order to access them remotely. But also Ron Dellums, who becomes a Congressperson in the seventies, was affiliated with the group as well.
So you have the three major strands of Black power: the cultural nationalists, the Panthers, and those who looked to electoral politics, including Elihu Harris, the second Black mayor of Oakland, who was a high-school student participant in the Afro-American Association.
One of the most interesting things about the Bay Area in the early sixties is you had all these leftist formations: some coming out of the Revolutionary Action Movement, who considered themselves Marxist-Leninist, and the broad range of cultural nationalists, electoralists, those self-consciously identified with the Left, and the Black nationalists. That is a story that remains to be fully told. There are disparate elements that influence Panther ideology. There are elements from the Declaration of Independence, there are elements of socialism arguing for full employment, and there are elements of Black nationalism.
I also know from the Panther archives that they were reading early Immanuel Wallerstein and world systems theory, which influenced their ideas about intercommunalism. Also William Patterson. So they read a lot of things from the Left, but they also read stuff that was not from the Left. These are young people who are creating politics as they themselves are politicized. But I realized these were very young people experimenting with ideas, which I think is very important.
My book is a social history and also an observation. There are people who see the Panthers as a model for organizing. I think they reflect a particular moment, and we can draw lessons from the things that they did successfully, but there are many things they did unsuccessfully. Their sheer brilliance and use of political education. The crowning glory of Living for the City is the idea of political education, especially the political education of non-elites. It came out of the rural South, a very different culture of intellectualism.
They created a really profound newspaper, they created one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Emory Douglas, who was there from the beginning. His art is thoroughly a reflection of politics, he sees himself as a political person rather than an abstract artist. Once I was at one of his book signings and a curator there asked him who his intellectual influences are as an artist, and Douglas became very angry.
He said my influence is the Cuban Revolution. The way they provided a framework for the depth of intellectualism and political consciousness was important. The were able to use the carrying of a gun and a law book, from following the police around to informing people of their legal rights—constitutionalism, if you will—to publishing a newspaper, to providing free breakfast programs, where along with being given something to eat the children were introduced to the ideas of the Party.
And in the s, they ran candidates in electoral campaigns. Even though they said they wanted to win in Oakland and Chicago, the real goal was to disseminate the ideas of the Party. Their biggest failing was their authoritarianism. You and I have talked about the limits of how they used democratic centralism, and one of the things that happens in the Party is that, faced with repression, the leadership becomes divorced from the rank and file.
The leadership was sent to prison. That separation between a leadership in jail and the rank and file outside led to a disjuncture. That disjuncture allowed Huey Newton to be turned into a god and we all know the danger of turning anyone into a god—that never ends well.
Their democratic centralist structure allowed for no leadership accountability, so when the leadership became authoritarian there was no way to stop them. And they needed to be stopped. They were very young and what they did with the resources they had I could never do, it was remarkable.
I also think the nature of state surveillance and repression is important. After the scandal with Richard Aoki, the first Japanese member of the Black Panther Party, [scholars] estimate there were up to informants at the height of the Panthers. If you cross a line, they [the state] try and crush you, and the Panthers obviously crossed that line. Could you talk about that? The famous quote from Hoover is made in , precisely at the time when the Panthers are turning away from armed struggle.
They were worried about the Panthers transmitting these ideas to young people and building a sustained radical Black Marxist opposition to the state.
The things that will trigger that level of state repression are not always clear. These breakfast programs and freedom schools were largely run by women of the Panthers who came to be the majority of the Party. Please talk about the role of women in the Party.
0コメント