Huey P. Newton - III. Formation and Purpose of the Party: What Makes It Different? lyrics

By 1966, the United States had experienced a recent series of disruptions in several of its major urban Black population centers—Harlem, Watts, Chicago and Detroit Numerous organizations and leaders representing groups of Black people—e.g., SCLC (Martin Luther King, Jr.), the Black m**ms (Elijah Muhammed and Malcolm X), CORE (James Farmer), NAACP (Roy Wilkins)—had repeatedly articulated the causes of these riots or urban rebellions: high unemployment, bad housing, police brutality, poor health care, and inferior educational opportunities. Their consensus on the ills that caused or contributed to the violent explosions in inner cities was confirmed by official investigating bodies such as the Kerner and McCone Commissions. While all groups were generally in agreement on the specific maladies of the society affecting Blacks, they were in disagreement as to the best solution for ending them. The Black nationalists favored separatism; traditional liberals, integration and pa**age of new legal guarantees; and some of the more activist-oriented demanded "revolution now." Amidst this clamor for social justice, the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California, in 1966. A. Ideology of Revolutionary Intercommunalism The Party differed from other organizations representing Black and poor persons in several respects. First, the Panthers embraced from the outset an explicitly socialist ideology, which it soon named "revolutionary intercommunalism." In essence, the Party acknowledged that it was, despite certain differences, basically socialist or Marxist because it followed the dialectical method and sought to integrate theory and practice. As the founder of the Panthers observed: We are not mechanical Marxists and we are not historical materialists. Some people think they are Marxists when they are actually following the thoughts of Hegel. Some people think they are Marxist-Leninists but they refuse to be creative, and are, therefore, tied to the past. They are tied to a rhetoric that does not apply to the present set of conditions. They are tied to a set of thoughts that approaches dogma...If we are using the method of dialectical materialism we don't expect to find anything the same even one minute later because "one minute later" is history. If things are in a constant state of change, we cannot expect them to be the same. Words used to describe old phenomena may be useless to describe the new. And if we use the old words to describe new events we run the risk of confusing people and misleading them into thinking that things are static. This espousal of revolutionary intercommunalism by the BPP obviously influenced the perception of others about it, especially, as will be shown, the federal government. Of equal importance, however, is the effect this ideology has upon the actions of the Party and the decisions of its leadership. Revolutionary intercommunalism provided an important paradigm for interpreting the world, much as a belief in laissez-faire capitalism affects the actions of corporate decision makers who embrace it. Thus, to the BPP, government opposition to its existence was expected as partial confirmation of its raison d' etre. On a more personal level, the BPP leadership felt toward their ideology and its likely opponents that "truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels." "Revolutionary intercommunalism" not only served to pit the BPP and government law enforcement against each other in ideological struggle, [but also] it gave the Party a perhaps unexpected a**et in its struggle for survival. The popular conception of ideology, especially one embracing terminology that seems foreign to traditional democratic politics, is that it is rigid and doctrinaire. Yet to the BPP leadership, its ideology, despite the sound of dogma it may have conveyed to others, served it as a pragmatic methodology for interpreting events. A central tenet of revolutionary intercommunalism, for example, is that "contradiction is the ruling principle of the universe," that everything is in a constant state of transformation. Recognition of these principles gave Party leaders an ability to grow through a self-criticism that many other radical political organizations seemed to lack. Thus, in 1970, Newton could say of the Party: In 1966 we called our Party a Black Nationalist Party (BNP). We called ourselves Black Nationalists because we thought that nationhood was the answer. Shortly after that we decided that what was really needed was revolutionary nationalism. That is, nationalism plus socialism. After an*lyzing conditions a little more, we found that it was impractical and even contradictory. Therefore we went to a higher level of consciousness. We saw that in order to be free we had to crush the ruling circle and therefore we had to unite with the peoples of the world. So we called ourselves Internationalists. . . We sought solidarity with what we thought were the nations of the world. But then what happened? We found that because everything is in a constant state of transformation, because of the development of technology, because of the development of the ma** media . . . and because of the fact that the United States is no longer a nation but an empire, nations could not exist, for they did not have the criteria for nationhood. Their self-determination, economic determination, and cultural determination has been transformed by the imperialists and the ruling circle. They were no longer nations. We found that in order to be Internationalists we had to be also Nationalists, or at least acknowledge nationhood. Internationalism . . . means the interrelationship among a group of nations. But since no nation exists, and since the United States is in fact an empire, it is impossible for us to be Internationalists. These transformations and phenomena require us to call ourselves "intercommunalists" because nations have been transformed into communities of the world. The Black Panther Party now disclaims internationalism and supports intercommunalism. B. Strategy for Building Community Institutions: The Survival Programs A second distinguishing characteristic of the Party has been its specific strategy to achieve revolutionary intercommunalism: the building of "survival" or community service programs. The purpose of these programs is to enable people to meet their daily needs by developing positive institutions within their communities and to organize the communities politically around these programs. This, of course, is nothing new when one thinks of certain minority or ethnic communities in the United States, such as the Jews or Chinese. Historically, one way these groups have affected their rise from deprivation is by developing communal a**ociations, ranging from fraternal and religious bodies to political machines. The function of these community a**ociations or institutions has been described by Cloward and Piven as "provid[ing] a base from which covert ethnic solidarity evolves into the political force required to overcome various forms of cla** inequality. They are therefore an important device by which the legitimate interests of particular groups are put forward to compete with those of other groups." Unfortunately, as Cloward and Piven concede, "the Black community"—and this was especially true in 1966 when the Party was forming—"lack[ed] an institutional framework in private social welfare [as well as in other institutional areas], and the separatist agencies of other ethnic and religious communities [were] not eager to see this deficiency overcome.... " Hence the BPP emphasized the importance of its survival programs. 1. The Police Patrols An early survival program focused on the issue of police brutality, which was a major concern, nationally and in Oakland, California. Applying knowledge of California law, Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale organized police patrols to respond to arrests of citizens that were regularly broadcast over the police officers' short-wave radio. Several Party members equipped with a shortwave radio in a car intercepted the calls, rushed to the scene of the arrest, and, armed with a law book, informed the person being arrested of his constitutional rights. Party members also carried loaded weapons, publicly displayed but not pointed toward anyone, and dressed in leather jackets and berets. The patrol participants were careful to stand no closer than ten feet from the arrest, to stay within the presumption that they were not interfering with the arrest. These initial contacts between Panther patrols and Oakland police resulted in the arrests of Party members and [in] considerable publicity. Media portrayals of these confrontations gave the impression that the Panthers were primarily an armed insurrectionary group. One of the reasons for this distorted image was astutely noted by Erik Erikson: You have all seen the now traditional picture of young Huey Newton like a latter day American revolutionary with a gun in his hands, held not threateningly, but safely pointing upward. To a man of my age, it was, not too long ago, almost impossible to imagine black men carrying guns openly—black vigilantes, black nightriders in automobiles, keeping an eye on (of all things) the law. Most readers of the news, of course, did not and do not know that according to California law, every citizen then had the right to carry a gun, one gun for self-defense and joint defense. But those who created that law certainly did not envisage anybody but white men doing so, nor did they envisage anybody but potential lawbreakers as the ones to be patrolled vigilant citizens in an ill-defined and frontier territory. . . . [What the BPP did] was to show how the black man's territory has never outlived the frontier state and is still the land of undefined laws; and that arbitrary violence in this territory often comes not from roving outlaws but from those charged with the enforcement of the law. Inclined to disregard the rights of black citizens, they break the law under the guise of defending it. [The BPP] made of the police, then, the symbol of uniformed and armed lawlessness. But [it] did so by ingeniously turning the white man's own imagery (especially dear to the American West and the Western) around against the white world itself. And in arming [themselves] and [their] brothers against that world, [the BPP] emphasized a disciplined adherence to existing law. In fact, [the BPP] patrol member traveled equipped not only with a gun but also with a law book. The book and the fire—it cannot escape us—what an elemental pair of symbols this has been in revolts as far removed from each other as that of the Germans in Luther's day and that of the Zionists in our own. The image of Blacks armed for self-defense against police brutality catapulted the Party nationally into the public consciousness and gave an erroneous impression that it advocated armed confrontation. Ironically, however, the single event most responsible for projecting this violent image was itself a pristine case of a group legally petitioning the government for redress of grievances. The BPP learned in April 1967 of the shooting by Richmond, California police of Denzil Dowell, a twenty-two-year-old Black. Official police accounts claim that the youth was running from the police after they had flagged him down in a stolen car. He reportedly jumped one fence, ran across an automobile junkyard, and was about to jump another fence when an officer shot him. No one claimed that Denzil Dowell was armed. Since he was shot while in the commission of a felony, the police claimed that it was justifiable homicide. But the police account suffered from factual inconsistencies. The victim suffered a hip injury, which made him an unlikely fence-jumper. Moreover, no oil or debris was found on his shoes or clothes, which, had he really run through the automobile junkyard near where he was found, would almost certainly have been present. Finally, several people had witnessed previous threats made by the police to Denzil Dowell, who was apparently viewed by some Richmond law enforcement personnel as a troublemaker. When BPP members went with Denzil Dowell's family to the sheriff of Contra Costa County to complain about the shooting, they were advised to go to the state capitol in Sacramento and get the law changed that permitted officers to shoot at suspects fleeing the scene of a felony. Party leaders saw this buck-pa**ing as further confirmation of their belief that armed citizen patrols of the police and the arming of the citizenry as guaranteed by the Constitution were the most effective deterrents to excessive use of police force. Soon after the shooting of Denzil Dowell, an East Bay legislator, Don Mulford, gave the BPP another reason to carry their grievances to the state capitol. Mulford introduced a bill to repeal the law that permitted citizens to carry loaded weapons in public places so long as the weapons were openly displayed. Obviously, the law Mulford sought to repeal was integral to the BPP's police patrols, which was why it was tagged the "Panther Bill" in numerous media reports. Pa**age of Mulford's bill, which the Panthers viewed as almost certain, would make it a crime for a citizen, not otherwise licensed, to carry a loaded weapon in a public place, whether openly displayed or concealed. In response to the introduction of this legislation, the BPP sent a delegation to the capitol to protest this attempted disarming of the citizenry. The delegation carried loaded rifles and shotguns, which they publicly displayed. They entered the state capitol, a public place, to make their protest by delivering Executive Mandate No. 1. The legislature responded to this protest by promptly pa**ing the law, which was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan. But the gathering of armed Black men on the capitol steps was photographed and published in newspapers and on television throughout the nation. These photographic representations served as a stimulus for Party popularity and growth among young Blacks, hostility by the government, and fear by much of the white citizenry recently racked by a series of Black urban riots. What never became clear to the public, largely because it was always deemphasized in the media, was that the armed self-defense program of the Party was just one form of what Party leaders viewed as self-defense against oppression. The Party had always urged self-defense against poor medical care, unemployment, slum housing, underrepresentation in the political process, and other social ills that poor and oppressed people suffer. The Panther means for implementing its concept of self-defense was its various survival programs, symbolized best by the police patrols and the free breakfast program for school children. In addition to these programs, however, the Party early initiated health clinics providing free medical and dental service, a busing program to take relatives of prisoners on visiting days, and an escort and transportation service for residents of senior citizen housing projects, as well as a clothing and shoe program to provide for more of the needs of the local community. It was these broad-based programs, including the free food programs where thousands of bags of groceries were given away to the poor citizens of the community, that gave the Party great appeal to poor and Black people throughout the country. For one of the first times since the organized slave rebellions before the Civil War, Blacks were responding to an organization that tried to build community institutions and did so under the banner of a political ideology that directly challenged democratic capitalism. 2. Use of Democratic Reforms by the Party to Build Community Institutions The Panthers, despite their explicit repudiation of democratic capitalism as a system that was inherently incapable of permitting Black and poor people from enjoying full and equal participation in it, did not eschew democratic means of reform, nor did they discourage Black capitalism. To the contrary, from its very inception, the Party utilized existing legal machinery in order to bring about social change and encouraged indigenous Black financial enterprises. In addition to the legal police patrols already mentioned, the Party frequently filed civil law suits seeking relief for its members, wand Black and poor people generally, from various injustices.18 The Panthers also turned to the ballot box, first by running members for mayor and city council in Oakland in 1972 and 1974, and comings surprisingly close to victory. In 1976, Party involvement was admittedly credited by two successful Black candidates for their elections, to the offices of Mayor of Oakland and Supervisor of Alameda County, the first two Black persons to be elected to these positions in Oakland's history, despite a sizeable Black population that had resided there since World War II. Moreover, the Party incorporated some of its main survival programs such as its Intercommunal Youth Institute and Seniors Against a Fearful Environment (SAFE). The Youth Institute, a school for more than one hundred Party and other children from the first through the eighth grades, was incorporated as the Educational Opportunities Corporation. SAFE was an escort and busing program in which young Blacks took seniors out into the community—a combination of Black and gray power that to some extent provides both groups what they need and desire—people power. The device of incorporation allowed both survival programs to avail themselves of tax-deductible contributions and some limited government benefits. The Party also advocated growth of indigenous community businesses, even though they were capitalistic. This is because the Party recognized that Black capitalism has come to mean to many people Black control of another one of the institutions in t thee community. This positive quality of Black capitalism should, the Party felt, be encouraged. Since the people see Black capitalism in the community as Black control of local institutions, this is a positive characteristic because the people can bring more direction and focus to the activities of the capitalist. At the same time, the Black capitalist who has the interest of the community at heart will respond to the needs of the people because this is where his true strength lies. So far as capital [in] general is concerned, the black capitalist merely has the status of a victim because the big capitalists have the sk**s, make the loans„ and in fact control the Black capitalist. If he wants to succeed in his enterprise, the Black capitalist must turn to the community because he depends on them to make his profits. He needs this strong community support because he cannot become independent of the control of the corporate capitalists who control the large monopolies. The Black capitalist will be able to support the people by contributing to the survival programs of the Black Panther Party. In contributing to such programs he will be able to help build the vehicle which will eventually liberate the Black community. He will not be able to deliver the people from their problems, but he will be able to help build the strong political machine which will serve as a revolutionary vanguard and guide the people in their move toward freedom. A practical application of the Party's view toward Black capitalism and the use of legal means of reform occurred in Oakland, California, in 1971. A group of small Black-owned retail liquor stores and taverns asked the BPP for support in a boycott against Mayfair Supermarkets because Mayfair purchased alcoholic beverages from companies that excluded Black truck drivers. The BPP joined in the boycott, and within a period of days, Mayfair ended its discriminatory practices. The Party then asked the group of Black businessmen who had solicited Party help to make a nominal continuing contribution to one or more survival programs. The businessmen, who had approached the Party initially through an organization called the California State Package Store and Tavern Owners Association (Cal-Pak), declined to contribute except via a single gift. The Party rejected Cal-Pak's offer, stating, . . . a continuing trickle of support is more important to the community than a large, once-only hush mouth gift. We will not be paid off; we will not be quiet. We will not go away. . . Why should the Black community nourish a Black profiteer who has no concern for his brother? It was considered important to the Party's concept of building community institutions that contributions from the Black businesses not only be continuing, but that they come from the a**ociation representing them. This would, in the Party's view, constitute participation through a united front and build Cal-Pak as a community institution along with the survival programs. Since the Party had been asked for a**istance in the Mayfair boycott by representatives of Cal-Pak, it also followed logically that Cal-Pak should support the survival programs. When Cal-Pak refused, the Party called for a boycott of the liquor stores of the president of Cal-Pak, Bill Boyette, and picketed the two liquor stores he owned. Five months later, Cal-Pak and the Party reached an agreement. Congressman Ronald Dellums, who helped negotiate the settlement, announced at a press conference in January 1972 that: . . . an agreement has been reached of great importance to all of the people in the Bay Area and, in particular, the Black population of this area. This agreement, between the Black Panther Party and the Ad Hoc Committee for Promotion of Black Business, officially ends the boycott of Boyette's Liquor Stores by the Black Panther Party. . . The United Fund of the Bay Area, Inc., sponsored and created by the Ad Hoc Committee for the Promotion of Black Business and the Cal-Pak Liquor Dealers, has already begun the task of collecting funds from Black businesses and individuals for programs of special need in the Black community. Operating as a nonprofit social vehicle for the Black community, this new organization will make disbursements to various significant organizations in the Black community on a regular and continuing basis. Among the programs that will benefit are the survival programs of the Black Panther Party. This willingness by the Party to use democratic means of reform and to support Black capitalism was criticized by some as inconsistent with the Panther ideology of revolutionary intercommunalism. This is partly because progressive people quite correctly observe that "It is very clear, upon reflection, what function law serves within any culture. It protects the culture's ideology. Under capitalism it protects property, the men who own it and guard it." From this observation, it is only a brief inferential step to the conclusion that, because law is a product and perpetuator of corporate interests in this country, it cannot be a force for significant socioeconomic change. But while this conclusion is logical in a mechanistic-sense, it is illogical, and therefore wrong, in a dialectical sense: According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life... [I]f somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is basis, but the various elements of the super-structure: political forms of the cla** struggle . . . constitutions established by the victorious cla** . . . judicial forms, had even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants . . . also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. In sum, the Panthers combined a unique blend of elements that set them apart from traditional civil rights and minority organizations: a revolutionary ideology that argued for the necessity of fundamental socioeconomic change, a practical series of survival programs that served the community and fostered institutional growth and consciousness, and a willingness to employ creative legal means within the democratic system to achieve their ends. It was these unique elements that made the Panthers popular with many Blacks and, at the same time, a nemesis to the federal government.