Black Panther Party Quotes

We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.

We don’t think you fight fire with fire best ; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.

Huey was something else. Huey was out of sight. He knew how to do it. Huey was ten motherfuckers.

When Black women stand up— as they did during the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as they did during the Black liberation era, earth-shaking changes occur.

I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.

The freedom movement was expansive. It was about transforming the entire country. It was not simply about acquiring civil rights within a framework that itself would not change.

The Black Panther Party may indeed be history, but the forces that gave rise to it are not. “They wait, for the proper season, to arise again.

The Black Panther Party was a revolutionary political organization. Although its members were leaders of the Black Power movement, they were not black nationalists. Their “black pride” was not based on denigrating whites, but on showing the black community how to take control of its own destiny. The Black Panther Party worked for economic justice and power for all people. Bobby

The Panthers saw black communities in the United States as a colony and the police as an occupying army.

There was no difference between the men and the women of the Black Panther Party. We were all working to serve the community.

I’m a big cat lover, so I thought it’d be cool to join the Black Panther party. But can you believe it, those fucking honkies wouldn’t let me in.

Being hungry is the hardest thing, & to this day I have prayers of gratitude for the Black Panthers, who made Breakfast for Children a thing that schools should do. We qualified for free lunch & breakfast, & without them I am almost sure we wouldn't have made it out of childhood alive despite my hardworking parents.

When a society is decaying, it props it­ self up with lies about how great it is, how invincible, and how glorious the future will be. The schools are used to pass on these lies from one generation to the next , in the name of "tradition.

Hoover’s program aimed to drive a wedge between the Party and its nonblack allies. Today, the popular misconception persists that the Black Panther Party was separatist, or antiwhite. Many current internet postings mischaracterize the Party in this way. 28

Nobody back then had ever heard of the counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) set up by the FBI. Nobody could possibly have known that the FBI had sent a phony letter to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, “signed” by the Panther 21, criticizing Huey Newton’s leadership. No one could have known that the FBI had sent a letter to Huey’s brother saying the New York Panthers were plotting to kill him. No one could have known that the FBI’s COINTELPRO was attempting to destroy the Black Panther Party in particular and the Black Liberation Movement in general, using divide-and-conquer tactics.

In the discussion at Phi Beta Sigma, a social fraternity I joined for a while, I expressed my anger about society and white racism. The other told me that I sounded like a guy named Donald Warden who was preaching Blackness at the Berkley campus of the University of California. He was the head of an organization called the Afro-American Association. I went to Berkley to find Warden and hear what he was saying. The first member I met, though, was Maurice Dawson, one of Warden’s tight partners. He turned me off with his arrogance. I had come searching for something, and he scorned me because I did not already know what I was seeking. I could not understand what he was saying about “Afro-Americans.” The term was new to me. Dawson really put me down. “You know what an Afro-Cucan is?” “Yes” “You know what an Afro-Brazilian is?” “Yes” “Then why don’t you know what an Afro-American is?” It may have been apparent to him, but not to me. But I was stilled interested. Maurice taught me a lesson that I try to apply to the Black Panther Party today. I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing a line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly feel into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.

A’ight, so what do you think it means?” “You don’t know?” I ask. “I know. I wanna hear what YOU think.” Here he goes. Picking my brain. “Khalil said it’s about what society feeds us as youth and how it comes back and bites them later,” I say. “I think it’s about more than youth though. I think it’s about us, period.” “Us who?” he asks. “Black people, minorities, poor people. Everybody at the bottom in society.” “The oppressed,” says Daddy. “Yeah. We’re the ones who get the short end of the stick, but we’re the ones they fear the most. That’s why the government targeted the Black Panthers, right? Because they were scared of the Panthers?” “Uh-huh,” Daddy says. “The Panthers educated and empowered the people. That tactic of empowering the oppressed goes even further back than the Panthers though. Name one.” Is he serious? He always makes me think. This one takes me a second. “The slave rebellion of 1831,” I say. “Nat Turner empowered and educated other slaves, and it led to one of the biggest slave revolts in history.” “A’ight, a’ight. You on it.” He gives me dap. “So, what’s the hate they’re giving the ‘little infants’ in today’s society?” “Racism?” “You gotta get a li’l more detailed than that. Think ’bout Khalil and his whole situation. Before he died.” “He was a drug dealer.” It hurts to say that. “And possibly a gang member.” “Why was he a drug dealer? Why are so many people in our neighborhood drug dealers?” I remember what Khalil said—he got tired of choosing between lights and food. “They need money,” I say. “And they don’t have a lot of other ways to get it.” “Right. Lack of opportunities,” Daddy says. “Corporate America don’t bring jobs to our communities, and they damn sure ain’t quick to hire us. Then, shit, even if you do have a high school diploma, so many of the schools in our neighborhoods don’t prepare us well enough. That’s why when your momma talked about sending you and your brothers to Williamson, I agreed. Our schools don’t get the resources to equip you like Williamson does. It’s easier to find some crack than it is to find a good school around here. “Now, think ’bout this,” he says. “How did the drugs even get in our neighborhood? This is a multibillion-dollar industry we talking ’bout, baby. That shit is flown into our communities, but I don’t know anybody with a private jet. Do you?” “No.” “Exactly. Drugs come from somewhere, and they’re destroying our community,” he says. “You got folks like Brenda, who think they need them to survive, and then you got the Khalils, who think they need to sell them to survive. The Brendas can’t get jobs unless they’re clean, and they can’t pay for rehab unless they got jobs. When the Khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry, or they have a hard time getting a real job and probably start selling drugs again. That’s the hate they’re giving us, baby, a system designed against us. That’s Thug Life.

Huey Newton was able to go down, and to take the nigger on the street and relate to him, understand what was going on inside of him, what he was thinking, and then implement that into an organization, into a PROGRAM and a PLATFORM, you dig it? Into the BLACK PANTHER PARTY—and then let it spread like wildfire across this country.

It was not simply what the Black Panthers did—but what they did in the conditions in which they found themselves—that proved so consequential

How do you fight white supremacy in the era of “color blindness”?

Nobody could have possibly known that the FBI had sent a phony letter to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, 'signed' by the Panther 21, criticizing Huey Newton's leadership... no one could have known that the FBI's cointelpro was attempting to destroy the Black Panther Party in particular, and the Black Liberation movement in general, using divide-and-conquer tactics.

The Black Panther Party sustained disruption as a source of power by leveraging broad political cleavages to draw widespread black, antiwar, and international support in resistance to repression. The Party became repressible only once the state made sweeping concessions to its allies—namely affirmative action, repeal of the draft, and international diplomatic reconciliation.

Nixon was clear to the men assembled that, in his view, “Rockefeller handled it well” because, as the president put it, “you see it’s the black business…he had to do it.”43 To a one, these men felt strongly that this rebellion was of a piece with the revolutionary plots that had recently been hatched in the California system by black activists such as Angela Davis, famed leader from the Black Panther Party. All

So the Black Panther Party had to navigate between two concerns. They recognized that black people had been oppressed on a specifically racial basis, and so they had to organize autonomously. But at the same time, if you talked about racism without talking about capitalism, you weren’t talking about getting power in the hands of the people. You were setting up a situation in which the white cop would be replaced by a black cop.

On April 5, 1967, six weeks after the Black Panther Party’s well-publicized confrontation with police while escorting Betty Shabazz, Assemblyman Mulford introduced a bill, AB 1591, in the California legislature proposing to outlaw the carrying of loaded firearms in public.29 In response to the “increasing incidence of organized groups and individuals publicly arming themselves,” Mulford argued, “it is imperative that this statute take effect immediately.

The black panther is an animal that when it is pressured it moves back until it is cornered, then it comes out fighting for life or death. We felt we had been pushed back long enough and that it was time for Negroes to come out and take over.

Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau observed, “The masses of poor Negroes remain an unorganized minority in swelling urban ghettos, and neither SNCC nor any other group has found a form of political organization that can convert the energy of the slums into political power.

I focused my speech on the way in which 1960s leftists had betrayed their own ideals by doing an about-face on civil rights and supporting race preferences, by abandoning the Vietnamese when they were being murdered and oppressed by communists, and by helping to crush the island of Cuba under the heel of the Castroist dictatorship. I also described my experiences with the Black Panther Party, a gang led by murderers and rapists whom the left had anointed as its political vanguard and whose crimes leftists continue to ignore to this day.

Bunchy” Carter, the so-called “Mayor of Watts.” Carter’s enforcer, Frank Diggs, is one of Elaine’s first Party heroes: “Frank Diggs, Captain Franco, was reputedly leader of the Panther underground. He had spent twelve years in Sing Sing Prison in New York on robbery and murder charges.” Captain Franco describes to Elaine and Ericka Huggins

As Michelle Alexander observes in The New Jim Crow, there are more black people under carceral control today than there were slaves in 1850. By 2000 the median white family owned ten times the assets of the median black family. Today, a decade and a half later, the median white family owns almost twenty times the assets of the median black family.

As much as they were concerned about the police, the Panthers also took seriously the threat of crime and sought to address the fears of the community they served. With this in mind, they organized Seniors Against a Fearful Environment (SAFE), an escort and bussing service in which young Black people accompanied the elderly on their business around the city. In Los Angeles, when the Party opened an office on Central Avenue, they immediately set about running the drug dealers out of the area. And in Philadelphia, neighbors reported a decrease in violent crime after the Party opened their office, and an increase after the office closed. There, the BPP paid particular attention to gang violence, organizing truces and recruiting gang members to help with the survival programs. It may be that the Panthers reduced crime by virtue of their very existence. Crime, and gang violence especially, dropped during the period of their activity, in part (in the estimate of sociologist Lewis Yablonsky) because the BPP and similar groups “channeled young black and Chicano youth who might have participated in gangbanging violence into relatively positive efforts for social change through political activities.

The following year Carmichael began a campaign to promote armed warfare in American cities and was briefly made "prime minister" of the Black Panther Party for his efforts. Ever the racist, Carmichael tried to persuade the Panthers to break off their alliances with whites, but failed. This led to his expulsion from the party and a ritual beating administered by his former comrades. Shortly thereafter, Carmichael left the United States for Africa. In Africa, he changed his name to Kwame Ture, thereby honoring two dictators (Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure) who caused untold misery to their own peoples. He took up residence as the personal guest of the sadistic Toure, Guinea's paranoid dictator, whose reputation was built on the torture-murders of thousands of his African subjects. Some 250,000 Guineans were driven into exile during Carmichael's stay there, without a protest from this New Left leader.

When we do disability justice work, it becomes impossible to look at disability and not examine how colonialism created it. It becomes a priority to look at Indigenous ways of perceiving and understanding disability, for example. It becomes a space where we see that disability is all up in Black and brown/queer and trans communities—from Henrietta Lacks to Harriet Tubman, from the Black Panther Party’s active support for disabled organizers’ two-month occupation of the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation to force the passage of Section 504, the law mandating disabled access to public spaces and transportation to the chronic illness and disability stories of second-wave queer feminists of color like Sylvia Rivera, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, and Barbara Cameron, whose lives are marked by bodily difference, trauma-surviving brilliance, and chronic illness but who mostly never used the term “disabled” to refer to themselves.

In the weeks leading up to the Detroit rebellion, three incidents exacerbated racial tensions. On June 12, a mob of more than eighty whites waged a miniriot and smoke-bombed the house of an interracial married couple—a black man and a white woman—who had moved into a suburban white neighborhood. On June 23, a black couple—Mr. Thomas, who worked at a local Ford plant, and Ms. Thomas, his pregnant wife—went to Rouge Park in a white neighborhood. A mob of more than fifteen whites harassed them, threatened to rape Mrs. Thomas, cut the wires on their car so they could not leave, and then shot Mr. Thomas three times, killing him and causing Ms. Thomas to miscarry. Six of the whites were arrested, but only one was charged, and he was eventually let off by a jury. In fact, at that time, no white had ever been found guilty of murdering a black person in Detroit.

New Rule: Democrats must get in touch with their inner asshole. I refer to the case of Van Jones, the man the Obama administration hired to find jobs for Americans in the new green industries. Seems like a smart thing to do in a recession, but Van Jones got fired because he got caught on tape saying Republicans are assholes. And they call it news! Now, I know I'm supposed to be all reinjected with yes-we-can-fever after the big health-care speech, and it was a great speech--when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter, there is none better. But here's the thing: Muhammad Ali also had a way with words, but it helped enormously that he could also punch guys in the face. It bothers me that Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like dropped "end-of-life counseling" from health-care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page. Crazy morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it. Same thing with the speech to schools this week, where the president attempted merely to tell children to work hard and wash their hands, and Cracker Nation reacted as if he was trying to hire the Black Panthers to hand out grenades in homeroom. Of course, the White House immediately capitulated. "No students will be forced to view the speech" a White House spokesperson assured a panicked nation. Isn't that like admitting that the president might be doing something unseemly? What a bunch of cowards. If the White House had any balls, they'd say, "He's giving a speech on the importance of staying in school, and if you jackasses don't show it to every damn kid, we're cutting off your federal education funding tomorrow." The Democrats just never learn: Americans don't really care which side of an issue you're on as long as you don't act like pussies When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats , who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen. I love Obama's civility, his desire to work with his enemies; it's positively Christlike. In college, he was probably the guy at the dorm parties who made sure the stoners shared their pot with the jocks. But we don't need that guy now. We need an asshole. Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the seventy percent of Americans who aren't crazy. And speaking of that seventy percent, when are we going to actually show up in all this? Tomorrow Glenn Beck's army of zombie retirees descending on Washington. It's the Million Moron March, although they won't get a million, of course, because many will be confused and drive to Washington state--but they will make news. Because people who take to the streets always do. They're at the town hall screaming at the congressman; we're on the couch screaming at the TV. Especially in this age of Twitters and blogs and Snuggies, it's a statement to just leave the house. But leave the house we must, because this is our last best shot for a long time to get the sort of serious health-care reform that would make the United States the envy of several African nations.

The 120 social scientists and investigators hired by the Kerner Commission, working under the guidance of Research Director Robert Shellow, provided a much more perceptive political analysis of the rebellions that the commission never published. In the concluding chapter of the analysis, “America on the Brink: White Racism and Black Rebellion,” the social scientists argued that racism pervaded all U.S. institutions and that blacks “feel it is legitimate and necessary to use violence against the social order. A truly revolutionary spirit has begun to take hold . . . an unwillingness to compromise or wait any longer, to risk death rather than have their people continue in a subordinate status.” Shellow and his team were subsequently fired, and their analysis was removed from the report.46 Powerful evidence supported the Shellow team’s view that many black people in Detroit saw the unrest as political action—that is, as a rebellion. In the Campbell-Schumann survey several months after the incident, 56 percent of the black respondents in Detroit characterized the incident as a “rebellion or revolution,” whereas only 19 percent characterized it as a “riot.”47 In

At its height, the rebellion can best be described as an insurrection. Large crowds of looters in the early part of July 23 gave way to roving bands of looters and fire bombers, who were much harder to control. Some coordinated their tactics by shortwave radio. Apparently, the rebels saw all government officials as the enemy, and they attacked firemen as well as policemen. By 4:40 P.M. on July 24, rebels had stolen hundreds of guns from gun shops. As police began to shoot at the looters, black snipers started shooting back. Hubert Locke, executive secretary of the establishment Committee for Equal Opportunity, called it a “total state of war.” Police officers and firemen reported being attacked by snipers on both the east and west sides of the city. Snipers made sporadic attacks on the Detroit Street Railways buses and on crews of the Public Lighting Commission and the Detroit Edison Company. Police records indicate that as many as ten people were shot by snipers on July 25 alone. A span of 140 blocks on the west side became a “bloody battlefield,” according to the Detroit News. Government tanks and armored personnel carriers “thundered through the streets and heavy machine guns chattered. . . . It was as though the Viet Cong had infiltrated the riot blackened streets.” The mayor said, “It looks like Berlin in 1945.”55 The black uprisings in Detroit and Newark were the largest of 1967 but by no means the only ones. Urban rebellions rocked cities large and small all across America. According to the Kerner Commission, 164 such rebellions erupted in the first nine months of the year.56

One of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the [Black Panther Party] is to keep this group isolated from the moderate black and white community which may support it. This is most emphatically pointed out in their Breakfast for Children Program, where they are actively soliciting and receiving support from uninformed whites and moderate blacks. . . . You state that the Bureau under the [Counterintelligence Program] should not attack programs of community interest such as the [Black Panther Party] “Breakfast for Children.” You state that this is because many prominent “humanitarians,” both white and black, are interested in the program as well as churches which are actively supporting it. You have obviously missed the point. —J. Edgar Hoover to FBI Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco, May 27, 1969

Black Power meant widely different things to different people. Despite

Some former Bush officials, however, believed that the Justice Department's failure to pursue the New Black Panther Party case resulted from top Obama administration officials' ideological belief that civil rights laws only apply to protect members of minority groups from discrimination by whites. Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler denied any such motives. She asserted that "the department makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved". But an anonymous Justice Department official told the Washington Post that "the Voting Rights Act was passed because people like Bull Connor [a white police commissioner] were hitting people like John Lewis [a black civil rights activist], not the other way around". The Post concluded that the New Black Panther Party case "tapped into deep divisions within the Justice Department that persist today over whether the agency should focus on protecting historically oppressed minorities or enforce laws without regard to race". The Office of Professional Responsibility's report on the case found that several former and current DOJ attorneys told investigators under oath that some lawyers in the Civil Rights Division don't believe that the DOJ should bring cases involving white victims of racial discrimination. The report also found that Voting Section lawyers believed that their boss, appointed by President Obama, wanted them to bring only cases protecting members of American minority groups. She phrased this as having the section pursue only "traditional" civil rights enforcement cases. Her employees understood that by "traditional" she meant only cases involving minority victims.

[...] white supremacy and coloniality still form the glue for the institutional and intellectual disciplinarity of western critical thought. Since the ideas of the Black Panther Party are limited to concerns with ethnic racism elsewhere, they do not register as thought qua thought, and can thus be exploited by and elevated to universality only in the hands of European thinkers such as Foucault, albeit without receiving any credit. [Dear reader, if this reminds you of the colonial expropriation of natural resources, you would be neither wrong nor alone in making such an assumption. In the words of Kanye West: that shit cray.]

Fred Hampton was instrumental in setting the terms of the relationship. Guerra continues, “Hampton was a very humble person and didn’t walk around like he was God’s gift to the movement, although he was an eloquent public speaker; he was also a great organizer. He was a person who came in an old car, got out, shook people’s hands, wanted to really talk to people. I remember him saying, ‘I’m glad to have met you. I’m glad to have met you.’ ”146 Hampton’s talents as organizer and public speaker and his radical coalition politics made him one of the most effective members of the Black Panther Party.

And so in the 1960s organizations like the Black Panther Party were created. (And I should say the Black Panther Party was founded in 1966, which means that there should be a fiftieth anniversary celebration coming up!) I wonder how we are going to address, for example, the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party. I’ll just summarize the Ten-Point Program and you might get an idea why there are not efforts under way to guarantee a large fiftieth anniversary celebration for the Black Panther Party. Number one was “We want freedom.” Two, full employment. Three, an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black and oppressed communities—it was anticapitalist! Number four, we want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings. Number five, we want decent education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society. And number six—which is especially significant in relation to the right-wing effort to undo the very small efforts made by the Obama administration to produce health care for poor people in the US—we want completely free health care for all Black and oppressed people. Number seven, we want an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of Black people, other people of color, and all oppressed people inside the United States. Number eight, we want an immediate end to all wars of aggression—you see how current this still sounds. Number nine, we want freedom for all Black and oppressed people now held in US federal, state, county, city, and military prisons and jails. We want trials by a jury of peers for all persons charged with so-called crimes under the laws of this country. And finally, number ten: we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace, and people’s community control of modern technology.

Some Dalits felt so strong a kinship with one wing of the American civil rights movement and had followed it so closely that, in the 1970s, they created the Dalit Panthers, inspired by the Black Panther Party.

I have come to realize that picking up the gun was/is the easy part. The difficult part is the day-to-day organizing, educating, and showing the people by example what needs to be done to create a new society. The hard, painstaking work of changing ourselves into new beings, of loving ourselves and our people, and working with them daily to create a new reality - this is the first revolution, that internal revolution.

While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads. From a reviewer:

We see anti-black sentiment in the immediate rejoinder to Black Lives Matter that all lives matter, that blue lives matter. And in the absurdly fake comparison between the white nationalist and alt-right movement with the Black Panther Party of the 1960s. We see anti-blackness in how much more harshly we criticize blacks, by every measure. We see it in the president of the United States positioning the avowed white supremacist Neo-Nazis marching openly in the streets... as equal in comparison to the people protesting them.

I also became a member of the Black Panther Party and worked with a branch of the organization in Los Angeles, where I was in charge of political education.

Black Panther Party—an organization founded in Oakland during the mid-1960s to stop police brutality toward African Americans and to help those who lacked employment, education and healthcare. Some of the many accomplishments of the Party would include the Free Breakfast for Children Program that would be replicated by public school systems across the country.

A prime example of intimidation at the polls that reveals the Obama administration’s disappointing attitude toward election crimes occurred in the 2008 federal election when two members of the New Black Panther Party stood in a doorway of a polling place in Philadelphia. They were in black paramilitary uniforms and one of them carried and brandished a nightstick. They argued with passersby and shouted racial insults at poll watchers. They attempted to block a poll watcher from entering the polling place and were recorded by a poll watcher with his video camera. At the time, Robert Popper was a deputy chief in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department. He was assigned to prosecute a civil action against these men for intimidation and attempted intimidation under the relevant federal statute, Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act. The case against the defendants was strong, and they subsequently defaulted by refusing even to answer the charges against them. But the case was abruptly curtailed and all but shut down by the newly appointed officials of the Obama administration. In the end, they ordered Popper to settle the case for a short, limited, and toothless injunction against only one of the four defendants. There was never a convincing explanation from Eric Holder or the administration as to why the case was cut short. Popper believes that it was a partisan abuse of what are supposed to be neutral law enforcement efforts to enforce the Voting Rights Act. This was only the beginning of the Obama administration’s abuse of its power over elections. The damage to the reputation of the Justice Department was enormous and enduring, and the damage to the public’s perception of the integrity of elections was incalculable.

The true extent of the agency’s domestic activities against dissidents would probably never be known, the Times declared—but the paper had been able to uncover CHAOS activities from the late sixties that had targeted the Black Panther party.

The FBI nicknamed the program COINTELPRO, as a shorthand for "counterintelligence program." COINTELPRO originated in the 1950s, to prevent socialist movements from developing in the United States, and the program rose to new heights in the Black Power era. Even prior to Stokely Carmichael's first calls for Black Power in 1966, the FBI was organizing to undermine civil rights movement efforts. The Black organizations they labeled as "militant' included not only Stokely's SNCC but also the Rev. Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group that never wavered in its dedication to nonviolent civil disobedience. Between 1963 and 1971, the FBI ran nearly three hundred separate COINTELPRO operations against Black nationalist groups, the majority of which targeted the Black Panther Party. The program's major goals were to: 1. Prevent the coalition of militant Black nationalist groups, as there would be strength in unity. 2. Prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could unify and electrify the movement, such as the Rev. Dr. King or Malcolm X. 3. Prevent violence, ideally by neutralizing movement leaders before they could become violent. 4. Prevent Black nationalist leaders from gaining respectability, ideally by discrediting them in the eyes of white people, Black people, and radicals of all races. 5. Prevent young people from joining the groups and increasing their membership base.

But Yippie was already a gleam in Abbie Hoffman’s eye; some hard SDS theoreticians were already smoking a joint now and then with the dopers, hoping to become closer to them and gradually lead them into the correct Marxist paths; and the potheads who were busted and spent some time in jail tended to come out with more willingness to listen to radical agitprop, especially if it had a strong anti-cop bias to it. The Black Panther Party’s polemical panchreston, “pig,” was even beginning to appear in some white vocabularies. And then, Eldridge Cleaver, who was a god in those days, announced that although heroin was rejected by the Panthers, they had no objection to marijuana.

one of the first acts of the Young Lords in Chicago was to join the Rainbow Coalition-uniting with our allies, our brothers and sisters, in the Black Panther Party, the Brown Berets, the Young Patriots, and Rising Up Angry. The Young Lords understood the importance of collaboration and of building a broad people's movement in order to transform society.

While the men at Attica hoped that powerful people such as State Senator John Dunne still might do something on their behalf, there was little consensus regarding what to do if this effort also failed to bring some meaningful improvements to their facility. The disparate political factions in the yard had been talking about this very question for some time now—activists like Sam Melville from the Weather Underground (a revolutionary organization committed to fighting racism and imperialism), Black Panthers like Tommy Hicks, Black Muslims like Richard X Clark, and men like Mariano “Dalou” Gonzalez from the Young Lords Party (a grassroots activist organization working in cities like New York and Chicago to improve conditions for Puerto Ricans).1 Still, no new strategy had been agreed upon. By early September 1971, however, and after Oswald’s taped message, all of them could agree on one crucial point: most men at Attica were now at a breaking point. Just about anything might cause this place to explode.

We see anti-black sentiment in how quickly images of brutality toward black children (let alone black adults) are justified by the white assumption that it must have been deserved. Such beliefs would be unimaginable if we had been shown images of white teens being thrown across schoolrooms, of white kindergarteners handcuffed, of a white child shot while playing with a toy gun in the park. We see anti-black sentiment in the immediate rejoinder to Black Lives Matter that all lives matter, that blue lives matter. And in the absurdly false comparison between the white nationalist and “alt-right” movement (now directly connected to the White House) with the Black Panther Party of the 1960s. We see anti-blackness in how much more harshly we criticize blacks, by every measure.

Il y a eu de nombres exemples, ces dernières années, de recours à l’action directe : les associations qui affrètent des bateaux pour secourir les migrants qui se noyaient dans la Méditerranée, Carola Rackete qui force en 2019 un blocus italien pour débarquer des hommes et femmes sauvés en mer vers le port de Lampedusa, Cédric Herrou et les militants qui apportent aux migrants aide et assistance, celles et ceux qui réquisitionnent des logements vides pour y loger là encore des migrants ou des mineurs isolés, des antifascistes qui se mobilisent pour empêcher un rassemblement d’extrême droite ou la signature d’un auteur réactionnaire… En un sens, les actes des lanceurs d’alerte qui publient des documents en ligne ressortissent à la même catégorie puisque l’on peut assimiler ces pratiques à du sabotage : perturber le fonctionnement d’une institution de l’intérieur de l’institution. C’est probablement en France l’association 269 Libération animale, peut-être l’un des groupes les plus innovants politiquement actuellement, qui en fait l’usage le plus beau et le plus conséquent : au lieu de se contenter de faire des vidéos d’abattoirs, dont l’effet se limite souvent au fait de distribuer des peines aux ouvriers qui y travaillent, ses membres libèrent des animaux sur le point d’être exécutés dans des abattoirs puis les installent et les laissent vivre dans des sanctuaires, sorte d’utopie pratique réalisée, dont sont absentes les logiques de l’exploitation animale […]. Lorsque le Black Panther Party organisa en 1967 des patrouilles armées pour policer la police et veiller à ce qu’elle respecte la Loi et la constitution, et la menaçait d’intervenir dans le cas contraire, puis lorsqu’il mit en place des programmes de santé, d’éducation, et de distribution alimentaire dans les quartiers noirs pour remplacer le gouvernement défaillant, c’est aussi de l’action directe qu’il développa. (p. 43-44)

By the time the New Left and the Civil Rights Movement came on the scene, Zinn had left the party’s ranks, but he was toying with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party and “gave his support to young black militants” of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers.29 Actually, Zinn radicalized the students, turned them into militants, and helped found and guide the radical SNCC.

toddler named Huey Newton was spirited from Monroe to Oakland with his sharecropper parents in 1943. His father had barely escaped a lynching in Louisiana for talking back to his white overseers. Huey Newton would become perhaps the most militant of the disillusioned offspring of the Great Migration. He founded the Black Panther Party in 1966 and reveled in discomfiting the white establishment with his black beret, rifle, and black power rhetoric.

The Party attracted large numbers of members and supporters, from various classes and races, who wanted to be part of a dynamic liberation movement rooted in the day-to-day struggles of ordinary black people, most of whom were poor and working class.

While whites were still the majority, they established preferences for blacks and Hispanics that took such deep root that Congress and state legislatures have been powerless to abolish them. These programs would provoke outrage if they were practiced in favor of whites, but they have been partially curbed only by state ballot initiatives and equivocal Supreme Court decisions. Demography would change this. In 2006, the state of Michigan voted to abolish racial preferences in college admissions and state contracting, but the measure passed only because whites were still a majority. Eighty-five percent of blacks and 69 percent of Hispanics voted to maintain racial preferences for themselves. When they have a voting majority nothing will prevent non-whites from reestablishing and extending preferences. Are there portents in the actions of Eric Holder, the first black attorney general, appointed by the first black president? J. Christian Adams, a white Justice Department lawyer resigned in protest when the department dropped a case of voter intimidation the previous administration had already won by default against the New Black Panther Party. In this 2008 case, fatigue-clad blacks waved billy clubs at white voters and yelled such things as “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” Mr. Adams called it “the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career.” He believed the decision to dismiss the case reflected hostility to the rights of whites. He said some of his colleagues called selective prosecution “payback time,” adding that “citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims.” Christopher Coates, who was the head of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division, agreed with this assessment. In sworn testimony before Congress, he called the dismissal of the Black Panthers case a “travesty of justice” and described a “hostile atmosphere” against “race-neutral enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act. He said the department had a “deep-seated opposition to the equal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act against racial minorities and for the protection of white voters who have been discriminated against.” How will the department behave when whites become a minority?

In an early proposal for the book in 2000, we elaborated a method of “strategic genealogy” to conduct this analysis. Rather than center our analysis on particular individuals or on dissection of the Party’s organization, we uncovered the political dynamics of the Party by studying the evolution of its political practices.34

In the summer of 1966, Seale was hired to run a youth work program at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center funded by the federal War on Poverty. Through his role as a social service provider, he came to understand even more clearly the economic and social needs of black youth. Beyond delivering services, Bobby brought his revolutionary nationalist theory to the job and used the opportunity to push up against the ideological bias in the government program. Rather than merely guiding young blacks into a government-prescribed path, he used his authority to help them stand up against oppressive authority, particularly against police brutality. One day Seale’s boss instructed him to take a group of young black men and women on a tour of the local police station. When the group arrived, the police officers pulled out notepads and pencils and started to interview the teenagers about the character of gangs in the neighborhood. Seale protested, instructing his group to remain silent and announcing that his program would not be used as a spy network to inform on people in the community. The officers claimed that they simply wanted to foster better relations with the community. In response, Seale turned the conversation around, creating an opportunity for the teenagers to describe their experiences with police brutality in the neighborhood. It was the first time the young people had had the opportunity to look white police officers in the eye and express their anger and frustration. One teenager berated the police for an incident in which several officers had thrown a woman down and beaten her in the head with billy clubs. “Say you!” said a sixteen-year-old girl, pointing at a policeman. “You don’t have to treat him like that,” Seale said to the girl. “I’ll treat him like I want to, because they done treated me so bad,” she replied. Bobby sat back as the girl grilled the officer about whether he had received proper psychiatric treatment. The officer turned red and started to shake. “The way you’re shaking now,” she said, “the way you’re shaking now and carrying on, you must be guilty of a whole lot! And I haven’t got no weapon or nothin.’”69 The poverty program provided a paycheck, some skills, and an opportunity to work with young people. But Newton and Seale were still searching for a way to galvanize the rage of the “brothers on the block.” They wanted to mobilize the ghetto the way that the Civil Rights Movement had mobilized blacks in the South. They dreamt of creating an unstoppable force that would transform the urban landscape forever. The problem was now clear to Huey and Bobby, but they did not yet have a solution. Huey and Bobby were not the only ones looking for answers.

The Revolutionary Action Movement advanced a pivotal idea that would become central to the politics of the Black Panther Party. Drawing on a line of thought reaching back at least to the mid-1940s and the black anticolonialism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Alpheaus Hunton, RAM argued that Black America was essentially a colony and framed the struggle against racism by blacks in the United States as part of the global anti-imperialist struggle against colonialism.47 Max Stanford defined the politics of revolutionary black nationalism this way in 1965: “We are revolutionary black nationalist, not based on ideas of national superiority, but striving for justice and liberation of all the oppressed peoples of the world. . . . There can be no liberty as long as black people are oppressed and the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America are oppressed by Yankee imperialism and neo-colonialism. After four hundred years of oppression, we realize that slavery, racism and imperialism are all interrelated and that liberty and justice for all cannot exist peacefully with imperialism.

Newton points out that military and political power are inextricably linked: without military power, there can be no political power. “Politics is war without bloodshed,” and “war is politics with bloodshed.” He criticizes black politics as toothless and thus powerless. Only by developing a force with real destructive capacity can black people obtain political power: When black people send a representative, he is somewhat absurd because he represents no political power. He does not represent land power because we do not own any land. He does not represent economic or industrial power because black people do not own the means of production. The only way he can become political is to represent what is commonly called a military power—which the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls Self-Defense Power. Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community, throughout the nation. Then we will choose a political representative and he will state to the power structure the desires of the black masses. If the desires are not met, the power structure will receive a political consequence. We will make it economically nonprofitable for the power structure to go on with its oppressive ways. We will then negotiate as equals. There will be a balance between the people who are economically powerful and the people who are potentially economically destructive.

Cleaver came across a picture of the white woman that Till had flirted with in a magazine and found her attractive. He saw himself in Till’s shoes, and it distressed him. “It intensified my frustrations,” Cleaver later explained, “to know that I was indoctrinated to see the white woman as more beautiful and desirable than my own black woman.” Cleaver’s emotional turmoil about his attraction to white women was not unusual. While white men often took liberties with black women, a black man who flirted even mildly with a white woman was considered to be making the gravest violation of white supremacy, one that was all too often punished by death. In this context, it is not surprising that many black men associated a sexual desire for white women with a desire to be recognized as human and free.

Carmichael also criticized the student peace movement and argued that if peace activists wanted to be relevant to most people, they needed to start organizing to resist the draft: The peace movement has been a failure because it hasn’t gotten off the college campuses where everybody has a 2S [draft deferment] and is not afraid of being drafted anyway. The problem is how you can move out of that into the white ghettos of this country and articulate a position for those white youth who do not want to go. . . . [SNCC is] the most militant organization for peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today. There isn’t one organization that has begun to meet our stand on the war in Vietnam. We not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. . . . There is a higher law than the law of a racist named [Secretary of Defense] McNamara; there is a higher law than the law of a fool named [Secretary of State] Rusk; there is a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. We will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we are going to decide who to kill.89

The Dalits were no more contented with their lot than anyone would be. In a caste system, conflating compliance with approval can be dehumanizing in itself. Many Dalits looked out beyond their homeland, surveyed the oppressed people all over the world, and identified the people closest to their lamentations. They recognized a shared fate with African-Americans, few of whom would have known of the suffering of Dalits. Some Dalits felt so strong a kinship with one wing of the American civil rights movement and had followed it so closely that, in the 1970s, they created the Dalit Panthers, inspired by the Black Panther Party. A

That was exactly one of our definitions of pig: the aggressor posing as the victim.

Such groups are often forced to live on the edge of social legality and, even when engaged in fully legal behavior, they are presented and hunted as criminals. Such has been the fate of groups like the Young Lords, and, again, the Black Panther Party, as well as “gangs” in the poor communities of Los Angeles and Chicago, for example, whose offenses were often mixed with programs aiming at social renewal and liberation.

Lockdown America, especially the mass incarceration and police violence that target poor communities of color, drive such leaders underground. Often, they have been murdered by the police. The Black Panther Party leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were murdered by Chicago police, together offer perhaps the most memorable case in point. The Philadelphia police bombing and shooting of MOVE Organization members is another example, as discussed at the outset of Part One of this book.

there are more black people under carceral control today than there were slaves in 1850.

Elaine Brown’s book A Taste of Power. Elaine rose up from an impoverished childhood in North Philly to become the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party, the ’60s political organization formed to challenge police brutality, fight systemic racism, and empower black communities.

Radical or revolutionary consciousness . . . is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed—and finally it is the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed who must unite to transform the objective conditions of their existence in order to resolve the contradiction between potentiality and actuality. Revolutionary consciousness leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression.

I give her another once-over, taking in her long, toned legs, her smooth stomach, thankfully visible due to her why-bother-wearing-me top. Her body is drop-dead gorgeous, but when you reach her eyes, they speak nothing of vixen, rather more like pure innocence. A total contradiction that has my mind reeling. “So, what are you supposed to be? A cat?” She glances at her outfit and sighs, taking another sip of her beer. She almost seems bored to be at the party. “I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be a panther but my roommates fell short in the costume department.” “Yeah, really short,” I add, eyeing her barely-there skirt. “Please tell me you’re wearing something under that.” “Nope,” she answers, sipping her beer and then smacking her lips. “I like to feel the wind in my undercarriage when I’m walking.” I wince. “Undercarriage? Fuck, I don’t want you to call it that.” She laughs and shakes her head. “I’m not a lady of the night, Knox. Of course I have something under this skirt.” She lifts up the side, flashing tiny black boy shorts. “Honestly, I’m going to be a librarian. I need to be sensible.” Sensible? More like hot as fuck. I saw partial ass cheek. I grip my beer close to my mouth and take a deep breath. “A sensible librarian wouldn’t flash a horny college guy her underwear.” “Well, maybe I’m more of a modern-day librarian then.” She winks and starts to walk away. “Hey, where are you going?” She looks over her shoulder. “I have more people to flash. Don’t think you’re the only lucky one.” Damn, that doesn’t sit well with me. Not one fucking bit.

Jazz musician Miles Davis once said, “If somebody told me I had only one hour to live, I’d spend it choking a white man. I’d do it nice and slow.” bell hooks, a black professor of English at City College of New York who spells her name in lower case, once wrote, “I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder.” Demond Washington, a star athlete at Tallassee High School in Tallassee, Alabama, got in trouble for saying over the school intercom, “I hate white people and I’m going to kill them all!” Later he said he did not mean it. Someone who probably did mean it was Maurice Heath, who heads the Philadelphia chapter of the New Black Panther party. He once told a crowd, “I hate white people—all of them! . . . You want freedom? You’re gonna have to kill some crackers! You’re gonna have to kill some of their babies!” Another one who probably meant it is Dr. Kamau Kambon, black activist and former visiting professor of Africana Studies at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. In 2005, Prof. Kambon told a panel at Howard University Law School that “white people want to kill us,” and that “we have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem.” In 2005, James “Jimi” Izrael, a black editorial assistant for the Lexington, Kentucky, Herald- Leader, was on a radio program to talk about Prof. Kambon. Another guest mentioned other blacks who have written about the fantasy of killing whites, and Mr. Izrael began to laugh. “Listen,” he said, “I’m laughing because if I had a dollar for every time I heard a black person [talking about] killing somebody white I’d be a millionaire.” For some, killing whites is not fantasy. Although the press was quiet about this aspect of the story, the two snipers who terrorized the Washington, DC, area in 2002 had a racial motive. Lee Malvo testified that his confederate, John Muhammad, was driven by hatred of America because of its “slavery, hypocrisy and foreign policy.” His plan was to kill six whites every day for 30 days. For a 179-day period in 1973 and 1974, a group of Black Muslim “Death Angels” kept the city of San Francisco in a panic as they killed scores of randomly-chosen “blue-eyed devils.” Some 71 deaths were eventually attributed to them. Four of an estimated 14 Death Angels were convicted of first-degree murder. Most Americans have never heard of what became known as the Zebra Killings. A 2005 analysis of crime victim surveys found that 45 percent of the violent crimes blacks committed were against whites, 43 percent against blacks, and 10 percent against Hispanics. There was therefore slightly more black-on-white than black-on-black crime. When whites committed violence they chose black victims only 3 percent of the time. Violence by whites against blacks, such as the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, is well reported, but racial murder by blacks is little publicized. For example, in Wilkinsburg, near Philadelphia, 39-year-old Ronald Taylor killed three men and wounded two others in a 2000 rampage, in which he targeted whites. At one point, he pushed a black woman out of his way, saying “Not you, sister. I’m not going to hurt any black people. I’m just out to kill all white people.

We see anti-black sentiment in how quickly images of brutality toward black children (let alone black adults) are justified by the white assumption that it must have been deserved. Such beliefs would be unimaginable if we had been shown images of white teens being thrown across schoolrooms, of white kindergarteners handcuffed, of a white child shot while playing with a toy gun in the park. We see anti-black sentiment in the immediate rejoinder to Black Lives Matter that all lives matter, that blue lives matter. And in the absurdly false comparison between the white nationalist and “alt-right” movement (now directly connected to the White House) with the Black Panther Party of the 1960s.

Growing numbers of black activists began organizing against police violence during this period, and some organizations, including the Black Panther Party (originally called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense), boldly asserted the right of black people to arm themselves in order to defend their communities against police brutality.

The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lighted, and the master was there, very calm . . . and our people stopped dead . . . it was the master . . . I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm. It was I, even I, and I told him so, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave of slaves, and suddenly his eyes were like two cockroaches, frightened in the rainy season . . . I struck, and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today. —Aimé Césaire excerpted in Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Black Panther Party booklist

Law enforcement did a lot of shooting during the weekend. They shot looters and also fired at random into crowds, hitting uninvolved bystanders on the sidelines and even some in their homes.

Rebellion reemerged as a political avenue precisely because of the limitations of the civil rights victories. These victories left untouched the economic and material dimensions of black subordination.