People Power

Review: “Giving More Power to the People” by Daniel Tasripin, Hunter SDS

What We Want, What We Believe: The Black Panther Party Library
Roz Payne Archives / Newsreel (AK Press)

The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service: 1967-1980
David Hilliard (Atria)

When SDS relaunched, I must admit that the initial reaction I felt (as did a number of people of color comrades from the circles I travel in), was one of skepticism. For myself and many others, the organizations that launched us into our trajectory were not those that were descended from SDS, or for that matter the mostly white anti-war movement. We were instead, more interested in the organizations of the 1960’s that had formed the original Rainbow Coalition: the Black Panther Party mostly, but also the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, the American Indian Movement, the Chican@ Brown Berets, the Chinese and Asian-American organizations like the Red Guards and I Wor Kuen.

That skepticism was, in retrospect, born out of a frustration many from my generation of “movement” people of color. Perusing the predominant historians of the Sixties – the “Boomerologists” as I call them – there’s a clear narrative: there’s the “Good Sixties”, when the terms of the Civil Rights and anti-war struggle were defined by attempts to compromise rather than settle the underlying questions decisively; then there’s the “Bad Sixties” in which first the black youth of the Civil Rights movement stopped being conciliatory, and then the white youth of the anti-war movement started to wonder whether the Vietnam War was worth winning in the first place.

Key to that Good Sixties/Bad Sixties narrative has been both a neglect and willful ignorance of the defining role the Black Panther Party played in shaping the New Left of the era, both through moral leadership as well as in the political actions of the party. That may be understandable for the part of the historians; for decades, the passing of the history of the Party has been made difficult by a number of factors, including the security considerations for political prisoners and exiles (both former and present), as well as the divergent narratives that arose out of the split of the Party’s splits. Of course, the largest factor may be the all-too-simple dismissal of the Panthers as simply “blacks with guns”.

There have been some bright spots of late, however. The past year has seen the DVD release of the film and video archives of movement journalist Roz Payne, and the long-awaited re-issuing of The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service archives in book format. In particular, these projects have an immediacy unseen to most of our generation; they present the Panthers as they presented themselves in their time.

Watching the three Newsreel films featured on the 4-disc set, it’s clear that more than other organizations of the time period, the Black Panthers had a hard-wired understanding of what the stakes of the time were. The Panthers were born as Malcolm X was murdered, his vision unable to be realized in an organized form. It had seen Dr. King likewise murdered as he not only condemned the Vietnam War, but condemned the U.S.-backed leaders of South Vietnam as “fascist.” The aesthetics of the Party on film – leather jackets, berets, afros, and fists in the air – reflect a sensibility according to which it was no longer enough to talk about revolution, nor even to make a few rudimentary steps toward revolution, but according to which the revolution had to become incarnate in the flesh and blood of thousands of young black men and women.

Aside from the Newsreel films, the rest of the DVD set is mostly devoted to the Party after the establishment understood the threat they posed. There are interviews with Panthers in exile, footage of two reunions of the Party, as well as an interview with a former FBI agent who had tailed the Party. This video, taken by Payne on her own and without the Newsreel stamp, is rawer but more intimate; particularly, watching a FBI agent calmly go through the Bureau’s policy of agitating rival black organizations against the Panthers, to the extent of sanctioning murder is a study in the bureaucratic thinking of the typical agency hack.

While a sympathizer to the Panthers, the Roz Payne archives keep a comfortable distance from their internal problems. The Newsreel footage is all from the era before internal splits within the Party surfaced – splits often put into terms of Huey P. Newton vs. Eldridge Cleaver’s factions, or East Coast vs. West Coast Panthers, but in truth a result of a jumble of contradictions that have yet to be totally teased out. While the subsequent footage features various partisans of the splits, I saw few (if any) direct references.

This distance works for the Roz Payne films and videos, but the presentation of The Black Panther by David Hilliard cannot help but walk a tightrope on the subject of the split. The book is surely not without its merits: The presentation of extracts from the Party’s newspaper’s pages, most un-retouched, demonstrates the evolution of the Party – the rise of the Party is reflected in its paper’s progression from amateurish paste-ups to a slicker format. Corresponding to this, the growing international perspective of the Party is reflected in cover-stories calling for solidarity with the Chican@ movement, as well as feature stories on the nascent Young Lords Party and the FBI’s incursions onto American Indian reservations.

This context provides greater depth on several party documents key documents of the Party, such as the 10-Point Program and Rules of the Party. They show the defiance that kept the Party moving in spite of the steady drumbeat of police harassment, assault and assassination, as well as the deep unity with the masses that they sought (and in most cases gained) through their Survival Programs; again, revolution becomes incarnate, this time in the real way in which the Party had assumed the burdens of providing for their community.

The tome hits a rough spot about halfway through, when the internal culture of the Party becomes poisoned. There are numerous ellipses throughout; the editions of the paper covering George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers are from years after their assassinations. Mid-volume, stories are inordinately focused on interviews with and (quite literal) paeans to Party Chairman Huey P. Newton; articles that could have provided context are cut off, “to be continued” in pages that are out of sight. By the later pages (covering the late 1970s into the early 80s), it is evident that the paper was attempting to keep scattered Panthers together through the ritualistic invocation of Newton’s name.

If anything, the deficiencies of the Payne films and those of Hilliard’s archives demonstrate what an enigma the Panthers still present us. Despite the flood of material, we cannot fully get into the depth of the Party. We are instead left with an incomplete, yet immediate, connection to the past. The Huey P. Newton of the rattan chair, shotgun, and spear is neither dead nor alive; he is instead like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, an un-dead specter, insistently making demands upon the living.