Franziska Meister Racism and Resistance Political Science | Volume 43 FranziskaMeister(PhD)isascienceandcultureeditoratSwissweekly»WOZ– Die Wochenzeitung«. Franziska Meister Racism and Resistance How the Black Panthers Challenged White Supremacy BBiibblliiooggrraapphhiicc iinnffoorrmmaattiioonn ppuubblliisshheedd bbyy tthhee DDeeuuttsscchhee NNaattiioonnaallbbiibblliiootthheekk The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Natio- nalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de ©© 22001177 ttrraannssccrriipptt VVeerrllaagg,, BBiieelleeffeelldd Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedoruti- lizedinanyformorbyanyelectronic,mechanical,orothermeans,nowknown or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any infor- mation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Typeset by Mark-Sebastian Schneider, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3857-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3857-2 Contents Preface | 7 Introduction: Playing the Race Card | 13 Enter the Captive Black Warrior in Babylon | 29 To Expose, Subvert, and Provoke | 47 Response: To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy | 91 Crucial Role of the Media | 123 Where Do We Go From Here? | 161 Notes | 193 Bibliography | 215 Preface “Can you believe it?”, the professor from the History Department at UC Berkeley shouted across the hallway to his approaching colleague, pointing his thumb towards me, “she wants to write about the Black Panthers!” That was at the end of the 1990s, and I wasn’t sure whether they were amused about me, a female white Ph.D. student from Switzerland, or about the subject of my historical venture. I chose to take both issues seriously – namely, to capitalize on the outsider’s perspective. For what has perplexed me ever since I spent my senior high school year as an exchange student in a practically all-white New England small town was a conception of race so universally shared that I caused profound irritation whenever I addressed it: a professed antiracism that went hand in hand with beliefs reflecting white supremacy. Race, I have since come to understand, is a category that permeates US history and society up to the present. At the same time, it is curiously absent from public discourse and conscience. Or at least it was until Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016. His patented slogan “Make America Great Again” and the buzzword “America First”, decoded, signify one thing above all: whites (or rather: white males) first. One could read this as a rollback of women’s political aspirations, which were incorporated by Trump’s Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, just as well as one could perceive it as a backlash against Barack Obama, the first black man who had ever become President of the United States. But that would be too simple of an explanation, and a mistaken one at that. Arguably, Obama was not elected because he is black, but rather in spite of it: what made him eligible for a majority of white citizens in 2008 is the fact that his age and African origin severed any possible ties to what is remembered as the “racial crisis” of the late 1960s. Obama himself deliberately excluded race relations from his campaign and continued to tiptoe around the issue during his tenure. Yet he would never have been able to take the oval office without those who shouted “Black Power” almost 50 years ago. After the election of Donald Trump, the danger of history repeating itself is closer than ever. No longer only because race has been marginalized from 8 Racism and Resistance contemporary discourse with the rise of the ideology of colorblindness, but because it could emerge once more in the factual guise of white supremacy. In view of a newly ascending Ku Klux Klan and overt racism manifesting itself in public again, discussing race from a black perspective becomes ever more urgent. This is what this book sets out to do. In fact, the era of Black Power still has to be captured in its historic significance, as the black historian Peniel E. Joseph points out, and this assessment holds true particularly for the period’s most influential and radical black activists, the Black Panthers. While contemporary interest in the Black Panther Party (BPP) was huge and prompted a variety of accounts and compilations mostly journalistic in style, these accounts catered almost exclusively to the hegemonial narrative of describing the Panthers as a bunch of violence-prone ghetto hoodlums. It was not until the 1990s that a series of rivaling biographies of former West Coast Panthers sought to reanimate interest in the BPP and its history (Anthony 1990; Brown 1992; Hilliard / Cole 1993; Brent 1996; Andrews 1996; Olsen 2000). Two groundbreaking collections of essays from both scholars and former Panthers or New Left activists (Jones 1998c; Cleaver / Katsiaficas 2001) set the stage for serious academic scholarship on the Party. These publications provide insight into different aspects of the BPP and its development. Over the past ten years, a new generation of scholars has added depth and detail to an increasingly multifaceted history of the Black Panther Party. Rhodes (2007), for instance, provides a nuanced account of the BPP’s history in the Bay Area as reflected in the intricate interplay between the Panthers and mass media, the black press, and underground newspapers. The role of women within the Party is comparably well researched, both in terms of their practical everyday contributions and from a gender perspective that explores their difficult search for the position of revolutionary black women caught between struggling against prevailing expressions of machoism within the Party and white-dominated perceptions within the women’s liberation movement (Alkebulan 2007; Witt 2007a; Cleaver 2001; LeBlanc-Ernest 1998; Matthews 1998). A shift of focus from national Party leaders to the rank and file in the various cities across the states – combined with oral history approaches – has opened access to the BPP in its local versions and brought to light the tremendous heterogeneity between individual Party chapters and branches (Arend 2009; Williams / Lazerow 2009; Jeffries 2007a; 2007b; Alkebulan 2007; Witt 2007a; 2007b; Austin 2006). Through these studies, the Panthers’ community service programs and the great efforts that went into establishing them and keeping them running came to the foreground. And while Party ideology has also been scrutinized both in relation to other Black Power concepts and its orientation on class (Alkebulan 2007; Jeffries 2002; Hayes / Kiene 1998; Spichal 1974), a thoroughly class- based analysis of the BPP, particularly with respect to its daily activities, has Preface 9 not yet been attempted. Much rather, it seems that Panther historiography has come to a halt with Bloom and Martin’s in-depth monography (2013). The roots of this book go back to my Ph.D., a monography on the Black Panther Party finished before the bulk of the above literature on the BPP was published. It is based on source material collected mainly in the archives of the Bancroft library at UC Berkeley, with additional material coming from the Special Collections and University Archives from Stanford and various private archives from former Panthers and New Left activists. When claiming that an outsider’s perspective guided my research, what I refer to is this: my groping to understand the importance of race in shaping America’s self-conception led me towards embracing the perspective of those growing up in the midst of US society without being recognized as full members of this society – black people. For their marginalized position provides them with what one of the preeminent black intellectuals of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois, labeled Double Consciousness – and thus, for me as a historian, with what I perceive as a privileged approach to understanding race and race relations in the tumultuous 1960s. While contemporary black writers and intellectuals such as Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, or James Baldwin – not to forget Martin Luther King and Malcolm X – have been enlightening my conception regarding the problem of race, it is from the black voices of the ghetto streets that I learned most: from the various testimonials coming from a broad cross section of the black community of Watts in the aftermath of the Los Angeles ghetto revolt in 1965, and, particularly, from The Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper which I systematically dissected from its first issue up to 1972. With respect to the various writings of Party members, which I also included in my analysis, one has to take into account that many of them were written in hindsight and offer a perspective molded accordingly by later events, which is why I have always sought to compare them with sources dating close to the events analyzed, especially The Black Panther. Many other sources I have used – among them government investigations and commission reports as well as articles from various mass media – have been included in studies on the Black Panther Party published since I finished my Ph.D. None of these studies, however, have rested so profoundly on an in- depth scrutiny of The Black Panther, and none of them, to my knowledge, have systematically gathered and analyzed contemporary agitprop and documentary films about the Panthers. What hopefully most distinguishes this book – apart from the inclusion of film sources – from other historical accounts is the approach taken: the attempt to capture the Black Panthers as engaged in a struggle for Black Visibility and to thus convey in what respects this struggle remains of importance until today. Critical Race Theory and particularly the work of the black philosopher Charles W. Mills has been of eminent importance