Reflections on the Black Panther Party

On this occasion we want to reflect on some of the history of the Black Panther Party and how Workers World Party and its youth group at the time, Youth Against War and Fascism, related to the Panthers. While some groups in the movement distanced themselves from the militant tactics and revolutionary ideology of the BPP, we recognized their struggle as a genuine expression of the fight for liberation and self-determination. We not only wrote about the BPP in our newspaper, but we tried to find every avenue to collaborate with them and show solidarity in their struggle for liberation and against repression.

Formed in Oakland, Calif., in 1966 as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the party had a revolutionary 10-point program and took bold initiatives in the struggle against racist police brutality in the Black community. But the Panthers were thrust into national prominence and grew rapidly following the May 1967 armed demonstration led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale at the State Capitol in Sacramento to declare the right of armed self-defense for the Black community. Part of their program was to monitor the police activity in the Black community and document the racist brutality that characterized the police occupation of the communities.

Shortly after the 1967 demonstration, Huey Newton was framed up on murder charges and a long struggle to “Free Huey” followed. Our party and its youth group, YAWF, were part of that campaign to “Free Huey” in every city where we had members. And he was eventually freed after a nationwide mass campaign.

The growth of the Black Panther Party took place in the midst of the turbulent 1960s, when revolutionary movements around the world and in the U.S. were growing -- especially under the impetus of the Vietnam War, the Cuban and Chinese revolutions and the liberation struggles in Africa.

By 1968, the BPP had grown to about 5,000 members and their newspaper had a weekly circulation of 100,000. Some reports indicate that at their height they had 250,000 readers. They were the inspiration for many revolutionary groups like the Young Lords Party, American Indian Movement, I Wor Kuen (an Asian revolutionary group) and others. They also took vanguard positions on such issues as gay liberation, women’s rights, and support for the National Liberation Front in Vietnam and the Palestinian struggle.

At the same time, the FBI and police nationwide began to target the BPP, labeling it a threat to national security. The infamous Counter Intelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO, was initiated under J. Edgar Hoover to assassinate leaders such as Fred Hampton and George Jackson, frame up members, and disrupt the organization from within. But even with all that, in January 1969, it was estimated that the BPP free breakfast program fed 10,000 children every day. The Panthers also organized free health clinics in cities around the country.

As the repression deepened, the Panthers called a conference in Berkeley, Calif., in 1969 to found the National Committee to Combat Fascism. We mobilized most of the membership of the party to be there in solidarity, including our chairperson, Sam Marcy, and worked in the local NCCF chapters.

In 1969, the police arrested 21 leaders of the BPP in New York City in pre-dawn raids on their homes. They were to become known as the Panther 21. YAWF joined with the New York chapter of the Panthers, the Young Lords Party and other anti-racist and anti-imperialist forces to work on their defense committee and demonstrate for their freedom. The women’s caucus of YAWF demonstrated repeatedly at the Women’s House of Detention, which was in Greenwich Village at the time, demanding freedom for Afeni Shakur and Joan Byrd, two of the Panther prisoners, and Angela Davis, who was also imprisoned there a year later.

On May Day of 1970 we mobilized to attend a demonstration of about 15,000 in New Haven, Conn., to protest against the arrest of Erica Huggins and Bobby Seale on trumped-up murder charges. They were freed after a hung jury ended the bogus case in a mistrial. The Panther 21 were also acquitted of all charges and freed in May 1971.

In September 1970 we attended the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, organized by the BPP in Philadelphia at Temple University to draft a new Constitution to serve the needs of the people. The Philadelphia police, headed at that time by an infamous racist named Frank Rizzo, tried to disrupt the convention by raiding the local offices of the Panthers and arresting their members. The police brutalized the Panthers and stripped them naked in public, letting the press photograph them, as if this were a slave auction. But the tactic was so outrageous and racist that it created a groundswell of anger. A multinational crowd of between 10,000 and 15,000 people gathered in Philadelphia to support the Panthers and participate in the process of drafting a people’s revolutionary Constitution that would be the basis for organizing. (Mumia Abu-Jamal was a member of the Philadelphia chapter of the Panthers at the time and was later targeted by the police for his activism.)

Some of the program of the RPCC included the idea that the people should control the means of production and social institutions. Black and Third World people were guaranteed proportional representation in the administration of these institutions, as were women. The right of national self-determination was guaranteed to all oppressed peoples. Sexual self-determination for women and gays and lesbians was affirmed. A standing army was to be replaced by a people’s militia, and the Constitution was to include an international bill of rights prohibiting U.S. aggression and interference in the internal affairs of other nations...The present racist legal system would be replaced by a system of people’s courts where one would be tried by a jury of one’s peers. Jails would be replaced by community rehabilitation programs. Adequate housing, health care, and day care would be considered Constitutional rights, not privileges.

As the government repression against the Panthers continued, they formed chapters of the National Committee Against Fascism in a number of cities, which we participated in. It was a true, multinational rainbow coalition. When Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated in Chicago in 1969, we joined thousands of activists nationwide who hit the streets in protest. And again when George Jackson was killed by prison guards at San Quentin in August 1971, we joined with our comrades from the Young Lords Party and other revolutionary forces to express our bitter outrage at his assassination and determination to carry on the struggle.

But we did not merely protest. In those years, the Women’s Caucus of YAWF in New York City had worked to form the Women’s Bail Fund, which raised funds to bail out poor women from the House of Detention and campaigned to free the women Panther prisoners held there. We also organized the Prisoners Solidarity Committee (PSC) in those years, which provided buses to transport families from New York City to the many far-away prisons upstate which housed their sons and daughters. Many of these families were too poor to visit their relatives otherwise.

It was because of this work of the PSC that when the Attica prisoners rebelled in September of 1971 (partly sparked by the murder of George Jackson a month earlier), the PSC was asked to send a representative to Attica to be part of the observers' committee there. Thus, a Puerto Rican comrade and leader of the PSC went to Attica to witness that historic uprising and was there until Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent in troops to slaughter both prisoners and guards and wipe out the multinational solidarity and leadership that was developed there, much of it inspired by the work of the Black Panther Party.

I’d like to end with a quote from George Jackson, who joined the Panther Party in prison in California. This short excerpt is from his book “Soledad Brother.”

“The first time I was put in prison, it was just like dying. Just to exist at all calls for some very heavy psychic adjustment. Being captured was the first of my fears. It may have been an acquired characteristic built up over centuries of black bondage.... (Then) I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao ...  and they redeemed me. For the first four years, I studied nothing but economics and military ideas.”

For us the struggle of the BPP not only affirms the courage and potential of the human spirit to fight oppression in the face of the most horrendous brutality, but as significant was the fact that Marxism is the tool that the oppressed have turned to over and over in history to find a path to liberation -- from Czarist Russia to China, Vietnam, Korea and Cuba, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. The Black Panther Party recognized that nowhere have the oppressed found the road to liberation without smashing the state of the capitalist class and building for a socialist future.

Long live the spirit of the Black Panther Party. All power to the people.