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Black against Empire

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there are more black people under carceral control today than there were slaves in 1850. — location: 289 ^ref-19640

The North Vietnamese—at war with the United States—sent letters home to the families of American prisoners of war (POWs) through the Black Panther Party and discussed releasing POWs in exchange for the release of Panthers from U.S. jails. — location: 360 ^ref-2968

agent provocateurs on the government payroll supplied explosives to Panther members and sought to incite them to blow up public buildings, and they promoted kangaroo courts encouraging Panther members to torture suspected informants. — location: 429 ^ref-28708

once there was little legal segregation left to defy, the insurgent Civil Rights Movement fell apart. — location: 535 ^ref-26550

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.” — location: 905 ^ref-60972

When people were arrested, he followed them to the jail and bailed them out. He soon abandoned the tactic, though, because it was too costly. — location: 957 ^ref-24299

Newton had finally hit upon a way to stand up to the police and organize the “brothers on the block.” He would organize patrols like the CAP in Watts. But he and his comrades would carry loaded guns. — location: 1061 ^ref-50072

The economic exploitation by this country of nonwhite people around the world must also die.” — location: 1101 ^ref-34760

Newton does not celebrate the riots. He argues that they represent an infantile approach, an unsophisticated spontaneous reaction incapable of meeting the interests and needs from which they arise. — location: 1595 ^ref-47615

“Politics is war without bloodshed,” and “war is politics with bloodshed.” — location: 1600 ^ref-25915

We will make it economically nonprofitable for the power structure to go on with its oppressive ways. — location: 1608 ^ref-2097

Thus Newton sought not only to organize the rage of the ghetto into a military force but also to assert its role in the vanguard of Black Power by championing solutions to the pressing needs of the black community: decent housing, employment, education, and freedom. — location: 1632 ^ref-27787

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. — location: 1675 ^ref-42200

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. — location: 1710 ^ref-21753

“You’ve been told that the Black Panthers . . . make no bones about hating whites,” said Seale. “That’s a bare-faced lie. We don’t hate nobody because of color. We hate oppression.” — location: 1875 ^ref-53655

“Racists call it ‘rioting’, but actually it’s a political consequence on the part of black people who have been denied freedom, justice and equality.” — location: 1989 ^ref-6224

Shellow and his team were subsequently fired, and their analysis was removed from the report. — location: 2007 ^ref-16842

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. With persistent racial subordination in the face of rhetorical freedom, pressures mounted. — location: 2098 ^ref-2911

Building on the political strategy they had developed in facing legal challenges after the Sacramento action, Newton and the Panthers insisted on a political approach to the trial. They would follow the law to the letter and strive to exonerate Huey through legal channels, to “exhaust all legal means,” but the principle behind the case would be political. — location: 2376 ^ref-38206

“The increasing isolation of the black radical movement from the white radical movement was a dangerous thing, playing into the power structure’s game of divide and conquer. We feel that in taking the step of making the coalition with the Peace and Freedom Party, we have altered the course of history on a minor, but important level.” — location: 2490 ^ref-32023

From its inception, the Black Panther Party had embraced both an uncompromising commitment to black liberation and a principled rejection of a separatist black politics. — location: 2493 ^ref-59197

The effort was part of King’s new emphasis on the alleviation of poverty and opposition to the Vietnam War. — location: 2602 ^ref-14205

In the months before his death, King endeavored to bridge these divergent paths. — location: 2622 ^ref-13436

As the movement defeated Jim Crow and the challenge to legal segregation became moot, King increasingly championed the struggle against poverty and publicly opposed the war in Vietnam—gaining the cautious respect of the radical young activists. His leftward turn toward anti-imperialism increasingly incurred the wrath of the establishment. — location: 2626 ^ref-5840

Shortly before his death, King told reporters, “Our program calls for a redistribution of economic power.” — location: 2628 ^ref-58092

By 1968, the Civil Rights Movement had unraveled as the defeat of formal racial subordination eliminated targets for effective civil rights mobilization. — location: 2715 ^ref-20916

Whereas activists could sit in at lunch counters or sit black and white together on a bus or insist on registering to vote where they had traditionally been excluded, they were often uncertain how to nonviolently disrupt black unemployment, substandard housing, poor medical care, or police brutality. — location: 2725 ^ref-13521

Kathleen Cleaver’s campaign for the California State Assembly. The Panthers saw both campaigns as opportunities to build influence and broaden their support within the Left. — location: 2798 ^ref-48855

The major growth of the New Left came with draft resistance between 1966 and 1968.42 — location: 2850 ^ref-23247

During World War II, some conscientious objectors were used for live human medical testing, such as experiments subjecting them to repeated lice bites. — location: 2861 ^ref-29065

Carmichael and Oglesby argued that blacks, Vietnamese, and draftees shared a common oppressor, and asserted a powerful moral justification for resisting the draft: — location: 2884 ^ref-42479

The new approach to draft resistance was compelling because of its universality. — location: 2914 ^ref-5195

“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.” — location: 2922 ^ref-63499

Only a small percentage of Californians actively ascribed to the Black Panthers’ revolutionary anti-imperialist politics, but elements of the Party’s position had broad appeal. — location: 3086 ^ref-24517

In every insurgent movement, conflicting visions compete. As movement groups challenge the legitimacy of the state and the established social order, each asserts its own vision as an alternative. The stakes appear high, especially the ability to claim leadership of the revolution and the potential to set the direction for the future. — location: 3191 ^ref-18389

responsibility. Within insurgent organizations like the Black Panther Party, law and custom are viewed as oppressive and illegitimate. Insurgents view their movement as above the law and custom, the embodiment of a greater morality. As a result, defining acceptable types of transgression of law and custom, and maintaining discipline within these constraints, often poses a serious challenge for insurgent organizations like the Black Panther Party. — location: 6796 ^ref-22025

The resilience of the Black Panthers’ politics depended heavily on support from three broad constituencies: blacks, opponents of the Vietnam War, and revolutionary governments internationally. — location: 6890 ^ref-19910

Once it appeared the war would be ended through institutionalized political means, those principally committed to ending the draft and war no longer shared a personal stake in radically transforming political institutions. Many now increasingly saw the Panthers’ call for revolution as unnecessary. — location: 6921 ^ref-28002

Following the disaster at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, the Democratic Party reached out to black electoral activists and reformed the nomination process with the McGovern-Fraser Commission. Black representation among party delegates more than doubled by 1972, to about 15 percent. — location: 6928 ^ref-6027

While the liberal establishment sought to redress black radicalism through social spending by extending Johnson’s Great Society programs and facilitating the expansion of black electoral representation, President Nixon intensified the government’s repression of black radicals. — location: 6939 ^ref-14897

Ballooning electoral representation, government hiring, affirmative action, and reform of college and university access and curricula granted blacks greater institutional channels for participating in American society and politics. This increasing access to mainstream institutions undercut the basis for blacks’ support of the Panthers’ politics. — location: 6953 ^ref-43630

As Sino-U.S. relations improved in the 1970s, China’s support for the Panthers evaporated. — location: 6965 ^ref-1075

But, as the tide of revolution shifted globally toward the end of the decade, security concerns took on higher priority in Cuban policy. Eager to avoid provoking retaliation from the United States, Cuba distanced itself from the Black Liberation Struggle, continuing to allow exiles but refraining from active support of black insurrection. — location: 6982 ^ref-9219

As the United States scaled back the war in Vietnam; reduced the military draft; improved political, educational, and employment access for blacks; and improved relations with former revolutionary governments around the world, the Black Panthers had difficulty maintaining support for politics involving armed confrontation with the state. — location: 6986 ^ref-43256

But liberal readers of the New Yorker and New York magazine were much more apt to embrace ridicule of the Black Panthers’ anti-imperialism once their children were not likely to be drafted and killed in Vietnam. — location: 7013 ^ref-57925

States. The radical Left saw revolutionary progress in winning Huey’s freedom, but many moderate allies saw less cause for revolution. — location: 7039 ^ref-10535

Unlike the situation in Vietnam or Cuba, guerilla warfare was never politically practical in the United States. In the United States, the state capacity for violent repression was enormous, — location: 7051 ^ref-37080

Their politics of armed self-defense had tapped the wells of resistance among black youth, and the national organization had mobilized broad support from a spectrum of black, antiwar, and international allies. This support in turn allowed the Party to flourish in the face of government repression and to sustain its anti-imperialist movement. — location: 7293 ^ref-29972

the success of the Party created a conflict between promoting insurrection and maintaining the Party’s image. — location: 7310 ^ref-65493

Instead, the Central Committee renounced immediate insurrection, denounced the “defecting” rival faction for its reckless embrace of insurrection, and insisted that the Panthers focus exclusively on social democratic programs until a sufficient mass of people was ready for revolution. — location: 7341 ^ref-53276

Facing dwindling public support, and embarrassing violent activity by rank-and-file members in chapters across the country, Newton and the national Party leadership decided to cut their losses and consolidate their political strength in Oakland. — location: 7602 ^ref-44342

Once Newton closed the Party chapters across the nation and called members back to Oakland, the Panthers no longer advanced effective and replicable politics. — location: 7631 ^ref-16573

Hoover had recognized by 1969 that criminalization was the best way to diminish public support for the Black Panthers and the political challenge they posed. Nothing did more to criminalize the Party in the public imagination than the allegations about Newton’s actions in the years following the ideological split. — location: 7662 ^ref-62171

politics. The source of the Party’s power under her leadership was conventional political savvy coupled with community service—an approach to grassroots politics adopted by thousands of community activists in hundreds of cities throughout the country. These political actors made inroads into political power and reform well before the Black Panther Party began and continue to do so today. — location: 7716 ^ref-34024

But conventional political savvy and community service alone have never been able to mobilize a serious radical challenge to status quo arrangements of power. For insurgent social movements to expand and proliferate, they must offer activists a set of insurgent practices that disrupt established social relations in ways that are difficult to repress. — location: 7719 ^ref-12513

But key to the success of the Panther’s politics of armed self-defense was Newton’s insistence that the Party—while advocating armed resistance—stay aboveground as long as possible, avoiding direct and explicit organization of insurrection. — location: 7738 ^ref-40296

Had the Party explicitly organized and directed armed insurrection, rather than simply advocating it, the state would have readily crushed it. — location: 7745 ^ref-36154

politically, direct organization of guerilla warfare was a world apart from the politics of armed self-defense upon which the Black Panther Party had thrived. — location: 7784 ^ref-10219

Contrary to the experiences of revolutionary African anticolonial struggles, in which a black majority sought to overcome political domination by a white minority, in the United States, guerilla warfare by revolutionary black nationalists has never achieved broad participation or significant political support. — location: 7796 ^ref-29545

The Panthers drew a line dividing the world in two. They argued that the oppression of draft resisters by the National Guard was the same as oppression of blacks by the police and the same as the oppression of the Vietnamese by the marines. Forced to choose sides by the state, many young draftees chose the side of the oppressed. — location: 7855 ^ref-28136

The hard-core right wing was not the main threat to the Party. Rather concessions to blacks and opponents of the war reestablished the credibility of liberalism to key constituencies. — location: 7870 ^ref-22857

The social democratic practices of Elaine Brown and others were more realistic and more attuned to the political possibilities. In Oakland, the Panthers did succeed in using the political clout they had garnered in the Party’s heyday to build local electoral power. But the Party no longer had any practical basis for building a broad insurgent movement. Unlike the viable insurgent politics of the Party’s earlier days, the social democratic Panthers could deliver no consequence. They had limited institutionalized power and no longer wielded the capacity to disrupt on a large scale, so they advanced no practical basis for a national movement. — location: 7889 ^ref-25735

Panther practices could receive broad political support only while the majority of Americans opposed to the Vietnam War and draft had no recourse through institutionalized political channels and while most blacks continued to face economic and political exclusion. — location: 7918 ^ref-6157

potential allies’ political reception of Panther insurgent practices determined the effects of repression on mobilization. During the time that Panther practices were well received by potential allies, in 1968 and 1969, repressive measures fostered further mobilization. But as these allies became less open to the Panthers’ revolutionary position in 1970 and 1971, repressive actions by the state became increasingly effective. — location: 7940 ^ref-19808

political context, rather than independently determining the extent of mobilization, determines the efficacy of particular insurgent practices. — location: 7953 ^ref-52943

insurgent movements proliferate when activists develop practices that simultaneously garner leverage by threatening the interests of powerful authorities and draw allied support in resistance to repression. Conversely, when concessions undermine the support of potential allies for those practices, the insurgency dies out. — location: 7958 ^ref-35886

Many young people in these neighborhoods might well embrace a revolutionary political practice today if it could be sustained. But crucially, the conditions for rallying potential allies have changed. — location: 7964 ^ref-560

channels. Most view insurgency as no longer necessary and do not feel threatened by state repression of insurgent challengers. — location: 7969 ^ref-34170

view, a movement is revolutionary politically to the extent that it poses an effective challenge. — location: 7988 ^ref-29569

a revolutionary movement must first be creative rather than arbitrary. It must seize the political imagination and offer credible proposals to address the grievances of large segments of the population, creating a “concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will.” — location: 7989 ^ref-29665

The ruling alliance does not simply crush political challenges directly through the coercive power of the state but makes concessions that reconsolidate its political power without undermining its basic interests. — location: 7993 ^ref-36187

revolutionary movement becomes significant politically only when it is able to win the loyalty of allies, articulating a broader insurgency. — location: 7994 ^ref-60718

Recent movements have not sustained insurgency, advanced a revolutionary vision, or articulated a broader alliance to challenge established political power. — location: 8001 ^ref-32070

The Black Panther Party stood out from countless politically insignificant revolutionary cadres because it was creative politically. For a few years, the Party seized the political imagination of a large constituency of young black people. Even more, it articulated this revolutionary movement of young blacks to a broader oppositional movement, drawing allied support from more moderate blacks and opponents of the Vietnam War of every race. — location: 8008 ^ref-33866

While minimovements with revolutionary ideologies abound, there is no politically significant revolutionary movement in the United States today because no cadre of revolutionaries has developed ideas and practices that credibly advance the interests of a large segment of the people. — location: 8019 ^ref-63824

in the terrorist variant, they tend to reinforce rather than challenge state power domestically because their practices threaten—rather than build common cause with—alienated constituencies within the United States. — location: 8024 ^ref-12627

No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foothold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease. This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party and may not happen again for a very long time. — location: 8025 ^ref-31102

dynamics. In our view, the advent of effective revolutionary political practices itself makes revolutionary ideology more broadly appealing, putting revolution “in the air.” — location: 10772 ^ref-43006