Black Panthers

By the mid-1960s, powerful elites in the United States were interpreting the social upheavals that disturbed the late-1950s and early-1960s cold war consensus not as a moment of legitimate dissent and needed reform but as a threat to the American way of life. For many politicians and pundits, the struggle for civil rights had become a problem of law and order, a deviation from the established pattern of social relations. The shift from a strategy of piecemeal legal challenges undermining segregation to mass protest and direct action demanding social equality had run into a politically ascendant new conservatism—“Middle America” or the “Silent Majority,” in political cliché. White backlash to black progress revealed as national sentiment the obstinacy of racial animosity that had long marked southern attitudes. Even progressive white liberal support for the goals of the civil rights movement was flagging, as a majority of citizens reported to pollsters that the pace of civil rights was too quick and the scope of change too far-reaching.

The refusal of the American mainstream to embrace fundamental change in race relations pushed a segment of the African American community to the political far left. On the front pages of the newspapers and in evening television news broadcasts, images of urban rebellions, prison riots, and the presence of National Guard troops replaced images of sit-ins and protest marches and soaring speeches. No organization epitomized the radicalism associated with this period more than the Black Panther Party, a militant, predominantly African American organization demanding not only equality for black Americans but calling for the abolition of capitalism.

The core idea amplifying the politics of the radical African American movement was “black power,” what civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. characterized as a predictable reaction of black youth to the reluctance of white power to make substantive concessions to the demands of the oppressed. The slogan was first used by Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) and Willie Ricks (Mukasa Dada), leaders in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordination [Page 65]Committee, as a conscious replacement for the nonviolent civil rights slogan “Freedom Now!” The black power slogan, represented by a clinched fist raised in defiance, was seared into public consciousness when Tommie Smith and John Carlos, standing on the winners' podium after receiving their medals at the 1968 Summer Olympics, lowered their heads and raised the salute. In this context, the Black Panthers emerged as the leading symbol of black power resistance to the white establishment and capitalist oppression. With their Cuban revolutionary–inspired black berets, black leather jackets, black turtleneck or light blue dress shirts, sunglasses, and conspicuous visual presence, which typically involved open display of weapons, as well as law books in tow, the group provided a readily accessible identity to disaffected black youth in America's inner-city urban communities.

The Panthers captured the imagination of not only the urban black masses who were dealing with police brutality and poverty on a chronic basis but also white youth associated with the New Left. In particular, the Students for a Democratic Society came to see the black power movement as the revolutionary vanguard of an era marked by rebellion against traditional authority. From the perspective of the white establishment, the Panthers represented the frightening possibility that black Americans, and by extension other disaffected groups, could organize urban communities to meet autonomous and self-determined ends, which proponents and opponents alike believed would undermine white control over property and political power globally. The fact that the Panthers, in following insurgent movements in Africa and Asia, developed a distinct socialist worldview, and that this worldview was shared by predominantly white youth organizations such as the Students for a Democratic Society, made the suppression of the black power movement necessary from the point of view of state elites. In turn, the intensification of state repression of the Black Panthers tracked the movement of the party from Black Nationalism through revolutionary nationalism into Marxist-Leninism.

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