“There Is No New Black Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s
2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/705022
ISSN2153-5086
Autores Tópico(s)Communism, Protests, Social Movements
ResumoPrevious articleNext article Free"There Is No New Black Panther Party": The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990sGeorge Derek MusgroveGeorge Derek MusgroveGeorge Derek Musgrove is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County Search for more articles by this author George Derek Musgrove is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland Baltimore CountyPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBlack people are an oppressed community who largely live in Third World conditions—that was true in the '60s and it's still true today—and the Panthers were a natural outgrowth of that fact. There was nothing startling about the formation of the party, and this country is ripe for the rise of another organization like it.1The Black Panther Collective was initiated in 1994 by former members of the Black Panther Party and represents a resurgence of interest in the Panther Party as a vehicle for revolutionary change.2It is best, then, to think of the African American freedom struggle in nonlinear terms, as something capable of reaching back in time … to earlier eras, to propel itself forward.3It was summer 1993 when they first saw them on 125th Street: kids selling T-shirts that read "Resurrect the Black Panther Party" next to an image of deceased party cofounder Huey Newton. "We found out who they were," recalled Shephard "Bro. Shep" McDaniel, a former member of the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party, and "pulled them in a back room." In the early 1990s, Black Power fashion was a lucrative cottage industry. African Americans were spending millions yearly on Kente-patterned fabric, cowry shell jewelry, and Malcolm X hats. If money was being made off the Panther name and imagery, the elder New York Panthers wanted it to go to the men and women who had paid the price to make it famous: their comrades in prison and exile. "Who gave you permission to wear this?," the former Panthers demanded. "Where is the money going?" Those Harlem youngsters were trying to make money, but the T-shirts also reflected a larger goal: they wanted to bring back the Black Panther Party.The Black Panther Party (BPP), arguably the most recognizable symbol of 1960s black militancy, had disbanded more than a decade before. After years of police harassment, disrupted lives, and broken dreams, few veteran Panthers wanted to bring it back. But the young people were persistent. The state of the black community was dire, they argued, with joblessness and working poverty stalking inner-city youth lucky enough to escape the crack and crime epidemics. Political elites in both parties vied to outdo each other in condemning them as criminals and welfare cheats. By force of will and strength of argument, the young people wore down their elders. In 1994, this intergenerational group of activists created the Black Panther Collective, an organization aiming to "continue the revolutionary legacy of the Black Panther Party." They were not alone. Between 1990 and 1998, black activists created eleven "Panther-like" groups, from Los Angeles to Madrid (fig. 1).4Figure 1. Members of the Black Panther Collective in Harlem, New York, 1996. Back row, left to right: Cyril "Bro. Bullwhip" Innis Jr., "Jason," Shephard "Bro. Shep" McDaniel (now known as Sadiki Ojore Olugbala), "Reggie," George Edwards, "Johnny," "Ray." Front row left to right: "Bebe," "Morning Star," two unidentified children, Ashanti Alston Omowale, "Sis. Dee." Picture reprinted courtesy of Shephard McDaniel.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointMost popular and scholarly studies of the Panther-like formations focus on the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) and its discontinuity with the BPP. In its oft-cited report, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center states that the group has "no connection" to the BPP and had "hijack[ed] … the Panther name and symbol." Backed up with quotes from prominent former Panthers, many scholars repeat this claim almost verbatim.5 However, Charles Jones, Clarence Lusane, and Mumia Abu-Jamal identify the NBPP as one group in a larger constellation of Panther-like organizations that were the "projections and legacies" of the Black Panther Party. This inquiry elaborates on their brief treatments of the subject by exploring why veterans of the Black Panther Party and a new generation of younger activists brought back the Panther in the 1990s, what they chose to bring back and what they left behind, how they dealt with the sticky subject of who 'owned' the Panther, and why the sole surviving Panther-like group with a national footprint today, the New Black Panther Party, evolved to be so different from the BPP.To tell this story, this essay necessarily explores the black freedom struggle in the post–civil rights period, particularly the rich political and cultural mobilizations of the 1980s and 1990s, an endeavor that historians are only beginning to undertake.6 The return of the Panther embodied a broader effort by many African Americans to bring back the Black Power Movement. Beginning in 1982 with a series of electoral insurgencies within the Democratic Party and running through the 1997 Million Woman March, African Americans engaged in what I call a "Black Power resurgence," in which they cast off their late 1970s integrationism and embraced Black Power symbols, political strategies, and cultural forms. The graying veterans of the Black Power Movement were critical to these mobilizations. Though many had remained active during the 1970s, their organizational efforts had atrophied as African Americans embraced the new possibilities of a desegregating society. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, many African Americans dusted off their imagery and flooded into (or recreated) their organizations to address new threats to black freedom.7Studying the Panther-like formations forces us to think more deeply not only about post–civil rights era black politics but also about how social movements interact with their own history and how that interaction takes place within history. Leaders of the resurgence, to quote Marx, "conjure[d] up into their service the spirits of the past, assume[d] their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time honored disguise and with such borrowed language." But they faced the dilemma of using Black Power symbols and ideas in conversation and in conflict with the aging activists who had made them famous. They operated, as Clarence Lang notes, "in the long shadow of the sixties," being measured against and negotiating their relationships with the real-world veterans of the Black Power Movement.8They also faced the difficulty of bringing back a revolutionary movement in a reactionary time. The Black Power Movement was influenced by decolonization abroad and revolt at home, pushing its politics leftward. The activists of the resurgence revisited these ideas during an era of triumphant conservatism. This affected the trajectory of the resurgence, transforming what began as a Left/liberal electoral insurgency into a cultural nationalist social movement. Unsatisfied with these options, a small contingent of African Americans embraced the black Left politics of the Panther. They struggled, however, to compete with the more popular cultural nationalism of the late resurgence. As many of the Panther-like groups declined in the late 1990s, adherents of former Nation of Islam (NOI) national spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad colonized the New Black Panther Party in Dallas. Because the NBPP used the same Panther symbols to advance what, under Muhammad's leadership, became a different politics, many BPP veterans mobilized to assert what they believed was the "true" nature of the Panther. They argued, in effect, that there was "no New Black Panther Party."This study is an effort to, in Rhonda Williams's words, trace the "roots, routes, and expressions" of Black Power politics in the period after the Black Power Movement. In so doing, I hope to displace the uncomplicated narratives of the post–civil rights period popular in discussions of the black freedom struggle today. Contrary to these claims, we can trace neither a direct upward line from the Civil Rights Movement to the election of Barack Obama nor a flat line between the Black Power Movement and Black Lives Matter.9The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of the Panther, 1965–1995Any discussion of the Panther in the post–civil rights period must begin with the recognition that it was, at times, an organization, but just as often, as Jane Rhodes argues, it was a political grammar for revolutionary nationalism.10 As such, we must explore the history of the Panther beyond the organizational bounds of the Black Panther Party during the years 1966–80. In the 1990s the Panther returned, first as historical symbol and them as historical model for contemporary activism.The Panther first appeared in 1965 as the symbol of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an all-black, independent political party founded by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in rural Alabama. The fierce, powerful cat—and the model of all-black, pro-armed self-defense, grassroots activism that it represented—captured the imagination of young activists seeking a militant alternative to the nonviolent direct action of mainstream civil rights organizations. In 1966, activists from Oakland, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit approached SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael about creating their own Black Panther parties. "We ain't got a patent," he responded. "If local conditions indicate, go for it." They did, and Panther organizations sprouted across urban America. In California alone, activists created twelve different groups, including the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP), founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland.11Though just a neighborhood organization in 1966, the BPP used innovative organizing techniques and media savvy to become the nation's best-known black radical organization. Most other Panther organizations soon affiliated or disbanded. By 1968 the party had ballooned to over 5,000 members in two dozen chapters across the United States and overseas. The BPP leadership struggled, however, to manage this growth. Individual chapters developed their own ideology and organizing agenda, sometimes at odds with party leadership. Even within chapters, cadres divided along lines of class, strategy, and ideology: college students or "SNCC types" struggled to work with "lumpen," black nationalists resisted the Central Committee's growing adherence to Marxism-Leninism, and underground and above-ground factions had different approaches to using violence as political strategy. (These divisions would reemerge in the 1990s when veteran cadres divided over how to respond to the Panther-like formations.) Facing intense police repression that exacerbated these divisions, the party retreated to Oakland in the mid-1970s to become an urban power broker. There it remained until 1980, when ongoing repression and Newton's drug use bankrupted the organization, forcing it to disband abruptly.12The BPP imploded in the midst of a burgeoning "urban crisis" and on the eve of the Reagan revolution. Though black Americans made significant economic gains in the 1960s, three recessions (1973–75, 1980, and 1981–82) and subsequent waves of deindustrialization hit black workers disproportionately hard. In 1975, black unemployment shot up to 15 percent and by 1983 reached a staggering 19.5 percent.13 Increasingly economically insecure themselves, many white Americans turned on their black fellow citizens, attacking the redistributive policies that had only begun to desegregate the society and elevating conservative elected officials intent on gutting social programs believed to serve the black poor.14Determined to protect the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, African Americans staged a Black Power resurgence. It began as a series of discreet campaigns against conservative Democrats and Reagan Republicans—for example, Alabama Black Belt voting rights activists' battles with white Democratic district attorneys intent on prosecuting them for voter fraud, Boston activist Mel King's effort to ride a "rainbow coalition" into city hall, the Congressional Black Caucus's publication of an alternative to the regressive Reagan budget.15 At mid-decade, national civil rights and black electoral operatives harnessed these local insurgencies into what historian Manning Marable has called a national "rainbow rebellion" against the forces of Reaganism. They staged a twentieth anniversary of the March on Washington to draw the coalition together, worked to pull the Democratic Party back to the left through the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, forced the Reagan Administration to sever its ties with the white supremacist government of South Africa, and spearheaded the first successful effort to reject a Reagan judicial nominee (Jefferson Sessions of Alabama). This electoral revolt declined after Jackson's second run for the presidency in 1988, but local movements continued to score impressive victories.16Though black elected and civil rights leadership had checked the Reagan revolution, they could not address the urban crisis, and economic conditions continued to deteriorate in black communities nationwide. Reagan gutted aide to the poor and cities, and black unemployment remained well above 11 percent through the end of the decade. International cartels abetted by the US intelligence establishment created one of the few growth sectors available to poor black youth by generating a cocaine (later crack) epidemic. Drug dealers' subsequent battles for markets turned many poor and working-class African American communities into war zones, where rising rates of addiction, violence, and an oppressive police response rent the already tattered social fabric.17As African Americans searched for remedies to the turmoil, they generated a renewed interest in black culture and history. Black bookstores, Afrocentric schools, and "rites of passage" programs proliferated. Celebrations of Kwanzaa increased after a late 1970s decline. Thousands of African Americans trekked to Washington, DC—and later Atlanta, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and several other cities—for the National Council of Negro Women's Black Family Reunion. Hip hop artists like KRS-One, Public Enemy, and Tupac Shakur produced what S. Craig Watkins has called "sixties inspired hip hop nationalism," while X Clan, Brand Nubian, and like groups generated "Afrocentric hip hop nationalism." Afrocentric scholars like Francis Cress Welsing, Ben Jochannan, and Jawanza Kunjufu fashioned what one writer has called a "weaponized history" designed to counterbalance white supremacist narratives.18 All in all, more than half of African Americans embraced cultural nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Algernon Austin has noted, a rate far greater than that recorded during the late 1960s.19African Americans' embrace of cultural nationalism boosted the popularity of the reconstituted Nation of Islam. Marginal to black politics in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade NOI leader Louis Farrakhan had become perhaps the most popular black political figure in the nation, a position he leveraged to stage a "Million Man March and Day of Atonement" in 1995. Two years later, three relatively unknown activists succeeded in bringing half a million black women to Philadelphia for a Million Woman March using little more than computer bulletin boards and black talk radio.20 Despite the size of the crowds, both marches suffered from a focus on personal renewal and a lack of follow-through. When the economy recovered and the Clinton Administration, believing that it had domesticated black political insurgency, toned down its policy and verbal attacks on black interests, the energies black activists had channeled dissipated, bringing the resurgence to an end.21Though the resurgence had brought large numbers of Black Power Movement activists back into the national spotlight, former Panthers remained largely silent about their time ion the party during the 1980s. Many were repelled by Newton's drug addiction and authoritarian leadership style; for others the wounds of just-concluded battles were too fresh and investigators still too active. Notably, the only former Panther to pen a book about her time in the party during this period was Assata Shakur, whose exile in Cuba likely gave her the distance to reflect on her experiences. This all would change in 1989, when Newton was murdered outside a crack house in downtown Oakland.22With Newton dead, a broad array of former Panthers reissued or published memoirs, stimulating public discussion of the party and its legacy. Black Classic Press, run by former Baltimore chapter chairman Paul Coates, reissued George Jackson's Blood in My Eye in 1990 and Bobby Seale's Seize the Time in 1991. In 1992, former national chairwoman Elaine Brown published her autobiography, A Taste of Power, and former chief of staff David Hilliard followed with This Side of Glory in 1993. Both embarked on book tours and joined Seale on the college lecture circuit. (Their speeches were typically part history lesson and part exhortation for a younger generation to take up the struggle. "We're not going to create a movement," Hilliard told an auditorium of college students in 1995: "We've got families … mortgages, we're not going to do much but talk. Now it's up to you.") After journalist Hugh Pearson depicted Newton as a "thug" and the BPP as a "criminal enterprise" in his 1994 Shadow of the Panther, Newton's widow Fredrika partnered with Brown and Hilliard to form the Huey P. Newton Foundation to shape the public image of the BPP.23 By mid-decade, the members of the old Central Committee had all but reconstituted themselves to mold the BPP legacy for a new generation of Americans.Interest in the BPP was not confined to the college lecture hall and coffee shop crowd. With former Chicago minister of information Bobby Rush's election to Congress in 1992, the Panthers again became news. The BPP also reentered popular culture as a militant symbol of black manhood. Hip hop artists like Public Enemy, Digable Planets, the Coup, Paris (aka "The Black Panther of Hip Hop"), and Tupac (son of New York Panther Afeni Shakur) referenced the Panthers in their lyrics or used Panther imagery in their videos and album art. In 1995, Mario and Melvin Van Peebles brought the party to the big screen with Panther, though the movie did poorly in the box office, dooming competing films in the works at Warner Brothers and HBO. Also that year, Robert Alexander staged the play Servant of the People! The Rise and Fall of Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party, while Roger Guenveur Smith wrote and starred in A Huey P. Newton Story in 1996. Surveying the renewed popular interest in the BPP, journalist Cheo Tyechimba argued that African Americans were caught in the grips of "Panthermania," while the San Francisco Sun Reporter identified a "Panther 'retro' movement" among black youth.24Though many African Americans embraced the Panther as history, others embraced it as historical example. While the Black Power Movement birthed a host of radical Pan-Africanist organizations, the resurgence organizations clustered toward the middle of the political spectrum, focusing less on revolutionary change and more on proportional representation, cultural nationalism, and personal renewal. A choice number of young activists, however, were dissatisfied with the liberal multiculturalism of the Rainbow Coalition and the socially conservative nationalism of the Nation of Islam. With the organized Left in disarray following the collapse of the Soviet Union, they mined the black past for models of black Left politics appropriate to address the present crisis, and many settled upon the Panther. As Kathleen Cleaver recalled in 1995, many of her former comrades had "kids come up to them and say, 'We don't want to go with Farrakhan, we want to go with the Panthers. Tell us how we can be Panthers.'"25The Panther-Like Formations, 1990–1998The first person to create a Panther-like organization during the Black Power resurgence was Milwaukee councilman Michael McGee (D). A mercurial Vietnam veteran, McGee had served as chairman of the Milwaukee chapter of the BPP from 1972 to 1974. Under his leadership, the chapter ran a rich assortment of community service programs that endeared the Panthers to the city's black community.26 Like many former cadres, McGee remained active after he left the BPP, joining the United Black Community Council, an umbrella group that coordinated black nationalist activism in the city, and founding a number of protest and social service organizations.27In 1984, McGee's neighbors rewarded his work with a seat on the common council, the powerful legislative branch of city government. Following the recessions of the early 1980s, which had badly damaged Milwaukee's manufacturing sector, the council poured hundreds of millions of dollars into creating a new tourism and white-collar economy. McGee tried to channel resources to his district, but as one of only three black members on the sixteen-member body he had little leverage. The monies facilitated white Milwaukee's recovery, with white unemployment dropping from 5.3 percent to 3.9 percent between 1980 and 1989. Meanwhile black unemployment climbed from 17 percent to 20.1 percent, making Milwaukee the most segregated city by income in the country. Unemployment in McGee's district, the poorest in the city, hovered around 40 percent.28Frustrated, McGee resorted to a series of outlandish protests. In 1987, he vowed to disrupt the city's famed Great Circus Parade and "other white peoples' fun" by dispatching teams of black protesters to throw eggs at revelers. The following year, he wore a paper bag over his head in the official common council photo. But after a contentious council meeting in 1989, when once again money was appropriated for downtown despite his entreaties to invest in black neighborhoods, McGee became "fighting mad." On February 28, 1990, he announced the creation of the Black Panther Militia (BPM) and issued a threat to city elites: invest $100 million in a jobs program for black youth by January 1, 1995, or his soldiers would initiate a campaign of armed attacks on residents and infrastructure. Later asked why he resorted to threats of violence, McGee argued that his council colleagues left him no choice: "We've done things the nonviolent way, and it hasn't gotten us anywhere. The only way to get respect is to be willing to use violence." Though condemned by white city leaders, McGee's call struck a chord with black Milwaukeeans. At his first public meeting after the announcement, 600 came out to cheer his stand and join the BPM.29Despite the talk of guns, the BPM operated more like a community organization than a militia. In its first year, it staged antidrug patrols, campaigned to have Third Street renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. and published the Panther Spirit, a newspaper underwritten by the African American owner of the Milwaukee Courier.30 Though the BPM's activities were tamer than its rhetoric, it nonetheless received heavy coverage from alarmed local and national press.31McGee's demands and aspirations grew in tandem with his public profile. By early 1991 he was calling for a $1 billion investment in black Milwaukee and increased black representation on the common council. He also began to speak of himself in national terms. "Milwaukee will be the Bunker Hill of a new American revolution that will be led by black people," he argued. "My role is to get together the army." He traveled the country to raise funds and encourage African Americans to start their own chapters of the BPM.32 On a trip to Dallas, McGee gained his first recruit outside of the Midwest, a twenty-eight-year-old assistant program manager at radio station KKDA-AM who went by the name Aaron Michaels.Dallas's African American community was primed for radical protest. After decades of being frozen out of political power, in the mid-1980s activists had used lawsuits and the burst of black voter registration that accompanied the Jackson presidential campaign to enter government. In 1984, Diane Ragsdale and Al Lipscomb, the voluble civil rights activist who had brought a case that eliminated the city's discriminatory at-large election system, joined the city council, while John Wiley Price secured a seat on the county commissioners' court.33 Inside the halls of power, these black elected officials endeavored to address the African American community's concerns, namely, Dallas's nation-leading rate of police shootings of civilians. Commissioner Price, young, charismatic and politically astute, brought national attention to the issue by inviting Congressman John Conyers's House Judiciary Committee to investigate in 1987. But the police pushed back, blaming Price and other black reform advocates for the 1988 murder of a Dallas police officer and rallying white residents to resist change. To keep the pressure on, Price organized a series of pickets outside of police headquarters (and several local news stations that he accused of discriminatory coverage). He cultivated a group of young male volunteers to provide security. Dressed in all-black military fatigues and committed to militant street protest, this group called themselves the "Warriors." Michaels emerged as a leader of the group.34Michaels was born Aaron McCarthy in West Dallas. He grew up in a religious middle-class South Dallas home, where his father emphasized "church, conduct, character," and the self-proclaimed "apolitical" young man excelled in band. After high school, however, Michaels lost direction. He married and divorced twice, started a series of unsuccessful businesses, and had a few minor run-ins with the police. In 1986, he was working at KKDA-AM, when his boss assigned him to work on Commissioner Price's Talk Back, Liberation Radio " show. His job included researching old audio clips of Black Power activists' speeches—which he used to fill the space between interviews—and booking activists to come on the air. In December 1990, he hosted McGee.McGee's angry impatience resonated. Following fast on his visit, West Dallas resident M. T. Av'ant demanded that the city spend $450 million on minority neighborhoods by 1996 or he would unleash a "small band of urban guerrillas" on the city. Soon after, an increasingly bombastic Commissioner Price announced that if city leaders selecting a new police chief didn't choose a candidate who was sensitive to minority concerns, he would issue a "call to arms." "M-16s and all, we will take to the fucking street. … We will shoot at fucking police cars," he proclaimed. Less dramatically, but far more consequentially, Michaels turned the Warriors into the New Black Panther Party (NBPP).35Drawing on South Dallas's robust black nationalist community, Michaels and his friend David Foreman assembled a small but loyal following of approximately thirty activists who met weekly. Though the NBPP espoused revolutionary nationalism—in 1993 Michaels told the Dallas Morning News that "Democratic capitalism must be overthrown"—its actions were more in keeping with the Black Panther Militia infused with Texas's robust gun culture. The NBPP created several community service programs—serving meals at a local housing project, delivering food to elderly shut-ins, and sending money to the African-American Homeless Coalition—but they were small, sporadic, and shorted-lived. Its most successful actions involved guns: serving as security for Commissioner Price and providing armed patrols in drug-ravaged neighborhoods. Possessed of an entrepreneurial ethos, Michaels openly discussed creating a "legitimate security firm" to generate revenue and "police our own communities."36Though the NBPP had only a tenuous local presence, Michaels, like McGee, harbored national ambitions. In May 1993 they together hosted a "National Black Power Summit and Youth Rally" in South Dallas. The event drew about 200 participants, primarily from Dallas–Forth Worth, demonstrating that McGee's efforts to create a national Panther confederation, while popular with many African Americans, had made little organizational headway. At the event, McGee grandiloquently claimed that he and Michaels had organized Panther-like groups in twenty cities. In fact, the number of functioning chapters was three.37The third Panther-like group created in the United States in the early 1990s was Mmoja Ajabu's Indianapolis chapter of the Black Panther Militia. A Vietnam veteran and former black student union organizer, Ajabu (born Paul West Jr.) and his wife Jane Hart-Ajabu were, in journalist Natalie Hopkinson's words, "the pulse of a fledgling Pan-African community in Indianapolis." Though the Ajabus and their black nationalist friends had created a cultural community to shield their children's minds from a racist society, a rash of late 1980s violence against Indiana blacks made them worry for their physical safety.38 Inspired by McGee's call for black activists to arm themselves, Ajabu collected 4,000 signatures to show the "Commander" that black Indianapolis wanted a chapter of the BPM. McGee gave his blessing in 1992.Ajabu quickly distinguished his as the most active Panther-like group in the country. They boycotted Korean-owned stores in black East Indianapolis, where proprietors allegedly mistreated black customers; held voter registration drives; and led an armed march through the white neighborhood of Ravenswood, where residents
Referência(s)