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A revolutionary party is under continual
stress from both internal and external forces. By its very
nature a political organization dedicated to social change
invites attack from the established order, constantly vigilant
to destroy it. This danger is taken for granted by the committed
revolutionary. Indeed, oppression first shaped the spirit of
resistance within him, and so it can neither defeat nor destroy
his resolve.
But he has two far greater enemies—the
failure of vision and the loss of the original revolutionary
concept. Either of these can lead to alienation from those the revolutionary seeks to set free. Eldridge Cleaver was guilty of
both.
When I came out of prison in August 1970, the
Party was in a shambles. This was understandable for a number of
reasons: Bobby and I had been off the streets and in jail for a
long time, and it had been difficult to direct the party on a
day-to-day basis from prison cells. Then, too, the Party was
harassed and beleaguered. Intelligence organizations throughout
the country had become obsessed with the desire to destroy the
Black Panther Party. Many of the brothers had been hunted down,
imprisoned, or killed.
These external assaults were formidable. But
there was a far more serious reason for the Party’s
difficulties, one that threatened its very raison d’etre:
the Party was heading down the road to reactionary suicide.
Under the influence of Eldridge Cleaver, it had lost sight of
its initial purpose and become caught up in irrelevant causes.
Estranged from Black people, who could not relate to it, the
Black Panther Party had defected from the community.
The Party was born in a particular time and
place. It came into being with a call for self-defense against
the police who patrolled our communities and brutalized us with
impunity. Until then, there had been little resistance to the
occupiers. We sought to provide a counterforce, a positive image
of strong and unafraid Black men in the community. The emphasis
on weapons was a necessary phase in our evolution, based on
Frantz Fanon’s contention that the people have to be shown
that the colonizers and their agents—the police—are not
bulletproof. We saw this action as a bold step in making our
program known and raising the consciousness of the people.
But we soon discovered that weapons and
uniforms set us apart from the community. We were looked upon as
an ad hoc military group, acting outside the community fabric
and too radical to be a part of it. Perhaps some of our tactics
at the time were extreme; perhaps we placed too much emphasis on
military action. We saw ourselves as the revolutionary
“vanguard” and did not fully understand then that only the
people can create the revolution.
At any rate, for two or three years, our
image in the community was intimidating. The people
misunderstood us and did not follow our lead in picking up the
gun. At the time, there was no clear solution to this dilemma.
We were a young revolutionary group seeking answers and ways to
alleviate racism. We had chosen to confront an evil head on and
within the limits of the law. But perhaps our military strategy
was too much of “a great leap forward.”
Nonetheless, I believe that the Black Panther
approach in 1966 and 1967 was basically good and necessary
phase. Our military actions called attention to our program and
our plans for the people. Our strategy brought us dedicated
members, and it gained the respect of the struggling peoples of
the Third World. Most important, it raised the consciousness of
Black and white citizens about the relationship between police
and minorities in this country. It is difficult to realize now
how much police relations with the Black community have changed
in six short years.
Our communities are still not free from
brutal incidents and corruption, but it is nonetheless true that
police departments have become more sensitive to the problems of
urban minorities. Today, it is the rare police commissioner who
has not tried to establish some form of public relations between
police and Blacks.
The average citizen, too, has a greater
awareness of police abuses that was once systematically
overlooked. This advance in consciousness is due in large part
to our military phase. Ho Chi Minh said that military tactics
made public for military reasons are unsound, while military
tactics made for political reasons are perfectly correct. We
have done as he said. Our military strategies are now known for
political reasons.
But revolution is not an action; it is a
process. Times change, and policies of the past are not
necessarily effective in the present. Our military strategies
were not frozen. As conditions changed, so did our tactics.
Patrolling the community was only one step in our ten-point
program and had never been regarded as the sole community
endeavor of the Black Panther Party.
As a matter of fact, the right to bear arms
for protection appeared near the end of our program, as Point 7,
and came only after those demands we considered far more
urgent—freedom, employment, education, and housing. Our
community programs—now called survival programs—were of
great importance from the beginning; we had always planned to
become involved in Black people’s daily struggle for survival
and sought only the means to serve the community’s needs.
But the Party was sabotaged from within and
without. For years
the Establishment media presented a sensational picture of us,
emphasizing violence and weapons. Colossal events like
Sacramento, the Ramparts confrontation with the police, the
shoot-out of April 6, 1968, were distorted and their
significance never understood or analyzed. Furthermore, our
ten-point program was ignored and our plans for survival
overlooked. The Black Panthers were identified with the gun.
Eldridge Cleaver identified with other
negative aspects of the Party. It is not a coincidence that he
joined the Party only after the Ramparts confrontation. What
appealed to him were force, firepower, and the intense moment
when combatants stood at the brink of death. For him this was
the revolution. Eldridge’s ideology was based on the rhetoric
of violence; his speeches abounded in either/or absolutes, like
“Either pick up the gun or remain a sniveling coward.”
He would not support the survival programs,
revolutionary process, a means of bringing the people closer to
the transformation of society. He believed this transformation
could take place only through violence, by picking up the gun
and storming the barricades, and his obsessive belief alienated
him more and more from the community. By refusing to abandon the
position of destruction and despair, he underestimated the enemy
and took on the role of the reactionary suicide.
Long before Eldridge’s actual defection
from the Party he had taken the first steps of his journey into
spiritual exile by failing to identify with the people. He
shunned the political intimacy that human beings demand of their
leaders. When he fled the country, his exile became a physical
reality. Eldridge had cut himself off from the revolutionary’s
greatest source of strength—unity with the people, a shared
sense of purpose and ideals.
His flight was a suicidal gesture, and his
continuing exile in Algeria is a symbol of his defection from
the community on all levels—geographic, psychological, and
spiritual.
From a dialectical point of view, something
positive has arisen out of Etheridge’s defection. While he and
his followers still identify with aspects of the Party that once
alienated us from the community, the Party has moved in a
different direction. He has taken the media’s image squarely
upon his own shoulders. We are glad to be free of the burden.
What little we lost in credibility we have gained in a wider
acceptance of the Party by the community. We have reached a more
advance state. There has been qualitative leap forward, a growth
in consciousness.
Camus wrote that the revolutionary’s “real
generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the
present.” This, he says, grows out of an intense love for the
earth, for our brothers, for justice. The Black Panther Party
embraces this principle. By giving all to the present we reject
fear, despair, and defeat. We work to repair the breaches of the
past. We strive to carry out the revolutionary principle of
transformation, and through long struggle, in Camus’s words,
“to remake the soul of our time.”
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Post- Katrina Conversation With Miriam
Miriam: Oh, I'm not about to get in
the middle of yall's
stimulating dialogue because both Arthur's poem and your
prose rebuttal are strong pieces. Do we have to choose
between Walker and Turner, Wells and Church, Dubois and Garvey,
King and Malcolm, the Movement and Black Power? All those
African Americans were committed to the Cause but went about
their Work in different ways. I'm with you, Arthur, in
subscribing to the power of the Word and the Pen, but I have
tremendous admiration for Nat Turner too, Rudy, along with
Denmark Vesey and all the other race rebels. Bottom line:
We got to pull together, Brothers.
Rudy: Well, the Walker-Turner thing
that's a game Wilson Moses and I play. He knew my response
before I responded. This is the kind of thing we've been doing
for several summers now. I am not quite sure why Arthur felt a
need to put in his two cents about Turner when he doesn't know
anything about Turner. I have never really thought about David
Walker. There's nothing that matches, nothing at all that draws
me to him. My interest in all of this is thinking, the kind of
thinking now afoot.
That is, after murdering a city, you'd think
we would desire a different kind of thinking. And so I want to
examine thinking that speaks to the needs of our times, in which
the leaders are themselves the issue, because it has become
self-evident, evidence in an abundance, they have moved far away
from the people. Once we were a fifth; then Skip put us in
thirds. And the lower third ain’t worth caring about. The
ghastly rumors spread by Nagin and his police chief against
their own people is emblematic of the rupture we have
in community. It's a dangerous, threatening situation.
So bring forth as many names as you think
will have something to say how we can develop a leadership that
is not so far distant from the interests of the bottom third of
our society. Don't you think it is time to examine this thinking
within our own communities that looks down on the poor and sees
them through the same eyes as those who think of them as
looters, rapists, and murderers. Well we talked much about
community in the 60s and 70s, not so much so in the 80s and 90s.
Huey P. Newton was an authority on community
organizing in speaking and writing about the need of
establishing community and ways to go about that. Within his
seeking he coined the concept "revolutionary suicide."
Community begins with the individual but he ends steeped in
community--the I becomes a we. That is, how we think determines
what kind of community we have. Well that doesn't exist now?
Why? Can it be?
For me that's a revolutionary way of looking
at things and I just find it fascinating. Huey says he learned
what it was to be free in prison. He discovered it for himself.
He discovered freedom through the mastery of himself and his
appetites. Are those ideas relevant, too dated, for
today's black adolescents? Would not the actions that too many
of our youth involve themselves come under the category of what
Huey calls " reactionary suicide," and the romance of
the gun. Or is it that only white authored ideas have staying
power, that last the years, eras, ages?
Can the people you wish to bring forth, can
they testify on the issue of "electoral politics" and
"party politics." And the failures that the poor have
endured as a result of their ascent? Can they speak on it for
our contemporary situation in which black electoral officials
have failed one third of our community and have no plans to
alleviate the disparities. These wise guys got no other program than
for us to vote Democratic.
Those are their masters, not we the people.
They owe their allegiance to corporations and the coffers they
fill. Is there no other kind of politics, for the poor and the
powerless? Is that's all that's left to them? That which Cosby
recommends? Aren't we, they more deserving? What would WEB
say about these hyenas? Would he say vote when every vote sinks
you deeper into your poverty. Voting however is just another
social control.
We are at a loss. We no longer know how to
teach our own children or what to teach them if we had the
resources to teach them. What black teachers and principals do
today is make education more mechanical than whites dare with
their own children. We tighten the controls to make them more
malleable for the System and its way of thinking, mere
followers, automatons, rather than leaders. By the time most
black kids get in their 20s they are confused. They don't know
who they are. Contradictions are overwhelming!
All they know is that they have been through
the gauntlet of public education, which has prepared them not
but for the role of good soldiers. The creative and thinking we
produce in one generation is not successfully transmitted from
one generation to the next, except on the lowest levels. That's
a serious problem if we are about what we say we about,
namely, community. Community must be wanted, a line of security
and defense, and you got to want it, fight for it with all your
heart. Then we must define just what we mean really. It's got to
be more than just color and oppression. Huey's notion of
"revolutionary suicide" seems to go beyond those
limitations.
I do not think that we have taken his full
measure until we read him. Until we question him on how we
find ourselves where we are today—dispersed. There’s no
getting together until we discover why we are not together. Huey
provides a mechanism for examining that very question, and
others, like what it means to be free and existential.
post 30 September 2005
* * * *
* The Caged Panther the
Prison Years of Huey P. Newton—J. Herman Blake—We also had
some very rich exchanges in discussing the ideas of
Emile
Durkheim—a French sociologist considered one of the founders
of the discipline Sociology. His works are cited at the
beginning of any introduction to sociology course. I was
interested in Durkheim’s ideas about “collective consciousness”
and group behavior. Newton had also read Durkheim and was much
more interested in his development of the social causes of
suicide. Newton had read an article in EBONY Magazine that a
fellow inmate had shared, discussing
Herbert Hendin’s study of the rising incidence of suicide
among African Americans—particularly males. This was a new and
surprising trend and apparently a subject of intense discussion
during the mealtimes he shared with other inmates. Newton and I
talked about Durkheim’s articulation of the major types of
suicide: Anomic, Altruistic, Egoistic, and Fatalistic.
First of all, Newton was
troubled by the increasing suicide rate among Black males. He
was dissatisfied with the way the trend was discussed in the
article for he felt the writer accepted the pattern as
understandable even if not acceptable. In talking about the
social forces used to explain suicide, Newton began to use
Durkheim’s paradigm to analyze these forces and develop an
expanded version of the theory. In Newton’s view, fatalistic
suicide as explained by Durkheim resulted from situations where
individuals felt oppressed and reacted by killing themselves as
an escape from their oppression. Newton theorized that when
faced with overwhelming social forces to kill oneself was
“reactionary suicide.” However, if the individual had a strong
desire to fulfill their life, they would move against their
oppressors and seek to liberate themselves and their people.
Even if the oppressors had much greater forces leading to the
individual’s death, the revolutionary act of moving against
oppression rather than self-destruction would result in
“revolutionary suicide” a form of liberation.
In other words,
“revolutionary suicide” resulted from such an overwhelming
desire to live free that one would take action against an
oppressor in spite of the odds. As he developed the idea of
“revolutionary suicide” in his reflections on the writings of
Herbert Hendin and the theories of
Emile Durkheim, Huey Newton seemed to become liberated
himself. Newton ruminated at length about Durkheim’s formulation
of how social forces—either tightly woven or very loose—might
lead a person to kill oneself. However, he argued further that
if social forces were overwhelmingly constraining, the
revolutionary act would be to move against the social forces and
their agents—even if that action led to one’s own death.
When he originally
articulated the concept of revolutionary suicide, Newton saw it
as another one of the abstract ideas we were developing to
stimulate his mind during his time in his jail cell. While
excited by his own analytical development of the concept, he did
not envision going further with the idea. It was one of many
ideas we discussed in relation to social conditions of poor
people around the world in general and Black people in America
in particular. Eventually it was to become the title of the
autobiography that emerged from our collaboration. Initially the
concept revolutionary suicide was ensconced in an intellectual
array of ideas to be discussed with other inmates in lieu of
brothers on the block. At that time, there was no indication
Newton wanted to pursue the idea further or promote the concept.
We talked about it and went on to other matters.—Springer
* * * *
* DVDs --
A Huey P. Newton Story 2001 /
What We Want, What We Believe The Black Panther Party Library
The Spook Who Sat By the Door /
Passin' It On; The Black Panthers' Search for Justice /
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* *
Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August
22, 1989) was an American political and urban
activist who, along with
Bobby Seale, co-founded the
Black Panther Party for Self Defense. . . .
There are many
references to Huey Newton in popular music,
including in the songs "Changes"
by
Tupac Shakur, "Welcome To The Terrordome" by
Public Enemy, "Queens Get The Money" by
Nas, "Sunny Kim" by
Andre Nickatina, "Just A Celebrity" by
The Jacka, "Same Thing" by
Flobots, "Dreams" and "911 Is A Joke(Cop Killa)"
by
The Game, "You Can't Murder Me" by
Papoose, "Police State" by
Dead Prez, "Propaganda" by
Dead Prez "We Want Freedom" by
Dead Prez, "Malcolm, Garvey, Huey" by
Dead Prez, "SLR" by
Lupe Fiasco, "Bill Gates Freestyle" by
Fabolous feat. Paul Cain, "Huey Newton" by
Wiz Khalifa &
Currensy,"Hiiipower" by
Kendrick Lamar, "My Favorite Mutiny" by
The Coup, and "Dream Team" by
Spearhead. In the comic strip and cartoon show
The Boondocks, the main character Huey Freeman,
a ten year-old African-American revolutionary, is
named after Newton; another reference comes when
Freeman starts an independent newspaper, dubbing it
the Free Huey World Report. In 1996,
A Huey P. Newton Story was performed on stage by
veteran actor
Roger Guenveur Smith. The one-man play later was
made into an award-winning 2001 film directed by
Spike Lee.— Wikipedia
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Revolutionary Suicide
By Huey P. Newton, Ho Che Anderson
(Illustrator), Fredrika Newton
(Introduction)
Eloquently tracing the birth of a
revolutionary, Huey P. Newton's famous
and oft-quoted autobiography is as much
a manifesto as a portrait of the inner
circle of America's Black Panther Party.
From Newton's impoverished childhood on
the streets of Oakland to his
adolescence and struggles with the
system, from his role in the Black
Panthers to his solitary confinement in
the Alameda County Jail, Revolutionary
Suicide is smart, unrepentant, and
thought-provoking in its portrayal of
inspired radicalism.
Huey P. Newton (1942-1989) was an
activist and inspirational leader of the
Black Panther Party. Fredrika Newton
joined the Black Panther Party as a
youth member in 1969 and married Huey P.
Newton in 1984. She established the Huey
P. Newton Foundation, a non-profit
educational organization, in 1993. Ho
Che Anderson was born in London in
1969 and named after the Vietnamese and
Cuban revolutionaries Ho Chi Minh and
Che Guevara. He is primarily known for
his comic books King, I Want
to Be Your Dog, Wise Son, and
Scream Queen. |
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Malcolm X
A Life of Reinvention
By
Manning Marable
Years
in the making-the definitive biography of
the legendary black activist.
Of the great figure in twentieth-century
American history perhaps none is more
complex and controversial than Malcolm X.
Constantly rewriting his own story, he
became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and
an icon, all before being felled by
assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
Through his tireless work and countless
speeches he empowered hundreds of thousands
of black Americans to create better lives
and stronger communities while establishing
the template for the self-actualized,
independent African American man. In death
he became a broad symbol of both resistance
and reconciliation for millions around the
world. |
Manning Marable's
new biography of Malcolm is a stunning achievement.
Filled with new information and shocking revelations
that go beyond the Autobiography, Malcolm X unfolds a
sweeping story of race and class in America, from the
rise of Marcus Garvey and the Ku Klux Klan to the
struggles of the civil rights movement in the fifties
and sixties.
Reaching into
Malcolm's troubled youth, it traces a path from his
parents' activism through his own engagement with the
Nation of Islam, charting his astronomical rise in the
world of Black Nationalism and culminating in the
never-before-told true story of his assassination.
Malcolm X will stand as the definitive work on one of
the most singular forces for social change, capturing
with revelatory clarity a man who constantly strove, in
the great American tradition, to remake himself anew.
* * * *
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Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory
Douglas
—The Black Panther
Party for Self Defense, formed in the aftermath
of the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965,
remains one of the most controversial movements
of the 20th-century. Founded by the charismatic
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the party
sounded a defiant cry for an end to the
institutionalized subjugation of African
Americans. The Black Panther newspaper was
founded to articulate the party's message and
artist Emory Douglas became the paper's art
director and later the party's Minister of
Culture. Douglas's artistic talents and
experience proved a powerful combination: his
striking collages of photographs and his own
drawings combined to create some of the era's
most iconic images, like that of Newton with his
signature beret and large gun set against a
background of a blood-red star, which could be
found blanketing neighborhoods during the 12
years the paper existed. This landmark book
brings together a remarkable lineup of party
insiders who detail the crafting of the party's
visual identity.
—Publisher Rizzoli
Douglas was the Norman Rockwell of the ghetto,
concentrating on the poor and oppressed.
Departing from the WPA/social realist style of
portraying poor people, which can be perceived
as voyeuristic and patronizing, Douglas’s
energetic drawings showed respect and action. He
maintained poor people’s dignity while
graphically illustrating harsh situations.—Wikipedia
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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updated 25 February 2008
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