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

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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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updated 25 February 2008