Posted by PAN AFRICAN NEWS WIRE on June 20, 1998 at 19:14:49:
From: Pan-African News Wire ac6123@wayne.edu
Pan-African News Wire, Pages From History, June 17, 1998
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Documents From the Black Panther Party
Title: From Resistance to Liberation Source: "The Black Panther: Black Community News Service", Saturday, June 20, 1970, pp. 17-18.
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Editor's Note: In the wake of the recent lynching of James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper County, Texas on June 5 and the subsequent appearance of Dr. Khalid Muhammad at the funeral on June 13 accompanied by armed guards who were called the "New Black Panthers", we felt that it would be appropriate to present some of the actual documents from the Black Panther Party during the height of its activism in 1970. This article entitled, "From Resistance to Liberation", will be reprinted in several parts over the next few days. It is important to compare the views of the BPP of a generation ago with activities over the last few years that have been assoicated with the Party's legacy and political symbolism. This article is taken from the archives of the Pan-African Research and Documentation Center.
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From Resistance to Liberation
Nearly 30 Panthers have been killed since the Party was founded; in the first year of the Nixon administration, over 400 had been arrested on various charges; Panther offices in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, Des Moines and 15 other cities have been attacked by police. Nearly all members of their original Central Committee have been suppressed: killed, jailed or forced into exile. The Justice Department has a special task force on the Panthers; the FBI considers them the greatest single threat to our national security; at least two congressional committees and several grand juries are investigating them.
The Panthers are the target not of repression but of an undeclared war. Under a state of repression, the heretic at least is accorded bail, trial and appeal. In a state of war, victims are killed or rounded up without serious regard for legal "niceties". The Panthers held in jails across America today are no different from prisoners held in Santo Domingo, Saigon or any other center of the American Empire.
The escalation of war against the Panthers has created vast differences between them and their less oppressed allies. The Panthers correctly criticize whites for not moving rapidly enough to deal with the special repression inflicted on blacks. And the whites, hesitant and confused about how to react to the brual repression of Panthers, are correctly critical of the broadside nature of occasional Panther attacks on student movements, women's liberation and the cultural rebellion arising from conditions in the Mother Country.
These differences cannot be understood without a perspective on the history of black-white political relations. In 1966 black radicals, led by Stokely Carmichael, purged whites from the "integrated" civil rights movement and directed them to go into the white community. Young whites did just this, creating a rebellious consciousness inside the Mother Country. Eldridge Cleaver and the Panthers then saw the possibilities of this white radical impulse, and put forward a strategy of "liberation in the colony" coupled with "revolution in the Mother Country". The Panther argued that blacks should wage an autonomous struggle for self-determination, but added that victory would not be secured until the Mother Country was also transformed from within. They began to experiment with coalitions for specific purposes with white organizations.
Few whites realized the risks which the Panthers took in pursuing this line. It left the Party exposed to constant baiting criticism by black "cultural nationalists" groups who preferred either no contact with whites or, if necessary, contact with white foundations and corporations rather than white radicals. Among black radicals, the Panthers were raising fears of a return to old-style coalitions which black people had been submerged and their interests made secondary to the class struggle. From great numbers of blacks, including those who joined the Party, the Panthers were demanding and incredible psychological adjustment: to conduct a racial struggle without anti-white feelings. White radicals, by comparison, had very little to lose from the coalitions except prestige or money.
Since 1967 one coalition after another between the Panthers and whites has been created, achieved something useful, then been more or less dissolved due to racial or political differences. Some have been mainly educational campaigns, like the relatively successful one waged around Huey's trial. Some have been abortively electoral, like that with the Peace and Freedom Party, which collapsed before the 1968 elections. The Panthers have searched back and forth for the most effective white allies and have come up with different answers from time to time. Sometimes the answer has been the broad liberal community and the students; sometimes poor whites in Chicago and Richmond; sometimes the Yippies and street people; sometimes the peace movement; sometimes a mixture of two or more of these. Always the coalitions have been affected by the fact that the Panthers are far more revolutionary and serious than their allies; always they have been plagued by the question of whether whites should be considered essentially as "supporters" or an independent radical force moving towards a front-line alliance with the blacks. *
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