Posted by PANW on June 20, 1998 at 19:22:07:
In Reply to: PAGES FROM HISTORY: Documents from the Black Panther Party posted by PAN AFRICAN NEWS WIRE on June 20, 1998 at 19:14:49:
Pan-African News Wire, Pages From History II, June 17, 1998 Documents From the Black Panther Party, (Cont.)
Title: From Resistance to Liberation, Part II Source: "The Black Panther: Black Community News Service", Saturday, June 20, 1970, pp. 17-18.
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Editor's Note: At the recent funeral of James Byrd, Jr., who was lynched on June 5, 1998 in Jasper County, Texas, Dr. Khalid Muhammad, the former Supreme Captain of the Nation of Islam under Minister Louis Farakhan, visited this southern community with a group of armed men calling themselves the "New Black Panthers". In the second portion of this document, the Panther newspaper of this period reflects on the character of the repressive system in the United States and the role of white radicals during this era.
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From Resistance to Liberation, Part II
All these problems came to a boiling point in 1969 as Nixon's policy of repression escalated. In response to severe attacks, the Panthers proposed a broad United Front which would essentially serve as a support group. The Front would raise funds, educate white people to the dangers of fascism, and help circulate a petition for "community control of the police".
The difficulty was that the liberals who would be most likely to join such a Front were having jitters about the Panthers and repression, and the younger radicals were going through birth pains of new struggles. In the white community, it was the ineffectual and opportunist Old Left groups which were most interested in the United Front. The radicals, meanwhile, were moving in at least four different directions: towards white working-class organizing, women's liberation, the cultural revolution (as asserted in the People's Park struggle), and armed struggle (as embodied by the Weathermen). Few of the younger radicals wanted to join a United Front with the Old Left or circulate petitions in the white community, and none wanted to accept Panther leadership.
Perhaps the Panthers did not understand the devastating effect this United Front would have on the young whites. Since their inception the Panther had gradually inspired significant numbers of whites to the idea of armed struggle. Few whites had become John Browns, but the Panthers heroic image was accelerating white revolutionary consciousness as no American movement had done before. Then, with little preparation, the Panthers suddenly adopted a reformist tactic which the whites had been trying to go beyond. White radicals had no objection to a United Front of middle-class liberal support for the Panthers. But they wanted the Panthers to recognize as well the need for militant liberation struggles in the Mother Country.
To the Panthers, the response of white radicals seemed self-centered and "anarchist". The embattled Panthers had difficulty understanding the priority of women's issues, for instance, or the significance of drugs and rock and roll, or why the Berkely radicals fought in the streets for 17 days when black people had already demonstrated the futility of riots, or why Weathermen wanted to pick up guns instead of petitions. They could not see the legitimacy of the struggles that whites were engaged in and began to assert that the Party should be the "vanguard" of the Mother Country as well as the Colony. The result was much hostile and futile "commandism" from the Panthers and much alienation among the whites.
Before the cleavages could be overcome, the U.S. government moved to take advantage of the situation. Noting that the United Front conference had ended in disarray and division, they concluded that the Panthers were isolated and therefore easy targets.
From the United Front conference through the trial of Bobby Seale and the Chicago 7, these gaps between the Panthers and their white allies continued. On November 15 in San Francisco David Hillard was booed by the liberal peace movement for suggesting that peace could not be achieved without a liberation struggle, and that Nixon (or anyone standing in the way of black liberation) should be killed. Seeing the black-white division, the power structure moved again, this time indicting Hillard for "threatening the President".
During the trial the gulf was both narrowed and widened. We enjoyed a political closeness with Bobby Seale, yet he remained in jail every day, while we were free. We helped create a mass consciousness among whites about the repression of the Panthers, but Bobby was the one who experienced the gagging. We asserted our unity with the Panthers, but could do nothing to prevent Bobby's sentence and the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The inadequacy was not simply our own; it existed throughout the white movement. Until November 15 in Washington, not one major demonstration occured to protest what had happened to Bobby.
Early this year, the Panther were beginning to reconsider their basic strategy of coalition. Eldridge drafted a manifesto declaring that if class struggle were not possible, then blacks should go it alone in a race war. The manifesto vowed that no more Panthers would be sacrificed on the "altar of interracial harmony".
Then, suddenly, a hopeful new coalition was being created in New Haven. It had taken a long time (the Panthers had been held in Connecticut dungeons since before the United Front Conference) but whites were beginning to move again on the issue of racism. A strike began in April. The president of Yale granted the validity of the question the Panthers had been raising all along: that a fair trial for black revolutionaries in America was hard to imagine. When 25,000 people, called by the Panthers and the Conspiracy, came to New Haven on May Day despite the warnings of Spiro Agnew and the threat of the National Guard, a militant United Front involving both moderate and revolutionary whites at last began to appear.
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