THE BLACK PANTHERS AND #MeTwo

Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton

Do you remember the Black Panthers?  Do you ever wonder what happened to them?  Are you curious to know what this has to do with #MeTwo?  Allow me, please, to unravel.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in 1966, in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.  Born at the height of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the Black Panther Party was originally focused on police brutality.  Its members patrolled the streets of West Oakland with rifles and shotguns.  California was an open carry state, but the gun-toting Panthers quickly got a reputation for militancy and black nationalism.  Nothing quite says “revolution” like the photograph of Newton seated in a rattan cobra chair, holding a rifle in one hand and a spear in the other. 

Huey P. Newton

The Panthers were fundamentally political.  They were community organizers who sponsored positive initiatives for their constituencies, such as local before-school breakfast programs, tuberculosis (and later, HIV) testing, ambulance services, and legal aid.  But it was actually the Panthers’ militancy that got the FBI’s attention.  FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Black Panther Party in 1968 as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” and the party became a primary target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO counterintelligence program.  Per Encyclopedia Britannica:

In a protracted program against the Black Panther Party, COINTELPRO used agent provocateurs, sabotage, misinformation, and lethal force to eviscerate the national organization.  The FBI’s campaign culminated in December 1969 with a five-hour police shoot-out at the Southern California headquarters of the Black Panther Party and an Illinois state police raid in which Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was killed.  The measures employed by the FBI were so extreme that, years later when they were revealed, the director of the agency publicly apologized for “wrongful uses of power.”

Not much new there.  But in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the FBI investigations and the police gun battles took their toll.  The Black Panther Party splintered into Cleaver and Newton factions and engaged in retaliatory assassinations.  Hundreds of members left the party and its leadership began to disintegrate.  As for the movers and shakers: 

  

• ·         Newton was convicted of killing a police officer, later overturned.  He exiled himself to Cuba for a while, only to return to be killed in a drug dispute not far from where he co-founded the Black Panther Party. 

• ·         Seale was indicted and later acquitted for the torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a suspected police informant.  At 83, he is still an activist.

• ·         A team of Black Panthers led by Eldridge Cleaver ambushed Oakland police officers.  Out on bail on a rape charge, Cleaver fled to Cuba and from there, Algeria.  He returned to the United States to design clothing in the ‘80s and later became a born-again Christian and a registered Republican. 

 What does this have to do with #MeToo?  A lot. 

 

I majored in Government in college.  It was 1968, my junior year, and I decided on a thesis topic:  The Black Panther Party as an Instrument of Political Modernization.  I needed a thesis advisor, and there was only one professor on campus who was interested in my topic and qualified to direct it.  He must have been about 36 or 37 then.  I was 20.  He was a large man.  I was not.  One spring afternoon, after finishing our discussion of some book or other relevant to my topic, I got up to leave his study.  He came around from behind his desk to see me off. 

 

Expecting him to precede me to the door so that he could politely usher me out, I followed him and paused, waiting.  But he stopped short of the door, turned around, and planted himself between me and the exit.  I was extremely uncomfortable.  He put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me hard.  Now I was afraid and didn’t know what to do.  I can’t really say how I got out of there.  I must have said something disapproving, ducked, and dashed out of his way.  I was too upset then to recall the details now; it’s been 50 years.  (Sound like anyone we know?  Christine Blasey Ford, perhaps?)

Like so many others before and after, I told no one, except my boyfriend.  I didn’t go to the police, the head of the department, a university officer, or the headmistress of my dorm.  I didn't confront my professorial predator, who had just confirmed a sickening stereotype.  I simply never went back to that man's study.  So that was the end of my thesis, there being no other qualified professor to advise me.   And even if there had been an alternate, I wouldn't have wanted to lie about my reasons for changing advisors, or to explain them.  

There was, unfortunately, an insult added to this injury.  Despite the fact that my college grades were good enough to graduate magna cum laude in Government, because I didn't write a thesis, I graduated with the utilitarian-homogenous-sounding cum laude in General Studies.  (Can you hear the air leaking out of that balloon?)  Still, I guess losing an academic honor is better than losing your virginity.  

Update:  The inspiration for this post was a 2-part podcast by The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb about a Black Panther couple who exiled themselves to a small village at the foot of a mountain in Tanzania 50 years ago.  Here are the links:  https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/american-exiles-east-africa 

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/american-exiles-east-africa-part-2

 

Keep it real!

Marilyn