Arts & Events

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution At the Shattuck Landmark and Piedmont Theaters

Reviewed by Gar Smith
Thursday October 01, 2015 - 10:49:00 PM

Emmy-Award-winning director Stanley Nelson has made a great film. For anyone who lived in the East Bay during the Sixties, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution will revive some powerful memories. Running nearly two hours, this documentary serves up a seething, brim-full cauldron of radical history, memorable images and gritty interviews with radicals, reporters, supporters, cops, informers and more than a dozen Panther survivors. Among those interviewed: Bobby Seale, Kathleen Cleaver, Jamal Joseph and Emory Douglas (the cartoonist who became the Party's Minister of Culture and created the indelible caricature of a pig outfitted in a police uniform, surrounded by buzzing flies).

 

 

 

The film excels at capturing the eloquence and conviction of many Black Panther Party (BPP) leaders but doesn't bite its tongue either—as when a fellow Panther describes Eldridge Cleaver as "a Rottweiler… fuck-yeah, crazy!" 

While the freedom struggle in the rural South largely focused on voting rights, the Panthers dealt with the daily issues of survival and human rights in the crowded cities of the North. Nelson reminds us that the organization's full name was The Black Panther Party for Self Defense. 

Nelson says he decided to make this film to communicate "the core driver of the movement" which was that the BPP "emerged out of a love for their people and a devotion to empowering them." 

With their urban black-is-beautiful bearing—proud Afros, dark glasses, berets and black leather jackets—the Panthers we're instantly appealing to the youth. The appearance of "Constitutionally armed" Panthers patrolling city streets—and, on one memorable occasion, the corridors of power in the State Capitol Building—made headlines around the world and reaped a harvest of new Panther Party offices in cities across America. 

The mainstream press would have us remember the Panthers in gun-bearing "battlefield mode" but how often have you seen photos of Panthers dressed in aprons serving breakfasts to hungry children—and impoverished, abandoned war veterans. The BPP's pioneering food program that eventually grew to provide 27,000 free meals a day to 18 different communities. Also contrary to the "mainstreaming" of the BPP, Nelson underscores the role of Panther women. By the end of the 60s, a majority of the Panthers were women. While some Panthers retained ingrained sexist habits, the BPP openly promoted the power of women and created a "womanist" ideology that fused feminism with black nationalism. 

The Panther's "Ten-Point Program" was, quite literally, revolutionary [See the complete Program at the end of this review]. The Panthers weren't just about guns, cop-watching and bravado. They walked the "Ten-Point" talk, providing the community with free food, free health clinics and free schools that provided missing lessons in African-American history. 

The FBI Plots to Destroy the Panthers 

Nelson does a good job of covering the government's secret war against the Panthers. One of the main tools was the FBI's COINTELPRO operation, which was designed to "disrupt and neutralize" radical organizations. The FBI saw the Panthers as a revolutionary vanguard and sent forged letters to sow suspicion among Panthers and their spouses. Fearing their families might be at risk, many Panther men were forced to abandon their families and congregate in safe houses known as "Panther pads." 

The FBI's COINTELPRO memos also spoke of the need to "prevent the rise of a Black Messiah." That warning was soon followed by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This blatant murder—both public and brutal—put an end to hopes for a peaceful revolution in the US. 

"We wanted nonviolence," one Panther reminisces in the film, but after King's murder, it became clear that Malcolm's path now seemed inevitable—"by any means necessary." 

Soon thereafter, Eldridge Cleaver was wounded by police bullets in an Oakland shoot-out and Little Bobby Hutton was shot to death—shirtless, with his hands raised above his head. Hutton's murder was the first overt Panther killing by police. 

Marlon Brando appeared at in Oakland Rally pledging to bring the Panthers' story back to his community. (A revived memory: Later that day, I ran into Brando and Cleaver in a former "bail hut" at 2229 MLK that had became a movement hub for Berkeley radicals. It was a harrowing time. Bobby Seale had also recently "disappeared.") 

In November 1968, Cleaver fled to Algeria where he started an international wing of the BPP. Malcolm X had talked about internationalizing the Black struggle in America but it was the Panthers who actually did it. The Vietnam war made black expatriates heroes around the world. 

The FBI Assassination of Fred Hampton 

Meanwhile, a charismatic Panther named Fred Hampton was making news in Chicago, inflaming crowds with chants like: "You can jailed the revolutionary but you can't jail the revolution." Hampton was a crowd magnet. At the age of 17 he headed to the NAACP's youth wing. He specialized in working with other marginal groups—including Puerto Rican street gangs and the Young Patriots, an organization of poor whites from the south. The specter of the political unification of the country's poor across racial lines, really spooked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who saw these burgeoning alliances as a major menace to the status quo. 

Hoover insisted the solution to all of America's problems boiled down to "law and order." When a reporter asked Hoover whether justice was also important, Hoover replied: "Justice is incidental to law and order." 

Hampton's rising prominence placed him squarely in the crosshairs of Hoover's COINTELPRO operation. The FBI decided to take a "proactive approach" to the Panthers, using local police to stage raids on Panthers offices across the country and they began with the Chicago police force, which agreed to stage a "night raid" on Fred Hampton's home. 

In 1969, an FBI informant infiltrated the Chicago Panthers and became Hampton's bodyguard. The informant worked with the cops to set up the home invasion that lead to Hampton's brutal assassination. A massive cover-up followed. The film offers previously unseen interviews with the survivors of the deadly assault that murdered Hampton and a young Panther named Mark Clark. The testimony of the survivors is gripping and shocking—as are the photos of the murder scene. 

The police attacked with submachine guns and falsely claimed the Panthers had fired upon them without provocation. In fact, only one Panther bullet was fired. It came from the barrel of a gun held by Clark, who was shot in the heart while answering the door. The gun discharged a single bullet—after it fell from Clark's hand and hit the floor. 

The FBI gave their informant a $300 bonus. 

Nelson includes a photograph that captured three Chicago cops laughing over the body of the slain Panther leader. 

Dennis Cunningham, a lawyer for Hampton's family subsequently called the incident "a police death squad directed by the FBI." A lawsuit was filed and the FBI and Chicago police were eventually ordered to pay a $1.8 million in a wrongful death settlement. (In 2010, Cunningham won a $4.4 million settlement in a lawsuit charging the FBI with civil rights violations following the Oakland car-bombing assault on environmental activist Judi Bari.) 

Another injustice soon followed in New York City where the "Panther 21" were accused of a terrorist bomb plot. They faced a collective 360 years in prison and were hit with $100,000 fines designed to keep them in prison. After more than two years in jail, the Panthers had to endure an eight-month trial at the end of which the jury deliberated for just three hours and acquitted all of the Panthers, handing out 156 not-guilty verdicts. 

Bobby Seale was arrested for giving a speech at a rally outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He was accused of fomenting in a riot, even though he left Chicago hours before the "police-riot" that precipitated the violent confrontation. 

In court, Seale was famously tied-up and muzzled when he attempted to represent himself. Even constrained by a straitjacket, Seale continued to protest loudly despite the gag that bound his mouth. Outside the courtroom a growing crowd of supporters picked up the chant, "Stop the trial!" 

Across the nation, Panthers begin sandbagging their offices, fearing more police assaults. They were not long in coming. Four days later, the country's first SWAT team quietly surrounded the Panther office in Los Angeles in the dead of night and suddenly opened fire. (The LAPD had been ordered to execute an "armed warrant" and were advised that "surprise was the element to be used.") The Panthers returned fire and held their ground for hours as the sun rose and local news crews gathered. 

In another of Nelson's memorable sets of interviews, survivors of that extended shootout recount what it was like to be in the middle of that LAPD assault. Although they were nicked and riddled with bullet wounds, they still managed to survive. 

In 1970, Huey Newton was freed from jail. Nelson's film records how Huey began to steer the Panthers away from armed confrontation and more towards community service. The shift angered Cleaver and others who believed the Panthers should continue to pursue the goal of "overthrowing the fascist, racist US government." The BPP split into two factions. 

Weakened further by factionalism, the Panthers became pray for the FBI's campaign of fake letters designed to create a culture of paranoia and to widen the rift between Panther factions. 

(This is a matter of some personal anguish. While I was on the staff of the Berkeley Barb, we received—and printed—one of these fake documents. Unaware of the secret COINTELPRO operation, we believed the letter to be a legitimate political complaint from a Panther insider directed against other Panthers. To our lasting regret, the antagonistic letter had the desired effect: shots were fired and people got hurt.) 

Nelson's archival acumen also resurrects a rare video clip involving a TV host who attempted to smooth over the differences between the factions by inviting Huey and Eldridge (on the phone from Algeria) to iron over their differences, live and on-air. But in the last minute of the broadcast, Cleaver lashed out at Newton's new direction. By some miracle, Nelson managed to locate an audiotaped recording of the enraged phone call that Newton made minutes after the broadcast. You can hear Newton and Cleaver rage at each other over opposite ends of the phone. It's an extraordinary moment. 

In 1973, Bobby Seale ran a populist campaign to become mayor of Oakland and nearly won in a run-off. Unfortunately, the campaign consumed a lot of BPP energy and money and, as one of the participants laments, after the electoral loss, "there was no Plan B." The BPP began a slow collapse as people quit the party and drifted away. 

As the film draws to a close, Newton, addled by drugs, has become a "fucking maniac" and the Panthers have been reduced to raising revenues by shaking down drug dealers, prostitutes and pimps. One of Huey's friends tells Nelson that Newton had become "a maniac in his penthouse who did all kinds of things to people" including angry rants, abusive behavior, and beatings. 

As comprehensive as Nelson's film is, it wasn't possible to cover all the stories that haunted the Panther's during Newton's decline. There is no mention of the Newton's savage beating of Preston Callins, the brutal murder of Panther bookkeeper Betty Van Patten (allegedly on Newton's orders) or of Newton's involvement in a the deaths of Kathleen Smith, Crystal Gray, and Nelson Malloy. 

In 1989, Huey Newton was killed in a drug deal on the streets of Oakland. 

But the story of the Panthers continues. In a closing admonition, Nelson notes: 

More than 20 Panthers are still serving terms and prisons. 

"What We Want Now!" 

The Black Panther Party's original Ten-Point program, published in the second issue of the Black Panther newspaper on May 15, 1967: 

  1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
  2. We want full employment for our people.
  3. We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
  4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
  5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.
  6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
  7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
  8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
  9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
  10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.