In this audio interview roundtable, Joe Street discusses his book Black Revolutionaries: A History of the Black Panther Party with Randall J. Stephens and Julian C. Chambliss.
Thinking Beyond Success or Failure
Randall Stephens: OK, so I’m Randall Stephens. I’m at the University of Oslo, and I am a professor of American and British Studies, and we have Julian Chambliss, who’s at Michigan State. You are in history, is that right?
Julian Chambliss: I’m in English now.
RS: OK.
JC: I’m in the Department of English, and I’m also the Val Berryman Curator of History here at the MSU Museum here at Michigan State.
RS: And then we have Joe Street, here, who’s at Northumbria University, and he’s in American studies and history. I was looking forward to this conversation because we’re going to be talking about his new book with the University of Georgia Press called Black Revolutionaries.
It was fun to read it. I just like how sprawling it is, you know, going back in time and forward up to the present and asking some really fun, big questions about the modern US, and the US in the 60s and the 70s. But maybe I could start out with a question to get us off the ground. I did really appreciate that in the intro that you’re talking about how the BPP, the Black Panther Party, for those not in the know, says a lot, reveals a great deal, about modern US history. And I wonder if you could say something about that, and Julian, if you want to jump in any time.
Joe Street: Yeah, I think obviously that the Black Panther Party tells us so much about the nature of American racism, and the centrality of American racism to even the modern day, going back into the modern day or going forward rather into the postmodern day. And I think that’s the most obvious and, in some respects, that’s kind of almost quite a depressing thing to say about what the Black Panther Party does. It holds up a mirror to the US. But I think also what it says is the fact that significant numbers of people in the United States want a more radical change than is being offered, or that has ever been offered by the two major political parties at the time, and it’s significant. I think that the Black Panther Party emerged within a year of supposedly the greatest liberal success of the 20th century. And, within that, people come in and say that is not enough.
This is hugely significant, and I think when we look at that, as well, it suggests that there are significant numbers of people who want to move outside of the two-party political system to create change. There are people themselves who were prepared to put their bodies and their souls on the line in order to effect that change. And that’s a story that’s not often told in the mainstream histories of the United States. There is actually a radical alternative right at the core of the United States, and that, I think, is what is rightly important to an understanding of both the Black Panther Party and the Black Panther Party’s position in American history.
JC: Yeah, I appreciate the way that this discussion about the party signals fundamental structural issues. You do a great job of illuminating our contemporary issues right down to their relationship between that sort of grassroots activism that is by definition more radical and challenging of the status quo that we can rightly parallel to something like the Black Lives Matter movement.
And I’m always curious when we talk about the Black Panther Party that, you know, one of its legacies is a culture of resistance at some level, more grassroots than the capacity of the political organization in the United States seemingly is able to absorb or reflect. Your book really calls attention to a lingering understanding, at least at the grassroots level, of a politics of change that can be achieved. How much that is struggling in the system that we have is very much appreciated.
JS: Yeah, thank you. That was one of the things I definitely wanted to do. So I’m really gratified that you said that I achieved that. One of the problems I’ve always had with teaching social movements, and to a lesser extent with the publications on them, is that people are desperate for stories of success. One of the traditional undergraduate tales or questions that we ask is, was the civil rights movement a success? To what extent was the movement a success or failure? And once we look at that, we look at so many social movements that are failures.
But in actual fact, if we flip it around and think about how these social movements operate, for those who are within them, they are transformative. And that is a story that is kind of told in the historiography of the Black Panther Party. And I think it does need to be emphasized, though, for a wider sense. Because one of the things that kind of drives my own work as an activist in the university here is that old phrase attributed to Antonio Gramsci: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” You think that you might fail, but you go and do these things anyway because it is important to your own self, and if you can effect that change on people around you, then you are having a positive impact, and that’s what I see with the Black Panther Party. These goals and these overarching aims in the template platform and program were hugely ambitious, and the fact that they weren’t necessarily achieved isn’t so much the point as the people were prepared to push for them. And that, in itself, is of great significance for me as a historian, and, I hope, to people who read it.
RS: I was wondering about how sometimes, as historians we focus on periods of time where there was a great deal of upheaval and social change and possibility—like the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1960s—and I wondered if you see parallels with other radical movements and/or departures. Or, if not departures, a difference with the Black Panther Party. It doesn’t quite compare to some of these other radical organizations of the time that flourished: Radical feminism, the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society], student protests, and things like that.
JS: I think there are two things going on in that question there, which it’s one of your deceptively complex questions, Randall. In one sense, I think that the idea of opportunity is really important, and this idea of a potential new future. That’s one of the things that’s always driven me with the Black Panther Party. They’re always looking to a potential new future that is better. And in that respect, I kind of see things a little bit like Brest-Litovsk, when Leon Trotsky goes to the old Powers and offers them neither peace nor war. I think there’s a really, really important moment in world history where the possibilities just suddenly broaden out, and they’re obviously shut down. They decided they would, the older actors decided, they would take advantage of Trotsky’s naivety, but there’s still that moment when suddenly this new vision of the world appears. And I think that’s where the Black Panther Party is hugely important because it does say another way is possible. We’re going to try to do it. They do try to live it. They try to embody it themselves, and those brief moments might be fleeting, but they are really important to transforming the world and for people around them.
And in terms of where your question also arrived at, which is like the contemporary period, I’ve seen them as very different to very many organizations. And that is because of the level of repression that they were subjected to. I start the book with a couple of mentions. Well, I started an earlier draft of the book with a couple of mentions of the difference between the Weather Underground and the Black Panther Party. The FBI admitted very clearly that they didn’t have a reliable informant within the Weather Underground. Whether that was due to the relative lack of transparency of the membership, or the FBI’s prejudice, or whatever, it contrasts sharply with the amount of information that the FBI were able to gather from the Black Panther Party. And that in itself speaks to both the threats that the establishment felt they faced from the Black Panther Party and its organising experience. There was constant surveillance and so on. Again, it heightens its importance that the people were able to do all of these fantastic things as members of the Black Panther Party whilst still being under intense state repression. That’s the main difference they see between them and their peers, really. It’s that repression that they face on a daily, sometimes even an hourly, basis.
RS: Julian, do you have anything there?
JC: Well, I think I guess I have a question. I think one of the things interesting about potentialities around this work is that it really calls attention to the ways that a radical ideology is understood either through a racial or a class lens. And the sort of intersections around that. To your point, when I teach about the 60s and the 70s, I’m always mindful that there’s a hysteria associated with this period, but it’s very pronounced. And that hysteria can be connected to a group like the Black Panther Party, or it can be connected to a group like the SDS. And one of the things I often point out to students is that the sort of knock-on consequences of these two groups, being radically different and having these really big imprints, on the one hand, you can make art of that. People who are in the SDS, some of those people go out and blow up things, like those in the Weather Underground. Some of them drift over to Silicon Valley, and you’re still dealing with their ideology today. It’s just really deeply embedded in a kind of popular culture around technology and utopianism, and so on and so forth. But those people started out in the same room. And we have a very different memory of the radicalism and the danger associated with them versus something like the Black Panther Party. The idea of the Black Panther Party seemed toxic at some level to the future of America, and you know, obviously, I think about this as a racial thing. But I also think of it as a little bit of a class issue, because who is a member of these groups becomes a huge part of that. Do you think about it in that regard?
JS: Yeah, yeah. And I think I think you’re right, Julian, that there is the issue of what the Black Panther Party experienced is what we now understand in terms of intersectionality, meaning that they experienced racial, class, and gender prejudice. They’re all acting on the Black Panther Party at the same time, to a greater extent than anybody in SDS. You know, when we look at the membership of the Black Panther Party, it’s overwhelmingly working class, in Marxist terms, or “Lumpenproletariat,” as far as people who worked kind of beneath the working class. There are relatively few middle class members. Whereas in the SDS, obviously, there’s a big link between the white middle class, college-educated people who become SDSers. Then, of course, a number of them, like you say, are spin-offs, looking back into the mainstream, the Democratic Party, and some end up in the Weather Underground. You don’t see that sort of thing so much with the Black Panther Party, in part, because of those experiences and those identities and the way in which those identities prevent somebody becoming like Tom Hayden or some of those big guys who go into Silicon Valley. That in itself is a huge indictment on the United States.
But also, what we see within the Black Panther Party is people living lives of purpose afterwards. That in itself is hugely inspiring. What has become a further narrative now amongst a lot of memoirists is being able to look back on their membership in the Black Panther Party as something that helped to make them who they are, you know. There’s some beautiful bit at the end of Flores Forbes’s autobiography, where he’s talking about a gap in his CV. And they said, well, what about this 10-year gap? Well, I was a member of the Black Panther Party. And he thought that this was the point at which he’s not going to get this job as a consequence of that. And they said, oh, great, let’s go on to your tax returns. It’s a great moment of closure for him, quite literally, because it’s at the end of his book, and it’s a point you can almost sense the relief that he felt that he didn’t have to justify being part of a revolutionary organization in his youth. This was just simply part of his past. And that in itself is a great thing. And it’s now, for many of them, they come to a place of peace with their former membership of the Black Panther Party, in part because of what they did and that acceptance of how important it was to them and to the communities around them.
Global Thinking, Local Activism
RS: I like the context you have on global activism. I think that parallels, or fits nicely, with the trend of the global 60s and these other trends like the long 1960s, the sort of the themes that go beyond the decade. And I was thinking about how, in the Port Huron statement, you have with the SDS this gesturing to global struggles and colonialism in a global context. It resonates so differently with the Black Panther Party. And I wonder if you could say something about the global dynamics and the sort of the global lens for social justice.
JS: That was one of the things that I was most keen to emphasize in the book. It’s the placing of the Black Panther Party in this internationalist world, and particularly in the anti-colonial world. It’s hugely important on an activist level and on an intellectual level that we see the Black Panther Party really engaging with the anticolonial struggle at a deep theoretical level. Their reading of Frantz Fanon is amongst the most complex readings of a phenomenon that you see in the United States at the time. It’s far more complex than Jean Paul Sartre’s reading that is published as the introduction of the book. That, I thought, was vital because it enables us to look at the way that they’re conceptualizing their own resistance within a different context to the one that’s often been presented. That they come at the tail-end of the 1960s.
It’s part of this declension theory: we have the good 1960s and the bad 1960s. And that’s something that generations of Black Panther Party historians are really trying to push against so that they actually come from a very different context. I think the answer to that question lies in examining them within the context of these anti-colonial struggles and the people who are using violence quite successfully against colonial oppressors. Once we see the Black Panther Party thinking in those terms, it enables us to understand more clearly their understanding of the colonial analogy that they bring to the United States. They are themselves a colonized people within the United States, so it kind of dovetails in that respect at an intellectual level. Then it enables us to see exactly why they’re being prepared to take up arms, why they’re prepared to go out into the streets and be ambivalent about the use of violence in the streets. They’ve seen how it works in these anti-colonial settings, and that, I think, is again crucial for an understanding of the Black Panther Party.
JC: Right. I want to actually, sort of, expand on that point, because I think one of the things that’s interesting about the Black Panther Party, for contemporary students or contemporary viewers, readers, is that the Black Panther Party essentially exists as a kind of cultural imperative. That’s one of the things that, if we think about the notion of how black power, or what we’re saying would be the black power movement, should persist after the height of this direct political engagement on the street. It becomes a cultural narrative. It becomes a touchstone that people take up in the arts, I would argue. In particular, it becomes very important as a kind of structural narrative. The Black Panther Party really articulated a set of tools and activities that were very deliberate, and people who experience those tools and experience those operations, whether it’s feeding kids or schooling, remain very impacted by them.
So, from a structural standpoint, what do you think we should learn from the Black Panther Party’s understanding of revolutionary movements? I ask that in the context of the United States, that at some level is experiencing what I would call retrenchment, political and religious movements, from other spaces, right. The idea that we need to organize ourselves and influence the government, or we might need to resort to violence being taken up by white religious minorities or other kinds of groups, there’s a way where the same kind of language and the same sort of sense of crisis is now being ascribed to groups that are coming from a very different place. It’s interesting to think about what you’re writing about the Black Panther Party and the kind of critiques it makes and the ways that those critiques really still matter to people of color. But they’re also being taken up in really dystopian ways, to my mind.
JS: And that’s the absolutely huge question. For me, the real importance here lies in their engagement with Marxist literature, and specifically Frantz Fanon and his understanding of, or his description of, the way in which colonialism operates, at a political level, at a structural level, at an intellectual level, and even at a psychological level. When I teach the Black Panther Party, which I’ve been doing for quite some time, I make all of the students read Fanon, whether they like it or not. And every year, I get students who say to me how difficult they’ve found it to read, but how enlightening it was. And how it enabled them to see a framework of the way that oppression operates even in today’s world. That’s part of the reason why I teach it the way I do. I think that’s one of the things that I wanted to stress about the Black Panther Party is that this immersion in this theoretical literature enables them to see what is going on around them and to respond to it and to develop their own ideas. I think we lose sight of the Black Panther Party’s intellectuals in some respects, and I think that that is vital to understanding it, because they have all these political education classes and a lot of these guys, and these men and women, rather, dropped out of school because school has failed them. The Black Panther Party becomes a vehicle through which they educate themselves and through which, through their school, they educate other people, often on a very highly theoretical level or highly theoretical conversations about the nature of oppression and how it operates at this street level. And I think we kind of lost that on the Left, in many respects.
You know, we seem to either have reading groups or we have on-the-street groups. And I think what the Black Panther Party do is they say you actually need to do both things. You need to understand the theory in order to be on the streets. And, once you’re on the streets, if you’ve got that theory, you can articulate why you need to be there and articulate what you do and be able to reflect critically on your successes and failures, which I think is another thing that we could learn from and see what did we do wrong in this situation. Well, this theory suggests that we should have done this, this, and this and that. I think that’s important. So, when we look at the Black Panther Party, we don’t just look at them as emerging, let’s say, from Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton’s getting fed up about police brutality. It’s also their reading of Fanon. It’s also their reading of Robert F. Williams. It’s their reading of Malcolm X. They’re reading of Du Bois. All of these works enable them to understand why they’re experiencing racial oppression and class oppression in this moment, at that time, in that sort of form. And that is so fundamental.
Thinking About Guns and Violence
RS: If I could pick up on something that Julian was saying, the mentioning of our world today and these groups that are on the far right and those who are prone to use guns and the images of guns and violence, it seems like that’s more on the right or the far right. I thought it was very interesting in your epilogue how some of the veterans of the Black Panther Party, when they are summing up their experiences and reimagining the history, there’s that tendency that you wrote about to downplay the arming up, the guns, the political violence, and focus on community activism, food programs, and things like this. But I just found that so fascinating. I did wonder if it’s because, in a sense, the rhetoric about violence or the discourse about violence seems to have shifted politically.
JS: There are two things going on there. You’re right that the rhetoric about gun ownership and so on has shifted a bit. Certainly, the NRA were very much in favor of the Gun Control Act, what became the Mulford Act in 1967, whereas the Black Panther Party were opposing it. Whereas now, there’s no question that the NRA would be opposing such a gun control act.
RS: But it still has to do with guns in a way?
JS: Exactly, and that is essentially what it was about. It was about if it’s African American people who’ve got guns, it’s not white people. That’s not what gun control is about. Gun control is about preventing African American people having guns. But there’s also an issue there about the rhetoric that surrounded the gun that trapped the Black Panther Party. And a number of historians, like Curtis Austin and Jane Rhodes, have been particularly acute in working out that this actually works to the Black Panther Party’s benefit. And you can kind of see that in some ways in your question. You use the word political violence. The astonishing thing about the Black Panther Party is that you don’t actually see that many violent activities for a group that’s brandishing guns—left, right, and center—you would have thought that they’d be involved in loads and loads of shootouts. So they would be starting with shootouts. You don’t actually see it. It’s the police that start pretty much all of them.
Of course, one of the problems that we have here is that as soon as people see, you know, as Bobby Seale writes in his first autobiography, to see the N-word with guns, people’s eyes start bugging out, and they cannot comprehend it. But they also think that, instantly, these people will be violent. And of course, what the Black Panther Party were doing by holding these guns was attempting to prevent violence. So, it’s a little like, you know, one of the analogies I used there is a little like mutually assured destruction. It’s playing on the racism of whites, that this is a crazy N-word, who will shoot and doesn’t care about his life. Whereas, in actual fact, it’s playing that back off against the other people.
RS: But, in a way, do we say armed self-defense, or resorting to self-defense in ways that whites are uncomfortable with?
JS: Exactly. But the narrative becomes these guys are violent because they hold guns. And that, of course, is used as a stick with which to beat the Black Panther Party on a number of occasions. This is why Jane Rhodes’s book is punningly titled Framing the Black Panthers. It’s a book about media representation, but also how media representations enclose the Black Panther Party and lock them into a thing. And I think part of the veterans’ decision that it’s not about the guns was in part to rebut those sorts of claims. It also comes with growing old. You know, we become less radical to a certain extent, and to the people that they’re speaking to, you know. The most famous piece that I could find, or the most widely cited episode here, is one on the Black Panther Party’s talk to schoolchildren. No, you’re not gonna talk to school children. You know, if we were running around with guns, that’s not going to give the right impression to them. So there’s a whole host of things going on there that I was hopefully trying to unpick through that narrative that I’m writing.
JC: Yeah, I really appreciate that. I do think that one of the things about life in the party is the idea that they become a kind of spectral boogeyman for concerns about the inner city, about black violence. As you point out, it’s a justification for a kind of aggressive policing. Also, the consequences related to the violation of rules and regulations around policing that no one ever really takes into account, right? It contrasts with the Weather Underground and how they were treated.
JS: They do become this, like you said, media boogeyman. It’s very easy to see this through the Black Panther Party’s presentation on television, in the news. It’s always about the guns. It’s always about the violence. The very first article in the San Francisco Examiner said that this is an anti-white group who were wandering around with guns. That is very difficult to break out of.
But it also leads us towards problematic conclusions about the role of violence. The guns are actually really a rhetorical tool for the Black Panther Party. It’s there to get people to think about violence and to rethink what it does, and also it’s to equalize things. Like, you’ve got the police wandering around heavily armed. If they’ve got heavily armed people wandering around policing them, then we have a slightly different balance of power.
RS: This just made me think of these editorial cartoons from the middle of the 60s and the late 60s. It’s incredible how many times liberal and conservative cartoonists do these standard, clichéd cartoons of a radical on the right, a Bircher on one side, and then sort of a hippie or a Panther on the other side. It’s like a kind of pre-both-sides-ism visual imagery. You certainly see it all over the place in the 60s.
JS: Yeah, and then there’s that visual shorthand of the Panther as well. It’s the afro. It’s the slightly scruffy bandolier, you know, and that is very difficult for the Black Panther Party to break out of. One of the things they attempt to do is to try to break out of that once the Mulford Bill is passed and becomes an act. Their police patrols decline quite rapidly because they can’t really do it. They try to engage in a far wider variety of social programs. But the media narrative stays fixed. You know, you still see them being talked about as the violent, anti-white Black Panther Party, which is, like the book says, completely untrue.
Thinking About Prison
RS: I wanted to circle back to something about the overarching structure of the book. You describe these three main pillars, aspects of the book: Intellectual history, which we were talking about; community activism, which we discussed a little bit too; and then state repression, which is just such a powerful, heartbreaking element of the book. That last one relates to how they were harassed and dogged by the federal government, the FBI under Hoover, especially. I wonder if we can get into that a little bit. It also ties back to the “Americanness” of this story, as a carceral state.
JS: Thank you for that. That was one of the emotions that I wanted people to get out of the book. It’s that final section, and how distressing, but also how heroic, the Black Panther Party’s experience was. The reason I chose that structure was that I realized, very early on in the process of writing a book, that there were already a number of very, very good chronological surveys of the Black Panther Party. And I didn’t want to write yet another one because they have been done. Whilst I was writing it, two more came out, you know, and I suddenly thought, well, I’m really quite glad I’m not writing that traditional narrative history because it would be very difficult for me to differentiate what I have to say from other people.
I think the other thing that was driving me was that it’s very difficult, and this comes back to one of my earlier answers, it’s very difficult to get out of that sense that this is a rise and fall narrative. You have the Black Panther Party founding and its major peak, that’s at the core of the world discourse in the late 1960s and 1970s, and then the slow decline into ignominy. I thought if we broke it down, that would enable us both to identify the successes and failures that are part of the Black Panther Party, but also what it did in isolation from what was done to it. What was done to it in isolation from what it did, and also exactly how the Black Panther Party came to the conclusions it did, at an intellectual level of what was needed. So, and this kind of reflects the way that I’ve taught the Black Panther Party in my teaching, we do the intellectual influences first, then we do what it did, and then we do state repression. It kind of worked in a strange sort of way just to enable students to understand the Black Panther Party as an activist group that moves from police patrols to creating a school, for example, and also the escalation of the repression of the Black Panther Party, whilst also having that knowledge in the back of their heads of where Fanon came from, where Malcolm X influenced them, and so on. So, it was good to break those things down, because that made those separate histories work a bit better.
But also, there is a political angle to it, which is to show how the repression operated in a way to both form and destroy the party. And, you know, one of the things I found very early on is that when you have so many people that are kind of orbiting the world of the carceral state, the carceral state will have an impact on the way that they’re thinking. What I wanted to get away from was saying, you know, the prison messed up the Black Panther Party. But certainly thinking about the prison enabled the Black Panther Party to think about the way in which United States democracy worked, or rather how it didn’t work for African American people.
And seeing it within, and placing all of these things one after the other, that was really useful for me to see exactly that they’re having these things done all the time, and how does that score with all of these achievements that they’ve already done. That, I think, places that activist section in an even heightened context, because you can see that they did all these things and those things without the repression are impressive enough. Seen within the context of the repression, hopefully, gets people towards the end of the book, both feeling saddened by the extent of this repression, but also thinking about how much more heroic that activist section appears. So, that was the concept behind it. I’ll leave readers to work out whether it’s been successful or not.
Thinking About the Family
JC: So, one of the reasons why the Black Panther Party matters in terms of Afrofuturism, ironically, is that [Black Panther director] Ryan Coogler is from Oakland. To the point that you’re talking about, there’s a way that there’s a narrative of trauma and a traumatizing system, and the results that that has intergenerationally. This is really crucial to the first Black Panther film. And, ironically, there’s actually a really complicated thing about whether or not the Black Panther film itself succeeds in being transnational or not, and the rise of a concept like African futurism and things like that. But I’m curious about something from your perspective. One of the things about that sort of repression that the film talks about is the question of family and the question of children. The Black Panther film is so concerned about family and about children and about safety. When you think about this and this part of the book in context, what is something that you want us to take away from it? Because it’s always a tragic story on its own. But, as to your point, they’re still doing these things, but is there something more that we should be thinking about?
JS: I think you’ve given me an idea for another book there. I think you’re right that family is vitally important and that the Black Panther Party’s politics of the family is something that I don’t really explore very much myself. But, you know, we see the creation of these alternative communities in light of the Panther Party that Robyn Spencer has written about very, very eloquently, beautifully, about the communal living the Black Panther Party engaged in. But we also see this, early on, in the picture of Emory Douglas, who’s the Black Panther Party’s Minister for Culture and their chief artist. When he’s drawing pictures of families, there’s often kids holding guns. There’s a wonderful one of a small child pointing a pistol at Santa Claus. Of course, Santa Claus is this white dude who comes down the chimney on Christmas Eve. Now, do we know he’s not going to steal your presents rather than give them out, you know? So the family is always present. There, and then later on, as they move into social activism, the school becomes a vitally important refuge for a number of Black Panther Party children. They’re being singled out at their public schools because everybody knows their parents are members of the Black Panther Party. And, the school in itself is vitally important for them to learn about the world and to understand their own place within it. So yeah, you know, I think that’s going to be the next book. I think so. Thank you for that.
JC: You’re welcome.
JS: I’ll make sure you’re fully credited. What we’re seeing as well, and what I didn’t really look into, and what other historians should, is how many children went through the school. What happened to them? How do they process their experience? The education that they’d had was commended by the Oakland school system. I can’t remember if it’s the state or the city. It was hugely innovative and very, very important to them. They go out to the outside world. They’d be thinking about their place within the world. They’re doing all these wonderful activities that I wish I’d done in my school. That must have had a massive impact on them. We have scattered evidence of people who went to the school and what happened to them, and how they perceived that. That would be a really, really fruitful avenue for other people to take up.
Thinking About Repression and Exhaustion
RS: You had mentioned earlier that there’s this originality trap about the story of the rise of the movement and the decline of it. But you do write some about the decline of it, and I’m interested as a historian about the factors that led to that and why. When we get to the mid or late 70s, right, it’s quite diminished. What is going on there? What explains that historically?
JS: Yeah, I think that, as with all historical processes, there’s an awful lot of things going on there, internal and external factors. There are loads of things that contribute to it. Traditionally, what we’ve had in the historiographies are the questions of: Was it an internal factor, in the mistakes that the Black Panther Party made; or was it external factors, including the amount of repression that went on, how many people were killed, how many people had to leave because they were being surveilled, and so on. As with many things like this, there’s a bit of both going on here. One of the things that happened by the mid 1970s is that a lot of the people in the Black Panther Party, as far as I can see, were exhausted. They’ve been in a full-time organization. When we say full time, this is not an organization that you would clock in at nine and clock off at five, five days a week. This demands all of your time. They’re people that are doing their daily activities. They’re selling the newspaper. They’re looking after each other’s children. They’re engaged in various political education activities in the evening. The weekends are devoted to the Black Panther Party. So, that’s going to be very difficult to sustain over a long period of time, no matter how intensely bonded you are to the people around you.
What we find in the mid-1970s is that a number of party members are headed towards their thirties. And they’re thinking: What else am I going to do with my life? So, that is one of the things. We also have the Bobby Seale campaign in 1973, where he runs for mayor, and the Black Panther Party throws everything it has at this campaign. And it’s a major grassroots campaign that’s been written about by Robert Self, most importantly. One of the things that goes on in this campaign is that you have weekly reports from people about how their little sections are doing in the city, how people are working, and so on. And one of the things that happens after is these weekly reports start to say that people are drifting away. They’re fed up. They’ve done so much work. They’re exhausted by it. So there is something in there about exhaustion.
But, of course, we can’t say that that happens independent of the psychological onslaught of the repression. You know, like when you know you’re being followed. It is psychologically draining when you know that your phones are being tapped. It’s psychologically draining. And that has a major impact. That doesn’t even go anywhere near to contend with the impact of people being killed and people being brutalized on a fairly regular basis by the police. So, there’s a whole host of things that go on at a kind of, we might say, a micro level. Then, of course, within the macro level, we see politics shifting again to the right. In Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin’s brilliant chronicle of the party, they say that with the waning of the Vietnam War, the Black Panther Party doesn’t have quite as much cachet to push one of its major campaigns, the anti-war movement. That comes alongside the drift towards Nixonian policies and also the Democratic Party’s shift rightward in the wake of Nixon’s success.
In Britain, we talk about the Overton Window, the window of politics that’s perceived to be possible. I mean shifting to the left and shifting to the right. That is definitely shifting to the right alongside, you know, the exhaustion that not only the Black Panther Party, but other activist groups experienced. People are moving towards a different form of activism. Mike Foley called it front porch politics. You’ve got to meet people and you talk with people at that level. So there’s an awful lot of historical processes taking place that explain the decline of the Black Panther Party, some of which I had room to talk about in the book, and some of which would have ended up making this a bigger book about the 1970s. I hope I’ve kind of answered some of it, whilst also not talking about the faults of my book.
Thinking About Community
JC: Well, I do think you answered a lot of it. I do think that question of the 70s is really interesting if you think, as you said, of this movement, of the politics in the United States. I’m curious, I’ve heard about the Black Panther Party’s changing, and you talked about these external factors. The end of the war. You know, this exhaustion. Could you say a little bit more about the community, though? Because in one way, again, whenever I’m talking about the Black Panther Party, some things often do intersect with them because, if you situated the Black Panther Party within a narrative of black political action, they are one thing. If you situated it in the context of grassroots movements, they are one thing.
In Afrofuturism, they crop up because they’re an interesting example of a lot of the elements you might associate with contemporary activism, like their impact on visual culture. Their strong critiques of institutions and cultures. Their belief in self-sustaining organization. Their implementation of alternative frameworks for economic and social action. There’s a lot of things where you’d be like, oh, they’re kind of Afrofuturist. Very speculative. And in that context, the question always comes up, for contemporary viewers of black movements: How is this different right now from the past? And so if we look at the Black Panther Party and you think that it was a party that had a lot of the same elements that I might associate with contemporary movements: How did their relationship to the people on the ground, even taking into account these internal-external dynamics, change in your mind?
JS: Yeah, that’s another really big question. I think one of the things that is important to note is that in 1972, the Black Panther Party retreats from a number of communities. It has chapters dotted around the United States, and it decides that what we really need to do is focus on Oakland. Win one city. In some respects, the Black Panther Party is moving away. Little chapters do remain, and people continue to be active, but it doesn’t have the institutional support that it did in the late 60s, early 1970s. So that is one thing that’s going on there. I think, as well, what you’re alluding to here is kind of like the zeitgeist. It changes, and the Black Panther Party is seen—maybe by 1973, 1974—as kind of old hat. One of the things that they’re internally battling with is how do they remain relevant. And you see all of these campaigns. These attempts to remain relevant and keep themselves in the public eye and keep responding to activities.
And sometimes, you know, people may well just have been exhausted by that sort of intense period of organizing, and that people actually are thinking I could do with something a little less intense.
Thinking about the Present and Future
So I’m stretching at things that are, I think, perhaps beyond the ken of the historian and going more into psychologists’ territory. But that’s one of the things I see.
Coming back to one of the questions that you have about culture as well is that one of the things that I’ve seen about leftist movements, and when they become culturally fascinating and less politically fascinating, is often the time when they become safe. So in the United Kingdom now there’s an awful lot of cultural productions about the 1985 miners’ strike. I see that it’s kind of interesting and useful in itself, but it also suggests that the danger of the miners’ strike, when people thought that Britain could be on the verge of a revolution, has now passed, and it’s now safe for us to engage with. There’s a very famous film called Pride, which rings this happy ending out of the miners’ strike.
Maybe part of that has happened with the Black Panther Party, too. It’s a way of making it safe and the way of rendering the problematic aspect of it, both internally and the questions it’s posed, a lot safer. Or, people to take into account. People to absorb. So, for example, Beyoncé’s famous Super Bowl halftime show. It’s fascinating because it’s kind of suggesting that they’re still dangerous. But also, you know, the Super Bowl isn’t the place to talk about revolutionary activity.
And likewise, with Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, which was a fascinating film in many respects, one of the things I wondered about is that the real Black Panther is the baddie! He’s advocating for revolution worldwide, which is precisely what the Black Panther Party were advocating for. So there are lots of tensions within the position that the Black Panther Party hold in the wider culture that I think in themselves are fascinating. That perhaps speaks to that same sort of ambivalence that we’ve talked about throughout this podcast.
JC: I just wanted to point out, you did not see the SNL skit yet about Beyoncé. Once you see that, you’ll understand that it’s still very dangerous.
JS: Well, yeah. I’m no viewer of SNL, I’m afraid. That’s one of the problems of living in this country. Or, maybe the beauty of it. I’m not entirely sure.
RS: Well, this has been really fun and enlightening to think about these connections to the past and the present and culture and politics. I guess we’ll go ahead and end it there. I don’t know. Julian, do you have anything else?
JC: It’s always cool to ask the one being interviewed: Is there something that you wanted to be asked that you were not asked?
JS: Well, the problem is that I always come up with something that is not as useful as the questions that I have been asked. Though I think we’ve covered an awful lot here, and I’m really grateful to you both for taking the book seriously and for exploring both its strengths and maybe its weaknesses as well. I was really gratified that you both took on the key things here, which is the structure and also the contemporary relevance of the Black Panther Party.
I think that’s the one thing that really, really hits me. You know, the past isn’t a foreign country. It isn’t even past. It’s always with us, and it will continue to be with us. And one of the things about the Black Panther Party is that we need to remember it just at the moment that we’re writing now, where it is passing into history. And one of the dangers of this transition from memory to history is what does that history become? And I hope that the book reminded people that the Black Panther Party were revolutionary. And that is a good thing. That the Black Panther Party really challenged the United States to be the best it could be. That in itself is a really, really important lesson that we can all hold.
RS: Well, thanks. That was really enjoyable.
JS: Thank you.
About the Authors
Randall J. Stephens is a professor of American and British Studies at the University of Oslo. His most recent book is The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll (Harvard University Press, 2018). Randall writes and teaches on conservatism, religion, popular culture, the 1960s, and environmental history.
Julian C. Chambliss is a Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. He is most recently the editor of Mapping Afrofuturism: Understanding Black Speculative Practice (Cognella Academic Publishing, 2024). Julian’s research and teaching focus on race, culture, space, identity, and power.
Joe Street is an associate professor in the School of Design, Arts, and Creative Industries at Northumbria University. His latest book is Black Revolutionaries: A History of the Black Panther Party (University of Georgia Press, 2024). His research and teaching focus on history, American Studies, film, the San Francisco Bay Area, the US in the 1960s, and the Black Panther Party.