Panthers, Communists, Black Nationalists, and Liberals in Southern California

This post is part of our forum on the Urban Rebellions of the 1960s

The Urban Rebellions of the 1960s were assuredly a landmark in the complex history of the Black Liberation Movement. And although they have received significant chronicling, the next generation of scholars would do well to provide more analysis of how and why so many took to the streets—at times armed—just as it appeared that the hateful system of Jim Crow was seemingly in retreat.

Allow me to point you to my most recent book—Armed Struggle? Panthers and Communists; Black Nationalists & Liberals in Southern California through the Sixties and Seventies—in order to illuminate issues sketched below. As the title suggests, this work does not look at these diverse ideological forces in isolation from one another but, instead, limns their interactions. This approach allows for tracing the influences of one trend upon another.

Thus, although the historiographical consensus seems to be that—for example—the Panthers, which emerged from these rebellions were part of the “Black Power” trend, they are grouped in this regard alongside certain so-called “Cultural Nationalists” with whom they clashed sharply. Indeed, a number of Panthers were quite critical of the “Black Power” trend, which they associated with what they considered to be non-revolutionary Black Nationalism.

More than this, this approach elides the wider point that the Panthers—by their own admission—were deeply influenced by socialist and Marxist trends. Thus, Jonathan Jackson, the Pasadena teenager who led a shootout at a California courthouse, ostensibly to free his elder brother—the vaunted political prisoner, George Jackson—produced a high school newsletter, ‘Iskra’, homage to a Bolshevik publication of the same name.  Leading Panthers were notorious for their study of now obscure Russian Marxists, e.g. Georgi Plekhanov, a name—I daresay—is wholly unrecognized by numerous students of this era. To be sure, the Panthers saw themselves as legatees of the heroic tradition of Malcolm X but—for whatever reason—the scholarly literature has tended to ignore or downplay the influence upon them of San Francisco born Communist William Patterson, who both influenced the legendary Paul Robeson and spearheaded the Scottsboro case of the 1930s, which set the stage for the agonizing retreat of Jim Crow.  Perhaps this elision of ideological influences to the radical and socialist left was a capitulation to the resolution of the Cold War and the rise of the so-called “sole remaining superpower,” now in the process of being eclipsed by the rise of China?

The bludgeoning of the Panthers was not only due to their attempt to “pick up the gun” but also their attempt—at least for a while—to forge solidarity with revolutionary forces globally, especially when they opened a legation in Algiers and communed with comrades in Pyongyang and Hanoi. In this adroit maneuver, the Panthers were extending the oft neglected insight that progress on the Black Liberation front often has emerged from the global correlation of forces.

The smashing of the Panthers facilitated the retarding of revolutionary ideology. For example, in recent months the term “Settler Colonialism” has barged its way into our vocabulary as a descriptor for Israel and historic Palestine. Yet, this illuminating term somehow has not been applied to the heavyweight champion of this phenomenon: the United States of America, which also was scarred indelibly by enslavement of Africans and concomitant anti-Blackness. This regression also handicapped radical analysis, making it difficult for comrades to unravel the “Class Collaborationism” that inheres in “Settler Colonialism,” which sheds light on how and why 75 million plus voted for the ethically challenged Donald Trump in 2020.  (It would be mathematically imprecise to suggest that so many voting conservative were all from the “1%” in this nation of 330 million—just as 6 January 2021 at the Capitol featured a multi-class formation devoted to barring the peaceful transfer of power.)

Grasping this nettle could have led to a different approach by the Panthers, which could have extended their longevity. However, it is not too late.  Students, faculty and staff clamoring against U.S. support for a plausible case for genocide in Historic Palestine—to cite the International Court of Justice—as movements tend to do have opened an ideological door, heretofore snapped shut.

Retrospectively, applying the insights of “Settler Colonialism” should lead to a clearer analysis of why so many took to the streets in the 1960s, not least because of a lack of confidence of Black protesters in the bona fides of fellow members of this multi-racial working class. This latter point also underlines why the Panthers—quite tragically in retrospect—sought to exalt the lumpen as the motive force of revolution (not as their global comrades would have it: the working class) because of an utter lack of confidence in this latter force. Thus, going forward “Urban Rebellions” bid fair to be one of the more fecund fields of research and scholarship.