Skip to main content

Interview Recalibrating the Panthers ideals and struggle

ELAINE BROWN speaks to Angus Reid about the Black Panthers, Huey Newton, the legacy and how it is being carried forward today

“HERE I am,” says Elaine Brown. “I’m 79 years old. I weigh 114 pounds. I couldn’t kick anyone’s ass. And people walk around, scared of me. Cracks me up!”

She was appointed to lead the Black Panther party by the founder, Huey Newton during his exile in Cuba, from 1974 to 1977.

“The greatest effort that black people in America ever made for liberation was the Black Panther party,” says Brown. “You can go back to Nat Turner, you can come forward to the Nation of Islam, and none of them were talking about dismantling the scheme.”

These movements all sought accommodation with the status quo of US capitalism, but the Panthers differed: “because of a correct analysis that there was no freedom under the current scheme.”

Browne can sum up the history of the struggle for black emancipation in the rapid, decisive strokes of someone who knows their part in shaping it.

“Go forward to the SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference lead by Martin Luther King), or the SNCC (that channelled student commitment to the civil rights movement) and you’ll not find an organisation that had our mass appeal to industrial America.

“In the history of the USA, the Black Panther party was singularly significant, and for one reason: it was founded by Huey P Newton. And Huey Newton was a genius! He gets in the streets with shotguns and says if we want to have a solution, we have to deliver a consequence.”

Newton was 24 years old when he formed the party with Bobby Seale.

“Huey patterned the party. He was the chief ideologue. And our first point said that we wanted freedom. Self-determination.”

Newton formulated the 10-point programme, the founding document of the BPP with the words: “1. We want freedom...’. It goes on: “2. We want full employment for our people. 3. We want an end to robbery by the capitalists of our black community. 4. We want decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings.

“This language wasn’t precise according to Marxist-Leninist jargon,” says Brown, “but made exactly so that we identified with him. And we stretched ourselves out. We collaborated with every other organisation that was ready to do what we were doing, which was to get the people ready for revolution.”

The party’s appeal was both the presence of those willing to take direct action, and the understanding that underlay that presence, which derived from a critique of Marxism made from the unique historical perspective of the black community of the US.

“Marx missed the point as regards black people. Marx was certainly against slavery, but Marx thought that somehow, magically, black people would be liberated and join the proletariat. But the unions have fought black people for years. A century. And even now. EVEN. AS. WE. SPEAK!’

She goes on: “America is a different country to the rest of the world. It didn't go out to colonise ... it took the people and brought them here as slaves. This is a history so unique that you need a unique analysis to understand this.

“So, what are the conditions? Look at black people in America. Are we the proletariat? We can’t even get a goddamn job!

“Marx might denounce the so-called lumpenproletariat but just about ALL of us are the lumpenproletariat. What is our role in the making of things in America? We didn't have one. This was Huey’s analysis. And we still don’t!

“And we still have the highest poverty rates, incidence of cancer, and death rates. We still have the highest infant mortality rates. The highest incarceration rates. And as for home ownership and education … As Dr King said, we have half of what is good and double of what is bad. And we own nothing in America!
 
“What’s good about us is that we have nothing to lose. Literally. We have nothing but a forward-looking ability. And as an oppressed people within this empire we are the most conscious.”

For Newton, the challenge was to create a revolutionary movement within the concrete conditions of the black population. It required new language to define dynamic relationships within the black community. Alongside class, he defined this as “communalism,” and this allowed him to reconceptualise relationships and alliances as “inter-communalism.”

Communalism emphasises subjectivity. It is about neighbourhood relationships and the power of local networks. It implies tangible forms of organisation and mutual interest. And as a form of collective consciousness, it also allowed the movement to reimagine the significance of the nation, and to step beyond it.

“The nation is no longer viable,” she says. “How can you have an independent Scotland for as long as America exists? It’s like black people saying they can have an independent black state in America. How are you going to take over Mississippi when the Russians can’t even take over Ukraine? THIS. IS. A. JOKE!

“Huey’s point was that if we have a revolutionary ideal — which means to destroy this empire and make an egalitarian world — then we can’t afford to have these little states fighting one another.”

So, what the Panthers proposed was revolutionary inter-communalism?

“Yes! And what has been proposed since the Black Panther Party? Nothing! The nothingness of no movement since the time of the Black Panthers.

“So, right now, we are in a stage of reactionary inter-communalism. Here we are in America and they say ‘Let’s talk about Asian hate-groups’. What ... really?

“We are connected, but it’s a reactionary scenario because the US is in control of all communications. And what they can’t control they will kill. Even if the US has never really been successful in a war.”

After spreading widely across the US in the early 70s and as a target for state-sponsored subversion, Newton made Brown the leader and then, from Cuba, he gave the order to make Oakland the “base of operations,” and to support Lionel Wilson’s campaign to be the first black mayor.

Brown asserted her authority over the party, and set about this task with extraordinary thoroughness. The “10x10x10” campaign to enfranchise unregistered black people, for example, remains a model of how to achieve democratic empowerment. Brown ran twice for Oakland City Council, eventually gaining 44 per cent of the vote.

“When I ran for office,” she says, “I had the endorsement of every single union in Alameda county. I had a coalition with the Black Police Officers Association of Oakland.”

While she remains bitter about the permanent undercurrent of racism that runs through US unions, surely this kind of engagement with democracy, and this kind of strategic socialist alliance signalled a sea-change in the organisation from para-militarism to democratic socialism?

“Yes,” she says. “Conditions had changed. We all understood that we had reached an incredible apex. That we had arrived to do something spectacular!

“We had the entire Port of Oakland which was at that time fully containerised, and the second biggest port in the world. I was working with everyone, from the Head of Clorax to Lionel Wilson [first black mayor of Oakland who served three terms 1977-91]. And I had the streets. Everybody on the streets was terrified of us and that’s exactly how we wanted it to be. We were in control of Oakland at that moment. But do you think that Huey saw that? No.

“That’s the truth. That’s the saddest part.”

When Wilson became mayor, Newton returned from Cuba.

“He was the leader. He was very strong and he had all the guns. If you don’t have the guns you don’t have anything. You need a little army. I had a little army. But their loyalty was ultimately to Huey, and Huey fucked it up. That’s all I can say. He didn’t see it. He should have stayed in Cuba.”

The paramilitary structure and ethos, necessary in the early days, needed to evolve. It was a fighting unit that no longer had an opposition, and it was unsuited to the administration of the revolutionary inter-communal project.

“But Huey was a brother from the street. Huey liked to get in the mix. And he allowed that part of him to distract him.”

In A Taste Of Power, Brown’s extraordinary memoir of this period, she states this tragedy with characteristic exactitude: “Huey knew this monster. He hated it. Yet he had been unable to rearrange the genetics of the ghetto which had been socialised into his chromosomes.”

Brown left, and by 1982 the party disbanded.

“Were we a failure?” she asks aloud. “I don't even know what that means. The struggle continues. I still believe that I have to stay in touch with the goal of revolution. Revolutionary change.”

The day before our interview she broke ground on her new project, an affordable housing complex for former prisoners, who experience systemic racial and economic oppression. It’s an $80 million development and the designs propose a gleaming, beautiful building.

“What I’m doing right now is to use my memory of the party to take away our defeatism, where all we can do is protest: George Floyd, oh my God, take your knee off my neck.

“Quit whining! Stand the fuck up! And stop worrying about your sexual identity and whether you’re he, she or it! You’re not DOING anything!”

And today, Brown is brimming with satisfaction. “There’s not one other black woman, or anybody black, developing affordable housing in the whole Bay area. People are gonna say: how come she can do it and the government can’t?

“My partners, they gave me all these millions of dollars. And then, yesterday, when I told them I’m calling the building the Black Panther, you should have seen their faces!”

OWNED BY OUR READERS

We're a reader-owned co-operative, which means you can become part of the paper too by buying shares in the People’s Press Printing Society.

 

 

Become a supporter

Fighting fund

You've Raised:£ 12,411
We need:£ 5,589
5 Days remaining
Donate today