The Art of the Black Panthers Black Panthers Were Not Just for Clack Peopel

The Black Panthers were arguably the nearly important revolutionary organization in the Usa in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Their presence was an inspiration to millions of men and women around the world, especially those living in colonial and neocolonial situations.  Furthermore, the Party was a central chemical element in the motion in the United States confronting imperialism and its manifestations of war and racism.  It was because of this latter truth that the Political party was besides the target of a roughshod campaign of repression organized at the highest levels of Washington DC's security apparatus.  Surveillance, false charges and arrests, the use of informants and provocateurs, and outright murder; nothing was out of the question when it came to destroying the Blackness Panther Party.

Begun in Oakland in 1967, the Panthers organized chapters in Los Angeles and Seattle, Washington soon later on.  The Seattle chapter would get one of the Political party'south longest lasting chapters and an integral part of the African-American and leftist customs in that city.  Founded and led by a young Seattle native named Aaron Dixon, the legacy of the Seattle chapter is still present in that city.

Like many immature people discovering leftist politics in the late 1960s, my experience was greatly influenced by the Panthers.  For better and worse, their leather jackets, berets and guns combined with a media presentation equally badasses appealed to me and many of my compatriots.  One instance in my political education that remains indelible in my mind occurred during the summer of 1970.  I was attention summer school at the United states of america high school in Frankfurt am Main, Frg.  We had just spent a class discussing the very recent US invasion of Cambodia, the student strike, law enforcement murders of young people at Kent and Jackson State, and the meaning of Nixon.  Class had been dismissed and I was hanging out in Gruneburg Park adjacent to the schoolhouse.  At that place was a backyard in the park where German hippies hung out and smoked hashish.  Young travelers from effectually the world oft ended up on this backyard, playing guitars and drums, smoking dope, meeting upward, discussing politics and music, and just hanging out.

That afternoon my friend and I concluded upward in a circle of people discussing the Blackness Panthers.  The word was more or less existence led by an African-American homo around twenty.  I had seen him in the park before, but had never talked with him.  Equally he connected to talk, almost half of the people drifted away, either too stoned to listen to his politics or but besides apathetic.  I stayed.  Somewhen, there were only three of us; me, a black girl I knew from high school and the same young man (who seemed quondam to my fifteen year sometime self).  He took out some literature from his backpack and handed us each a packet.  Equally it turned out, he was a GI recently discharged from the Army who was traveling around Europe.  He had ordered several copies of Mao Ze Dong'south Piddling Red Book and a quantity of other literature from the Panthers' Oakland function to distribute on his travels.  He suggested a couple articles to read in the result of the Blackness Panther newspaper he had given us and for the next several days, the iii of u.s.a. met in the park and discussed what we had read.  He continued on his travels, and the girl and I stayed on, occasionally hanging out at school the following year despite the dissimilar circles nosotros traveled in.

I relate the previous story as an case of the influence the Panthers had.  The recently released memoir by Aaron Dixon tells a much more than compelling story while providing a history of the Party through the optics of one of its long-term members.  Dixon was both a leader and a foot soldier; an intelligent black human being in the mid-century United states who knew racism first mitt and wanted to end it.  As a young teen he occasionally participated in protests against racism while learning the streets of Seattle.  His parents worked hard to maintain an approximation of a heart grade life for their children while bitter their tongues all also ofttimes when they ran into racism in their daily lives.  Like many others of his generation, it was the bump-off of Martin Luther Male monarch, Jr. in 1968 that convinced him that non-fierce protest was no longer the only option.  If there was to be existent change in the United States, information technology would take to be of the kind put forward by the newly found Black Panther Party.  Dixon and several others traveled to the San Francisco Bay Area for a Blackness Student Union briefing and he joined the Panthers.  Simultaneously, he was made captain of the Seattle co-operative.

Dixon's book, titled My People Are Rising, goes on to tell a tale of protestation, gunfights with police force and their stooges, and political change.  The reader is presented with a story full of activeness, honey and politics.  The Black Panther Political party'due south rise and fall is revealed through the experiences of Aaron Dixon and those men and women he worked and lived with during his time in the party.  Moments of victory and moments of defeat fill up these pages, both personal and political.  The narrative reads like an action thriller.  Dixon's writing is even, descriptive and urgent.  Whether describing the preparations for an attack by police on a Panther house or the organization of the Panther breakfast program in Seattle, My People Are Rising keeps the reader in the story, curious as to which way the events described volition turn.

The Panthers somewhen fell apart.  The power they represented in the African-American community diminished midway through the 1970s in their chief base of Oakland and much earlier in other parts of the United States.  Much of this can exist attributed to the repression carried out by law enforcement under the aegis of COINTELPRO.  Other factors that caused the disintegration of the party were related to the nature of the Political party itself.  During the heyday of their organizing bulldoze, many people who joined saw the Panthers as just another street gang and used it accordingly: selling drugs and pimping women.  When the Political party leadership got current of air of such activities carried out in the Panthers proper noun, they dealt with it quickly and harshly.  Indeed, when the Party began to compress in size, Dixon was called to Oakland and became a member of 1 of the cadres that engaged in such activity.  A questionable program was begun to chase dealers and pimps from the streets of Oakland'due south neighborhoods. I say questionable non because the pimps and dealers should have stayed simply because the coin, guns and violence involved invited corruption.  Meanwhile, the political wing of the Political party had involved itself in electoral politics, running and endorsing candidates for political office in Oakland, California.  Unfortunately, no Panthers were elected, although some of the candidates they endorsed did.  By 1978, though, the party was substantially finished.

Coda:  In 1978 a friend and I were hitchhiking in Oakland.  We were headed to Santa Cruz.  An African-American man driving a Buick Regal picked the states upward.  Once nosotros got in the automobile he asked us where we were headed.  I told him Santa Cruz and he said he would take us there.  Beginning, though, he needed to stop at a firm in the Oakland Hills.  My friend and I shrugged our shoulders and went along for the ride.  He constitute the house, went inside for fifteen or 20 minutes and came out in a hurry.  We left that firm and made our fashion to Highway 17 towards Santa Cruz.  In one case we were on the highway he pulled out a big joint and lit it.  We smoked the weed and sat back.  He handed me a pint of brandy and asked me to open it.  Later on a few sips, our tongues loosened and nosotros got to talking well-nigh Oakland.  My friend and I had only been in California for v months and told him so.  He told us he had grown up there.  As the chat somehow turned to politics, the bailiwick of the Panthers came upward.  He dismissed them out of hand.  I objected, telling him the story I related at the beginning of this piece.  He chuckled and said; yeah he was like that once, too.  Later on working for the Chairman, though, all he was going to say was that the Panthers had turned out to be zero more than another bunch of gangsters.  I didn't argue and I didn't agree.  We changed the field of study.

Aaron Dixon'south memoir is the beginning of many Panther memoirs I have read that honestly addresses the demise of the Panthers.  He discusses the role of COINTELPRO, the descent into gangsterism, and the end of the revolutionary attribute of the Party.  He does non mince words, nor does he disavow what the Political party meant to millions and ways in history.  In the volume'due south final paragraph, Dixon apologizes for cipher, remembering the Black Panther Party every bit "men and women rising in unison to…write a new, bold future for Blackness America."  That, I believe, is the truth found in this book and the truth revealed by history.

Ron Jacobsis the writer ofThe Way the Current of air Blew: a History of the Weather Hush-hushandBrusque Social club Frame Upward. Jacobs' essay on Big Pecker Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch'south collection on music, fine art and sex,Serpents in the Garden. His collection of essays and other musings titled Tripping Through the American Night is at present available and his new novel isThe Co-Conspirator's Tale. He is a contributor toHopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press.  He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.

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Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/28/the-black-panthers-no-bullshitting/

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