“As Foreign Troops Occupy Territory”: The Colonial Model in the Twenty-First Century

Perhaps the most important legacy of the BPP is the continuing salience of the colonial model to make sense of the situation of African Americans. The colonial analysis offered by Harold Cruse, subsequently adapted by RAM, and popularized by the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was never a perfect fit. As Cynthia B. Young observed in her broader analysis of the U.S. Third World Left, “The specific forms of oppression faced by national minorities who are legal citizens differ from that of colonized national subjects, though both were denied full citizenship rights… . [T]he collapsing of disparities implied in the use of the term [“Third World”] fails to acknowledge variation, hierarchies, and gradations within the Third World itself, or between it and the First World.”13 More recently, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, though sympathetic to both the BPP and Black Lives Matter, has argued that is “inaccurate to describe Black Americans’ relationship to the United States as colonial, despite [the] obvious similarities,” particularly as the meager profits from the exploitation of the contemporary inner city are “not a motor of American capitalism compared to the cotton, rubber, sugar, and mineral extraction and trade that had fueled colonial empires for hundreds of years.”14

For all of its limits, however, the colonial model as employed by the Panthers offers important insights into both the historical development of black America and the stubborn persistence of institutionalized inequalities along racial lines in the United States. From Oakland to Ferguson, these racialized inequalities are the result of systematic state policies with deep historical roots that have long benefited white people at the expense of people of color. They are the result of both white supremacy and capitalism and cannot be understood without reference to both. As Harold Cruse observed in the early 1960s, the enslavement of black people in the country that was to become the United States “coincided with the colonial expansion of European powers and was nothing but more or less than a condition of domestic colonialism. Instead of the United States establishing a colonial empire in Africa, it brought the colonial system home and installed it in the Southern states.”15 For over a century after the abolition of slavery, African Americans served as a cheap, disposable labor force on farms, factories, and in the homes of whites while remaining largely excluded from the body politic and segregated by law or custom. This colonial relationship is not as legible to modern observers in large part because at around the same time the BPP formed in the mid-1960s, the need for black labor that long fueled American capitalism was evaporating. It is undoubtedly true in the twenty-first century that there are few profits to be wrung from what Eldridge Cleaver once referred to as “the black colony” in the United States. And it is not a coincidence that this transition was accompanied not by decolonization or reparations but by the rise of a regime of mass incarceration that moved a significant number of the residents of that colony behind bars.16 The legacy of colonialism, however, cannot be so simply removed from civic life.

The uprising in Ferguson in the summer of 2014 brought renewed attention to the lingering colonial aspects of black life in the United States. In response to the events in Ferguson, the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, conducted a detailed study of how the St. Louis suburb was transformed over the course of several decades from an middle-class, white “sundown town” (where blacks were prohibited from entering after dark) to an effectively segregated municipality with a 67 percent African American population, a 13 percent unemployment rate, and 25 percent of its residents living below the federal poverty line.17 While devoid of the pointed language used by the BPP in reference to the “black colony” and “white mother country,” the report systemically demolished the notion that the segregation, poverty, unemployment, and violence that characterized Ferguson were somehow accidental or the result of individual preferences or biases often lumped under the label “white flight.” Rather, the report concluded that the most “powerful cause of metropolitan segregation in St. Louis and nationwide has been the explicit intents of federal, state, and local governments to create racially segregated metropolises.”18 Despite the abolition of legal segregation nationwide and the apparent triumph of the liberal civil rights movement in the 1960s, “[g]overnmental policies turned black neighborhoods into overcrowded slums” while “state-sponsored labor and employment discrimination reduced the income of African Americans relative to whites.” Works by historians such as Thomas Sugrue and Robert O. Self buttress the report’s contention that these policies were not confined to Missouri but rather were “duplicated in almost every metropolis nationwide.”19

While the apparent triumph of the liberal civil rights movement won headlines, the deliberate underdevelopment of black America remained at the heart of U.S. public policy in the second half of the twentieth century. “Even as an officially sanctioned apartheid was being dismantled,” observed scholar Nikhil Pal Singh, “new structures of racial inequality, rooted in a national racial geography of urban ghettoes and suburban idylls, and intractable disparities of Black and white wealth and employment were being established.”20 The result was that people of color who live in de facto segregated cities and suburbs suffer from both state-sanctioned violence in the form of a racialized policing and judicial system (as outlined by legal scholar Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow) as well as the less visible violence of state-sanctioned poverty and unemployment.21 Even if there is little direct profit to be wrung from the “black colony” in the era of deindustrialization, its very exclusion and separation serves to enrich elements of the “white mother country” both materially and psychologically. The predominantly white St. Louis suburbs of Wildwood and Green Park, for example, have a poverty rate of less than 2 percent, while Ferguson’s stands at almost 25 percent.22 Understanding these disparities as the intentional product of governmental policies at the local, state, and federal level helps to explain why neither the crusading liberalism of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society nor the neoliberalism exemplified by Ronald Reagan’s administration and Bill Clinton’s welfare reform efforts during the 1990s succeeded in reversing the racial inequalities that have characterized American life. “[T]he failure of the liberal state and liberalism as a political orientation to secure black equality and to lift impoverished African Americans into a stable working class” that Robert O. Self chronicled in his history of postwar Oakland is in fact endemic to its very nature as political ideology that serves the interests of white people at the expense of people of color.23

The colonial model also helps to explain the disproportionate police violence directed against people of color. The DOJ report on policing in Ferguson described a law enforcement culture that treated the black population “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.”24 In both their daily operations and, more visibly, in their militarized response to the 2014 protests, the FPD validated Huey Newton’s assertion that “police are used to occupy our community just as foreign troops occupy territory.”25 The same state policies that fostered the unequal economic development of largely segregated neighborhoods and suburbs also contributed to the withdrawal of municipal services and encouraged a culture of policing that treats people of color as a threat to public order.26 “What we have made of our police departments [in] America, what we have ordered them to do,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates (son a former BPP member) in a December 2015 article in the Atlantic, “is a direct challenge to any usable definition of democracy. A state that allows its agents to kill, to beat, to tase, without any real sanction, has ceased to govern and has commenced to simply rule.”27 Fanon was more direct in observing that “[t]he colonial world is a world divided in two,” where “the proximity and frequent, direct intervention by the police and the military ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm.”28 One does not have to accept a one-to-one relationship between French-occupied Algiers and the contemporary situation in Ferguson or other U.S. municipalities to grasp the continuing usefulness of the BPP’s colonial model. In highlighting the linked forces of white supremacy, state violence, and economic exploitation of people of color as the direct result of state policies, rather than as the by-product of individual prejudice or sectional peculiarities, this analysis helps to explain why racial inequalities have persisted long after the nominal triumph of the liberal civil rights movement and continue even in a supposedly “post-racial” era under a black president. To use the parlance of the digital age, racialized inequality, economic exploitation, and violence are a feature, not a bug, in the American system, and to that it extent it shares something significant with more traditional forms of colonialism.

From “Off the Pigs” to “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”: Twenty-First-Century U.S. Anticolonialism

Some of the tactics employed by the Panthers as part of their self-consciously anticolonial struggle have continuing relevance for Black Lives Matter and related groups, such as Black Youth Project 100 and We Charge Genocide, in the twenty-first century. Though employing cell phone cameras rather than guns, contemporary activists have embraced the BPP’s strategy of “patrolling the pigs” by directly confronting the exercise and abuse of police power in the streets. In the midst of the Ferguson protests, activist Ashley Yates created iconic shirts featuring the slogan “Assata Taught Me” in reference to former BPP and BLA member Assata Shakur.29 Though the Ferguson protesters and the larger Black Lives Matter movement have eschewed the calls for violent revolution associated with Shakur’s more militant positions, they largely share the notion that oppressive systems and their agents are endemic in the daily lives of urban (and suburban) black Americans and must be confronted directly and publicly. Nor were these efforts solely confined to the issue of police violence. One of the more dramatic public demonstrations of contemporary black anticolonialism came on June 27, 2015, when activist Bree Newsome scaled a thirty-foot flagpole to forcibly haul down the Confederate battle flag that flew outside the state capitol building in Columbia, South Carolina. Newsome hardly fits the image of a Black Panther: when confronted by police, she peaceably submitted to arrest and quoted from the Bible rather than the ten-point program or the works of Chairman Mao.30 But in explaining her actions, Newsome cited not simply the flag’s ties to slavery and white supremacy but also the ongoing and institutionalized violence and oppression that continues to characterize African American life. Referencing unrest in response to police violence in Ferguson and Baltimore (which included the highly publicized burning of a CVS drug store), she decried media invocations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and calls for nonviolence:

While Black Lives Matter is a broad movement encompassing a range of ideological and tactical perspectives, it holds in common with the BPP an analysis of white supremacy and racialized violence as institutionalized features of American life and a focus on exposing and confronting the exercise of state power through direct action.

Black Lives Matter and related groups and movements have also cultivated their own version of the anticolonial vernacular employed by the Panthers. Social networks such as Twitter and Tumblr have facilitated a form of activism that combines a cutting analysis of white supremacy, institutionalized inequality, and state violence against black people with humor, colorful language, images, and even emojis in a concise, easily accessible format that serves much the same function as Emory Douglas’s and Tarika Lewis’s artwork or Eldridge Cleaver’s speeches did for the BPP. Even before Ferguson, “Black Twitter,” an informal grouping of users of the microblogging service, frequently used hashtags not only as a way of affirming black identity but also to critique and undermine aspects of white supremacy. So-called “Blacktags” such as #onlyintheghetto, observed scholar Sanjay Sharma, “connote ‘Black’ vernacular expression in the form of humor and social commentary … expressive of everyday racialized issues and concerns.”32 When joined to #BlackLivesMatter, this form of expression has served as both a focal point for on-the-ground activism (by linking protesters and supporters) and a means of exposing and critiquing state violence and white supremacy for a wide audience outside traditional activist or intellectual circles. As journalist Jay Caspian King concluded in his profile of the movement for the New York Times Magazine, “Their innovation has been to marry the strengths of social media—the swift, morally blunt consensus that be created by hashtags; the personal connection that a charismatic online persona can make with followers; the broad networks that allow for the easy distribution of documentary photos and videos—with an effort to quickly mobilize protests in each new city where a police shooting occurs.”33 This format also facilitates transnational connections. In August and September 2014, for example, Palestinians who had recently experienced fifty-one days of warfare as a result of Israel’s “Protective Edge” offensive in Gaza took to Twitter to share advice with Ferguson protesters on how to deal with tear gas.34

If the BPP’s anticolonial analysis and vernacular remain salient in the twenty-first century, the party’s struggles and failures also have relevance for contemporary activists. Although not nearly as intense as the COINTELPRO efforts unleashed against the Panthers, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have engaged in intensive surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists. Speaking to reporters in Cleveland, FBI deputy director Mark F. Giuliano stirred memories of the bureau’s unsavory past by declaring, “It’s outsiders who tend to stir the pot. If we have that intel we pass it directly on to the PD, we have worked with Ferguson. We’ve worked with Baltimore and we will work with the Cleveland PD on that very thing. That’s what we bring to the game.”35 The hierarchical leadership structure of the BPP made the party vulnerable to police and government pressure as the arrest or defection of even a handful of key leaders could have dramatic effects of the party’s operations. In adopting a decentralized structure, the Black Lives Matter movement is perhaps better positioned to withstand such external pressure. As Harris observed in his study of the movement, “They are rejecting the charismatic leadership model that has dominated black politics for the past half century.” Instead they have “insisted on a group-centered model of leadership rooted in ideas of participatory democracy.”36 This is a model that owes much to the pioneering work of black feminist activists and theorists from Ella Baker to Angela Davis. As Davis recently observed, these “new generation organizations … have developed new models of leadership … that acknowledge how important Black feminist insights are to the development of viable twenty-first century radical Black movements.”37 While there are disputes over questions of gender and sexuality within the Black Lives Matter movement, the horizontal and more open nature of its organization and its origins in the activism of queer women of color provides much more of an opportunity for genuine dialog and change on these issues than did the male-dominated hierarchy of the BPP during its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The #SayHerName movement, for example, has pushed for equal attention to be given to police violence against black women.38

Exposing the routine exercise of state-sponsored violence against black Americans was a central goal of the BPP and is also a core element of the Black Lives Matter movement. More vexing, however, is the question of what role, if any, violence should play in bringing about larger structural changes. The Panthers remained united in exhorting self-defense against police attacks but eventually split over the question of whether to undertake anticolonial violence in order to bring about the revolution that they professed. While Eldridge Cleaver’s faction, and later the BLA, took literally the call to “off the pigs,” by the early 1970s the Newton-led BPP in Oakland abandoned the notion of direct confrontation in favor of electoral politics and community activism. Despite sensational charges that its members are encouraging terrorism or attacks against police, activists in Ferguson and elsewhere have eschewed the routine embrace of rhetorical violence employed by the BPP in its anticolonial vernacular, much less the open brandishing of weapons and calls to overthrow the U.S. government.39 It is hard to imagine, for example, contemporary activists openly publishing and distributing the types of articles on urban guerrilla warfare tactics that were commonplace in the Black Panther during the late 1960s. The rallying cry of “hands up, don’t shoot” (based on an accounts by some witnesses that Michael Brown had his hands up at the time of his killing) is indicative of the extent to which this contemporary movement against police violence differs from the more confrontational stance of the Panthers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Our demand is simple,” said Black Lives Matter organizer Johnnetta Elzie: “Stop killing us.”40

Given the price paid by the Panthers during the party’s most militant period, the failure of the BLA’s guerrilla efforts to affect any sort of meaningful change, and the overwhelming force that local, state, and federal governments are able to bring to bear, it is hardly surprising that few contemporary activists are willing to entertain even the rhetoric of anticolonial violence in service of black liberation in the United States. By the early 1970s, most of the surviving leadership and rank and file of the Panthers had already reached the conclusion that “we could never win a shooting ‘War of Liberation.’ ”41 A number of scholars, journalists, and former activists have expressed versions of this critique, citing the Panthers’ flirtations with anticolonial violence prior to the Newton-Cleaver split as nihilistic and counterproductive. Historian Christopher B. Strain argued that “[t]he positive deeds of the Panthers—including the Free Breakfast Programs, Free Health Clinics, Clothing and Shoe Programs, and Busses-to-Prison Program—were often overshadowed by their violent rhetoric, and by the early 1970s, the scurrilous deeds of some Panthers had eclipsed whatever good the group had accomplished in Oakland.”42 But while it is easy to dismiss violence as an ineffective, if not immoral, tool in service of social change, this analysis leaves open the question of how the kind of revolutionary change sought by the BPP could take place without it.

Whatever one makes of Eldridge Cleaver’s at times quixotic fixation with guerrilla warfare, he was not wrong when he observed that “whether we like it or not, the world that we live in is controlled with guns, organized and controlled by those who rule. This is the basic fact that we have to deal with. Those who cannot move beyond that point—I don’t know what to say to them.”43 Having concluded on good evidence that the racialized violence that characterized both policing in Oakland and the war in Vietnam was inextricably linked to the fundamental political and economic institutions of the U.S. state, and was in fact closely identified with American liberalism, many Panthers saw little use in working within that system or appealing to the conscience of the American ruling class. “Nobody in the world, nobody in history,” declared Assata Shakur, “has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”44 And while African American political mobilization has succeeded in getting “black faces in high places,” including the Oval Office, it has done little to address the underlying structural problems facing their constituents. “After forty years of this electoral strategy,” observed Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Black elected officials’ inability to alter the poverty, unemployment, and housing and food insecurity their Black constituents face casts significant doubt on the existing electoral system as a viable vehicle for Black liberation.”45

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon famously declared that “[d]ecolonization is always a violent event.”46 Fanon’s definition included not simply physical violence but also the symbolic and psychological violence that accompanied the dramatic changes that came with decolonization. The sweeping change sought by the Black Panthers in their ten-point program would have required at least the latter, and likely the former as well. Some of the more narrow goals sought by the Black Lives Matter movement with respect to curbing police violence could likely be accomplished through traditional channels of institutional reform. But in addressing the underlying structures of white supremacy, racialized violence, and economic inequality that has led to the systematic devaluing of black lives, the movement brushes up, however indirectly, against the larger and more revolutionary changes envisioned by the Panthers. In words that echo parts of the BPP’s ten-point program, co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter Patrisse Cullors, speaking from Cuba, invoked the need for “new and radical demands that push for true public safety: Housing, jobs, and access to healthy food.”47 It remains unclear in the early decades of the twenty-first century if such changes are possible within an existing U.S. political and economic system that is itself upheld by the routine exercise of state violence.

International and Transnational Activism in a Neoliberal World

Even the most militant Panthers were not blind to the practical difficulties that they faced in putting revolutionary nationalism into practice as a minority population confronting the economic, political, and military might of the world’s most powerful nation. A central focus of this book has been the BPP’s attempt to resolve that dilemma by situating themselves as part of a larger majority of people of color struggling against white supremacy and capitalism on the world stage. Drawing on Malcolm X’s injunction that “[t]he only kind of power that can help you and me is international power, not local power,” the BPP leveraged their domestic anticolonialism into real and symbolic links to both the Third World and sympathetic audiences within other First World nations.48 It is hard to imagine the Panthers achieving the success and notoriety that they did in the absence of these links, which not only provided material support, publicity, and refuge for party members beyond the reach of the U.S. government, but also contributed to a genuine belief among many activists that colonialism and white supremacy were on the retreat around the world. In addition to these practical benefits, international and transnational connections also helped to strengthen and refine the Panthers’ domestic analysis of American society. These links also came with costs and drawbacks. The dramatic changes in the international environment that accompanied détente and the thawing of the Cold War were only the most dramatic example of the often-tenuous nature of some of the party’s connections. Even at the height of the party’s international success, during the era of the Cleaver-led “Asian strategy” in 1969–70, the BPP’s state-level allies often treated the Panthers more as useful propaganda tools (for both domestic and foreign consumption) then as true partners. Transnational connections to activists in western Europe and Japan took place on more equal terms, but in addition to the complications of culture and language inherent in such exchanges, these relationships could not offer the same practical benefits as those with powerful, revolutionary nation-states.

If the internationalism of the BPP was fraught with both opportunities and dangers, contemporary activists in the United States face a more unambiguously bleak situation. The end of the Cold War, the rise of the neoliberal “Washington consensus” among international elites, and the fragmenting of the Third World political project leave those disenchanted with pursuing reforms through domestic channels in the United States few if any reliable state-level allies. Cuba and the DPRK remain revolutionary states but have been shorn of the power and allure that made them attractive to black activists in the 1960s. China has risen to become major world power but one guided more by state-driven capitalism and oligarchy then the revolutionary maxims of Chairman Mao. Despite the end of the Cold War, the United States retains a massive military deployed at bases around the world while conducting an uninterrupted string of military operations since 2001, including an ongoing drone war against suspected terrorist suspects that targets almost exclusively people of color in countries that would have once been classified as belonging to the Third World. Although there remain political parties and movements around the world critical of capitalism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the hegemonic role of the United States, there is nothing approaching the practical and ideological support for revolutionary movements that the Panthers enjoyed during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

International organizations such as the United Nations remain a potential venue for addressing the concerns of black Americans outside the confines of the nation-state. The parents of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin as well as the Chicago-based group We Charge Genocide (which draws its name from a 1951 petition to the UN sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress) have brought their concerns about state violence inflicted against African Americans to various UN committees.49 But as black organizations have found since the UN’s founding, there are sharp limits to its ability to take any meaningful action on behalf of minority populations against its more powerful nation-state members. We Charge Genocide organizer Page May was frank in acknowledging this, saying that “[w]e knew the UN wasn’t going to ‘save us’ in any shape or form,” but held out hope that at the very least the experience of appearing before that body would empower black youth to look beyond the narrow confines of state-level discourse about policing.50 Patrisse Cullors invoked the international precedent of the BPP in arguing that “anti-Black racism has global consequences” and thus “[i]t’s essential that we center this conversation and also our practice in an international frame.”51

Contemporary activists can take some solace in the way in which social networks have made transnational connections considerably easier than in the era of the BPP, at least for those with access to the Internet. In additional to informal transnational connections via services such as Twitter, there have also been recent examples of more concrete links between black activists and allies overseas. One particularly fruitful field of collaboration appears to be the emerging connection between Black Lives Matter activists and Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation.52 In addition to organizing around the issue of political prisoners, Alex Lubin’s study of black and Palestinian activism suggests that hip-hop and poetry are two contemporary examples of “[t]ranslational politics … [that] identify shared conditions produced by globalization and incarceration while also paying homage to previous generations’ political imaginaries.” Lubin optimistically concludes that “while globalization and neoliberalism have restricted the horizons of social movements in the public sphere, they have been unable to do so in the realm of cultural politics, where new geographies of liberation are being imagined.”53

For all their promise, these new forms of transnational activism face many of the same challenges that the Panthers encountered as well as new problems of their own. A major factor in the ability of the BPP to continue propagating its messages despite severe government repression was the party’s decision to maintain full control over the production, printing, and distribution of their own newspaper rather than relying on venues more susceptible to corporate or government control. The online activism associated with #BlackLivesMatter, however, is largely conducted through services such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram that are controlled by large for-profit corporations. Even if these companies choose not to censor the content that they host, governments around the world have found ways of effectively controlling access to Internet services that they deem to be subversive.54 Beyond censorship, corporations like Twitter have proven adept at finding ways to turn struggles that challenge the status quo into safe and profitable business opportunities. In June 2016, billionaire Twitter cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey sat down for a discussion with Black Lives Matter activist Deray McKesson at the tech industry Code Conference.55 Dorsey, who presided over a company where only 3 percent of the workforce was black or Latino and who had recently hired a white man as head of “diversity,” marked the occasion by wearing a Twitter-branded “Stay Woke” T-shirt that appropriated a phrase associated with Black Lives Matter in service of raising his company’s brand awareness. McKesson, meanwhile, has built a cozy online relationship with brands such as McDonald’s, Apple, and Spotify that has drawn criticism from some within the movement.56 For all of its struggles, late-period capitalism excels, if nothing else, at appropriating and commodifying dissenting cultural forms within the confines of the existing system. While corporate platforms like Twitter can perhaps be situationally employed to revolutionary ends, any movement that seeks changes on par with those pursued by the Panthers must have a plan for addressing the underlying material structures of political and economic power that organize life both online and in the streets of places such as Oakland and Ferguson.

Even in a best-case scenario, in which activists overcome technical hurdles, government repression, corporate co-optation, and the barriers of language and culture to form bonds across borders, the case of the BPP illustrates the limits of transnational organizing in the face of the power wielded by the U.S. government and its allies. While the Panthers’ embrace of figures such as Kim Il-sung and Mao Zedong might seem naïve or ill-advised in retrospect, these alliances reflected the reality that those seeking revolutionary change needed more than goodwill and donations from foreign admirers if they wished to survive, much less topple, the U.S. government. For all the complications that they brought, connections to powerful and sympathetic revolutionary states were crucial to envisioning the possibility of a successful revolution in the United States. As historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin observed, “Today, with few potential allies for a revolutionary black organization, the state could easily repress any Panther-like organization, no matter how disciplined and organized.”57 Any group seeking a revolutionary decolonization of American society would need to engage in a long-term project of organizing across borders in the hopes that such alliances might one day bring to power governments in other nations that could provide the kind of support sought by the BPP during its heyday.

The Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s attempted nothing less than a revolution founded on the notion that the lives of people of color in the United States and around the world should not only matter but also be liberated from centuries of institutionalized white supremacy and state violence in all its forms. This was a monumentally ambitious task even in an age in which such a revolution seemed far more possible than it does today. Perhaps such change can take place without the kind of radical decolonization envisioned by the Panthers, though evidence thus far casts doubt on that proposition. The BPP failed in its central goal, but the history of the party and its members continues to hold valuable lessons for scholars and activists seeking to understand and change the conditions that prompted Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to action in the streets of Oakland in October 1966. While this story provides no easy or comforting answers, it nevertheless remains relevant for those committed to change that goes beyond the liberal reforms of the civil rights movement or a contemporary multiculturalism that often serves the interests of the status quo. Before his death in prison in April 2000, former BPP and BLA member Albert “Nuh” Washington reflected on the legacy of the party and its meaning for contemporary activists. “We’ve tried and in the trying, some died,” he declared. “Others went on with their lives for good or bad, and some of us are still imprisoned. Is this then our legacy—failure? If so, then history and future generations will condemn us—not for failing, but for not trying again.”58