“Free Huey” at the United Nations

The United Nations provided the venue for the BPP’s first official foray into foreign affairs. On July 24, 1968, a group of Black Panthers including Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Emory Douglas, and members of the party’s newly founded New York City chapter arrived at the UN building in Manhattan. After meeting with representatives from the Tanzanian and Cuban governments and filing an application requesting official recognition as a nongovernmental organization, they marched outside to hold a press conference. Dressed in their signature black leather jackets despite the summer heat, the Panthers addressed their reasons for visiting the UN. Their most urgent goal was to draw international attention to the Newton trial, transforming it from a local issue of crime and punishment into an international referendum on white supremacy and colonialism. “Because Huey P. Newton stood up to oppose and denounce the imperialist aggression of the United States in international affairs and the vicious oppression of Black people in the domestic areas,” they declared, “he has been singled out for silencing by the power structure.” In response, the Panthers called for “the oppressed and colonized people, to organize demonstrations before the embassies, consulates, and property of the imperialist exploiters of the United States.” Drawing on their colonial analysis of black America, they also requested “the stationing of UN Observer Teams throughout the cities of America wherein Black people are cooped up and concentrated in wretched ghettos.”9

From its creation at the San Francisco Conference in June 1945, African American activists had seen the UN as a venue to which they could appeal for aid in combating white supremacy within the United States. During the 1940s and 1950s, groups ranging from the left-leaning National Negro Congress (NNC) and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) to the NAACP had petitioned the organization to address the treatment of black Americans as a human rights issue. These early efforts to make use of the UN as a venue for the black freedom struggle foundered due to a combination of Cold War geopolitics and domination of the organization by a handful of great powers, many of which still held colonies of their own.10 This came to a head in 1961, when black activists in New York staged a raucous demonstration at the UN to protest the organization’s complicity in the removal and execution of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in the Republic of the Congo. Several developments, however, combined to make the UN once again a potentially relevant venue by the mid-1960s. The rapid spread of decolonization significantly changed the face of the organization as new nations composed of formerly colonized people of color joined in the wake of their independence. The Tanzanian delegation with whom the BPP met in July 1968 was one of thirty-six member states that had joined since 1960.11 Meanwhile, U.S. interventions in Cuba, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic and support for Israel during the 1967 war with its Arab neighbors served to mobilize anti-American and anticolonial sentiment at the UN. By 1964, Malcolm X, who had earlier previously offered tacit support for the pro-Lumumba and anti-UN demonstrations, declared that the time had come to “[e]xpand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, take it into the United Nations.”12

Panther leaders explicitly cited Malcolm X’s injunction as they turned to the UN in mid-1968.13 In appealing to United Nations, however, they were not only motivated by the legacy of Malcolm and the need to gain publicity for the “Free Huey” campaign but also by ideological developments inside the party itself. In 1968, as the BPP began to expand nationwide, the Panthers embraced the UN as a way to deal with the so-called “land question” that had long bedeviled black nationalist groups in the United States. Did black nationalism require a separate black nation-state? If so, how were black people, dispersed across the interior of a First World superpower, to gain the land needed to assert their independence? For revolutionary nationalists like the Panthers, an additional question revolved around how to locate black nationalism in an international context and reconcile it with the larger goals of Third World anticolonialism and worldwide socialist revolution. Part of the BPP leaders’ response to this dilemma was to create what Cleaver dubbed an “embryonic sovereignty” through the party’s anticolonial vernacular, one that symbolically located black people as part of a global anticolonial majority while acknowledging their unique position within the United States.14 But as the BPP expanded through the creation of decentralized local chapters, it raised anew the question of how to respond to the “land question.”

It was Cleaver who first broached the notion of using the United Nations in order to bridge the gap between local community activism and formal nationhood. As black people successfully combated “community imperialism” at the local level, they would simultaneously take part in a “UN supervised plebiscite throughout the colony,” in which they would decide whether they wanted to seek formal separation from the United States. The very process of implementing the plebiscite, Cleaver postulated, “would correspond to the role of the first or the key political campaign that happened in all countries emerging from colonial bondage”:

Moreover, by situating black nationalism within the framework of the UN, Newton declared that the Panthers would “demonstrate our internationalist as well as nationalist position to the people; we simultaneously educate them and put pressure on the U.S. Government in the eyes of the world.” Newton was sufficiently impressed with this idea to modify the BPP’s ten-point program in mid-1968 to add Cleaver’s call for a UN-supervised plebiscite “for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.”16

For all its appeal as both a publicity tool in the “Free Huey” campaign and as a venue in which to explore black nationalism in an international context, dealing with the UN proved to be as challenging for the BPP as it had for the party’s predecessors in the black freedom struggle. Though decolonization had broadened the UN’s membership, it remained firmly rooted in individual nation-states, the vast majority of which were reluctant to directly challenge the United States on behalf of the BPP or set the precedent of intervening in the internal affairs of member nations. On a practical level, the Oakland-based Panther leaders had no contacts with member delegations at the UN, complicating potential efforts to bring their case before the organization. Prior to the July visit to New York, BPP leaders attempted to address this issue by working through allies in SNCC. The Panthers had tapped SNCC leaders Stokely Carmichael and James Foreman in 1968, appointing them prime minister and minister of foreign affairs respectively, as prelude to a potential merger between SNCC and the BPP.17 Both men had developed relationships with representatives of foreign governments during their international travels, and the hope was that their connections within the UN would not only allow the BPP to gain entrance but also provide an opportunity for Seale and Cleaver to address the General Assembly. Shortly after arriving in New York, however, this ambitious plan was scuttled by tensions between SNCC and the BPP.

The roots of the BPP-SNCC split were both ideological and practical. As a result of their sometimes-troubled history of working with white volunteers, SNCC leaders had come to distrust such alliances and were skeptical of the BPP’s willingness to explore coalitions with groups such as the primarily white Peace and Freedom Party.18 Carmichael, meanwhile, had come to reject Marxism as a useful tool for understanding the black experience, turning instead to a more essentialist pan-Africanism that clashed with Panthers’ revolutionary nationalism. Behind the scenes, he clashed with Foreman over the direction of SNCC, further complicating efforts to coordinate with the BPP. Relations between the two organizations were also frayed by tensions between experienced SNCC leaders who had spent years organizing the black freedom struggle and the brash and often younger BPP members who had vaulted from relative obscurity into icons of the Black Power movement.19 A tinderbox exacerbated by the FBI’s COINTELPRO efforts ignited when Oakland-based Panthers arrived in New York in July. Following an explosive meeting, which according to some accounts ended with the Panthers confronting Foreman with a gun, the BPP-SNCC alliance effectively ended, leaving the party without the necessary contacts to gain entrance to the UN.20

It took a last-minute appeal from Cleaver to “Queen Mother” Audley Moore, a former CPUSA member who had helped to mentor RAM members earlier in the decade, to secure an invitation for the BPP to meet with members the Tanzanian delegation.21 Moore’s intervention helped salvage the Panthers’ inaugural attempt at international diplomacy. While they were unable to address the General Assembly or convince a member state to introduce a resolution supporting the party’s plan for a black plebiscite, BPP leaders did make valuable contacts with the Tanzanian and Cuban governments, and they were able to parlay their UN visit into additional publicity for the “Free Huey” movement. For a group that less than a year earlier had been on the verge of extinction and little known outside the San Francisco Bay Area, this was a major accomplishment. The struggle to gain access to the UN, however, was a harsh reminder of the difficulty that non-state groups, particularly those representing oppressed minority populations, faced in dealing with nation-states and the international bodies in which they were represented. The cruel irony of using the UN as a venue in which to explore the “land question” was that without a formal state of their own, black Americans would never be effectively represented in that body. In the wake of their UN trip, BPP leaders pursued two separate tracks designed to give them the kind of international leverage that they had struggled to achieve while in New York. One track involved following up on the contacts with the Cuban government to create a more formal alliance with a sympathetic partner in the Third World. However, given the challenge of dealing even with friendly foreign governments, the BPP’s leadership also began to explore transnational connections that would bypass nation-states entirely while creating global solidarity networks.

Tokyo and Montreal: Early Efforts at Transnational Movement Building

While the BPP identified most strongly with the revolutionary Third World, the party’s initial efforts at transnational organizing in 1968–69 were most successful in western Europe and Japan. Though they attempted some sporadic contacts with Mexican students and activists in 1968, the only lasting transnational connections built in this period were rooted in Scandinavia and West Germany.22 In retrospect, this should not be surprising. The Third World nations and people with whom BPP leaders believed they shared natural affinities tended to be represented by independent governments, most of which jealously guarded their independence and were not keen on diplomacy taking place outside their control. Those Third World groups that were not under the direct control of national governments, such as the various guerrillas fighting against Portuguese colonialism and white supremacy in sub-Saharan Africa, tended to be too far away and too deeply immersed in their own struggles to engage with a new and relatively unknown organization such as the BPP. Meanwhile, 1968 marked the ascendency of a global New Left movement that swept across most of the industrialized, noncommunist First World. While the outlook and agenda of these groups varied from country to country (indeed, even within individual countries), they tended to share opposition to the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism more broadly, admiration for Third World anticolonialism, and a hunger for an alternative to Soviet communism and U.S. capitalism.23 In theory, at least, the Panthers and their anticolonial vernacular were well suited to alliances with the kaleidoscope of New Left groups that sprang up around the world in the late 1960s. In practice, transnational diplomacy proved to be alternatively frustrating and rewarding for the BPP.

One month after their UN visit, Panther leaders embarked on an inaugural effort at transnational diplomacy. This venture was the result of an overture in the summer of 1968 from a coalition of Japanese artists, activists, students, and intellectuals. Founded in April 1965, Beheiren (Citizens’ Alliance for Peace in Vietnam) was an umbrella organization that encompassed a wide range of viewpoints and backgrounds, all united by opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam and their own government’s complicity in the U.S. aggression. Nominally led by novelist and social critic Makoto Oda, in practice Beheiren was a loosely knit organization that eventually encompassed over three hundred local chapters throughout Japan.24 From the beginning, the group’s leaders had sought to build transnational connections not only with peace activists and New Left groups in the United States but also with representatives of the civil rights and Black Power movements. The group was, in the words of historian Yuichiro Onishi, “committed to promoting internationalism and solidarity with people mobilizing against the rampant pursuit of wealth, whiteness, and imperialist interests.”25 Beheiren leaders, including Oda and Tsurumi Yoshiyuki, made direct contact with Carmichael and other figures in SNCC prior to reaching out to the Panthers. In August 1966, the group hosted a Japan-U.S. Citizens’ Conference for Peace in Vietnam that included SNCC representative Ralph Featherstone.26

The high-profile anti–Vietnam War stance taken by both SNCC and the BPP was one obvious point of connection with Beheiren. But as noted by historian Simon Andrew Avenell, so too were the efforts by Black Power activists in the United States to theorize the relationship between colonialism, white supremacy, and U.S. militarism. For Oda, Yoshiyuki, and other Beheiren activists, the notion that white supremacy underlay not only anti-black racism in the United States but also U.S. imperialist aggression in Vietnam and a neo-colonialist relationship with its Japanese client state was a crucial innovation. Much as the Panthers’ anticolonial vernacular offered a way to overcome their minority status in the United States, this brand of Third World anticolonialism allowed Beheiren to separate itself from Japan’s imperialist past and complicity in Washington’s war in Vietnam by identifying as fellow victims—and opponents—of U.S. policy. And while Beheiren remained firmly committed to nonviolent tactics in its demonstrations in Japan, it supported the right of other groups to win their freedom through armed struggle when necessary.27

In August 1968, Beheiren leaders extended an invitation to Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver to visit Japan as part an international conference dealing with the Vietnam War, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and the status of Okinawa. Eldridge was prevented from attending by the terms of his parole, so Earl Anthony, the Los Angeles Panther who was a mole for the FBI, unbeknown to the party leaders, took his place. The two BPP emissaries traveled first to Hawaii, where they encountered last-minute trouble getting a visa for entry into Japan, likely as a result of high-level government concerns over their visit. Although demonstrations by activists in Tokyo pressured the Japanese government into issuing the visa, Kathleen Cleaver decided to forego the trip, leaving Anthony alone to represent the party.28 Anthony’s visit to Japan in August 1968 was the first time a BPP member had traveled overseas in pursuit of transnational alliances and as such was a watershed moment in the party’s history. Ultimately, however, the trip yielded few positive results and illustrated many of the challenges posed by efforts to build such transnational connections.

Left to represent the BPP by himself, Anthony departed from the party’s established line to offer a more essentialist take on the problems facing black Americans and people of color around the world. Rejecting both Marxism and the possibility of working with white activists, he insisted that “racism was the dominant problem for Afro-Americans, and a major one for other Third World people.”29 Anthony’s position was not only a departure from the BPP’s revolutionary nationalism, which stressed the inherent links between white supremacy and capitalism as systems of oppression, but also a repudiation of the party’s ongoing cooperation with the primarily white Peace and Freedom Party. It was also an odd choice of message when addressing Japanese groups that had made a concerted effort to forge links across both geographic and racial lines. Like the BPP, Beheiren actively worked with whites of the U.S. New Left (including SDS members and, later, Jane Fonda’s “FTA” antiwar tour of U.S. bases in the Pacific).30 Whether the result of deliberate sabotage at the behest of the FBI or, as Anthony claimed, a spur-of-the-moment “personal decision,” the result was to turn the party’s first foray into transnational diplomacy into a something of a debacle.31 BPP leaders were not pleased when they received word of Anthony’s speeches, and instead of promoting further collaboration with Beheiren they buried any mention of the entire affair. Collaboration with Japanese groups did not resume for over a year, until Deputy Minister of Information Elbert “Big Man” Howard visited in the fall of 1969 to meet with members of the Tokyo-area Sanya Liberation Committee.32 Anthony, meanwhile, was placed under house arrest by Chairman Hilliard after returning to the United States, effectively ending his tenure with the party.33

Chance played a major element in the disappointing results from the BPP’s first effort at forging a transnational alliance. If Eldridge or Kathleen Cleaver had managed to make the trip to Japan, Anthony would not have had the opportunity to single-handedly wreck the venture. But even under more ideal circumstances, forging connections with Beheiren or other such groups was a fraught endeavor. Anthony was surprised upon his arrival to discover that, much like the Panthers, Beheiren did not speak with one voice. As he toured Japan and Okinawa meeting Beheiren’s many member organizations, he found that “[t]here were pro-Maoists, anti-Maoists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, and numerous other groups… . The sponsoring faction would always ask me leading questions, which were geared to bring a response from me that would be an ideological attack upon other factions.”34 While the extremely loosely knit nature of Beheiren as an organization made it somewhat exceptional in this regard, the very nature of transnational “citizen’s diplomacy” involved interacting with a wide spectrum of individuals and groups that often had only the loosest of connections.

The BPP got a second chance at transnational diplomacy in late November 1968 when the party was invited to attend the Hemispheric Conference to End the War in Vietnam, held in Montreal. The three-day conference gathered sixteen hundred delegates from twenty-five countries, including Chilean senator Salvador Allende (head of the Latin American Solidarity Organization) and North Vietnamese minister of culture Hoang Minh Giam. Most of the attendees, however, were not government officials but representatives of various antiwar groups from the United States, Canada, and elsewhere.35 Unlike during the ill-fated Japan venture, the BPP was represented at Montreal by its senior leaders, including Seale and Hilliard. In a speech before the assembled delegates, Seale drew on the party’s anticolonial vernacular in attacking “the avaricious businessman, the racist, decadent, demagogic politicians of the world, and the pig police forces, be they in the Black community or in Vietnam.” Drawing on comparisons offered in a different context to domestic audiences, Seale linked the founding of the BPP to Newton’s realization that the police terrorizing West Oakland were essentially the same as the “pig forces committing murder and genocide right in front of our faces in Vietnam.” This background of oppression created natural links between U.S. people of color, Vietnamese, and the revolutionary Third World. “It’s time,” Seale concluded, “that we begin to stand up in some form of unity” and apply “people’s power” in order to “make this racist tyrant, the U.S. aggressor[,] act in a desired manner.”36

The Montreal gathering was the first attempt by BPP leaders to apply their anticolonial vernacular to building a transnational coalition against U.S. imperialism at home and abroad. Seale’s speech was said to have been greeted with “thunderous applause,” and although the BPP delegation was small, it managed to attract a disproportionate amount of attention from both attendees and the media. On the closing day of the conference, the crowd chanted “Panther Power to the Vanguard!” amid a bonfire of burning draft cards, while the North Vietnamese culture minister exclaimed, “You are Black Panthers, we are Yellow Panthers!”37 As with the UN venture, this was an impressive accomplishment given that a little over year earlier the Panthers had been a small, Oakland-based group with no national or international support and perhaps no more than a dozen members. But the Montreal gathering also illustrated some fundamental weaknesses in the BPP’s strategy of transnational coalition building.

The Panthers had inherited from RAM a framework that posited black Americans as the natural vanguard of the worldwide anticolonial struggle by virtue of their strategic location within the heart of the United States. As Newton posited in 1967, “Black people in America are the only people who can free the world, loosen the [yoke] of colonialism and destroy the war machine.”38 While this thesis helped to empower small numbers of motivated BPP members to take on the seemingly impossible task of opposing the U.S. government, it could also sometimes slide over into a paternalistic attitude toward Third World people that complicated the party’s efforts at international and transnational collaboration. While Seale was careful to praise the Vietnamese in his speech at Montreal, coverage of the event in the Black Panther reflected the most negative aspects of the party’s claim to vanguard status. “The BLACK PANTHER PARTY did not attend the Hemispheric Conference,” declared Raymond Lewis, “The BLACK PANTHER PARTY dominated it.” Lewis went on to insist that “[l]iterally no one objected to the PANTHERS leadership of the conference,” with both the Vietnamese and white delegates taking direction from the party. “At any other conference called to ‘End the War in Viet Nam,’ ” he declared, “the dominant figures would naturally be the ones the war is all about—Hanoi and Viet Cong delegation. But not at this conference… . PANTHER POWER prevailed.” While Lewis was certainly exaggerating the extent to which the Panthers dominated the conference, contemporary reports indicate that were was friction between the BPP and other delegates. The New York Times reported that “a flurry of fighting, pushing and shoving” broke out on the conference floor as a result of a dispute between the BPP and the organizers. Ideological debates also divided the delegates, and some activists returned home from Montreal disappointed with “another fiasco of left division and petty-factionalism.”39 Ultimately, while the conference helped to further raise the Panthers’ international profile, it did not lead to lasting relationships or institutional links between the party and the other assembled groups and revealed blind spots caused by the party’s ideological commitment to its own vanguard status.

Scandinavia and Germany: The Panther in Western Europe

The BPP’s most successful transnational efforts in 1968–69, and the only ones that left a lasting institutional legacy, were in western Europe. The combination of the high-profile trial of Huey Newton in Oakland and the broad reach of the Black Panther brought the party to the attention of a number of European New Left parties and groups in the late 1960s. Activists in Scandinavia, particularly Denmark and Sweden, provided some of the strongest support for the Panthers and the “Free Huey” campaign during this period. This seemingly odd pairing, matching Oakland-based Black Panthers with blond, blue-eyed activists in snowy Scandinavia, was somewhat serendipitous but also rooted in larger international and national developments.

As was the case across much of the noncommunist, industrialized world in the 1960s, the Left in Sweden and Denmark was in a state of turmoil. As historian Thomas Elman Jørgensen has chronicled, the combination of the post-Stalin revelations of Soviet tyranny, the grim reality of life in the neighboring “people’s democracies” of eastern Europe, and the increasingly conservative role played by the working classes in western Europe led to a crisis among Scandinavian leftists who had once looked to Marxism for inspiration. At the same time, the spread of decolonization and the polarizing effects of U.S. interventions in the Third World, particularly in Vietnam, led many to embrace the revolutionary movements of the global South. The result was the growth of an anticapitalist, noncommunist, and pro-Third World outlook that, while shaped by local conditions, had much in common with New Left politics elsewhere in western Europe as well as in the United States and Japan.40 In such an environment, the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular and its status as a Third World–oriented group within the heart of U.S. imperialism made it particularly appealing to a new generation of Scandinavian activists.

SNCC representatives, in this case Stokely Carmichael, helped lay the groundwork for collaboration between Scandinavian activists and the black freedom struggle in the United States. In November 1967, Carmichael made a series of appearances in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark that included an interview on Swedish television. His visit raised the profile of the U.S. Black Power movement and led to lasting interest that soon transcended a single figure or organization.41 It is doubtful, however, that this attention would have amounted to significant transnational collaborations with the BPP without the fortuitous intervention of a young, Jamaican-born resident of Denmark. Connie Matthews, who worked for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Copenhagen, was inspired by what she read of the Panthers during the Newton trial and used her contacts among the European Left to raise awareness of the party and its struggles in the United States. As part of this process, she arranged for Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, and Raymond “Masai” Hewitt to undertake a Scandinavian tour in March 1969.42 The result was the most successful of the party’s early efforts at ad hoc transnational diplomacy.

The Panthers’ trip, which included stops in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, ran into initial difficulties as they were confronted by the widespread assumption, even among many potentially friendly activists, that the BPP was a narrowly nationalist, even racist organization. This impression was in part due to media coverage of the party but also owed much to recent visits by Carmichael, who would move to Guinea in 1969 and later change his name to Kwame Ture. While still nominally affiliated with the BPP in early 1969, Carmichael had rejected Marxism and alliances with white radicals in favor of a more essentialist pan-Africanism. Thus, as Hewitt explained it, the BPP representatives in March 1969 found themselves in the difficult position of having to respond to Carmichael’s “deviations from the Party line, blowing at rampant racism and cultural nationalism,” which had been “especially confusing to the representatives of the various revolutionary groups represented in Scandinavian countries.”43

In addition to relying on the inclusive language embedded in the party’s anticolonial vernacular, BPP representatives employed two specific strategies in their Scandinavian tour to facilitate transnational alliances with Scandinavian activists. First, Seale and the rest of the delegation emphasized the party’s commitment to a non-doctrinaire socialism and anti-imperialism that provided natural links to European New Left groups. Declaring the need for a global “stand against capitalism” rooted in “the people, not the governments,” Seale also reassured his audience that “we don’t fight racism with more racism,” an implicit rejection of Carmichael’s approach. They also made a strategic nod to local concerns by declaring that “we don’t fight imperialism with more imperialism, such as the way the Russians [are] using imperialistic tactics in Czechoslovakia, etc.”44 The crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in August 1968 was a fresh and painful memory, particularly for those nations for whom the Red Army was close and ever-present. The Panthers presented themselves to their Scandinavian hosts as a vibrant and open alternative to both Carmichael’s essentialist pan-Africanism and the grim tyranny of Soviet communism with its stodgy version of Marxism.

In addition to employing a form of revolutionary triangulation, the Panthers also offered a more nuanced version of their vanguard thesis as part of the Scandinavian excursion. While the notion of black Americans as the vanguard of the world revolution was empowering for a minority group living within a First World superpower, as demonstrated by events at Montreal it could complicate relations with other groups. In speaking to audiences in Scandinavia, Seale stressed that the BPP was one of many vanguards among “all the revolutionary peoples and revolutionary fronts throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America.” In Asia, it was the revolutionary governments of China and Vietnam that played the lead role, while in Africa it was the freedom fighters in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. In Latin America, the “Cuban brothers” were at the vanguard, along with revolutionaries in Venezuela and elsewhere. Even in the United States, Seale placed black Americans amid a number of other groups, including radical whites:

Seale did not explicitly address Europe in his roll call of vanguards, but the message to his Scandinavian audiences was clear: any group of people who shared the party’s commitment to revolutionary actions against the linked forces of capitalism and white supremacy could claim membership in this movement and even leadership within their own regional context. This savvy spin on the party’s vanguard thesis brought it in line with the inclusive rhetoric of the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular and its emphasis on honoring local circumstances while building transnational links among activists.

While geographic factors limited the kind of practical support that Scandinavian activists could offer to the BPP fund-raising and awareness campaigns, the brief European visit showed that, with the right approach and the local contacts, the party could spread its influence and message outside the United States with a minimal investment of time and resources. Matthews was rewarded for her role in organizing the Scandinavian trip and overseeing the ensuing solidarity committees with an appointment as the BPP’s international coordinator. She was subsequently summoned to Oakland for consultation with the party’s leaders and gave a number of speeches before returning to continue her organizing work.46 Matthews eventually married New York Panther Michael Cetewayo Tabor, and the two went on to join the international section of the BPP in Algeria (discussed in the next chapter) in the early 1970s.47 Meanwhile, the example set by the Scandinavian solidarity committees was repeated by young activists in West Germany in 1969.

As in Japan and Scandinavia, transnational links to the Panthers in the Federal Republic of Germany originated in a combination of local and international factors. The Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (German Socialist Student League, usually referred to by its German-language initials, SDS) provided the initial point of contact between young Germans and the Panthers. The German SDS began life as the youth arm of the established Social Democratic Party (SDP), but it was expelled in 1962 as its members embraced New Left politics similar to those of their U.S. counterparts in Students for a Democratic Society.48 In the latter half of the 1960s, the German SDS, and particularly the influential Berlin chapter headed by Rudi Dutschke, began to identify with both Third World anticolonial struggles and the Black Power movement in the United States. As with New Left groups elsewhere around the world, the German SDS’s focus on the Third World reflected outrage at the escalating war in Vietnam, frustration with the inability of both U.S. capitalism and Soviet communism to create truly democratic and egalitarian societies, and optimism in the ability of states and groups in the global South to offer alternatives to the grim Cold War nuclear standoff. Black Power, meanwhile, was attractive because it offered, in the words of historian Martin Klimke, “a case of an anti-imperialist movement in a highly industrialized country that was seen as the motherland of imperialist aggression.”49 For the young Germans in the SDS, Black Power showed that resistance was possible even for those living within the heart of the First World. Again, as in both Japan and Scandinavia, connections between the German New Left and the BPP were facilitated by the pioneering efforts of activists in SNCC. German SDS leaders who attended the July 1967 Dialectics of Liberation conference in London were favorably impressed by Stokely Carmichael’s appearance, and that same year the organization officially endorsed the U.S. Black Power movement, including violent resistance if necessary, at its national conference. The following year, SNCC representative Dale Smith spoke at an anti–Vietnam War event organized by the German SDS in West Berlin.50

Factors more specific to the German past and present also influenced the German SDS and its engagement with Black Power and the Third World. The legacy of Nazism, particularly the Holocaust, hung heavily over postwar Germany. Young Germans, in particular, had to grapple with the failure of their parents’ generation to prevent the rise of Hitler or to mount effective resistance to his regime once in power. Having been “educated by German history” with respect to the need to resist “the fascist murderous gang,” as German SDS member Christian Semler explained in a letter to the BPP, young activists were keen to prevent such calamities in the future.51 To those in the SDS, the German government’s alliance with the United States, which including hosting facilities that supported the U.S. war effort in Southeast Asia, constituted complicity in the ongoing genocide in Vietnam. This tragedy presented an opportunity, indeed a responsibility, for young Germans to succeed where their parents had failed in standing up to aggression and genocide. As a result, German SDS members embraced the anti–Vietnam War campaign with a fervor that belied the geographic and historical distance that separated them from that conflict.52 Moreover, U.S. military bases in West Germany were home to a large number of black GIs, many of whom chafed at the racism they experienced both within the armed forces and from some aspects of German society. A number of these GIs ended up identifying with the Black Power movement, either through formal membership in one of the U.S.-based organizations or through informal local networks on base. While activists in Scandinavia had to rely on media coverage and occasional visits from figures such as Carmichael, Seale, and Hilliard, the young Germans in the SDS had ready access to potential allies in the U.S. black freedom and antiwar struggles from within the very heart of the war machine that they jointly opposed.53

For all the practical and ideological links between German activists and the U.S. Black Power movements, it took the intervention of Karl Dietrich Wolff to create a more formal network of support linking German activists and the BPP. Wolff had become involved in the German SDS while a student and eventually rose to serve as the organization’s national chairman in 1967–68.54 After stepping down, he embarked on a tour of the United States at the invitation of the American SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. Among the highlights of Wolff’s visit was a comical appearance before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on the Internal Security Act, which had subpoenaed the German activist to question him about his associations with American radicals. In a farcical session that saw Wolff dancing rhetorical circles around his would-be interrogators (while simultaneously claiming not to be fluent in English), he infuriated the committee’s acting chair, arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and brought raucous approval from the gallery by playfully declaring “I prefer panthers to pigs.”55 Of more direct import to future transnational relations, however, was his meeting with BPP leaders in Oakland in March 1969. Introduced to the Panthers by antiwar activist Tom Hayden while visiting the Bay Area, Wolff quickly latched on to the party and its struggles against both U.S. imperialism and the U.S. justice system.56 After returning to Germany, Wolff worked with Connie Matthews and visiting BPP deputy minister of information Elbert Howard to form a Black Panther Solidarity Committee in Frankfurt. The committee not only raised funds for the party but also staged a number of public demonstrations in support of jailed BPP members, hosted visiting Panthers such as Howard and Kathleen Cleaver, and used translated BPP writings to educate young Germans about the party’s struggles in the United States.57 While the Solidarity Committee’s work was initially limited to rhetorical and financial support, in the early 1970s elements of the German Left sought even more direct, and violent, solidarity with the Panthers (a subject chronicled in chapter 6).

The BPP’s alliances with western European activists in 1968–69 represented a promising beginning of a transnational coalition that linked the global New Left with communities of color in the United States and revolutionaries in the Third Word. This coalition was rooted not simply in opposition to the war in Vietnam, but also in a shared understanding that linked that conflict to capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. This notion was not new for black activists in the United States or anticolonial leaders among the “darker nations,” who had been offering variations on this thesis since the early twentieth century. This particular formation, however, had an appeal that crossed over to include a wide network of white New Left activists around the world. By bypassing national governments, the Panthers were able to achieve substantial gains with a minimal investment of time and other resources and little in the way of compromises or entangling relationships that might limit their freedom of action. The most successful of these ventures were largely autonomous in their daily operations, with the most extreme of these being the British Black Panthers, a group not covered here since they were an independent entity that was inspired by the Oakland-based BPP and shared the party’s name and sensibility but operated entirely independently in pursuit of their own agenda.58 For those groups that did share more direct links to the party, the combination of occasional visits by BPP leaders with the work of local activists such as Matthews and Wolff and the long reach of the anticolonial vernacular (in both English and in translation) allowed the Panthers to leverage the power of educated and materially comfortable young European activists. This in turned allowed the latter to influence their home societies while raising awareness of the situation facing black Americans. Unlike state governments, these activists were happy to ally with the BPP while demanding little if anything in return. Indeed, many eagerly deferred to the party’s self-proclaimed vanguard status, particularly when couched in the modified form proposed by Seale during his Scandinavian visit.

These relationships were not without complications, however. European activists’ fascination with the Panthers sometimes slid into an Orientalist exoticization of black Americans in general and the BPP in particular. French novelist, playwright, and activist Jean Genet illustrated this temptation in declaring during a U.S. visit that “America’s Blacks, and especially the Black Panthers are the only thing that glows, that shines intensely, even burns and fascinates in this sadly boring country.”59 Historians Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke observed that for young German activists, “Black Panther GIs presented novel forms of masculinity and a revolutionary authenticity that their own privileged middle-class upbringing could not provide them.” But while these face-to-face encounters might “make abstract ideas such as international class and race solidarity immediate and real,” they did so in part by creating a shallow and glamorized understanding of blackness.60 This same problem plagued the Panthers’ relationship with white radicals in the United States, but in Europe and Japan it was further complicated by the mediating role that the party came to play in the conflicting feelings aroused by American popular culture. Around the industrialized world in the 1960s, American music, movies, and fashion were immensely appealing, particularly to a younger generation that could use these imported cultural forms as a way of distinguishing themselves from their parents’ generation. However, many of these same young people were also deeply troubled by America’s hegemonic status as well the U.S. government’s policies in Vietnam and elsewhere. The Panthers and their anticolonial vernacular were perfectly placed to exploit this dichotomy by marrying the attractively subversive elements of American popular culture—from black leather jackets to rock and funk music and colorful slang—to an unquestionably “authentic” anti-imperialist politics.61 The downside of this appeal, however, was that it facilitated shallow, self-serving identification with the BPP in lieu of a more nuanced and committed commitment to the party’s principles and struggle. This is not to imply that all European activists (or all white American allies of the party) fell victim to such a glamorized understanding of the Panthers and what they represented. Nevertheless, navigating the gap between well-off European activists and the BPP was as challenging in its own way as relations with Third World governments and peoples.

“Molasses and Blood, Machetes and Screams”: The Cuban Connection

Even when successful, transnational alliances came with inherent limitations. Without formal borders and armed forces to protect them, transnational groups couldn’t offer lasting sanctuary to the BPP or even a reliable venue for hosting visiting Panthers. This was particularly true of partners located in states that had important trade or military alliances with the United States. The troubles that party members had with visas and local law enforcement in their visits to places such as Japan, Germany, and Mexico illustrated the natural limits of relying on organizations and activists based in states locked within Washington’s Cold War orbit. Moreover, the various revolutionary models that the Panthers sought to emulate—from Algeria to Cuba, China, and Vietnam—had all defined their revolutions in national terms.62 Thus, for all the potential promises of transnational support networks and all the drawbacks and challenges of dealing with foreign governments on highly unequal terms, the BPP could not entirely forsake attempts to cultivate more formal international alliances to supplement their fledgling transnational solidarity network.

While Mao, his Red Book, and the People’s Republic of China played the most prominent public role in the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular, it was Cuba that the party turned to in its first attempt at state-level diplomacy in 1968–69. The island and its government under Fidel Castro was an attractive partner for the BPP in part because of its previously expressed commitment to support black radicals ranging from Amiri Baraka to Robert F. Williams and Stokely Carmichael, who made a triumphant state visit in July–August 1967 during the inaugural conference of the Organización Latinoamericana de Solidaridad. Although after leaving Cuba both Williams and Carmichael offered thinly veiled criticism of Castro’s regime and its attitude toward issues of race and revolution, the island retained an important place in the black radical imagination.63 In recounting his attitude toward Cuba on the eve of his own exile there in December 1968, Cleaver declared, “Like every other Babylonian, I had watched the Cuban Revolution from beginning to end… . The very name, Cuba, was full of molasses and blood, machetes and screams.”64 This romanticized understanding of Cuba and its revolution was further reinforced by the creation of OSPAAAL as part of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference. Headquartered in Havana, OSPAAAL published journals, newsletters, and posters celebrating anticolonial revolutions around the world while implicitly or explicitly naming Cuba as a champion of these struggles.65

More immediate practical factors also stimulated the BPP’s decision to pursue contacts with Cuba in 1968. Its location ninety miles from U.S. shores made the island a more convenient spot for the Panthers to conduct their nascent international diplomacy than distant venues such as China or Algeria. This was particularly relevant for those within the party who had visions of building an external base that would allow the Panthers to train and equip fighters who could then slip back into the country undetected. Cleaver apparently broached this subject with the Cuban mission in New York during the July trip to the UN and received assurances, later writing that “if I came to Cuba they would give me a facility for training some men and they would help us reenter the United States.”66 Prior to testing this commitment, the BPP took advantage of an offer from the Cuban government to send representatives to visit the island as part of an OSPAAAL celebration of “Solidarity with the Struggle of the Afro-American People” timed to correspond with the third anniversary of the Watts uprising in August 1968. An initial attempt to send BPP representatives to Cuba was foiled when Chief of Staff Hilliard, Minister of Education George Murray, and Field Marshall Landon R. Williams were detained and then deported by Mexican police while attempting to transit through the country. A second attempt succeeded, and in late August, Murray and Joudon Ford of the New York BPP chapter toured the island and gave speeches as part of the OSPAAAL-sponsored event.67

The Murray-Ford trip represented the BPP’s first attempt at conducting state-level diplomacy outside the United States. While on the island they met not only with Cuban government representatives but also with other OSPAAAL members, including delegates from North Korea and Guinea (home of the revolutionary government of Sékou Touré and his honorary co-president Kwame Nkrumah). In appealing to their Cuban hosts and other potential allies, Ford and Murray drew heavily on the BPP’s evolving anticolonial vernacular while linking the “Free Huey” campaign to Third World anticolonialism. Identifying as “a colony within the imperialist domains of North America,” Murray vowed that the Panthers would “not … put down our guns or stop making Molotov cocktails until colonialized Africans, Asians and Latin Americans in the United States and throughout the world have become free.” While embracing a form of African American exceptionalism in stressing the “the historic duty of Black people in the United States to bring about the complete, absolute and unconditional end of racism and neo-colonialism,” Murray was also careful to note that in doing so “we will follow the example of Che Guevara, the Cuban people” and other Third World revolutionaries. Murray also took an explicitly Marxist line in attacking the concept of private property and blaming Newton’s imprisonment on “the capitalist beasts that make up the power structure of the USA.”68

The BPP’s efforts to cultivate support from the Cuban government and OSPAAAL in July and August 1968 paid some immediate short-term dividends in the form of international publicity for the party and its efforts to free Newton. Granma, the official Cuban news agency, reprinted Murray’s speech as well as an article hailing Newton’s contributions to the revolution.69 Speaking for the Cuban Communist Party, Luis Lara declared that “ Cuban revolutionaries are prepared to give their lives for the cause of the Afro-Americans, which is the cause of the peoples of the world.” The OSPAAAL Executive Secretariat expressed similar support, calling “upon all its members … all revolutionary and progressive forces of the world and the North America people to celebrate this day in a combative way, by denouncing the plots for the physical elimination of Huey Newton, encouraging his … example and by expressing with concrete actions and solidarity messages their acknowledgment and support of the revolutionary struggle of the Afro-Americans.”70 The vocal support for Newton from OSPAAAL and the Cuban government was a major achievement for the party. Less than a year earlier, the Panthers had struggled to reach over a dozen members and were barely managing to survive as a local organization in Oakland. By the summer of 1968, however, they were hailed as revolutionary heroes in Havana and directly compared to Malcolm X. The party reciprocated with statements of support for “the brothers and sisters in Cuba” while Emory Douglas contributed artwork for OSPAAAL posters.71

The support of OSPAAAL and the Cuban government was a boon to the “Free Huey” movement and a testament to the ability of the party’s anticolonial vernacular to help build bridges to the revolutionary Third World. When combined with the transnational solidarity networks in Europe, the Cuban connection offered the party a diversified set of alliances outside the borders of the United States, which provided everything from publicity and fund-raising to perhaps a base for guerrilla training and staging. It remained unclear, however, whether the Cuban government was truly willing to go beyond rhetorical support and make good on the promises that Cleaver believed he had secured while in New York. It was also uncertain whether or how foreign-supported guerrilla warfare operations fit into the BPP’s rapidly evolving strategy within the United States. Those questions would be answered in dramatic fashion by the end of 1969, with Eldridge Cleaver taking center stage as the foremost Panther advocate of both guerrilla warfare and Cold War–inspired internationalism.