The People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation and the International Section

The U.S. People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation, which arrived in Pyongyang in July 1970, represented the culmination of Cleaver’s strategy of domestic and international alliance building. Cleaver was the head of the eleven-person group, which also included Elaine Brown, an L.A. Panther who had ascended to the inner circle of the national party, as well as members of other organizations, including the San Francisco–based Red Guards, the Peace and Freedom Party, the Movement for a Democratic Military, Ramparts magazine, and New York Newsreel.6 After a brief stop in the Soviet Union, Cleaver led this diverse collection of activists on a two-and-half month journey that began in North Korea and continued on to North Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China.

The delegation returned to Algiers in September to preside over the formal opening of the international section of the Black Panther Party. In a poem written upon his return, titled “Gangster Cigarettes” (slang meaning marijuana joints), Cleaver offered “a Guinness Book of Records boast”:

In this wry reflection on his international travels in service of the revolution, Cleaver captured both the strengths and weaknesses of the People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation and its approach to “people’s diplomacy” in revolutionary Asia.

Figure 12. Eldridge Cleaver and unidentified Vietnamese women in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) as part of the tour of the People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation, August 1970. Eldridge Cleaver Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

The most obvious accomplishment of the delegation was to attract international attention to the Panthers while positioning them as the vanguard of the U.S. Left. In his incisive analysis of the BPP’s domestic operations, Nikhil Pal Singh suggested that “we should understand them as being the practitioners of an insurgent form of visibility, a literal-minded and deadly serious guerrilla theater in which militant sloganeering, bodily display, and spectacular action simultaneously signified their possession and real lack of power.”8 The Cleaver-led delegation brought a similar form of “insurgent visibility” to the world stage as the swaggering “untamed vato” from L.A. shook hands with generals and dignitaries while exuding disdain for institutions of traditional diplomacy. In public statements and appearances in Pyongyang, Hanoi, and Beijing, Cleaver and other members of the delegation married the sweeping rhetoric of Third World solidarity and anti-imperialism to the geopolitics of the Cold War in Asia. “We have come to understand,” declared the delegates in a statement released on their way to Pyongyang, “that Black people in the United States are treated as an internal colony, and are subject to the same genocidal aggression by U.S. imperialism as are the peoples of Asia.” As a result, “[u]nderstanding the Korean people’s struggle, and communicating this to the American movement is a crucial step in developing this internationalist perspective.”9 Statements such as these linked the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular and analysis of the domestic situation of people of color in the United States to the new diplomatic direction initiated by Cleaver as part of the “Asian strategy” of Cold War–inflected international alliances.

The People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation succeeded in garnering significant attention from both the mainstream and alternative press as well as wary interest from the security apparatus of the U.S. government, which closely tracked its movements.10 In mid-August, the North Vietnamese government held a public ceremony marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Afro-American People (an event that had its origins in the OSPAAAL celebration of the Watts uprising), at which the delegation took center stage. While it was ideologically and racially diverse, with a female majority of delegates, Cleaver positioned himself as its leader and public face. The trip and the ensuing international media coverage bolstered his position in the party and burnished his credentials as a diplomatic representative of the black freedom struggle in the United States. It also positioned the Panthers as leaders of an alliance between the antiwar movement and the emerging force of the U.S. Third World Left. In a gesture acknowledging the BPP’s key role in the antiwar struggle, North Vietnamese officials gave the delegation a packet of over three hundred letters written by American POWs to be taken back to the United States.11

In addition to its symbolic value, the delegation’s travel also allowed Cleaver to expand upon the ties with the revolutionary governments in Asia that he had begun to cultivate in Algiers and during his first trip to the DPRK in September 1969. In North Korea, the delegation was greeted by Kang Ryang-uk, vice president of the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly, as well as Kim Il-sung’s uncle and close adviser, who hailed “[t]he struggle of the Black Panther Party and the Black people in America against the cursed policy of racial discrimination of the U.S. imperialists” while specifically calling for the release of Bobby Seale and other Panthers behind bars.12 Members of the group also met with North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong and famed military leader Võ Nguyên Giáp as well as exiled Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia and numerous lower-level officials from their socialist hosts.13 There were clear limits on the diplomatic status accorded to Cleaver and the delegation. They were not granted access to the highest-level officials in Pyongyang, Hanoi, or Beijing, and most of the meetings they did have were largely pro forma publicity opportunities. Nevertheless, receiving official recognition from state-level actors was significant not only as a symbolic nod to the BPP’s rising international status but also to keep Cleaver’s operations in Algiers afloat on a daily basis. In return, the anti-imperialist delegation contributed to propaganda efforts on behalf of their hosts. In addition to continuing to forward Vietnamese, North Korean, and Chinese material back to Oakland to be published in the Black Panther, Cleaver made a broadcast from Hanoi aimed at encouraging African American soldiers to “start ripping off the uncle toms and those pigs who’re giving you order[s] to kill the Vietnamese people… . Throw those hand grenades at them, and put that dynamite up under their houses, up under their jeeps.”14 As historian Judy Wu observed, broadcasts such as these not only served as part of the DRV’s public diplomacy on the international front, they also bolstered morale among a war-weary North Vietnamese population by highlighting divisions and weakness within the camp of their superpower opponent.15

Even as the delegation enjoyed its welcome in revolutionary Asia, there were already signs of the internal disputes that would contribution to the fracturing and eventual dissolution of the party. In a private account of the trip written upon her return to the United States, Elaine Brown described bitter divisions behind the scenes, with Cleaver blasting the Oakland-based leadership, David Hilliard in particular, as the “ ‘right wing’ of the Black Panther Party” for their embrace of the survival programs and rejection of armed struggle. Lamenting that the Panthers in the United States had become “a ‘Breakfast-for-Children’ Party,” Cleaver apparently went so far as to call for the murder of David Hilliard and his brother June Hilliard while on the trip.16 Brown also reported that Cleaver and Ramparts editor Robert Scheer exercised dictatorial control over the delegation, particularly its female members. Eldridge, in Brown’s account, threatened her life, publicly humiliated his wife Kathleen, physically abused Connie Matthews, and saw the female members of the delegation as there to meet his sexual needs. Judy Wu, who interviewed several members of the delegation, concluded that the power dynamics within the traveling party were highly patriarchal, with Cleaver exercising “authoritarian control” and targeting “members of his own delegation for humiliation and hostility.” Kathleen Cleaver and other women in the international section have denied having problems with Eldridge on the basis of gender. And as Wu observed, both Cleaver’s actions while heading the delegation and Brown’s post facto accounts of the trip must be understood against the backdrop of the contest for leadership within the BPP as well as the external pressures on the party.17 Nevertheless, the patriarchal and misogynistic elements of Cleaver’s leadership in the party are well documented, including his embrace of “pussy power,” in which he defined women’s role in the revolution as providing (or withholding) sex in order to encourage men to be proper revolutionaries.18

The external relations of the People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation also illustrated a fundamental problem that had vexed the BPP’s efforts at foreign alliances from the very beginning. For all its success in attracting public attention, the delegation was often caught in an awkward position between transnational and international diplomacy. In Judy Wu’s description, the delegation “[appropriated] President Eisenhower’s concept of ‘people’s diplomacy …’ [and] challenged the ability of the U.S. government to represent their interests. Instead, they sought direct, people-to-people contact with socialist Asia.”19 This effort at building transnational connections was undermined, however, not only by the troubled internal dynamics of the delegation but also by the nature of their contacts in the DPRK, North Vietnam, and China. As was invariably the case with foreign visitors to these countries, the delegation’s travels were closely circumscribed and monitored by their host governments. While the groups with whom they met, such the Korean Democratic Women’s Union or the central committee of the Vietnam Women’s Unions, were often nominally independent actors, the nature and context of these meetings sharply limited the opportunity for genuine people-to-people diplomacy. As historian Lien-Hang Nguyen concluded, “Although these people’s diplomats were drawn from mass organizations and other non-state entities, the Communist Party directed their campaigns. In others words, there’s no removing the state (or the nation) from this transnational history of non-state actors.”20 The strict control exercised by the hosts in revolutionary Asia complicated opportunities for meaningful transnational connections. It placed the People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation in the position of interacting with national governments that tended to view them, not inaccurately, as clients rather than as equals in the struggle against U.S. imperialism. While they received a warm welcome and were accorded many of the public courtesies of state-level visitors, these gestures did nothing to alter the fundamental power imbalance between a sometimes-fractious group of U.S. citizens and the revolutionary states that hosted them. This imbalance was an inescapable element of the BPP’s “Asian strategy,” which traded some measure of the party’s autonomy in seeking support from more powerful nation-states for their struggles within the United States.

The compromises required of the party in cultivating its international alliances in Asia were most visible in the delegation’s fawning public comments with regard to their host governments. Upon her return, Elaine Brown bragged that that North Korean people “have nothing to envy anybody in the world” and that China, then in the grips of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, was a place where “where human beings respond to each other as human beings for the first time in history.”21 This praise was certainly sincere to a point—the combination of what Wu identified as a form of romanticized “radical orientalism” with the carefully staged nature of their tour undoubtedly predisposed the members of the delegation to respond favorably to their hosts.22 So too did the fact that the delegation shared many points of genuine commonality with revolutionary governments in their opposition to white supremacy, capitalism, and the U.S. role in Asia. But the BPP members of the delegation, and Cleaver particularly, given his delicate position in Algiers, were also aware that their partnerships with China, the DPRK, and the Vietnamese were not equal ones and that the support they received was conditioned on agreeing to serve as outlets for state propaganda. Liberal civil rights activists and organizations in the United States that aligned with the federal government during the Cold War, most notably the NAACP, did so at the cost of acquiescing to a vastly narrowed debate on issues of race and inequality. They also had to at least tacitly endorse the oppressive measures used by the U.S. government to silence individuals who refused to accept those limits. But in attempting a mirror image of the accommodationist strategy by casting their lot with America’s Cold War adversaries, the Panthers and the People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation also had to sacrifice a degree of autonomy in exchange for state-level support.

Despite these many internal and external challenges, the People’s Anti- Imperialist Delegation could boast of both real and symbolic accomplishments upon its return. At a time when the party was on defensive against police and FBI pressure in the United States, the delegation allowed the Panthers the opportunity to go on the offensive internationally, flouting the U.S. ban on travel to communist nations and burnishing the party’s internationalist credentials for both a foreign and domestic audience. The trip also deeply affected many of the individuals involved. For all the problems she faced in dealing with Cleaver, Elaine Brown celebrated the voyage as “the first time in … our own lives we were treated as human beings and as respected members of the human race.”23 Although Brown’s enthusiasm was undoubtedly influenced by the need to portray the party’s new allies in a positive light, Judy Wu’s interviews confirmed that many members of the delegation found the trip to genuinely emotionally and intellectually fulfilling, inspiring them to return dedicated to continuing service in pursuit of an American revolution that they believed to be imminent.24 Cleaver and the BPP also derived more tangible benefits from the trip, most notably in shoring up support for Panther operations in Algeria. Nowhere was this clearer than in the formal opening of the headquarters of the international section of the Black Panther Party in Algiers upon the return of the delegation. At a reception on September 13, 1970, held in a whitewashed, two-story villa in the El Biar neighborhood that had formerly belonged to the NLF, delegates from the embassies of the DPRK, China, and the PRG joined dignitaries from several African nations and high-ranking members of the Algerian government to toast Cleaver and the Panthers. Along with the building came official recognition as a resistance movement from the Algerian government, a regular stipend for expenses, entrance and exit visas for party members, identity cards, and access to telexes and telephones for international communication with both the BPP headquarters in Oakland and the party’s allies in Asia and Europe.25 Cleaver’s Asian strategy and the alliances he had forged on his two international trips were instrumental in facilitating this accomplishment and vital in ensuring the international section’s continued operations in Algiers.

The establishment of the international section of the BPP as an officially accredited revolutionary movement in Algiers was a major milestone, not only in the development of the Panthers but also in the history of African American internationalism. For all the efforts of U.S.-based activists from Martin R. Delany to W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Vicki Garvin, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, the international section was the first time that black American activists had established an independent, officially recognized, institutional presence outside the United States. Recognition from the Algerian government was not only symbolically important but also facilitated Cleaver’s efforts to build connections with other governments and movements while supporting the growing contingent of Panther exiles in Algiers. As law enforcement in the United States continued to crack down on BPP chapters across the country, a number of party members fled to join Cleaver’s operation. Field Marshall Donald Cox, Pete and Charlotte O’Neal from the Kansas City BPP chapter, and Larry Mack, Sekou Odinga, Michael Tabor, and Richard Moore (later Dhoruba bin Wahad) from the New York branch, along with several of their family members, joined the international section in 1970–71. Eventually the group grew to encompass almost thirty people spread across the headquarters villa and several apartments throughout the city.26

As the international section continued to grow in 1970–71, maintaining and supporting its operations proved to be as challenging as the path to formal recognition. Though willing to grant the section the diplomatic courtesies it accorded to other resistance movements, the government of President Boumédiène balked at providing the military training facilities that Cleaver had long sought in order to build a guerrilla army to take the fight back to Babylon.27 Moreover, the Panthers with their (in Cleaver’s words) “fast cars, Russian machine guns, and plenty of fresh-air macho,” consistently tested the patience of the Algerian government and its secret police force. Factors ranging from drug use to the style of dress preferred by some female members of the delegation and the international section’s high telex bills led to friction with local authorities. This was exacerbated by the fact that the stipend provided by the government was insufficient to support the daily needs of Cleaver’s ambitious operations in exile. As a result, party members in Algiers resorted to “hustling,” including fencing stolen passports, visas, and even cars in order to make ends meet, activities that did little to endear the Panthers to their sometimes reluctant host.28 With the ever-present threat that the Algerian government might ditch the Panthers in order to facilitate economic connections with the United States, the international section remained reliant on continued interventions by its Asian allies. Cleaver later reflected that “the Algerian government in its crooked dagger style of rubbing people out, very nearly reached us, and would have, had it not been for the Vietnamese and the North Koreans.”29 While leveraging the support of revolutionary governments in Asia to pressure the revolutionary government in Algiers worked in the short term, it left Cleaver and the international section dependent on allies over whom they had no control and highly vulnerable to changes in the Cold War environment.

At the same time as he had to contend with the Algerian government and maintain the favor of his allies in the DPRK and Vietnam, Cleaver also struggled with problems inside the international section and the BPP. Nothing in his experience as author, activist, and revolutionary had prepared him for the day-to-day logistical challenges of housing, feeding, and caring for over twenty people, including several young children, while simultaneously carrying out delicate international diplomacy and plotting guerrilla war. At times Cleaver sounded like a frustrated middle manager as he lamented the messy state of the headquarters villa and the failure to empty trash cans in a timely fashion, musing, “Maybe we need a suggestion box in this motherfucker, maybe that’ll solve the problem.”30 Not surprisingly, given the hothouse atmosphere of exile in Algiers, maintaining party discipline was more challenging than taking out the trash. There were persistent though never proven rumors that Eldridge had murdered one of the members of the international section, Clinton Rahim Smith, after discovering that he had had an affair with Kathleen Cleaver.31 Both Cleavers denied these allegations, but privately Kathleen blasted her husband for his own extramarital activities as well as for physically abusing her on multiple occasions.32

Problems in maintaining internal cohesion grew even worse with the arrival of individuals with little direct connection to the BPP and sometimes a tenuous grasp of reality. LSD guru Timothy Leary had been serving a time at a minimum-security prison for drug offenses when he escaped in September 1970 and subsequently made his way to Algeria with help from allies in the Weather Underground. The international section agreed (with Huey Newton’s approval) to house Leary and his wife Rosemary in exile, but the impish “pope of dope” was a poor fit for the Panthers and their nascent international organization.33 Leary’s insistence on proselytizing the joys of acid while in Algiers, aided by a stash of over one thousand tabs of “Orange Sunshine” smuggled over by supporters from the United States, brought additional unwanted attention from local authorities. The last straw was apparently his efforts to dose members of the Algerian secret police, whom he had invited to a party. Cleaver responded by placing Leary and his wife under house arrest, an action he described as a “revolutionary bust,” while publicly decrying the negative impact of drug culture on the revolution.34 These internal problems in Algiers, which would later grow with the arrival of hijackers who had only tenuous connections to the BPP, were compounded by increasing tension with the leaders of the Oakland-based Panthers.

Huey Newton and “Revolutionary Intercommunalism”

While the minister of information and his crew of exiles pursued state-level allies in Asia and plotted urban guerrilla warfare in the United States, the Oakland Panthers and many of the other U.S. chapters moved away from violent confrontations and Cold War politics in favor of local community service programs in 1969–70. The roots of this growing divide went back as far as the internal dispute over Cleaver’s botched ambush of the OPD in April 1968. The differences grew in the wake of Cleaver’s flight from the United States, as those left behind struggled to deal with the daily challenges posed by police repression and the party’s mounting legal woes. Prior to 1971, several factors prevented the Oakland and Algiers contingents from formally splitting. The first was that Panther leaders in the United States had yet to develop an ideological alternative to the Cold War internationalism that Cleaver pushed as part of his Asian strategy. Although the community-focused work of the U.S. party increasingly clashed with the international section’s emphasis on guerrilla warfare and the nuances of Juche and Korean reunification, those running the party in Oakland struggled to formulate a way to incorporate this new approach into a coherent ideological vision for black liberation. Newton and Seale had drawn heavily on the anticolonial analysis and militant rhetoric of Fanon, Mao, and Che Guevara in founding the party, and the Panthers had identified with the Vietnamese struggle from the very beginning. Ideologically repositioning the party as a domestic community service organization was a delicate task, even without Cleaver waving the banner of revolution and international proletarian solidarity from Algiers. This challenge was compounded by the fact that both Newton and Seale (convicted of charges stemming from his role in the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago) were imprisoned for much of 1969–70. In their absence, there was no BPP leader with the stature to publicly challenge Cleaver. As the ranking Panther leader in the United States not behind bars, Chief of Staff David Hilliard had his hands full managing the party’s daily operations and was ill prepared to take on the high-profile Cleaver and his new allies. The result was an uneasy truce between Oakland and Algiers, with the two factions moving in different directions while publicly maintaining a unified front.

Huey Newton’s release from prison on August 5, 1970, radically shifted the balance of power within the party’s wings. Newton initially appeared to endorse Cleaver’s strategy of Cold War internationalism and anticolonial violence. On the day of his release he held a press conference at which he offered Black Panther volunteers to the resistance forces in South Vietnam. Shortly afterward he formalized this offer in a letter to the NLF and PRG, promising “an undetermined number of troops to assist you in your fight against American imperialism.” In offering Panthers to fight in Vietnam, he invoked “the spirit of international revolutionary solidarity” as well as the party’s “obligation to … advance Marxism-Leninism.” Although the Vietnamese politely declined, Newton’s decision to “offer these troops in recognition of the necessity for international alliances to deal with this problem [of U.S. imperialism],” seemed a straightforward endorsement of Cleaver’s strategy of Cold War alliance building in Asia.35 In an interview a week after his release, Newton followed up these statements by reasserting that “[o]ur program is armed struggle” and that “[w]e have hooked up with the people who are rising up all over the world with arms, because we feel that only with the power of the gun will the bourgeoisie be destroyed and the world transformed.” Asked about the BPP’s influences, he followed Cleaver in invoking “Fidel and Che, Ho Chi Minh and Mao and Kim Il Sung, but also all the guerrilla bands that have been operating in Mozambique and Angola, and the Palestinian guerrillas who are fighting for a socialist world.”36 Newton also bolstered his revolutionary credentials by winning the support of George Jackson, a California convict who had become politicized behind bars and who declared that “[t]he people of the U.S. are held in the throes of a form of colonialism” and that “[t]here is no case of successful liberation without violence.”37 Jackson’s case attracted even greater attention when his younger brother Jonathan was killed in a shootout at the Marin County Courthouse in August 1970 in a failed bid to win his freedom. Vowing to continue the struggle from jail, George Jackson aligned himself with the BPP and founded the San Quentin branch of the party. At a time when the national leadership of the party was moving toward less confrontational approaches centered around community service, the alliance with Jackson and his followers helped inoculate Newton against charges that the Panthers had abandoned their commitment to revolution by any means necessary.38

Even as he publicly supported Jackson, Cleaver, the international section, and the Asian strategy, Newton was already in the process of steering the Panthers in a new direction at the time of his release from prison. While still behind bars, Newton had privately worried that the attention accorded to Cleaver’s Asian allies in the Black Panther was alienating the party from its core supporters in the United States. “Who are we selling papers to?” he complained in a tape sent from prison to Hilliard, “the black community, or the Chinese or the Koreans?” At Newton’s behest, the Panther newspaper changed its format in November 1969, consigning international news to a separate section at the end of the paper.39 This seemingly cosmetic change was in fact quite significant, signaling a retreat from Cleaver’s emphasis on intertwining Third World internationalism and Cold War geopolitics with the daily struggles of urban black America. International developments were repositioned as related to, but separate from, the party’s work in the United States. At the same time, Newton endorsed a series of practical measures that gradually repositioned the Panthers as more locally focused and reform-oriented. In addition to the various survival programs, the party organized a series of dispersed National Committees to Combat Fascism (NCCF) to lobby for community control of the police. This initiative was consistent with the BPP’s increasing emphasis on tackling practical issues such as police brutality through community action at the local level rather than waiting for a revolution that might never come or depending on international allies thousands of miles away.40 As early as September 1970, a month after Newton’s release from prison, a CIA report on Newton’s address to the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention (RPCC) in Philadelphia observed that “the Panther’s undisputed No. 1 leader and martyr, was considerable more moderate in his address, to the gathering.”41 The biggest changes, however, came in the fall of 1970 as Newton went public with a new vision for the Panthers that directly challenged Cleaver’s Cold War internationalism and emphasis on anticolonial violence.

During an address at Boston College on November 18, 1970, Newton introduced his concept of intercommunalism. While he had briefly alluded to this new analysis of the party’s international relations at a speech in September, the Boston College appearance represented the first time that the party’s cofounder and newly dubbed “supreme commander” explained it in depth to a public audience.42 The central precept, which Newton continued to expand upon in the months that followed, was that the United States was not only an empire but also one so powerful and far-reaching that it had fundamentally changed everything. The difference between the contemporary U.S. empire and previous empires, such as that of the Romans, was “that other nations were able to exist external to and independent of the Roman Empire because their means of exploration, conquest, and control were all relatively limited.” In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the combination of technology, particularly in transportation and mass media, with the unprecedented military and financial power wielded by the United States on behalf of corporate capitalism had so permeated the rest of the world that it had undermined the very notion of the nation-state. Thus, “when we say ‘empire’ today, we mean precisely what we say. An empire is a nation-state that has transformed itself into a power controlling all the world’s lands and people.”43 The result was that for the rest of the world “nationhood did not exist, because they did not have the criteria for nationhood. Because their self-determination was destroyed, because their economic determination was destroyed, because their cultural determination was transformed.”44 In place of a collection of jostling nation-states was a single, hegemonic world system controlled directly or indirectly by powerful capitalist interests in the United States.

Following from Newton’s suppositions about the nature of the U.S. empire were several prescriptions for those movements seeking to resist it. First, he concluded that traditional anticolonialism, which aimed at the restoration of nation-states free from imperial domination, was no longer a viable strategy. “If a people is colonized,” Newton explained, “it must be possible for them to decolonize and become what they formerly were.”

The BPP leader was frank in acknowledging that this new thesis required overturning some of the fundamental assumptions upon which the party had been built. In announcing intercommunalism, he simultaneously renounced the colonial analysis of black America that had its roots in the writings of Harold Cruse, had been further developed by RAM in the early 1960s, and had been a foundational element of the BPP’s philosophy in the latter half of that decade. Acknowledging that “[w]e used to call ourselves before we became conscious, a dispersed collection of colonies here in North America,” Newton conceded that the party’s critics had been correct all along in asserting that “you’re not a nation, you’re a community.” And if it no longer made sense to think of black Americans as a colonized people or a “nation within a nation,” it was equally futile to pursue international alliances premised on the primacy of the nation-state as the foundational unit of world politics. “We are no longer internationalists,” Newton declared in his Boston College speech. “We’re not afraid about that.”46

In place of anticolonial internationalism, Newton offered “revolutionary intercommunalism” to meet the changed circumstances confronting oppressed people in the late twentieth century. In a dialectical analysis drawing on Marx and Hegel, Newton suggested that just as capitalism had replaced feudalism, “the communications revolution, combined with the expansive domination of the American empire,” had replaced the old system of nation-states with a “global village.”47 It was no more possible—or desirable—to return to the days of isolated nation-states than it was to return to feudalism. Rather, the goal of any revolutionary movement should be to replace “reactionary Intercommunalism,” which ordered the world system around the principle of profit for a handful of corporate enterprises, with a similarly globalized system “that would allow the people of the world to develop a culture that is essentially human and would nurture those things that would allow the people to resolve contradictions in a way that would not cause the mutual slaughter of all of us.”48 Just as capitalism had created the possibility of socialism, the material and technological developments that made possible “reactionary Intercommunalism” created the opportunity for a more utopian “revolutionary Intercommunalism” that avoided the worst feature of both nationalism and capitalism by binding the world’s people together regardless of color, creed, culture, or nationality. In striving to reach this goal, the central organizing unit was not the nation (or proto-nation) but the community: “a small unit with a comprehensive collection of institutions that exist to serve a small group of people.”49 As each community, whether it be black Americans, Asian Americans, or those struggling for freedom in the nations of the Third World, achieved control over its own local institutions it would improve the lives of its residents while laying the groundwork for a “universal identity that extends beyond family, tribe, or nation.”50

Newton’s intercommunalism posed obvious questions about the future operations of the BPP. If the Panthers were “no longer internationalists” and no longer committed to a guerrilla war for national liberation (as such a venture was no longer tenable in light of the end of nation-states as effective units), what was to be the party’s role going forward? Newton provided two answers to this question. First, the BPP, as a vanguard organization, would educate the masses about the new realities of reactionary intercommunalism and the nature of the U.S. empire in order to prepare them for the struggles to come. “The primary concern of the Black Panther Party,” he declared, “is to lift the level of consciousness of the people through theory and practice to the point where they will see exactly what is controlling them and what is oppressing them, and therefore see exactly what has to be done—or at least what the first step is.”51 Second, while promoting the growth of a mass consciousness in opposition to empire, the BPP would ensure the survival of the black community in the United States through its various service programs. If the world was, as Newton posited, a collection of dispersed communities rather than discrete nations, then it made sense to focus the party’s efforts on its own local community while preparing to link with others around the world engaging in similar efforts. “[U]ntil such time that we can achieve … total transformation,” Newton declared, “we must exist. In order to exist, we must survive, so, therefore, we need a survival kit.” Building on the party’s existing community programs, he repositioned the notion of self-defense as something more than “patrolling the pigs” or plotting guerrilla warfare:

In this analysis, the act of feeding schoolchildren or providing free health care to senior citizens was just as revolutionary and infinitely more practical and effective than standing up to the OPD with a loaded shotgun. “The gun itself is not necessarily revolutionary,” as Newton explained, “because the fascists carry guns—in fact they have more guns.”53

As an intellectual contribution to understanding transnational capitalism and its discontents in the late twentieth century, intercommunalism has attracted praise from a number of scholars.54 While Newton undoubtedly exaggerated the extent to which transnational capitalism had entirely replaced nationalism as the driving force in world affairs, his analysis was prescient in looking beyond both the Cold War and decolonization while anticipating the rise of neoliberal globalization in the decades to come. President Richard Nixon’s dramatic bid to open relations with China, the rise of Soviet-American détente, the crisis of the U.S.-led Bretton Woods international monetary system in the early 1970s, the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, and the decline of the Third World as an effective political construct all seemed to conform to Newton’s predictions about the shifting nature of the world system. In adapting Marxism to fit the changed circumstances of late-twentieth-century U.S. hegemony, he anticipated the works of scholars such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose 2000 book Empire shared much in common with Newton’s intercommunalism. “We can’t go back to our mother’s womb, nor can we go back to 1917,” Newton declared. Intercommunalism was a creative attempt to apply the practical lessons he had learned with the BPP to a searching analysis that retained the dialectical spirit of Marxism while acknowledging its limitations in grappling with a world fundamentally remade by capitalism in the nearly one hundred years since Marx’s death.55 In its focus on transnational organizing at the community level, intercommunalism also offered the possibility of organizing for liberation free from entanglements with either a hopelessly corrupt U.S. state apparatus or foreign governments that, however well meaning, had little understanding of the history and circumstances facing black Americans.

Intercommunalism was also a tactical masterstroke in its ability to provide an ideological justification for the shift in party operations to play to the Panthers’ practical strengths while steering away from activities that had proved for the most part counterproductive, at least in the United States. The BPP had always excelled in its ability to convey complicated concepts such as colonialism, institutionalized white supremacy, and Third World internationalism in a fashion accessible to the brothers and sisters on the block, whether in the form of the party’s early armed patrols or in the anticolonial vernacular on display in the artwork of Emory Douglas and in the pages of the Black Panther. And while of more recent vintage, the BPP’s survival programs had proven to be popular and effective at the local level.56 The party’s sporadic (and Pyrrhic) attempts at guerrilla action, meanwhile, had showed no signs of precipitating a revolution that would unseat the U.S. government. As Newton explained it, “we’ll reach the shore when the people reach the level of consciousness to change the society, and therefore change the world. Until that time… . it is very necessary to stop just talking about revolution, because you might not be able to participate; you might not be able to participate, if you are wiped out beforehand.”57 Similarly, while Cleaver’s international alliances had brought publicity to the Panthers and help underwrite the existence of the international section in Algiers, they had had little tangible impact on the day-to-day operations of the party in the United States. Whatever one made of the “genius” of Kim Il-sung, from the perspective of the Oakland-based leadership neither the Koreans nor any of Cleaver’s Asian allies were in an immediate position to protect the Panthers from police harassment or improve the daily life of black Americans.

For all of its theoretical and practical merits, intercommunalism suffered from a number of problems and contradictions at its inception. The biggest unanswered questions centered on its practical implantation. Specifically, given the tremendous economic and military power wielded by the U.S. empire, how could a loosely bound collection of dispersed communities ever hope to overthrow it in order to advance to the utopian vision of revolutionary intercommunalism outlined by Newton? Cleaver’s North American Liberation Front had the virtue of at least offering a clear plan for affecting change: urban guerrilla warfare against the supposed soft underbelly of U.S. capitalism, followed by the overthrow of the federal government with aid from sympathetic foreign government and fellow guerrillas around the world. Newton, in contrast, focused on education and community survival programs in part as a way of deferring the difficult question of how, exactly, to enact large-scale, revolutionary change in the face of such powerful resistance. Even if successful at the local level, what good would it do to control a single community, whether in Oakland or Vietnam, so long as the United States maintained a hegemonic grip over the world system through a combination of military and financial might? As Newton himself noted, “A community evolves around a greater structure that we usually call the state and the state has certain control over the community.”58 This was a problem that had long vexed black nationalist movements in the United States, and Newton had little to offer in response other than vague notions of cooperation between these dispersed communities to undermine reactionary intercommunalism from within. Newton’s vision of a decentralized, transnational anti-imperialist movement rooted in local grassroots activism was attractive to the extent that it avoided the kind of compromising entanglements and power imbalances that characterized Cleaver’s Cold War internationalism. In the short term, however, intercommunalism entailed turning away from the tenuous but nevertheless real alliances that the party had built in Asia with little in the way of a practical replacement. As New York Panther Assata Shakur remarked, “The problem [with intercommunalism] was that somebody had forgotten to tell these oppressed communities that they were no longer nations.”59

The theoretical challenges posed by intercommunalism were compounded by Newton’s difficulties in explaining this new theory to an often confused and reluctant rank and file. Unlike figures such as Cleaver, Bobby Seale, or Elaine Brown, Newton had never been a particularly dynamic or comfortable public speaker. His leadership in the early days of the party had relied instead on individual acts of bravery and his ability to work well in small group situations to rally a select core of members.60 Upon his release from prison, Newton confronted the daunting task of repositioning a party that had dozens of chapters spread around the United States as well as legions of supporters not directly affiliated with the Panthers, many of whom saw the minister of defense as a one-dimensional icon of black manhood and anticolonial violence. Even staunch party loyalists were shocked when Newton took the stage to deliver, in a reedy voice, dense addresses that were short on rhetorical bombast and long on dialectical materialism. Shakur recalled that “almost no one understood Huey’s long speeches explaining intercommunalism,” saying that “he had a kind of high-pitched monotonous voice and his rambling for three hours about the negation of the negation was sheer disaster.”61 Philadelphia Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal agreed, writing, “Huey, [who] we all would have died for in a heartbeat, was not a good public speaker.”62 It did not help that his message of abandoning traditional anticolonialism and international alliances clashed dramatically with long-held BPP positions. Newton struggled mightily to try to convey the complexities of intercommunalism, admitting ruefully in 1971, “So far I haven’t been able to do it well enough to keep from being booed off the stage.”63 Given that education was one of the pillars of his new strategy, Newton’s inability to convince his own closest allies was troubling. Hilliard observed that party members were “impatient and dismissive of Huey’s new theory,” and even sympathetic scholars have agreed that intercommunalism was generally ignored or rejected by the Panther rank and file.64

In prioritizing education and the survival programs while downplaying talk of immediate revolution and alliances with nation-states, Newton’s intercommunalism provided the ideological basis for a break with Cleaver and his operations in Algeria. Tied to this shift were more subtle changes in the way that party leaders understood and articulated gender and sexuality, which in turn paved the way for an alternative approach to both domestic and international operations. Shortly after his release from prison, Newton published an article in the Black Panther calling on party members to embrace feminism and gay rights. Acknowledging the existence of patriarchy, misogyny, and homophobia within party, Newton observed that “we want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the woman or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.” The time had come, however, to give up these “insecurities” and “hang-ups” in order to establish a “revolutionary value system.” In practice this meant forming “a working coalition with the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements.” It also required changing the way party members thought and behaved, including forsaking the use of homophobic slur such as “faggot” and “punk” (the latter term being one oft-employed by Cleaver).65 Within the party itself, Panther women, including Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown, occupied increasingly important roles within the national leadership in the early 1970s. When combined with intercommunalism and its emphasis on transnational community building, the BPP’s new position on gender and sexuality constituted a direct challenge to the link between national liberation, armed struggle, and manhood that characterized the early years of the party and continued to dominate Cleaver’s operations in exile. While Cleaver sought “to stand up as black men inside of Babylon and to give the pigs … [a] taste of their own medicine,” the U.S.-based Panthers were beginning to explore alternate notions of liberation and transnational cooperation less rooted in the male politics of violence.66

The Split in the Party

Ironically, given intercommunalism’s emphasis on an interconnected global village, the distance between Algiers and Oakland and the difficulty of coordinating activities via sporadic long-distance phone calls initially helped prevent a direct clash between Newton and Cleaver and their increasingly divergent approaches to black liberation. Cleaver publicly endorsed the party’s new approach by renaming his operation the “Intercommunal Section” in deference to Newton’s wishes.67 Privately, however, the Algiers contingent found intercommunalism to be “gibberish” fueled by Newton’s “cult of personality.” Kathleen Cleaver told me that “we changed [the name] to be disciplined and accepting but it was very awkward.”

In practice, Cleaver continued to pursue the same combination of state-level Cold War alliances and commitment to guerrilla warfare that had marked his operations in Algiers prior to Newton’s release. Free from outside interference, it is conceivable that the domestic and international wings of the BPP could have worked out a way to coexist or even operate in complementary fashion despite their many differences. The PLO, with whom Cleaver regularly interacted in Algiers, offered an example of a contemporary liberation group with a dispersed base that often disagreed on both tactical and strategic matters but remained functional in spite of this. Any hopes of replicating this example, however, were doomed by the efforts of the U.S. government.

With a network of informants within the party and telephone taps intercepting communications between Oakland and Algiers, the FBI (with help from the CIA’s MH/CHAOS program) was well positioned to exploit the divide between the Newton-led Panthers in the United States and the Cleaver’s international section.69 Beginning in March 1970, FBI agents forged letters designed to widen the rift between Newton and Cleaver and convince each man that the other was plotting against him. After dispatching these letters to their intended targets, FBI agents then eavesdropped on the ensuing communications within the party that they provoked, observing with pleasure on February 25, 1971, that “the fortunes of the BPP are at a low ebb.”70 Kathleen Cleaver later recalled that upon receiving the letters, “We did not know who to believe about what, so the general effect, not only of the letter but the whole situation in which the letters were part was creating uncertainty. It was a very bizarre feeling.”71 The differences between Oakland and Algiers were real and might well have eventually led to a break even without outside intervention. The FBI’s efforts, however, forced the issue and escalated the stakes such that when the split did finally take place it spilled over into violence between the two factions.

Privately Cleaver lamented in a December 1970 letter to Newton that “we are being blocked, by you, because of your refusal or failure to [communicate] with us[,] to inform us,” pleading with Newton to continue printing material from his revolutionary Asian allies.72 The breaking point finally arrived on February 26, one day after the FBI’s gleeful report on the BPP’s internal problems. The precipitating factor was Newton’s decision to purge some of the party’s most militant advocates of guerrilla warfare. Purges were not new, as the dramatic rise in membership and the creation of local branches across the United States starting in 1968 had forced Panthers leaders to periodically expel members for offenses such as being drunk on duty or on suspicion of being an informant.73 In early 1971, however, Newton specifically targeted Panthers either involved with or advocating for underground guerrilla campaigns. In January he expelled Geronimo Pratt (later ji-Jaga), a decorated Vietnam veteran who had put his military training to use in organizing the defense of the Los Angeles chapter of the Panthers against attacks by the LAPD. In the wake of a December 1969 gun battle with police who were attempting to raid the Panthers’ L.A. headquarters, Pratt went underground on instructions from the BPP’s Central Committee. Sent to the American South, his primary task was to work with other members of the underground to organize a military force that would serve as the clandestine military wing of the BPP.74 By 1971, however, this operation no longer fit into Newton’s vision for the Panthers and threatened his efforts to reposition the party. Given the paranoia deliberately stoked by COINTELPRO, Newton was also likely concerned about the existence within the BPP of an underground army over which he had little control.

After Pratt was arrested in Dallas in 1970 and charged with a 1968 murder in Santa Monica, Newton publicly purged him and several of his closest comrades from the party, effectively cutting off the nascent underground operation. One month later, Newton expelled the so-called Panther 21, a group of New York City BPP members who were on trial for conspiracy to bomb several New York City Police Department stations. Though the national party had initially defended the Panther 21, their public endorsement of the Weather Underground’s bombing campaign, combined with an implicit criticism of the more reformist direction coming out of Oakland, brought Newton’s ire down upon the New York chapter. When several of the Panther 21 skipped bail and went underground in early February rather than facing trial, Newton responded by publicly purging the entire group.75 Pratt and many of the New York Panthers had been close to Cleaver and shared his conviction that armed struggle in the United States was both necessary and inevitable. Cleaver had also corresponded privately with members of the Weather Underground and defended them publicly, declaring that “the criticism of the Weathermen that has come to my attention seems to me to be reactionary, invalid and valuable only to the enemy.” This was accompanied by a pointed injunction—“Fuck all those who block the revolution with rhetoric—revolutionary rhetoric or counterrevolutionary rhetoric”—which constituted a thinly veiled attack on the more reformist elements within the BPP. Cleaver was thus undoubtedly unnerved by Newton’s decision to purge the Panther 21 for voicing similar sentiments.76

Combined with the differing ideological visions coming out of Oakland and Algeria and the intra-party paranoia stoked by the FBI’s covert letter-writing campaign, the purge tipped the delicate balance that held together the national and international wings of the BPP. In an ill-fated attempt to demonstrate party unity, Newton and Cleaver talked live by telephone on a local Bay Area morning television program on February 26, 1971. Cleaver surprised the Panther leader by using the venue to attack the recent purge, demand the dismissal of David Hilliard, and lament that the BPP was “falling apart.”77 After the tense on-air conversation concluded, a furious Newton stormed out of the studio and placed a private call to Algiers in which he formally expelled Cleaver and the entire international section from the BPP. In the weeks that followed, the Black Panther, which remained under Newton’s control, published a series of articles attacking Eldridge and claiming that he was holding Kathleen Cleaver prisoner in Algiers. Newton followed with a long essay in April lamenting that Cleaver’s fixation on the gun and guerrilla warfare had “influenced us to isolate ourselves from the Black community, so that it was war between the oppressor and the Black Panther Party, not war between the oppressor and the oppressed community.” With Cleaver gone, however, “we are now free to move toward the building of a community structure which will become a true voice of the people, promoting their interests in many ways.”78

Behind the scenes, Newton sought to neutralize Cleaver’s operation in Algeria. Recognizing that Cleaver was dependent on the continued support of his nation-state partners, particularly those in Asia, Newton warned the exiled minister of information, “I’m going to write the Koreans, I’m going to write the Chinese, and the Algerians to kick you out of our embassy.”79 The U.S. Panther leadership soon followed up on this threat with letters to Fidel Castro, Kim Il-sung, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Pham Van Dong, and others, condemning “the dangerously infantile leftist practices of Mr. Eldridge Cleaver” and warning that he and his allies in Algeria “no longer represent the Black Panther Party.”80 The most immediate consequences of the split, however, were felt within the United States, as Panther members and chapters were forced to pick sides between the Newton and Cleaver factions. While the national leadership of the BPP maintained control over the party’s infrastructure, most notably the Black Panther, as well as retaining at least nominal oversight of the remaining local chapters, Cleaver and the international section maintained a strong base of support among Panthers in New York, New Jersey, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.81

Partisans on each side engaged in rhetorical as well as real violence in the months after the split, including at least two murders (Robert Webb of the Cleaver-aligned New York City Panthers and Robert Napier, distribution manager for the Black Panther).82 “For a period,” recalled San Francisco Panther (and Cleaver supporter) Nuh Washington, “our attention was taken away from the people as we concentrated on former comrades who were viewed as more serious threats than our enemies.”

Even more destructive to the long-term future of the party than sporadic violence unleashed by the split was the widespread sense of fear and disillusionment among the rank and file that followed. As one Panther member put it, “The ideological split between Huey and Eldridge scared me more than the police ever could.”84 Philadelphia Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal was blunter, declaring:

As sectarian strife roiled the BPP in the months that followed, many Panthers drifted away from the party, and by some accounts as many as 40 percent of members left.86 Some founded their own local organizations, such as the Black United Liberation Front (BULF) in Philadelphia and the Sons of Malcolm in Kansas City, while others joined existing community groups or new organizations such as the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), entered into mainstream politics, or simply returned to “civilian” life.87

Amidst the chaos unleashed by the BPP’s fragmentation and the on-going FBI and police efforts to finish off the Panthers, three groups offering contrasting interpretations of the party’s original mandate stood out as challengers on the national and international stage during the early 1970s. Under Newton and then Elaine Brown, the BPP kept its name but closed its regional chapters and consolidated the remaining members as part of a “Base of Operations” strategy to seize political and economic control over the city of Oakland. Although Newton traveled to China, Cuba, and the Middle East in the ensuing decade, the post-1971 BPP downplayed international alliances in favor of building one spoke of a larger transnational hub through its local operations in the Bay Area. Cleaver and the remnants of the international section, meanwhile, pursued an array of international and transnational strategies for keeping alive their dream of a revolution that would overthrow the government of the United States. After exploring connections with socialist governments in Africa, Cleaver eventually embraced the example set by Palestinian Black September guerrillas and their strategy of transnational anticolonial violence. A third group, the Black Liberation Army (BLA) emerged from the remnants of the BPP’s underground wing in the United States. Although the BLA shared Cleaver’s commitment to revolutionary violence and at times collaborated with the exiles in Algiers, in practice its small, clandestine cells focused more on directly applying the lessons of figures such as Carlos Marighella (a Brazilian revolutionary and author of the Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla) in the United States rather than working on cultivating international or transnational connections.

For all the disastrous human consequences that followed in its wake, one positive result of the split was that it afforded the opportunity for the resulting splinter groups to formulate their approaches to black liberation free from the burden of having to balance the loosely wound coalition that had characterized the party prior to the break. While Newton challenged Cleaver by declaring that “we’ll battle like two bulls, we’ll lock horns,” the 1970s saw many Panthers and ex-Panthers moving beyond the macho posturing and male-dominated leadership that characterized much of the party’s early history.88 Both the BPP and the BLA featured women in important leadership positions during this period, while Kathleen Cleaver and Denise Oliver played crucial roles in keeping what was left of the international section and its operations afloat. Although in retrospect it seems clear that the BPP and its splinter groups were doomed and would not last out the decade, the years following the Newton-Cleaver break saw leaders in Algiers, Oakland, and the black underground offering innovative practical and ideological improvisations as they attempted to grapple with the consequences of the split, ongoing government repression, and the changing international and domestic climate of the détente era.