Back to Oakland: The “Base of Operation” Plan

Huey Newton beat Richard Nixon to China by five months, but the race to shape the Cold War in Asia was already over by the time that the Panthers’ cofounder touched down in Beijing. Taking advantage of an invitation proffered shortly after his release from prison, Newton, Elaine Brown, and a small delegation of Panthers arrived in China for a ten-day tour in September 1971.3 On the surface, Newton’s visit, which included audiences with Premier Zhou Enlai, seemed to portend a return to the glory days of the Panthers’ internationalism. In fact, however, the trip served largely as a form of revolutionary theater, as both the Chinese government and the Panthers publicly burnished their radical credentials in the midst of pivoting toward more accommodationist positions with respect to the United States. Newton was circumspect in revealing what he had discussed in his meetings with Chinese leaders, noting only, “Premier Chou En-Lai said many things to me … I will not comment on specifics.”4 Whatever was exchanged between the two men, the course that Newton and Brown charted for the Panthers in the aftermath of the trip made it clear that Cold War geopolitics and Third World anticolonialism were no longer important elements of the party’s daily operations.

Whereas BPP leaders had once invoked Mao in support of “picking up the gun,” in 1972 the Chinese leader and his nation served as a justification for entering into mainstream electoral politics. As Elaine Brown explained, “China’s recent entrance into the U.N. was neither contradictory to China’s goal of toppling U.S. imperialism nor an abnegation of revolutionary principles… . It was a tactic, Huey concluded, that offered us a great example. Those were the roots of Huey’s new idea: to have Panthers run for political office.”5 Flores Alexander Forbes, a Southern California Panther who became a key member of the party’s inner circle in the 1970s, recalled party leaders justifying the focus on local politics in Oakland as “a plan à la Mao’s Long March” that would “rejuvenate our Party, which had suffered so much from being under attack by the U.S. government and local police agencies.”6 An article published in the Black Panther in April 1972 was even more explicit in declaring that foreign connections were no substitute for local political organizing. “We cannot blame the Communist Party of China and take our frustrations out on China,” the author declared, “because we have been delinquent and negligent in carrying out our own revolution.”

Starting in June 1972, Newton and the Panthers unveiled a new strategy that put this logic into practice in the streets of Oakland.

Two elements informed the “Base of Operation” plan. The first was a directive to close down all Panther offices and chapters outside of Oakland. Those who remained loyal to the party were to pack up and move to California, where they would join the national leaders in building a single, powerful BPP organization in the East Bay. As would be expected, this directive was not always well received by the local Panther chapters that had sprung up around the country, and many chose to leave the party rather than move to Oakland.8 For Newton, however, the benefits of centralization outweighed the loss of members. The BPP’s cofounder had gone behind bars in October 1967 as leader of a small crew of trusted neighborhood friends and allies, many of whom he had known since grade school. He emerged in August 1970 as the nominal head of a sprawling national and international organization staffed by thousands of members he had never met. Newton had never been entirely comfortable overseeing such a large operation, and the internal strife unleashed by COINTELPRO and the split with Cleaver made him even more wary of depending on a dispersed base of supporters over whom he had no control. Ordering Panther members to move to Oakland would weed out the disloyal or unmotivated and concentrate those who remained in one location where party leaders could more easily oversee their operations. Increased efficiency would compensate for the loss in raw numbers, as the remaining loyalists would now be applying all of their energies to a single goal in Oakland. As Forbes described it, “[Newton] believed we would never be effective until we knew one another and worked around one another implementing a common program and agenda.”9

As the birthplace of the Panthers, home to its national headquarters, and familiar turf for Newton, Oakland was an easy choice as the party’s base of operations. However, party leaders also offered another set of explanations in explaining this decision to the rank and file. Unlike other cities where black activists had attempted to win control of municipal services, Oakland was not a once-great manufacturing city shattered by deindustrialization. As Brown explained it:

The Port of Oakland, with its modern, containerized, and mechanized facilities, generated $6.5 million per year in revenue in 1970 and represented a rare bright economic bright spot in a region that increasingly saw its industries fleeing from inner cities to suburban areas or overseas. As historian Robert O. Self has chronicled, however, the nature of the port’s financing and operations ensured that little or none of its revenues flowed back into the city of Oakland. The port’s charter required that profits from its operations be reinvested into expansion of the port itself or used to service bonds held by financial institutions and individuals with no direct connection to the East Bay.11 If a Panther-led coalition could seize control of Oakland and renegotiate the port’s charter, it might produce a budget windfall that could bankroll a dramatic increase in city services. Winning local control over municipal facilities could also serve more revolutionary ends. Panther campaign documents declared that “Oakland is a military-industrial city” and noted that its port “was one of the main departure points for militarized cargo during the U.S. War in Vietnam.”12 Under Panther control, the port’s revenues and its operations could be made to serve the people of Oakland rather than serve as profits for capitalists or facilitate the U.S. war machine. Aaron Dixon, a former Seattle Panther who made the journey to Oakland to take part in the new campaign, recalled that “[f]or years, cocaine had flowed freely into [the Port of] Oakland from South America. Now we could put an end to that. Elaine [Brown] used to joke that, instead, ‘Now we’ll have AK-47s coming in.’ ”13

The Oakland BPP’s post-split strategy of withdrawing from the national scene and pursuing change at the local level was in some ways a return to its roots in 1966–67. The way in which the party went about that goal in the 1970s, however, represented a fundamental departure from its previous incarnation. In the early days of the Panthers, Newton and Seale had embraced a colonial model for understanding the position of black Americans. Based on their reading of Fanon and other anticolonial theorists, they concluded that the “brothers on the block” in West Oakland were not citizens denied their rights but colonial subjects whose continuing oppression was an inherent part of the system that governed not only Oakland but also the United States and its entire empire. Working from within that system at either the local or national level was pointless as its very nature was rooted in the infliction of violence on people of color. The confrontational tactic of “patrolling the pigs” was a perfect example of the BPP’s early emphasis on confronting state violence from the outside in. Though Panther candidates had run for local and national offices in 1968, they had done so purely as protest candidates with no effort to actually turn out voters on Election Day. As late as April 1971, Newton declared that while the BPP might endorse candidates, “[w]e will never run for political office.”14 Two years later, however, Bobby Seale was running a serious and well-organized campaign for mayor of Oakland while Elaine Brown sought a seat on the city council.

The second major component of the “Base of Operations” strategy was to abandon direct confrontations with the system in favor of trying to win elections and change it from within. In her memoir, Brown suggested that it was China’s entrance into the United Nations that had inspired Newton to shift the BPP’s effort to working within the U.S. political system.15 The roots of this change, however, well predated Newton’s visit to China. The advent of the “survival programs” in early 1969 in the wake of Cleaver’s botched police ambush and flight to Cuba were indicative of a gradual realization among Panther leaders that the strategy of directly confronting the armed might of the U.S. state was simply untenable for the party in its current state. Although it took another four years to move from community service to electoral politics, this was a logical progression of the party’s evolution in the face of state repression. Having deemed armed revolution to be impractical, if not downright suicidal, but still committed to affecting social change, the BPP’s remaining leaders eventually concluded that engaging with the political system was the only practical course open to the party if it wished to survive and stay relevant. In campaign appearances Brown and Seale directly addressed this issue, acknowledging that the party’s past commitment to revolutionary anticolonialism modeled on the struggles of Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam might lead critics to ask, “What does this [electoral campaign] have to do with guerrilla warfare? And is it true that the Black Panther Party is saying that we don’t have to fight?” In response, Brown bluntly declared that “[t]here’s a practical problem, when you talk about liberating territory, or establishing a provisional revolutionary government.”

In light of the fact that “[t]he Oakland Police Department has got all the guns,” the only viable course of action for “implementing people’s power in just one city” was to do so at the ballot box.16

Nominally, at least, the BPP leaders portrayed the 1973 electoral campaign (and a subsequent run for city council by Brown in 1975) as part of a long-term strategy for revolution across the United States. The party’s ten-point platform, revised in March 1972, remained a radical call for fundamental political and economic change.17 The local focus of the Oakland campaign was explained to the rank and file as the first step in a larger plan. As Forbes later recalled, “The final phase, once Oakland was taken, was to relaunch the revolution and replicate the Oakland success in other major U.S. cities.”18 The way in which the party ran the campaign, however, was indicative of a major practical and ideological shift that made the Panthers look more like the left wing of the Democratic Party than the vanguard of the revolution. A Seale-Brown campaign leaflet was blunt in exhorting voters to “Elect Two Democrats” while claiming that, in Oakland, at least, “It’s Not a Race Problem: It’s a Jobs Problem.”19 The duo’s fourteen-point platform, while undeniably progressive, was centered almost entirely on taxation, spending, and job creation policies that were well in line with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Even their intended requirement that Oakland police and fire officers live within city limits, the sole and somewhat tenuous link to the BPP’s initial efforts to rein in the OPD’s history of abusive treatment of black residents, was pitched in economic terms. The residency requirement, they argued, “would bring over $15 million back into the general economy of the city, and approximately $1 million into the city budget itself.”20

No aspect of the Seale-Brown campaign was more indicative of the BPP’s shifting agenda than their proposal for a “community-owned and operated Multi-Ethnic International Trade and Cultural Center.” Whereas the party had once looked to the Third World for models of revolution and allies in their struggle to overthrow the U.S. government, the proposed trade center was a textbook example of neoliberal globalization. Its goal was not to promote revolutionary anticolonialism but “to greatly stimulate international trade and cultural exchange between Oakland and South American, Asian and African nations … which will produce more jobs as well as increase business.” The notion of revolutionary solidarity among people of color that had once fueled the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular was replaced with a consumerist internationalism that promised “[f]ood centers and restaurants [that] would provide foods from Third World countries, both for preparation at home and for consumption on the site.” The primary enemy that the center would confront was not U.S. imperialism but rather Oakland’s rival across the bay. Seale insisted that “such a Center in Oakland, in full swing, would rival San Francisco as a tourist attraction in the Bay Area and would draw visitors to the East Bay in great numbers.”21

The BPP’s pivot toward mainstream politics in 1973 was successful in some respects. Although they failed to win electoral office, Seale forced incumbent Oakland mayor John Reading into a run-off election, and Brown gained respectable vote totals in both her 1973 and 1975 campaigns.22 With endorsement and help from farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez among others, they were able to mobilize significant popular support for what had at first appeared a quixotic quest.23 While perhaps unable to win office on their own, the Panthers had demonstrated that they could be an important political player on the local scene with the ability to reliably turn out large numbers of black and progressive voters. The BPP, and Elaine Brown in particular, capitalized on this success by cultivating ties with the Democratic Party establishment in California, including Governor Jerry Brown and East Bay congressional representative Ron Dellums (who was given a weekly column in the Panther newspaper). In return for campaigning for California Democrats, they were rewarded with access to state and local leaders. In 1976, Elaine Brown was appointed to serve on the Oakland Council for Economic Development (OCED) and traveled to the Democratic National Convention as a delegate for Jerry Brown. This strategy culminated in 1977 when the BPP helped to elect Lionel Wilson as Oakland’s first black mayor.24 Newton also attempted to extend the party’s influence nationally by cultivating ties to the emerging Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). No longer blasting black politicians as “Uncle Toms,” Newton wrote to Congressman Robert N. C. Nix in 1972, declaring, “We know that Black elected officials, too, must endure a thousand assaults, from both the racist and so-called ‘far-left’ elements of our society.” Though Newton received sympathetic letters from CBC members Charles B. Rangel and John Conyers, the small size and local focus of the Oakland Panthers limited their ability to cut deals with national politicians.25

The “Base of Operations” phase was appealing to many among the Panthers’ battered rank and file. As Forbes explained, “To me, as one of the brothers in the trenches, what Huey wanted to do made a hell of a lot of sense; it made sense to stop fighting the police toe-to-toe. After thirty-plus dead Panthers in two years, shit, I [was] glad somebody up north realized that we could never win a shooting ‘War of Liberation.’ ” In focusing on winning political power at the local level, the BPP leaders “outlined a tangible and viable program that I could really go for, and judging from the other comrade’s [sic] responses, they could, too.”26 When combined with a greatly expanded suite of community service programs, which included everything from medical care to support for prisoners and their families, free clothes and food, cultural programs, and the highly successful Oakland Community School (OCS) under the direction of Ericka Huggins and Donna Howell, the BPP’s new political program provided its members with the ability to make a concrete difference in the lives of local residents without having to fear constant clashes with police.27 Newton even mended fences with the black church, an early target of BPP criticism, declaring that “the church is striving to come back into the favor of the community; so with the church the Black Panther Party will attempt this also.28 “In effect,” recalled Aaron Dixon, “we put our guns in the closet and instead drew upon the talents of our members to develop the programs and strategies for moving the community forward.”29

Along with these practical changes came a gradual shift away from the gendered notions of violence and manhood that had often informed the party’s operations from 1966 to 1970. The move from revolutionary violence and “standing up as a man inside Babylon” to local politics and community service opened up space for women to be more nearly equal contributors. During the period from 1972 to 1977, women played crucial roles not only in the rank and file, as they had from the beginning, but also in the leadership of the party. Brown was arguably the most visible and powerful Panther leader for much of the 1970s, editing the Black Panther, running the party while Newton was in exile, and acting as its chief liaison to local and national politicians. Gendered notions of leadership and violence within the party never entirely vanished. When Brown took charge she faced significant opposition and felt pressure to exert authority by performing a form of ritualized violence that had long been part of the Panther mystique. Appearing as party leader for the first time in August 1974, she was flanked by armed male bodyguards while declaring to the assembled members, “I have all the guns and all the money. I can withstand challenge from without and within.” Like Newton, Brown relied on an all-male security force to back up these threats, sometimes delivering physical punishments to dissident members who threatened her authority.30 Nevertheless, the increasing visibility of women within the BPP leadership ranks opened opportunities to shape policy that had not been available to grassroots female members in the early years of the party. By the end of this period, the BPP’s Central Committee had six female members, a sharp contrast to the origins of that body when Kathleen Cleaver had been the only female member.

Long-time Panther Ericka Huggins exercised substantial power both as a member of the Central Committee and director of the Oakland Community School, while Joan Kelley, formerly of the party’s L.A. chapter, oversaw the Oakland Community Learning Center (OCLC), which coordinated the Panthers’ burgeoning social programs.31 The party’s move to distance itself from the heteropatriarchal foundations of its previous commitment to revolutionary violence was on full display in the 1973 electoral campaign, where Brown and Seale endorsed gay rights and produced leaflets explaining “Why Gay People Should Vote for Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown.”32 Emory Douglas’s artwork in the Black Panther and elsewhere also underwent a major shift, replacing guns and violence as markers of anticolonial heroism with images of the everyday dignity of men, women, and children struggling to overcome poverty and improve their communities.33

Domestic Feuds and Decaying Internationalism

For all its apparent success in transitioning from a divided, battered, and besieged cadre of revolutionaries into an effective vehicle for local politics and social activism, the Black Panther Party of the 1970s had flaws that ultimately undermined its effectiveness as an agent for change. Most obviously, the shift in emphasis from revolutionary nationalism to mainstream electoral politics put sharp limits on the ability of the Panthers to attack the structural roots of poverty, white supremacy, and militarism. Taken at face value, the emphasis on creating jobs and improving city services that formed the heart of the 1973 Seale-Brown campaign made them complicit in the rhetoric and logic of liberalism, which portrayed the problems facing poor people and people of color in Oakland and elsewhere as susceptible to simple technocratic solutions rather than as endemic to the system of racialized capitalism. Even if this rhetoric was used to conceal the real intentions of the BPP’s candidates, the fact that they felt the need to run on a liberal Democratic platform limited their ability to build a mandate for more sweeping social and political change. As historians Waldo Martin and Joshua Bloom concluded, “Unlike the Black Panther Party before the ideological split, the Oakland Black Panthers in the 1970s never provided a model for disrupting established relations of power.”34 The choice to focus on local politics in Oakland also sharply circumscribed the options that the Panther candidates could have considered even had they won office. As Self observed, “Municipalities like Oakland are poor instruments for either revolutionary or social-democratic projects. The property tax can never act as the primary leverage for redistributions because the very survival of the city’s institutions depends on it—overtaxed employers and industries simply flee to cities that will not burden them with high taxes.”35

Further complicating their efforts to achieve success in the mainstream political arena, the Oakland Panthers had generally poor relations with other black activists, many of whom they had once attacked as “pork chop nationalists” or “bootlickers” while asserting that the BPP was the true vanguard of the black revolution. As party members attempted to gather support for efforts to win office, they found relatively few allies outside Oakland. Nowhere was this clearer than at the landmark National Black Political Convention in March 1972. Held in Gary, Indiana, this historic event brought together a wide cross-section of black politicians and activists, ranging from Amiri Baraka to Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, and Betty Shabazz, to consider ways to mobilize black political power in the United States. Although the Panthers attended the conference, they were scheduled to speak away from the main hall during a musical interlude where Bobby Seale “was relegated to express the [BPP] program for voting in conjunction with the singing of Isaac Hayes.” Though expressing no ill will toward “Brother Isaac Hayes,” this slight further alienated the party from the growing national coalition of black political activists and elected officials gathered at Gary.36

The “Base of Operations” strategy also saw the Panthers moving away from the international and transnational alliances that had bolstered the party’s fortunes in the late 1960s. For all of the complications and ambiguities that had accompanied them, these alliances (both real and metaphorical) had been instrumental in fueling the BPP’s rise from a small, West Oakland neighborhood group into an internationally recognized force that received plaudits from Algiers, Beijing, Havana, Hanoi, and Pyongyang and anxious scrutiny from Washington. Beyond the practical assistance that foreign allies had provided, either in the form of fund-raising from transnational allies in Europe and Japan or state-level diplomatic pressure in support of the international section’s operations, the notion of the Panthers as partners in a worldwide uprising against colonialism and white supremacy was a crucial element in the party’s anticolonial vernacular. Third World anticolonialism served as a sort of force multiplier for the Panthers, allowing them to position themselves not as a helpless, persecuted minority but rather as a vital part of a worldwide majority of people of color helping to take down the American Empire from the inside. In refocusing on Oakland and on working within the U.S. political and economic system, the BPP deprived themselves of the ability to effectively imagine revolutionary change, much less carry it out.

It would be misleading to suggest that the Panthers of the 1970s entirely abandoned foreign connections or inspirations. In addition to Newton’s travels, a second BPP delegation that included Emory Douglas and Raymond “Masai” Hewitt visited China in March 1972.37 The Black Panther continued to feature extensive coverage of international events throughout the decade, from the anticolonial wars of liberation in sub-Saharan Africa to the battle against apartheid in South Africa, Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation, the growth of the Third World bloc at the United Nations, and even the struggles of Irish Republican forces against British rule. Under the editorship of David Graham Du Bois (son of Shirley Graham and stepson of W. E. B. Du Bois) from 1973 to 1977, the Panther paper offered rich and cosmopolitan news coverage, with a particular focus on Africa and China.38 In both tone and practice, however, the BPP’s relationship to other nations and groups shifted in subtle but important ways during this period. The party’s earlier emphasis on a single, shared revolutionary struggle, perhaps best exemplified in the early art of Emory Douglas, was replaced by a more distant form of solidarity politics. At the heart of Newton’s doctrine of intercommunalism was the notion that while all struggles against imperialism were ultimately linked, in the short term each group or nation would have to fight its own battle in its own way on its own home turf. While the Panthers strongly supported the efforts of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) to liberate their country, for example, there was no suggestion that the tactics or the goals of the MPLA were applicable to the situation of people of color in the United States. This new approach was more realistic about the capabilities of the BPP and the often tenuous nature of its connections to other anticolonial groups and nations around the world, but it effectively consigned the party to working within the existing U.S. political and economic system without outside aid or support. Having taken that step, there was little to distinguish the BPP from other mainstream American political groups that enjoyed larger bases of mainstream support and lacked the baggage that came along with having once been associated with Kim Il-Sung and having had leaders jailed on criminal charges.

The Panthers also retreated from the kind of practical alliances, both international and transnational, that figures such as Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Connie Matthews, and Denise Oliver had forged during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Newton traveled to China, Sweden, Cuba, and the Middle East from 1972 to 1981, none of these visits resulted in the kind of ties that the Panthers had cultivated with foreign governments and support groups from 1968 to 1971. The European Panther solidarity committees gradually dissolved in the wake of the party’s split and its shift toward a more domestic agenda in the United States. Newton’s biggest concern with respect to the party’s remaining foreign allies was apparently to ensure that they disowned Cleaver.39 The Black Panther still published letters of support from individuals and groups around the world that had been inspired by the BPP, which by the mid-1970s included the Dalit Panthers in India, the Polynesian Panthers in New Zealand, and even a group of Mizrahi Jews who founded an Israeli Panthers group.40 In practical terms, however, there were few connections between the Oakland-based party and its international supporters and imitators.

In their shift toward the “Base of Operations” strategy, Panther leaders also largely missed out on the surge of domestic and international alliance building centered around the resurgence of interest in African Liberation Day (ALD), inaugurated in 1958 at the first conference of Independent African States in Ghana, and the ongoing struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The anti-apartheid campaign during the 1970s and 1980 served much the same function as the Vietnam War had for the Panthers in the 1960s by connecting black and white activists in the United States (particularly on college campuses) with allies in other countries in common opposition to white supremacy.41 But while Panther leaders appeared at some ALD events and the party newspaper offered frequent coverage of the anti-apartheid battle, the BPP played only a marginal role in the movement, as its leaders sought to focus their limited resources on Oakland. In December 1973, the Panthers sharply criticized a proposed conference on African liberation for failing to address “actions aimed at organizing and unifying Black people around those very critical issues affecting their day-to-day survival.” Though “hailing, supporting and publicizing the wide-ranging, militant struggles of the peoples of Africa for liberation,” the party newspaper made clear that “the Black Panther Party understands that its first task, as a vanguard organization of Black people in America, is to carry forward, intensify and widen the struggle against the U.S. empire makers here at home!”42 A private intra-party memo was more blunt, declaring that “[w]e do not support [the] African Liberation Day Support Committee, therefore we will not participate in African Liberation Day activities, scheduled for next month. Specifically, the A.L.D Committee has supported Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, but when they were asked to make it known that we were very instrumental in making the past African Liberation Day a success, they refused to acknowledge us. They were asked for an apology and refused to give it.”43 Although the Panthers eased this stance somewhat while Newton was in exile and eventually developed close ties to Pan Africanist Congress of Azania representative David Sibeko, the party remained largely on the fringes of the growing anti-apartheid coalition.44

“Illegitimate Capitalists” and Intra-party Violence

The BPP’s changing relationship to violence was another important factor that undermined the party’s effectiveness in the 1970s. By 1972, any vestiges of the Panthers’ previous commitment to violence in support of an American revolution had been excised from the party’s public presentation. The death of George Jackson at the hands of guards during a failed escape attempt from San Quentin State Prison in August 1971 had eliminated the last high-profile member of the party who spoke loudly in favor of anticolonial violence.45 The Black Panther newspaper that had once printed not only images celebrating armed resistance but also practical guides to guerrilla warfare now discouraged such talk as suicidal and counterproductive. In an article headlined “Prospects for Revolutionary Intercommunal Warfare,” Romaine Fitzgerald declared that “[l]iberated territory can only be established if the guerrilla forces can keep the enemy on the defensive and unable to amass for a sustained offensive.”

A review in the Panther paper of the 1973 film The Spook Who Sat by the Door, based on Sam Greenlee’s novel about a black former CIA agent who organizes an urban uprising in the United States, savaged it for encouraging young black men to take up arms against the U.S. government. Such an action would “result in the wholesale slaughter of Black people” and be harmful to the cause as “the young, White dude in the uniform of the U.S. Army is not the enemy, even with his racism.”47 Newton publicly expressed regret for his past actions in encouraging such thinking, lamenting his August 1970 offer to send black troops to fight alongside the NLF in Vietnam as indicative of a “revolutionary cultist” period in the Panthers’ history.48

As with the BPP’s skepticism regarding foreign alliances in the 1970s, the turn away from anticolonial violence was rooted in a reasonable assessment of the party’s capabilities. Although abandoning the notion of armed rebellion limited the Panthers’ ability to advocate for truly revolutionary change, it is hard to begrudge or second-guess this decision in light of the tremendous sacrifices and limited gains that accompanied the more confrontational tactics favored by Cleaver and his allies. Had the party truly abandoned violence in favor of local social and political activism, it might have at least carved out a lasting place in the fabric of the East Bay even if the Panthers failed to achieve their lofty goal of remaking American society. Instead, however, violence remained crucial to the BPP’s operations in the 1970s but was largely directed inward at the black community and its own members. While the BPP publicly disarmed, ditching both guns and their signature black-jacketed uniforms, it maintained a massive cache of weapons stored in safe houses across the Bay Area. Instead of being widely distributed to members, these weapons and their handling were turned over a small group of Newton’s bodyguards (many of whom later went on to work under Elaine Brown during her tenure as party leader).49

Dubbed the Buddha Samurai by Newton, the armed wing of the 1970s Panthers differed substantially from the underground unit that Geronimo Pratt had led in the late 1960s prior to being expelled from the party.50 This small, disciplined, and well-armed cadre was not intended to wage guerrilla warfare against the U.S. government or even to protect the BPP offices against assaults by local police. Instead, they served as personal bodyguards for Panther leaders, internal enforcers of party discipline, and, most importantly, as Newton’s chief weapon in a crusade to establish control over Oakland’s criminal underground. David Hilliard offered arguably the most positive interpretation of the Panthers’ attempts to seize control of the East Bay’s drug, prostitution, and after-hours nightclub enterprises in the 1970s. “We were approaching them in a way to make them part and parcel of our movement,” he suggested, “serving the community they lived in, so that they might no longer be looked on as outcasts or as a predatory group.”

These operations, which Newton dubbed “taxing the illegitimate capitalists,” provided badly needed income for a party that could no longer depend on consistent contributions from white supporters or sales of the Black Panther to finance its expanding political and community service operations in Oakland.52 But they also took the BPP far from its revolutionary roots and made it complicit in the kind of violence within the black community that they had once attacked as counterrevolutionary. And for a party that was seeking to move away from the patriarchy and misogyny that often characterized its early history, the fact that these operations included profiting from prostitution was not encouraging. Newton himself was charged with murdering a young prostitute on the streets of Oakland in 1974, and Chief of Security Flores Forbes was sentenced for attempted murder following a failed attempt to assassinate one of the witnesses in the case.53

The CIA was perhaps unusually astute in observing in September 1972 that the BPP’s operations in Oakland “faintly resemble the early days of the so-called American Mafia.” But while government analysts believed that these “Mafia-type activities [were] designed to gain control of the black ghetto communities where sanctuaries for long-range revolutionary activities would be assured,” the reality was that controlling the criminal underworld was becoming an end in itself for the Oakland Panthers rather than a springboard for revolution.54 Increasingly running party operations out of the Lamp Post, an Oakland bar and nightclub, Newton traded the Little Red Book and The Wretched of the Earth for a new literary influence. “The Lamp Post,” recalled Hilliard, “comes to symbolize a new influence guiding Huey: The Godfather.”

Multiple Newton loyalists asserted that Puzo’s novel and the 1972 film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola were mandatory texts for party members as the Panthers waged their underground war to control the East Bay’s “illegitimate capitalists.”56

As with Puzo’s fictional crime family, BPP members in the 1970s often found that the violence they used to control the local community was frequently turned inward on those suspected of disloyalty or insufficient devotion to Newton, Brown, or other party leaders. Such violence had never been entirely absent, and the BPP had long maintained a relatively rigid and hierarchical command structure at the national level. Previously, however, the dispersed nature of the party and the fact that access to firearms was relatively democratized, with weapons training in many cases mandatory for new members, had discouraged attempts by Panther leaders to routinely impose their will by force on the rank and file. But with the BPP centralized in Oakland and access to weapons restricted to an elite guard loyal only to the party leaders, harsh physical punishment for even minor infractions become much more common. Aaron Dixon, who was part of the BPP security squad in the 1970s, recalled that “[c]orporal punishment had never really been established as a party policy. It just seemed to grow out of our circumstances and our paramilitary ideology.”

This intra-party violence, combined with the BPP’s ties to organized crime and Newton’s increasingly heavy drug use, undermined the Panthers’ efforts to establish a lasting presence even with their more limited and mainstream political and social agenda. By the mid-1970s, cofounder Bobby Seale and Chief of Staff David Hilliard had left, and Brown followed several years later, leaving a shrinking party in the hands of an increasingly erratic Newton and a handful of remaining loyalists. Dixon, who stayed on through the waning days of the party, recalled, “We were all trying to dull our senses, trying to deny what was happening, that our revolutionary family was coming to an end and we would all have to make a decision when to leave our slowly disintegrating revolutionary army.”58

The Black Liberation Army and Guerrilla Warfare in the 1970s

While the Oakland-based Panthers pivoted toward mainstream political and social organizing supplemented with Godfather-style criminal activities, a handful of former BPP members across the country remained committed to carrying out the revolution by any means necessary. The origins and operations of the Black Liberation Army remain cloaked in mystery. As a small, underground network of revolutionary cells self-consciously engaged in illegal activities, the BLA kept little or no records of its operations and issued few public statements. It left no equivalent of the Black Panther newspaper that would allow historians to track its evolution on a weekly basis. Many of its surviving members are behind bars, and those who remain free, most notably Assata Shakur in exile in Cuba, have been reluctant to disclose details that might incriminate their former comrades in arms. The only extended scholarly work on the BLA remains an unpublished doctoral dissertation by Gaidi Faraj.59 A number of journalists have written about the group, but these accounts have been warped by heavy reliance on police and FBI sources and a tendency to emphasize the more sensationalistic aspects of the BLA’s story while failing to grapple with the ideology that informed its origins and operation.60 Although a definitive account of the BLA is likely to remain elusive, a survey of what is known about the organization is important in understanding the legacy of the Panthers and their domestic and international agenda in the 1970s.

As early as September 28, 1968, the published “Rules of the Black Panther Party” declared, “No party member can join any other army or force other than the BLACK LIBERATION ARMY.”61 In 1968, however, the BLA was almost certainly not a formal organization or even an unofficial subsection of the party. Rather, it appears to have been a term used loosely either as a synonym for the party itself or a blanket label for those committed to ending white supremacy in the United States by force if necessary. As BPP (and later BLA) member Nuh Washington explained it, “Anyone who desired freedom, to control their own destiny, is essentially a member of the Black Liberation Army, in that sense.”62 A number of local BPP chapters apparently had underground or quasi-military wings in the late 1960s, and BLA member Jalil Muntaqim later asserted that well prior to the 1970s “the Black underground was becoming rich in experience in the tactics of armed expropriations, sabotage, and ambush-assaults.”63 But it was developments within two specific BPP chapters, those in Los Angeles and New York, that helped lay the foundations for the development of the BLA as a distinct and ultimately separate unit.

The L.A. branch of the BPP was organized in 1968 under the leadership of Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. Carter had been an influential member of the Slausons, an early L.A. street gang, before being sent to prison, where he joined the Nation of Islam. In January 1966, Eldridge Cleaver was transferred to Soledad, where he met and befriended Carter, convincing him to drop his affiliation with the NOI in favor of a more politicized approach to black liberation. Upon his release, Carter renewed his acquaintance with Cleaver, and in January 1968 he organized the L.A. Panther chapter, the first branch of the party to operate outside of the Bay Area.64 In forming the chapter, Carter tapped a number of current and former Slausons to serve under him. According to Faraj, in doing so he set up a two-tier structure within the chapter. In addition to the public membership of the L.A. Panthers, Carter also recruited a small number of “Wolves,” gang members who were to serve as an “underground cadre” to carry out actions that could not be traced directly back to the party and its leaders.65 Though not ideologically or operationally distinct from the BPP in the way that the BLA would eventually become, the notion of supplementing the party’s aboveground operations with an underground military force can be traced directly back to the founding of the L.A. chapter under Carter’s leadership.

Though other local chapters may have had similar quasi-underground arrangements, it was another L.A. Panther, Geronimo Pratt, who was responsible for bringing this innovation to the national stage. Pratt was a Vietnam veteran who had received multiple decorations while serving as a scout with the Eighty-Second Airborne. Rotated back to the States long enough to take part in crushing the 1967 Detroit rebellion, Pratt returned to Vietnam where he fought at Da Nang in the midst of the Tet Offensive. Disillusioned with the government that he had risked his life to serve, Pratt took an early discharge and traveled to the West Coast in the fall of 1968. While in L.A., Pratt met with Carter, and the two men struck up a close relationship while attending the High Potential program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).66 Drawn into the world of the L.A. Panthers, Pratt put his military experience to use in fortifying party offices and training members in the care and use of various types of firearms and explosives. His talents also won him attention from the national headquarters in Oakland. While Newton was behind bars, Carter assumed many of the responsibilities of the minister of defense position, including traveling around the country to help prepare other chapters to resist police assaults. Following Carter’s murder at the hands of a rival black nationalist group (the US Organization) in January 1969, an event directly precipitated by the FBI’s COINTELPRO efforts, Pratt was appointed head of the L.A. chapter.67

On December 9, 1969, heavily armed officers from the newly created Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) branch of the LAPD staged a raid on the Panthers’ headquarters at Forty-First and Central. A five-hour standoff and running gun battle ensued, and a police helicopter dropped dynamite on the roof of the building.68 Although not in the office at the time, Pratt still faced charges stemming from the Central Avenue shootout. Skipping his L.A. court dates, he went underground in August 1970. With the approval of the BPP’s Central Committee and Newton’s blessing, Pratt set up a clandestine military training facility for party members in Texas. He also traveled across the South to share the tactics that he had pioneered while in Los Angeles.69 Pratt’s short-lived Texas training camp, which was terminated following his arrest on December 8, 1970, represented the first attempt to create a formal, underground military wing of the BPP. Its organization reflected Pratt’s belief that the party would benefit from “a cell system, that empowered local leadership” rather than the centralized and hierarchical operations preferred by leaders in Oakland.70 Both this leadership philosophy and the unit’s emphasis on preparing for an underground war against the U.S. government were increasingly at odds with the direction taken by Newton upon his release from prison. Although the Panther cofounder had initially deferred to Pratt and his impressive military credentials, Pratt’s arrest provided a convenient excuse for Newton to purge him and his more militant supporters from the party.71

A second impetus for the creation of the BLA came from within the New York City branch of the BPP. The New York chapter had roots in the city’s rich black nationalist, pan-African, and Muslim movements, with members often taking African-inspired names and preferring dashikis to the standard West Coast Panther uniform of black leather jacket and beret. These trappings of cultural nationalism, as well as the fact that a number of New York party members were Sunni Muslims (in most cases inspired by Malcolm X’s conversion after leaving the NOI), often led to tensions with national leaders in Oakland.72 Additionally, by 1970 some New York party members had come to believe that Newton’s emphasis on defending Panther homes and offices (outlined in his Executive Mandate #3) was misguided.73 Standard guerrilla doctrine, as advocated by theorists such as Regis Debray and Carlos Marighella, was to avoid defending fixed objectives where insurgents could easily be located and overwhelmed by numerically superior police or military forces. As New York Panther and BLA member Assata Shakur explained it, “One of the basic laws of people’s struggle is to retreat when the enemy is strong and to attack when the enemy is weak.”

Shakur and others within the New York chapter preferred the guerrilla tactics pioneered by the Weather Underground in its secretive war against the U.S. government and military machine. An open letter to the Weather Underground from the Panther 21—a group of New York party members charged (and eventually found not guilty) with planning an assault on NYPD stations and other targets—supported the Weather Underground bombing campaign, critiqued the BPP’s leadership for failing to pursue similar efforts, and declared that “racism, colonialism, sexism, and all other pig ‘isms’ … can only be ended by … ARMED STRUGGLE.”75

It was Newton’s decision to purge Pratt and his allies and associates along with the Panther 21 in early 1971, followed shortly thereafter by the split with Cleaver, that led to the creation of the BLA as a distinct, if still inchoate, entity outside the structure of the BPP. In the beginning, at least, the BLA had no membership rolls or command structure. Washington recalled that in the wake of Cleaver-Newton feud, “[m]any were left out in the cold, but fortunately, other comrades who had gone underground were able to take them in.”

Early BLA cells organized in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but the largest unit was formed out of the ashes of the New York Panthers and included figures such as Lumumba Shakur, Zayd Malik Shakur, Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, and Dhoruba bin Wahad. The New York wing of the BLA was initially in close contact with Cleaver in Algeria, who planned to use the group as the nucleus for his Afro-American People’s Army. “To follow Algeria, that was the initial plan,” recalled Dhoruba bin Wahad. “When the split went down, we were following instructions from Eldridge and D.C. [Donald Cox] in Algiers.”77 But disputes over tactics, compounded by the vast distance between New York and Algiers, soon led to tensions between Cleaver and the nascent BLA.

Safiya Bukhari, a New York Panther and BLA supporter, recoiled upon receiving a phone call from Cleaver demanding that they “escalate the struggle” by immediately launching guerrilla attacks. Although committed to liberation through violence if necessary, Bukhari found Cleaver’s orders presumptive and ill-advised:

Sekou Odinga, a former New York Panther who had fled to Algeria, was similarly dismissive, declaring in an interview that “[Cleaver] was not a military man; he only thought he was… . It may have looked like Cleaver was leading the BLA, but he wasn’t. He just talked the talk.”79 After BLA soldiers did take the offensive with the assassination of two New York City police officers on May 19, 1971, the group’s New York cells went deep underground, further compounding the existing communications problems. As Cleaver became immersed in his own struggles with the Algerian government and his erstwhile Asian allies, the two groups went their separate ways, leading to the de facto “second split” that Cleaver had prophesied. The only link between the two organizations was Odinga, who left Algeria in 1973 to join the BLA in New York and went on to become one of its longest serving members.80

One of the major weaknesses of most historical coverage of the BLA is the tendency to focus on the group’s violent tactics without considering the ideology and goals that motivated its members. This focus on the group’s criminality was facilitated by the BLA’s tendency to eschew the frequent issuing of manifestos or party platforms in favor of direct action. Nevertheless, the group did make several attempts to explain its goals, strategy, and tactics during the 1970s. These statements must be treated with some care as the decentralized and secretive nature of the BLA makes it difficult to know how representative they were of the group as a whole. Nevertheless, a close reading of BLA memoirs and communiqués provides a relatively clear and consistent picture of the group’s motivations. At its core the BLA was motivated by the same brand of revolutionary nationalism that had animated the formation and operations of the BPP from 1966 to 1971. Central to this proposition was that, in the words of BLA member Kuwasi Balagoon (Donald Weems), “[t]he ruling class of the United States and its Government colonizes the New Afrikan People; that is, Black people held within the confines of the present borders of the U.S.”81

As had been the case in the early days of the BPP, two conclusions flowed from the BLA’s colonial analysis of black America. The first was that anticolonial violence was a just and necessary response to the oppression that they faced. Balagoon, for example, compared the group to the PLO, Irish Republican Army, African National Congress, and other anticolonial guerrillas in concluding that “[h]istorically and universally the counter to imperialist armies are liberation armies, the counter to colonial wars are wars of liberation, the counter to reactionary violence, revolutionary violence.”82 The second conclusion that flowed from the BLA’s colonial analysis was that, in the words of Dhoruba bin Wahad, “[r]evolutionary nationalism … understood that there was a common solidarity between all people under the same economic and social political system. This oppression has its historical roots in the development of European hegemony and power in the world.”83 Thus while many BLA members were sympathetic to aspects of cultural and religious nationalism (and some shared membership in the separatist Republic of New Afrika), most retained a loosely Marxist conception that envisioned links between diverse peoples and nations created by the shared experience of racialized colonial occupation.

Declaring the BLA to be “anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-sexist,” its leaders expressed goals nearly identical to those of the pre-split BPP, including “the institution of Socialistic relationships in which Black people have total and absolute control over their own destiny as a people.” Like the BPP before them, BLA members also viewed their struggle within the United States as making a vital contribution to Third World liberation, “for in striving to liberate ourselves we must abolish a system that enslaves others throughout the world.”84 This analysis was on display in one of the organization’s first public statements, a letter sent to the New York Times claiming responsibility for the killing of two NYPD officers in May 1971:

In justifying their actions, the BLA closely echoed Newton’s 1967 statement that “[t]here is a great similarity between the occupying army in Southeast Asia and the occupation of our communities by the racist police.”86 In doing so, they recapitulated not simply the rhetoric but also the ideology that had guided the early incarnation of the Black Panther Party.

Although rooted in a formulation of revolutionary nationalism that had its roots in the early to mid-1960s, the BLA and its members also had to account for the changing domestic and international circumstances of the 1970s. The birth and early growth of the Panthers had coincided with a rising tide of militant anticolonialism that seemed to have the United States and its allies on the defensive at home and around the world. Many party members in the late 1960s operated under the sincere belief that a revolution in the United States was as inevitable and imminent as the victory of the NLF in Vietnam. By the time the BLA emerged as a separate organization in 1971, however, it was clear that whatever success the Vietnamese might have would not be equaled by radicals in the United States any time in the near future. The election of Richard Nixon, the shattering blows dealt by COINTELPRO, the fragmentation of groups such as the BPP and SDS, and the ripple effects of détente complicated previous assumptions about the vulnerabilities of the American Empire. The BLA acknowledged these developments, and its calls for guerrilla warfare lacked the bravado of Robert F. Williams’s prediction of a ninety-day victory in the first half of the 1960s. Muntaqim referred to the BLA’s early operations as part of a “defensive-offensive” strategy intended not to overthrow the U.S. government but rather “to protect the interest of the aboveground political apparatus’ aspiration to develop a mass movement towards national liberation.”87 In this conception, the BLA’s military actions would draw the attention of the state away from allies operating aboveground, creating space for political mobilization while at the same time inspiring the masses and striking fear into the heart of the oppressors. It was essentially a holding action designed to allow larger domestic and international mobilization a chance to survive and recover in the hostile terrain of the early 1970s.

The “defensive-offensive” strategy had its origins in the period when the nascent BLA was still at least loosely connected to the BPP and its aboveground political apparatus. By May 1971, however, it was clear that the break with the Newton-led Panthers was irrevocable and that Cleaver’s Algerian operation was not able to offer a viable replacement. This left the BLA in the position of being an underground unit without aboveground political partners. Nor did the group enjoy any significant international contacts that might provide shelter, arms, or even propaganda support. Despite lacking a viable means to translate their actions into a viable strategy for revolutionary change, BLA cells pushed ahead with their plans for guerrilla warfare in 1971–1973. These actions included assassinations (targeted killings of police officers), expropriations (robberies of banks and businesses to raise funds), and sabotage (bombings). Undoubtedly, the hasty move to armed action was stimulated by the paranoid, hothouse atmosphere of the early 1970s that saw BLA members fearing attacks from both the police and agents of the Newton-led BPP.88

Donald Cox privately critiqued the BLA’s actions as impulsive and ill-timed in a letter sent to the New York cell from Algeria. Although supportive of armed struggle, Cox insisted that “[b]efore we commit ourselves we must build a foundation… . We can’t do any building if we’re running and hiding.” He also took issue with the BLA’s public communiqués as premature “until we have our foundation developed to the point where we can guarantee a continuity of actions” and warned, “I don’t think it does us any good to talk about the fact that we have hand grenades when our enemy has hydrogen bombs.”89 Some BLA members later agreed that undertaking an offensive campaign against the state in the absence of community support, or at least a viable aboveground political unit, was a mistake. Odinga conceded that “[p]eople weren’t ready for armed struggle.”

Mass support is not necessarily a prerequisite for a successful guerrilla campaign, but at the very least any such effort must be tied to some sort of political organization that can leverage the military actions of the underground into building such support. Divorced from the BPP and too busy plotting military action and running from the authorities to operate their own educational or propaganda wing, the BLA was unable to effectively connect their sporadic acts of violence to a larger political or ideological program.

Given the domestic and international climate of the early 1970s, it is highly unlikely that the BLA would have enjoyed meaningful success even with significant aboveground political support. But it would have allowed the group’s members to contextualize their actions in such a way as to spur greater contemporary and historical discussion of their aims. The BPP’s prolific and skillful public communications efforts, including the Black Panther newspaper and frequent speeches and interviews with party leaders, made it difficult to tar the party’s members as simple criminals, despite the best efforts of the police, the FBI, the U.S. government, and large sections of the media. In contrast, the secretive, underground tactics that characterized the BLA made it far easier for government officials, the press, and even historians to casually dismiss them as “madmen” who “did it for nothing.”91 Although the group’s guerrilla efforts were ill-conceived and ultimately counterproductive, they were motivated by a genuine set of grievances and in service of an ideology, revolutionary nationalism, that offered a coherent analysis and plan of action for battling colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy.

Taps for Revolutionaries and the Dawn of the Reagan Counterrevolution

By the end of 1973, police had killed or imprisoned a large percentage of the BLA’s membership. Muntaqim conceded that “[b]y 1974–1975, the fighting capacity of the Black Liberation Army had been destroyed,” although he argued that “the BLA as a politico-military organization had not been destroyed.”92 With most of its surviving leaders behind bars, the organization turned its efforts to prisons as a site of organization and political action. Arguably the most important legacy of the BLA was in its campaign for the reform or abolition of the U.S. prison system while bringing attention to the plight of political prisoners and their treatment within the United States.93 Behind bars, ironically, BLA members were also able to more coherently formulate and publicize the rational for the actions they had undertaken earlier in the decade, most notably in the 1975 publication Message to the Black Movement. Elements of the group did attempt a return to guerrilla warfare in the latter half of the decade. Odinga returned to the United States secretly in 1973 and avoided capture or detection. He eventually teamed with Mutulu Shakur, a doctor at the radical Lincoln Detox Clinic in New York City, other former BLA members (most notably Kuwasi Balagoon), and several white radicals, including Kathy Boudin and Marilyn Buck.94 They scored a major coup by freeing Assata Shakur from a New Jersey prison in November 1979 and assisting her subsequent flight to Cuba. The primary focus of the revived group, however, was on so-called expropriations, which largely took the form of a series of bank robberies and stick-ups. The BLA–white radical alliance met its end in the aftermath of a botched robbery of a Brink’s truck in New York in October 1981. Although captured members of the group tried to use the ensuing trial as a forum for advancing their cause, this second iteration of the BLA shared with its predecessor an inability to effectively tie its acts of violence to a larger political program.95

The BPP soldiered on in Oakland (with some regional offices reopening in the mid-1970s), where it was increasingly tied to the Democratic Party establishment. Newton’s continuing problems with the law (including murder and assault charges), drug abuse, and erratic behavior hastened the demise of the Black Panthers as an effective force even at the local level. Mumia Abu-Jamal lamented Newton’s fate: “Huey, a supreme commander without a command, a visionary with no outlet for his vision, a revolutionary bereft of a revolutionary party, retrogressed into the fascination of the street hustlers of his Oakland youth; the pimps, the players, the ‘illegitimate capitalists’ (as he called them) called him. It was, to be sure, a fatal attraction.”96 At best, the BPP in the latter half of the 1970s was a small but important player in California politics and community service in Oakland. At its worst, the party came to represent the kind of criminal organization that its opponents had long accused it of being. The last issue of the Black Panther newspaper appeared in September 1980, one month before former California governor and long-time Panther nemesis Ronald Wilson Reagan won election as the fortieth president of the United States. Newton continued to spiral into addiction and was murdered by a drug dealer outside an Oakland crack house on August 22, 1989.

Eldridge Cleaver experienced arguably the most colorful, if still ultimately tragic, post-BPP career. Cleaver withdrew from both the Cold War and the Third World in the aftermath of his departure from Algeria. Eldridge, Kathleen, and their two children (both born in exile) settled in Paris, where they lived clandestinely while appealing for asylum from the French government. Eldridge had tired of living in exile and was bitterly disillusioned by the collapse of the international section. “Face it,” he told an interviewer who tracked him down in Paris, “people are Nationalists more than they are internationalist, and they use Internationalism in a very cynical way in order to further their own nationalist aspirations.” As for the Third World, Cleaver declared it to be “an empty phrase,” masking the “the many differences between the needs of the various countries involved.”97 Abandoned by both the BPP and his former international allies and unable to summon the creative powers that had fueled Soul on Ice, Cleaver decided to return to the United States to face trial in 1975.

While in an Alameda County, California, jail, Cleaver embraced evangelical Christianity. Upon his release on bail in August 1976, he underwent a whirlwind series of transformations as he attempted to reinvent himself as a born-again Christian minister while also exploring Mormonism, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, and a religion of his own creation that he dubbed “Christlam.” The fact that he was also attempting to produce and market a new style of men’s pants that featured a prominent external codpiece (or “penis sleeve”) led some observers to doubt the sincerity of Cleaver’s conversion(s). Entitling one of his sermons “The Golden Shower” also indicated a certain lack of commitment to his faith.98 Politically, the former Panther swerved hard right, embracing his former nemesis Reagan’s run for the presidency in 1980 and further reinventing himself as a fervent anticommunist in the pages of the National Review. In a 1981 interview, the erstwhile guerrilla leader invoked Booker T. Washington in urging black Americans to “cast down your bucket where you are” and declared that the United States “is the greatest country in the world. I really feel in my heart that America really needs to take control of the world.”99

Cleaver’s life in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a whirlwind that featured an appearance with Donald Rumsfeld at Vanderbilt University and at a benefit for cryonics featuring Wavy Gravy, Robert Anton Wilson, Paul Krassner, and Timothy Leary. While promoting his newfound embrace of American exceptionalism, he was hit in the face with an Oreo-cookie cream pie by the Anarchist Party of Canada (Groucho Marxist) and heckled by an audience in Oakland. Having been rejected for a job at a new Silicon Valley startup named Apple Computer in 1981, Cleaver found work as a tree surgeon in nearby San Jose, California.100 By the 1990s, he had drifted back leftward, penning critiques of the first Gulf War and voicing support for the Million Man March organized by Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan.101 Cleaver died in 1998 in relative obscurity, a shadow of the “Cosmopolitan Guerrilla” who had once commanded international attention.

Ultimately, the hard-pressed leaders of the BPP, the international section and RPCN, and the BLA were unable to formulate an effective response to the changed international and domestic landscape that they confronted in the age of détente and late–Cold War stagnation. Not all members or former members met fates as tragic as those of Newton, Cleaver, and the imprisoned or killed soldiers of the BLA. A number of former Panthers went on to make productive contributions in community service, politics, and activism. But as Aaron Dixon lamented, most of the party’s rank and file who returned to their communities battered and bruised from their confrontations with police repression and party infighting found that “there would be no cheering crowds, no open arms, no therapy, no counseling.”102 Former New York City BPP member Afeni Shakur observed simply, “It was a war we lost.”103 The BPP and its various splinter groups undeniably failed to bring about the revolutionary remaking of American society that stood as their central goal. They efforts, however, left a rich and contested legacy that remains relevant in the twenty-first century at a time when white supremacy, colonialism, and the ongoing effects of neoliberalism and deindustrialization continue to haunt the world from Ferguson, Missouri, to occupied Palestine.