“Philosophical Hydrogen Bombs”: Cleaver, Douglas, and the Revolutionary Arts

In forming the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in October 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale had fused anticolonial ideology with urban Black Power activism into a form of direct action aimed at capturing the hearts and minds of local Oakland residents. The next step in the BPP’s evolution owed much to Eldridge Cleaver and Emory Douglas, both of whom joined the party in early 1967, shortly before the crisis caused by the Mulford Act. These two men shared with the founders of the BPP a set of influences ranging from Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams to Mao Zedong and Frantz Fanon. Cleaver and Douglas, however, brought with them a set of experiences and talents that helped to subtly shift the direction of Panthers’ anticolonialism at a crucial moment in the party’s history.

Born in 1935 in Arkansas, as a child Cleaver was part of the World War II era exodus of American Americans out of the South. His father moved the family west in search of new job opportunities in the mid-1940s, eventually settling in Los Angeles. By Cleaver’s own account, he had little in the way of political awareness in his early years. As a teenager he drifted into petty crime that ranged from bicycle theft to a 1954 felony charge for possessing a “shopping bag full of marijuana” that sent him to Soledad for three years.4 Released on parole in 1957, he returned to prison the following year on an assault conviction stemming from a series of rapes. It was during his incarceration at San Quentin, Folsom, and Soledad from 1958 to 1966 that Cleaver honed the anticolonial analysis of urban black America that underlay his post-prison activism as part of the BPP. The Nation of Islam played the most important role in Cleaver’s transformation from nihilistic young man who celebrated raping white women as an “insurrectionary act” to an anticolonial intellectual.5 “From 1959 to 1963,” Cleaver declared, “the Black Muslims dropped philosophical hydrogen bombs on the terrain of the American Negro brain.” This was particularly true for the NOI’s converts behind bars, where Elijah Muhammad found a receptive audience for his message of black pride and self-improvement coupled with a condemnation of “white devils” and their institutions.6

Unlike Newton and Seale, who had only passing involvement with the NOI, Cleaver became a full-fledged member, and by 1963 he had been promoted to head of the San Quentin mosque after its previous leader (and Cleaver’s cellmate) was shot and killed by a prison guard. Through his involvement with the NOI, Cleaver was drawn into an international analysis of U.S. race relations that continued to evolve long after he broke with the organization.7 He also came into contact with the AAA during this time, as al-Mansour worked with Cleaver and other inmates at San Quentin in defense of their right to practice their faith behind bars.8 Malcolm X, however, was the single most important figure in Cleaver’s political awakening. The charismatic NOI minister’s “style, fearlessness, and mental prowess” appealed to Cleaver, as did the fact that “[l]ike me, he had been a gangster … ruthless and gun-toting.”9 More significant in terms of Cleaver’s ideological development was Malcolm’s brief but eventful career following his break with the NOI. In the internecine feud that gripped the NOI in 1964–65, Cleaver stood firmly behind Malcolm, embracing both his practical efforts at internationalizing the black freedom struggle and his willingness to consider coalitions that transcended race and religion.10

Following the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, Cleaver threw himself into formulating his own vision of black anticolonialism. No longer at home in the NOI and lacking alternative organizations or institutions in which to pursue his evolving interest in exploring links between black Americans, the Cold War, and the Third World, Cleaver focused his energies on writing. Encouraged by his lawyer, Beverly Axelrod, with whom he began an impassioned correspondence, Cleaver wrote a series of essays from behind bars. His prison writings, many of which were later collected and published as the critically acclaimed Soul on Ice, reflected an attempt to graft a critique of capitalism and imperialism onto the framework of black internationalism that he had inherited from Malcolm X and the NOI. Untroubled by theoretical heterodoxy, he eagerly devoured works by Mikhail Bakunin, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara as well as Marxist-influenced American historians Herbert Aptheker and William Appleman Williams.11 Like the founders of the BPP, Cleaver was also strongly influenced by Third World anticolonial struggles. Cleaver closely followed news from the Third World, and “[t]he rise of China, Cuba, the Congo, [and] Vietnam” was a consistent theme in his prison notebooks. Though he lacked direct access to these distant events, his prison reading list included works ranging from Frantz Fanon to Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.12 His understanding of Third World anticolonialism was deeply gendered in its linking of self-determination to manhood, as he described Algerian leader Ben Bella, for example, as “one of my machos.”13 And while he nominally disavowed the sexual violence against women that had landed him behind bars, his writings from this period were imbued with heteropatriarchal sentiments that were strident even in the larger context of a society deeply imbued with those values.14

While Cleaver’s self-taught jailhouse education mirrored that which Newton and Seale received at Merritt and through participating in groups such as the AAA, SSAC, and RAM, his vision of how to put it into practice differed in significant ways from that of the Panthers’ founders. Locked behind bars, Cleaver had no hope of directly participating in community organizing, much less the kind of dramatic armed patrols that marked the first six months of the BPP’s existence. Indeed, while Cleaver hailed Third World guerrilla movements and celebrated the spontaneous violence of the 1965 Watts uprising, he also expressed doubts about the ultimate effectiveness of armed struggle as a tool for minority groups seeking to enact social change in the United States.15 In what turned out to be a prescient analysis, he warned that such resistance would almost certainly be crushed:

In light of the ability of the state to deploy “unlimited firepower,” as well as his own inability to take place in such direct actions, Cleaver’s prison-era writings explored alternative methods for decolonizing black America.16

One solution to the power imbalance facing black Americans in the United States was to seek external allies. Building on the pioneering work of Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams, Cleaver stressed the importance of allying with the emerging states of the Third World. This emphasis on international solidarity was the logical conclusion of using the model of internal colonialism to understand the black experience in the United States. While the material circumstances of the “black colony” in the United States might differ from those prevailing among Third World people, all shared an ongoing history as victims of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. From the genocidal conquest of the Americas, African slavery, and formal colonialism to more subtle contemporary practices, including the neo-colonialist economic exploitation of the Third Word and the domestic reliance on people of color as a low-paid, disposable labor force, the prosperity of the West was made possible by “a system of foreign and domestic exploitation, rooted in the myth of white supremacy and the manifest destiny of the white race.”17 Thus rather than marching on Washington or petitioning the federal government, black Americans urgently needed “to gain organizational unity and communication with their brothers and allies around the world, on an international basis.”18

If affiliating with a global majority of color offered African Americans a powerful set of potential allies, it left unresolved more practical questions about how to leverage that support to enact revolutionary change within the United States. Cleaver’s solution was to work in parallel with a new generation of white radicals in order to wrest control of the country from the inside while simultaneously reaching out to the Third World for external support. Following from his jail cell the developing unrest among American young people, who were disenchanted with the war in Vietnam as well as white supremacy at home, Cleaver hailed a “new generation of whites, appalled by the sanguine and despicable record carved over the face of the globe by their race in the last five hundred years, [who] are rejecting the panoply of white heroes, whose heroism consisted in erecting the inglorious edifice of colonialism and imperialism.” In an illustration of the links between foreign and domestic coalition building that would mark his tenure with the BPP, Cleaver saw the rise of revolutionary anticolonialism in the Third World as pivotal in cementing the relationship between African Americans and white radicals in the United States. “[J]ust as world revolution has prompted the oppressed to re-evaluate their self-image in terms of the changing conditions, to slough off the servile attitudes inculcated by long years of subordination,” he argued, “white youth are repudiating their heritage of blood and taking people of color as their heroes and models.”

For Cleaver, one of the most important consequences of decolonization, and particularly of the radical turn in Third World independence movements during the 1960s, was how it aided the building of bridges between white and black activists in the United States while linking both groups to allies overseas.

In a significant departure from most Black Power advocates, Cleaver identified the emerging counterculture as both another link between black and white youths and a lever by which they could collectively undermine the U.S. empire from within. Picking up on a theme that Norman Mailer had championed in his controversial 1957 essay “The White Negro,” Cleaver argued that since African Americans had little investment in the mythologies of white America, black culture had an inherently subversive quality. As young whites became disillusioned with the world created by their elders, they were increasingly rejecting not only the political system but also the cultural apparatus that propped it up. In its place, they turned to black culture and its white interpreters (“soul by proxy”), such as the Beatles, who were, Cleaver wrote, “injecting Negritude by the ton into the whites, in this post-Elvis Presley-beatnik era of ferment.”20 The revolution that Cleaver prophesied in Soul on Ice and his other prison writings did not come out of the barrel of a gun so much as from the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, the brutal, balletic grace of Muhammad Ali’s boxing, the music of Bob Dylan, and the frenzied movements of the Watusi and the Twist. As Cleaver described it, the Twist was “a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and the law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.”21 This was, in essence, a modified version of Harold Cruse’s call for a cultural revolution as the prelude to remaking U.S. society as a whole, though with far more emphasis on the possibility of cooperation with at least some white Americans.

As with Cruse’s calls for a “cultural revolution,” there remained unresolved questions in Cleaver’s prison writing about how, precisely, to translate aesthetic challenges to mainstream white culture into political or economic revolution. If nothing else, however, Cleaver’s essays helped win his own freedom. With Axelrod’s aid, several of his works were smuggled out of prison and published in Ramparts, a Catholic literary magazine headquartered in San Francisco that had become the leading voice of New Left journalism under the editorship of Warren Hinckle and Robert Scheer in the mid-1960s.22 Cleaver’s growing status as a literary icon undoubtedly aided his release on parole in December 1966. It also shaped his immediate post-prison approach to activism. Though he had considered forming an all-black political organization modeled on Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), upon his release Cleaver instead focused his energies on working for change through various cultural institutions. As a staff writer for Ramparts, Cleaver built connections with white youth while making good on his vow to “[blaze] a new pathfinder’s trail through the stymied upbeat brain of the New Left.” With poet and playwright Marvin X, he cofounded the Black House, a San Francisco venue that became “the center of non-Establishment black culture throughout the Bay Area” and provided a home for both local artists and visiting Black Arts Movement luminaries from the East Coast, including Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Askia Touré.23

It was via the Black House that Cleaver was introduced to Emory Douglas, who would go on to play a crucial role in crafting a visual identity for the BPP. Douglas was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1943, but as with many other early Panther members, he moved west as a child, settling in San Francisco with his mother in 1951. Like Cleaver, Douglas had early run-ins with the law, including several stints in juvenile detention for charges ranging from truancy to gambling, fighting, and burglary. A nine-month sentence at the Log Cabin Ranch, a rural facility for juvenile offenders in the mountains outside Santa Cruz, California, saw Douglas assigned to care for and clean up after the camp’s pigs, an experience that would later surface in unexpected fashion in his work as a revolutionary artist. After throwing bottles at a police car, Douglas was sent away again, serving a fifteen-month sentence at the Youth Training School in Ontario, California, adjacent to the men’s prison at Chino. In part as a result of working in the print shop while serving his sentence, Douglas enrolled in San Francisco’s City College in 1964 with plans to become a commercial artist.24

Though not as known so much as Merritt College in its role as an incubator of Black Power and black internationalism, City College played host to a similar mixture of community and educational activism. Involvement with the college’s Black Student Association (which was linked to San Francisco State’s Black Student Union) and the arrival of Amiri Baraka in San Francisco helped to radicalize Douglas in 1966–67. Inspired by both the Black Arts Movement and, as he later explained it, “the revolutionary art of the world that was coming in, from Viet Nam, the work out of Cuba, the Middle East,” Douglas began to experiment with blending graphic design techniques borrowed from advertising and contemporary commercial art with black aesthetics and proletarian internationalism.25 The result in visual terms was similar in many ways to the fusion that Cleaver produced in his prison writings. The two men met after Douglas volunteered to be the resident set designer for the Black Communications Project, a radical theater company that Baraka helped to create during his West Coast stay. Many of the company’s productions were staged at the Black House, and it was there that Cleaver and Douglas established a relationship with each other and with the nascent BPP, which provided security for several of Baraka’s performances.26

The jumbled mix of art, politics, and activism at the Black House, including both local figures and representatives from the East Coast Black Arts Movement, was illustrative of the cosmopolitan nature of Black Power in the Bay Area. While many of those in the orbit of the Black House would eventually line up in separate, sometimes warring, factions of the black freedom struggle, in 1966 and early 1967 the differences between cultural nationalism and revolutionary nationalism had yet to harden into firm divisions. Nor was it certain that Douglas and Cleaver would end up aligning themselves with the BPP and its particular brand of community-centered direct action. Although they admired Newton and Seale’s organizing efforts in the East Bay, Douglas and Cleaver were initially content working primarily within the artistic wing of the black freedom struggle. Cleaver’s willingness to dabble in Marxism and work with the predominantly white New Left, as well as his romantic relationship with his white lawyer, led to tensions with Marvin X and others in the Black House, who were more attuned to pan-Africanism and developing a purely black aesthetic.27 But as a successful writer with a book contract and a regular job, Cleaver had little reason to risk his parole status by aligning himself with the BPP and their tactics of armed provocation. It took a dramatic encounter at the Ramparts offices to push both Cleaver and Douglas to embrace a more direct approach to anticolonial activism.

In February 1967, a number of local black organizations, including the nascent BPP, banded together to promote a ceremony marking the second anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination. Ramparts provided meeting space for the event’s planning, and when Newton, Seale, and a small cadre of Panthers clad in black leather jackets and armed with shotguns arrived at the offices escorting Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s widow, they created an immediate sensation. At this point in their history, the Panthers were still heavily reliant on armed displays of resistance as a way of both attracting supporters and distinguishing themselves from rival organizations. Leaving the Ramparts building after the meeting, Newton became embroiled in a confrontation with San Francisco police. With a shotgun in his hand, he jacked a round into the chamber and taunted an SFPD officer, daring him to draw his gun. After a tense moment, the policeman backed down and walked away. The incident inspired both Douglas and Cleaver—the latter declared Newton to be “the baddest motherfucker I’ve ever seen!”28 Shortly afterward, both men joined the BPP (although Cleaver’s membership remained secret at first to avoid attracting undue attention from his parole officer). Together they helped chart a new course for the party that paved the way for its expansion into a national and ultimately international organization.

“When I Say Motherfucker”: A New Vocabulary for Black Anticolonialism

When Newton dispatched the Panthers to Sacramento on May 2, 1967, to protest the Mulford Act, Cleaver and Douglas were both present. Unlike Seale and the rest of the contingent, however, Cleaver was armed with nothing more than a camera, a pen, and a notepad. Though Cleaver’s status as an unarmed observer was largely dictated by the terms of his parole, it was also illustrative of the new strategy that he would help to implement as the BPP’s minister of information. In the aftermath of the Mulford Act, the Panthers abandoned the armed patrols that had won them notoriety in the streets of Oakland. Instead they leveraged the heightened visibility they had gained as a result of the Sacramento demonstration to expand their appeal beyond the neighborhood. Central to this approach was the creative use of an anticolonial vernacular that drew on the party’s local roots and history of armed theatricality while simultaneously shifting the primary theater and mode of action. Though the BPP continued to operate in Oakland and inspired others to found chapters of the organization in communities across the United States, arguably its most important contribution in 1967–68 was to bring the struggle from the streets back to the realm of ideas, ideology, and culture.

The Black Panther Party’s anticolonial vernacular was born in response to a particular set of circumstances in 1967–68, including the dilemma posed by the Mulford Act and the fallout from the Sacramento demonstration. It was the organic creation of talented individuals including Douglas, Cleaver, and Tarika Lewis (who published her drawings under the pen name Matilaba), combined with the dramatic sensibilities of Newton and Seale’s early operations in Oakland. But while closely associated with a handful of Panther artists and writers, it had no single author, and it was not confined solely to speeches, images, or the printed word. In songs and chants (“The revolution has come! / Off the pigs! / Time to pick up the gun!”), with their eye-catching paramilitary uniforms, and in renaming public spaces after fallen Panthers (transforming West Oakland’s DeFremery Park into Bobby Hutton Memorial Park, for example), the BPP found multiple ways to express complex ideas about colonialism, violence, self-determination, and internationalism in sharp and concise fashion.29 But while these diverse forms of anticolonial discourse—and their various local manifestations outside the party’s national headquarters in Oakland—remain a topic worthy of further investigation, the Black Panther newspaper provided the most enduring and far-reaching expression of the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular. Well after its halting beginnings, the paper played a crucial role in defining the Panthers’ identity both inside and outside the party.

The four-page inaugural issue of the Black Panther Community News Service, produced in April 1967 under Cleaver’s direction, featured hand- lettered headlines and was entirely focused on a single local incident (the police killing of Denzil Dowell in Richmond). By the start of 1968, the Black Panther had grown into a professionally produced and lavishly illustrated weekly that mixed local news and commentary with coverage of national and international developments. From Douglas’s and Lewis’s striking illustrations to Cleaver’s characterization of American hegemony as “the international pig power structure,” the Black Panther offered a critique of capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism that melded a global analysis with local issues and idioms.30 The paper provided a way for the BPP to reach beyond its limited membership in Oakland to a wider audience not only among African Americans, but also other communities of color as well as white radicals. As the party began to expand to include chapters outside Oakland, the Black Panther provided an ideological touchstone and a common vocabulary that helped to unite its dispersed membership. It also served a more practical role in party building. Selling the paper became a central activity around which chapters could be organized, and the proceeds (from an estimated weekly circulation of somewhere between 139,000 to 200,000 by the end of the 1960s) were the single most important source of the party’s funds.31

Building on a premise previously explored by Harold Cruse and RAM, the Panthers’ anticolonial vernacular was premised on the notion that African Americans were not citizens denied their rights but a “black colony” imprisoned in ghettos within the heart of what Cleaver dubbed the “white mother country.” As such, black Americans from Oakland to Harlem were linked to the Third World by a history of racialized colonialism. “In the aftermath of Watts, and all the other uprisings that have set the ghettos of America ablaze,” Cleaver declared, “it is obvious that there is very little difference in the way oppressed people feel and react, whether they are oppressed in Algeria by the French, in Kenya by the British, in Angola by the Portuguese, or in Los Angeles by Yankee Doodle.”32 The Black Panther was by no means the first black publication to feature coverage of international events or promote solidarity with the Third World. From mainstream outlets like the Chicago Defender to Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper and its successor Freedomways to 1960s publications such as the Guardian, Black America, On Guard, Black World, Muhammad Speaks, and Soulbook, the black press had long devoted attention to decolonization and its links to the struggle against white supremacy inside the United States. What distinguished the Black Panther were the ways it articulated connections between black Americans and the Third World.

The most immediately striking feature of the Black Panther was its use of language and imagery as a way of bridging the gap between anticolonial theory and the lived experience of the community from which it sprung. Elaine Brown, who would eventually ascend to lead the party in the 1970s, described the paper as “dedicated … to reporting news and information in words the People could understand.”33 Much more so than its contemporaries and predecessors, the Panther newspaper self-consciously employed a specific form of urban African American vernacular in its words and visual presentation. Drawing on the party’s origins as a vehicle for organizing the “brothers on the block,” the artists and writers who contributed to the paper in its early years often presented their vision of black anticolonialism in what BPP chief of staff David Hilliard dubbed “the language that was born out of oppression.” Hilliard expressed the logic behind this concept in colorful terms:

Cleaver was notorious for leading crowds in chants of “fuck Ronald Reagan” while Bobby Seale devoted several pages in his 1971 autobiography to the etymology of the word “motherfucker,” asserting that “the racism and oppression of black people, from history to this very day … has caused this word … to be part of the vernacular of the ghetto.”35

Newton later expressed reservations about the use of profanity, and by the early 1970s the Panthers began to move away from it in both speeches and the newspaper.36 Scholars have often downplayed it as well, presumably under the assumption that it might undermine efforts to have the BPP taken seriously as a subject of academic study. But what BPP minister of education Raymond “Masai” Hewitt dubbed “the vernacular … of rebellion and revolution” was a crucial part of the party’s attempts to spread its anticolonial message beyond traditional activist circles while distinguishing itself from both the liberal civil rights movement and revolutionary groups such as RAM and PL that skewed toward a college-educated and often middle-class audience.37 The result was, in the words of Aaron Dixon, who headed the party’s Seattle chapter, “blunt, hardcore,” and “[u]nlike any other paper I had seen.”38

In their use of profanity, the Panthers drew from African American verbal folk traditions including toasts, signifying, and word games such as the dozens, as well as the work of Black Arts Movement figures such as Amiri Baraka with his ringing declaration that “[t]he magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker.”39 It also fit into a long tradition of working-class and lumpenproletariat groups that employed salty language as a way of indicating their alienation from the “polite” world of the bosses and the bourgeoisie. “[O]bscenity,” remarked West German activist and Panther ally Karl Dietrich Wolff in 1969, “was always one of the weapons of the oppressed.”40 As scholar Benedict Anderson observed, “the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities.”41 In this respect, the language used by the BPP signified the group’s rejection of working within the existing U.S. social and political system in the late 1960s. Blacks were not citizens denied their rights but rather, as Hewitt phrased it, the “victims of American Democracy for over 400 years.” As such, they should not be bound by “any verbal Marquis of Queensbury Rules as to what we should say about the oppressor or how we should say it… . If we want to call him a motherfucker, then he’s a motherfucker.”42 Some fifty years later, scholar Steven Salaita echoed those sentiments, declaring, “Insofar as ‘civil’ is profoundly racialized and has a long history of demanding conformity to the ethos of imperialism and colonization, I frequently choose incivility as a form of communication.”43 Thus when Eldridge Cleaver called for “a coalition with every people in the world who has been fucked over by another people,” the very way in which he expressed the proposition was indicative of his rejection of both conventional American politics and traditional conceptions of international relations based on government-level interactions between nation-states.44 Sharp, simple, and rooted in a culturally particular urban African American folk vernacular, “motherfucker” was a verbal marker of the Panthers’ embrace of their status as what historian David Roediger termed “anticitizens.” It also fit with Fanon’s analysis of decolonization as “not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.”45 What better way to express this difference than by calling a motherfucker a motherfucker?

Profanity was not the only distinguishing characteristic of the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular. In speeches and the pages of the Black Panther, party leaders employed a colorful vocabulary that acted as verbal shorthand for their ideological challenge to colonialism, militarism, and white supremacy in their neighborhoods, the United States, and around the world. Cleaver, for example, frequently referred to the United States as “Babylon,” signifying its status as a decadent and declining empire, and he delighted in taunting California governor Ronald Reagan as “a punk, a sissy and a coward.”46 Perhaps the most famous example, however, was party’s use of the epithet “pig.” The BPP’s popularization of the term dated to May 1967, as its leaders were seeking alternate ways to confront the police at a time when armed patrols were no longer a viable option. As Seale described it:

Cleaver’s definition of a pig as “a low natured beast that has no regard for the law, justice, or the rights of the people … usually found masquerading as a victim of an unprovoked attack” served to cast the police, rather than the Panthers, as the true threat to peace and justice in Oakland. Douglas, reaching back to his experiences taking care of the pig pen while serving as a juvenile offender, illustrated the term with the first of his many pig drawings, which appeared in the second issue of the Panther paper under the caption “Support your local police.”48

These drawings mixed potent political symbolism with humor to challenge the moral and practical policing powers of the state. Amiri Baraka recalled that “just looking at [Douglas’s pig illustrations] would crack you up in a mixture of merriment and contempt!”49

While the Panthers initially employed “pig” in the specific context of police brutality in Oakland, its use quickly blossomed to express a wider national and international critique of U.S. hegemony. By 1968 the Panthers were employing the term in reference to the U.S. government and its puppets and allies around the world. “Internationally,” Cleaver insisted, “we have to place ourselves in the Third World, with the oppressed people of the world against the pigs, the international pig power structure.”50 Ideologically, this construction served to emphasize the commonalities between oppressed groups around the world struggling against the U.S. government and its allies to win the right to self-determination. Echoing Che Guevara’s insistence that “[s]olidarity among peoples does not now come from religion, customs, tastes, racial affinity or its lack… . [but] from a similarity in economic social conditions and from a similarity in desire for progress and recuperation,” Cleaver sought to define opposition to “the international pig power structure” as the determining factor in the party’s coalition building. At the same time as they sought to elide differences between themselves and their allies in the Third World, the Panthers’ use of terms such as “pig” and “motherfucker” rhetorically grounded them in the specific milieu of the urban, African American community that had birthed the organization in October 1966. In essence, by doing so the BPP offered a preemptive answer to the question later posed by postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha, who pondered whether it was “possible to be ‘culturally particularist’ without being patriotic? Committed to the specificity of event and yet linked to a transhistorical memory and solidarity?”51 New York Panther Assata Shakur was blunter in her assessment that “Panthers don’t try to sound all intellectual, talking about the national bourgeoisie, the military-industrial complex, the reactionary ruling class. They simply called a pig a pig.”52

Figure 3. December 20, 1967. Photo courtesy of Emory Douglas/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 4. May 31, 1970. Photo courtesy of Emory Douglas/Art Resource, NY.

Illustrations by Emory Douglas and Tarika Lewis, published regularly in the Black Panther and often turned into posters and other forms of public art, used a visual vocabulary to similarly demonstrate links between the Panthers’ local struggles and other movements around the world resisting white supremacy, capitalism, and U.S. militarism. In an illustration headed “It’s All the Same,” published in March 1968, Douglas used three panels to depict identically clothed pigs armed with guns, napalm, and mace, labeled “local police,” “national guard,” and “marines.”53

By the end of 1968, Douglas was using caricatures of pigs to represent not only soldiers and police officers but also figures ranging from San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto, California governor Ronald Reagan, national political figures such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace, and even Santa Claus.

Opposed to these tools of racialized colonialism in the United States and around the world was a diverse group that was bound together by having a common enemy and a common goal of self-determination. In September 1968, Douglas juxtaposed a quote from Mao Zedong, declaring that “war can only be abolished through war,” with illustrations of an armed black freedom fighter standing alongside Vietnamese and Afro-Cuban guerrillas, a Mexican revolutionary, and a Native American warrior with a flaming hatchet.54 As evidenced by this and other illustrations, Douglas was entirely comfortable working with a transnational and transhistorical vocabulary. His work for the BPP was heavily influenced by the art of Third World revolutionary movements, particularly those in Cuba and Vietnam, and he directly collaborated with the Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina (OSPAAAL) in 1968 to produce posters celebrating international solidarity with the African American people.55 At the same time, however, Douglas remained closely linked to the verbal and visual vernacular that characterized the origins of the Panthers in the East Bay’s urban African American community. Amiri Baraka characterized Douglas’s work as “a combination of expressionist agitprop and homeboy familiarity,” which “come[s] on like drawings, straight out of the hood.”56

Figure 5. September 28, 1968. Photo courtesy of Emory Douglas/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 6. September 28, 1968. Photo courtesy of Emory Douglas/Art Resource, NY.

An illustration from March 1968 depicting Lyndon Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk as pigs with broken necks, for example, was paired with words “on landscape art”: “It is good only when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree by his mother f—kin neck.”57

The very layout of the Black Panther reinforced links between local issues facing African Americans and broader international developments, particularly in the Third World. The October 26, 1968 edition, to take one typical example, featured a front-page article by Cleaver urging the paper’s readers to “look outside the borders of the United States in order to relate to the present balance of revolutionary forces in the world.” Accompanying this injunction was the iconic photograph of U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the Black Power salute following their first-place and third-place finish in the two-hundred-meter race at the Mexico City Olympic Games. Inside were stories from Laos, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Iraq in addition to coverage of local and national news relating to African Americans.58 Following the example of Soulbook, the Black Panther initially had no dedicated “international” section. Rather, local, national, and global appeared side by side in its pages. An approving comment on China’s first test of a thermonuclear weapon in July 1967, for example, was sandwiched between short items dealing with grassroots organizing in Atlanta and Los Angeles, all of which appeared under the heading “The World of Black People.”59 As with their predecessors in RAM, the Panthers’ definition of blackness in this period was expansive, with color serving not as a fixed cultural or biological construct but rather as a marker of struggle against white supremacy and colonialism.

Figure 7. Anticolonial vernacular at work: Emory Douglas comments on the U.S. political establishment (focusing on Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy). March 16, 1968. Photo courtesy of Emory Douglas/Art Resource, NY.

“Off the Pig”: Symbolic Violence in the Panthers’ Anticolonial Vernacular

Depictions of violence provided another crucial element of the Panthers’ anticolonial vernacular, one that built upon international referents while also drawing on the history and contemporary lived experience of black people in the United States. Accounts of Fanon’s contributions to the evolution of the black freedom struggle in the United States have generally emphasized his role in legitimating violence as a both a practical and psychological necessity in resisting colonialism. Equally, important, however, was his description of the routinized violence that lay at the heart of the colonial system itself. The crumbling infrastructure, poverty, and human misery of the ghetto were, in Fanon’s description, the inevitable consequence of “the violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world.” The police, whose task was to “ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm,” were the most visible agents of this violence, but it extended to include virtually all of the institutions that structured life for the colonized.60 Exposing the ways in which the exercise of state violence shaped the daily life of Oakland residents, and of urban black America more broadly, was a crucial element in the BPP’s program from the formation of the party in October 1966. While the party’s armed patrols initially served this purpose with respect to police brutality, by mid-1967 the task of dramatizing this violence increasingly moved from the streets of Oakland to the pages of the Black Panther.

The first issue of the paper highlighted the killing of Denzil Dowell in North Richmond as evidence of a larger pattern of police misconduct in black communities and championed armed self-defense as necessary to “free our communities from this brutal form of oppression.”61 Subsequent issues published in the aftermath of the Sacramento demonstration widened the scope of analysis, linking local acts of police brutality to a larger pattern of colonial violence directed at people of color by the U.S. government and its agencies both at home and abroad. In a column written for the second issue of the newspaper, Newton argued that “[t]here is a great similarity between the occupying army in Southeast Asia and the occupation of our communities by the racist police.”62 The BPP subsequently expanded on this comparison with both words and images, striving to communicate these links to a rank-and-file audience that knew little about the geopolitics of Vietnam or the nuances Fanon’s work but could easily relate to being brutalized and intimidated by local police. Whereas in “fascist America,” insisted New Haven BPP member Rory Hithe, “they use the thin blue line, fascist dog policemen, national guardsmen, cynical F.B.I. agents and traitorous, bootlicking civil rights leaders” to oppress people of color, externally the United States relied on “sadistic C.I.A. agents, the mercenary U.S. armed services, and running dog treaty organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).”63 While the tools and venues varied, in each of these cases the U.S. government employed organized violence to oppress and exploit people of color. As scholar Cynthia B. Young observed in her larger study of the U.S. Third World Left, activists in this period “used a focus on state violence and the internal colony to provide the ideological glue connecting U.S. minorities and Third World majorities.”64

Illustrations in the pages of the Black Panther provided one of the most powerful tools in the BPP’s efforts to convey the impact of colonial violence on daily life in the black ghetto and its links to U.S. imperialism overseas. Emory Douglas’s depictions of snarling, armed pigs terrorizing the black community easily paired with similar illustrations depicting violence inflicted against the Vietnamese and other Third World peoples struggling for self-determination. Tarika Lewis contributed similarly themed drawings of police violence and intimidation featuring hideous pigs dressed in police uniforms and terrorizing black youth.65 By the end of the 1960s, Douglas had begun experimenting with ways to illustrate the more subtle ways in which white colonial control of the ghetto inflicted violence and suffering on black people. One of his iconic images depicted an armed black woman sitting in wait for a greedy landlord, while beside her a baby is eyed by oversized rats.

Later (starting in 1971 after Cleaver and Newton split), Douglas expanded upon this effort in drawings dramatizing the way in which poverty, hunger, ill health, and dilapidated schools and housing constituted a form of routinized and institutionalized violence.66 Whether it was through caricatures of police officers and soldiers or his realistic drawings of, in the words of Philadelphia BPP member Mumia Abu-Jamal, “people in the ghetto, sisters with their hair in braids, with frayed sleeves and worn shoes,” Douglas provided a vivid and easily accessible way to illustrate the racialized colonial violence that linked African Americans to people of color around the world.67

Another key element of the Panthers’ anticolonial vernacular was the assertion that any serious attempt to overturn white colonial control of the ghetto would require a willingness on the part of the colonized to confront it with force. In “patrolling the pigs,” the Panthers had not only dramatized the violence of the police but also, in openly bearing arms and demonstrating a willingness to use them, showed the residents of West Oakland that it was both necessary and possible for black people to rid themselves of the passivity and inferiority complex that Fanon had identified as a consequence of colonialism. The Mulford Act deprived the Panthers of this option, and Newton recognized that the BPP was not prepared to initiate guerrilla warfare without first building a broader base of support in the black community and perhaps beyond. Thus, while the party quietly continued to amass weapons, one of the major challenges facing the Panthers in mid-1967 was finding a way to convincingly advocate for the psychological and practical role of violence in black liberation in the United States without running afoul of the law or prematurely entering into an open, armed struggle that would have surely doomed the party. It was partly in response to this dilemma that Cleaver, Douglas, Lewis, and others in 1967–68 turned to embedding anticolonial violence in the party’s visual, written, and spoken vernacular.

Figure 8. September 12, 1970. Photo courtesy of Emory Douglas/Art Resource, NY.

Stripped of the ability to dramatically embody anticolonial violence, or at least potential violence, in the form of armed patrols, the BPP’s rhetoric grew increasingly bold in response. Rhetorically, at least, “picking up the gun” morphed from self-defense against local incidents of police brutality to a form of revolutionary violence directed against the entire white colonial system. Cleaver was typically blunt in exhorting black Americans to “get some guns, organize, and square off to deal with this honkie.”68 BPP minister of education George Murray offered a similarly concise summary of the role of violence in black liberation: “Change. Freedom everywhere. Dynamite! Black Power. Use the gun. Kill the pig everywhere.” Chicago BPP leader Fred Hampton agreed, declaring, “Kill a few and get a little satisfaction. Kill some more and you get some more satisfaction. Kill em all and you get complete satisfaction.”69 While usually employed as part of a blanket attack on colonial systems that controlled black people, sometimes this language was directed at more specific targets. In an open letter to Los Angeles police chief Thomas Reddin published in the Black Panther in November 1968, John Huggins of the L.A. chapter of the BPP declared that “[a]s a closing message to you we’d like to say UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERFUCKER!” Black leaders deemed to be “bootlickers” or “Uncle Toms” as well as specific police officers “Wanted Dead for Murder” were also singled out by the Panthers for at least rhetorical violence. Perhaps most famously, David Hilliard attracted notoriety and legal attention for announcing in a 1969 speech, “We will kill Richard Nixon. We will kill any motherfucker that stands in the way of our freedom.”70

As with the party’s efforts to illustrate the links between the black ghetto and the Third World, visual imagery played arguably the most important role in conveying the BPP’s willingness to use arms. Images of guns, including carbines, M16s, and the iconic shotgun wielded by Newton were ubiquitous in the Black Panther in 1967–68. Douglas and Lewis also frequently contributed drawings of armed black people proudly carrying guns, ammunition, and explosives, often styled after similar depictions of Cuban and Vietnamese guerrillas. While black men featured most heavily in these visual representations, both Lewis and Douglas made a point of showing women and children handling firearms, again echoing examples from Third World guerrilla struggles. One of Lewis’s iconic pieces showed a mother teaching her young child how to shoot. In a drawing published in December 1968, Douglas depicted a young boy asking his approving father for a machine gun, shotgun, dynamite, hand grenades, and matches as a Christmas gift. Around the borders of the drawing were slogans including “Off the Pig,” “Blow Oink Away,” and “Snipe the Hogs!”71 Both artists also frequently portrayed black men and women directly employing anticolonial violence against their enemies. In 1968 the pages of the Black Panther regularly featured drawings of pigs being stabbed, shot, strangled, set on fire, hung from trees, blown to pieces, splashed with acid, dropped on spikes, crushed under a boot, and carried away in coffins.

Figure 9. January 3, 1970. Photo courtesy of Emory Douglas/Art Resource, NY.

While Douglas often depicted this violence in outlandish and cartoonish fashion, Lewis’s pieces tended to feature more realistic depictions of armed black men ambushing police paired with injunctions on proper guerrilla tactics (“No More Riots … Twos and Threes”).72

The increasing visual and rhetorical emphasis on violence served a number of purposes for the party in 1967–68. As with the previous armed police patrols, one of the central goals of the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular was to communicate its ideas and call to action men and women who might not have attended college, read Fanon, Mao, and Che Guevara, or participated in covert groups such as RAM. This meant that even as the Black Panther opened a broader channel of communications for the BPP, one that transcended the streets of the Bay Area, its editors and writers consciously attempted to pitch their message in terms drawn from the milieu of the party’s founding and early operations. As Douglas explained it in May 1968:

Similarly, Lewis’s striking drawing of a black guerrilla fighter standing before the backdrop of a flaming city, with the caption “Before we talk reconstruction, let’s accomplish the ruins,” was a simple and direct way of communicating Fanon’s assertion that “[d]ecolonization is always a violent event.”74

The verbal and visual emphasis on anticolonial violence in the pages of the Black Panther and elsewhere also served to served create transhistorical and transnational links between the BPP and individuals, groups, and nations that fought for self-determination against colonialism and white supremacy. In arguably the most famous photo of Newton—first appearing in the Black Panther in June 1967 and repeatedly reprinted in the newspaper as well as on posters—the BPP’s minister of defense was pictured sitting in a large wicker throne, with a modern M1 rifle in one hand and a spear in the other, personally embodying a kind of “imagined community” (to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase) that linked black Americans to their African ancestors as well as contemporary resistance to white supremacy and colonialism.75 The increasingly prominent role of Mao Zedong in the Panthers’ visual and verbal lexicon was also symptomatic of a larger shift in the way the party expressed its connections to the Third World. Whereas previously the BPP had used the Red Book primarily as a tool to raise money within white radical circles, Mao’s assertions that that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and that “in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun” featured heavily in the pages of the Black Panther and in the speeches of Panther leaders in 1967–68. By 1969, Bobby Seale could stand in front of a large, multi-ethnic rally outside the San Francisco Federal Building and exhort the crowd to “[h]old your Red Books up and tell the brothers where we getting some new ideology from.”76

During this period, Mao joined a host of other Third World figures as additional referents that came to define the party’s public image within the black community and beyond. In a May 1968 essay, Minister of Education George Murray invoked Fanon in asserting that “[w]e can create a black world, a black nation… . The way we can make this happen is through violence… . When we take out a policeman, major businessman or senator … we are educating ourselves and people like us.” The rhetoric of anticolonial violence simultaneously linked the Panthers to both the black past (via the history of slave rebellions) and the revolutionary Third World of the present. Such actions, Murray declared, would be “in the spirit of Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, the Viet Cong, and black guerillas in Southern Rhodesia.”77 When Emory Douglas drew armed Panthers flanked by Cuban guerrillas and Native American warriors or a figure of a pig labeled “U.S. Imperialism”—with its neck being wrung by black and brown hands labeled “Get out of the ghetto, Get out of Africa, Get out of Asia, Get out of Latin America”—it conveyed in simple and direct terms that the local struggle waged by the BPP in Oakland was linked to a long history of global struggle against white supremacy and colonialism.78

Figure 10. October 19, 1968. Photo courtesy of Emory Douglas/Art Resource, NY.

“Righteous and for Real Peoples’ Power”: Evaluating the BPP’s Anticolonial Vernacular

The most obvious accomplishment of the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular was to create a vocabulary that helped to bind the party to an identity that was neither entirely national nor entirely diasporic. Though prose, speeches, art, dress, and even music the Panthers built on their early operations in the East Bay in 1967–68, forging links based on transnational and transhistorical notions of blackness while remaining firmly rooted in the local circumstances of urban African American life. In doing so, they identified themselves as part of an imagined community of antiracist, anticapitalist, anticolonialist freedom fighters without becoming too closely entangled with any particular nation, government, or political-economic system or losing sight of their local roots. Among other advantages, this approach allowed the Panthers to avoid the “land hang-up” that had historically frustrated black nationalist ventures. As Cleaver observed, the long history of injustices perpetrated against black people in the United States had produced a “feeling of alienation and dissociation” powerful enough that they “long ago would have readily identified themselves with another sovereignty had a viable one existed.”79 This was complicated, however, by the unique position of black Americans as a colonized people with deep roots and a long history living inside a First World superpower. The solution, he suggested, was for black people to embrace this liminal position as neither a nation-state in the traditional sense (since they were dispersed and lacked land) nor full citizens of the United States (an impossibility given that the nation was founded and maintained by a system of white supremacy):

The Panthers’ anticolonial vernacular facilitated this “embryonic sovereignty” by linking black Americans to Third World nations and other groups seeking self-determination while acknowledging the realities of daily life in U.S. ghettos and celebrating African American culture. As such, it was highly influential not only within the party but also in the development of what Cynthia Young identified as key trends in the “interstitial approach” of the U.S. Third World Left, with its emphasis on “interpolating and signaling a community with certain shared interests: the commitment to eradicating colonialism, imperialism, racism, class exploitation, and, in some admittedly rare instances, homophobia and misogyny.”81

Another major accomplishment of the party’s populist anticolonial discourse was to call attention to the links between capitalism and white supremacy without becoming trapped in sterile academic debates over which of those two world historical forces was more important in producing the oppression of black people. Thus, while Cleaver argued that capitalism and the desire of the West to expropriate labor and resources from people of color had historically fueled the growth of white supremacy, he noted that “[p]eople who confront this situation daily, and who haven’t had time to do elaborate studies of the situation, don’t have time to distinguish between the economics and the racism.” Newton expressed similar sentiments, suggesting that the most important thing was not to untangle this complicated historical relationship theoretically but to “develop a power that will make it non-profitable for racist[s] to go on oppressing us.”82 Similarly the party’s anticolonial vernacular drew on Marxism and its variants without becoming too deeply involved in theoretical nuances of Marxism. In lambasting “the avaricious businessman, the racist, decadent, demagogic politicians of the world, and the pig police forces, be they in the Black community or in Vietnam” and calling for “righteous and for real people’s power,” Panther leaders advanced a collectivist critique of capitalism in terms designed to appeal to a working class and lumpenproletariat who experienced its negative effects on a daily basis but had little interest in a seminar on Marxist-Leninist theory. Indeed, for all the favorable references to Mao, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and other Marx-inspired revolutionaries, the Black Panther did not hew to anything approaching a party line in 1967–68. Some on the Left, then and now, have criticized the Panthers for their heterodoxy and theoretical laxness. But by keeping the focus on a simple demand for “land, bread [and] housing” the BPP was able to articulate anticapitalist sentiments to a large audience without becoming mired in Marxist dogma or the doctrinal infighting that had often characterized groups such as the CPUSA and PL.83

By mixing a critique of white supremacy, capitalism, and militarism, the Panthers’ anticolonial vernacular also opened up the possibility of alliances with white radicals involved in the antiwar movement. In 1968, Cleaver led the BPP in forging an alliance with the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), which had its roots in the predominantly white antiwar movement in the San Francisco Bay Area. The immediate origins of this collaboration lay in expediency—the PFP sought black votes in the upcoming election, while the BPP wanted publicity for its campaign to “Free Huey” following Newton’s October 1967 arrest (detailed in chapter 4). But emphasizing the colonial situation facing African Americans as an economic as well as racial process that had direct links to the Vietnam War and other U.S. imperial endeavors overseas helped prepare a sometimes skeptical Panther membership for working tactically with “mother country radicals” in the PFP. The BPP’s anticolonial vernacular was also potentially attractive to many white antiwar activists as it allowed them to connect their efforts to end the war in Vietnam to the Panthers’ struggles to take control of their own communities. Cleaver’s personal affinity for the emerging counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, his position at Ramparts, and the admiration he expressed for the younger generation of white radicals in Soul on Ice helped cement this relationship.84

The broad-based anticolonial ideology expressed by Cleaver, Douglas, and other Panther activists and artists also facilitated connections with a growing Third World Left in the United States that related to the Panthers’ urban-centric critique of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. Anticipating notions of polyculturalism later expressed by scholar Vijay Prashad, the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular allowed for a shared set of ideas about colonialism and self-determination among people of color in the United States while simultaneously leaving room for different groups to offer variations based on their own experiences and expressed in their own culturally and geographically particular terms.85 Thus, groups such as the Red Guards (based in San Francisco’s Chinatown), the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican nationalist group with a strong following in Chicago and New York), and the Brown Berets (a Los Angeles–based Chicano group) offered their own versions of the Panthers’ ten-point program, but in doing so they modified it to include demands such as treatment for tuberculosis sufferers in Chinatown, freedom for Puerto Rico, and respect for Spanish-language speakers in the United States.86 More directly, the Panthers provided assistance to groups looking to emulate the party’s success in using the Black Panther as both an organizational tool and ideological touchstone. When a nascent Chicano/a group based in the Mission District of San Francisco dubbed Los Siete de la Raza (named after seven Chicano youth charged with killing a white policeman) sought to publish its own newspaper, the BPP initially provided space in the Black Panther, while Emory Douglas helped train artists who would go on to produce the independent publication Basta Ya!87

For all its strengths, the anticolonial vernacular developed by the Panthers in 1967–68 also contained a number of ambiguities and contradictions that contributed to the party’s growing pains as it expanded beyond its initial base in Oakland. Most obviously, the increasingly heavy reliance on rhetorical violence masked a growing divide between those who saw it as a symbolic substitute for armed revolution and those who took it more literally. Newton, Seale, and Hilliard argued that the party’s calls to “off the pigs” and “kill any motherfucker that stands in the way of our freedom” did not signify a fundamental change in the party’s initial caution and respect for the law regarding the handling of firearms. While leaving open the possibility of an eventual escalation to guerrilla warfare (and quietly amassing an arsenal in preparation), they were careful to ensure that the BPP’s day-to-day operations remained legal and aboveground for the indefinite future. Thus, Newton continued to insist in 1968 that the Panthers would only use guns in self-defense and that “we’re not advocating violence.” Seale, meanwhile, explained that when used as part of the Panthers’ vernacular, phrases such as “off the pig” and “kill” did not mean “commit murder” but rather were a “a reaction to someone … that is about to unjustly attack.”88 Whatever the intent of the party’s founders, however, the rhetoric of anticolonial violence once unleashed was not always easy to contain to the realms of symbolism or self-defense. As detailed in the chapters that follow, the question of how to interpret the role of violence in the BPP’s daily operations would eventually contribute to a catastrophic split within the party.

The nature of the relationship between black Americans and the governments and peoples of the Third World was another point of ambiguity in the Panther’s anticolonial discourse that would eventually pose complications for the party. In the Black Panther and elsewhere, the party championed Third World solidarity in broad strokes without dwelling on the specific situations of these nations or on the many potential conflicts in their relationships with each other or with black Americans. Scholars have sometimes criticized these types of rhetorical comparisons as both oversimplifying the diverse and contested nature of the Third World and ignoring the many differences that separated black Americans living in a First World superpower from the colonial and postcolonial subjects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America the Panthers so frequently invoked. Whatever the scholarly validity of such comparisons, as an organizing device to build a constituency among black Americans and other people of color within the United States this kind of rhetoric was tremendously effective for the BPP in 1967–68. The notion of an imagined and idealized community that linked people of color around the world in a battle against white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism allowed the Panthers to organize locally while claiming links to a larger movement that transcended race and geography. Where it fell short, however, was in preparing the party and its members for building working relationships with governments and movements in the Third World.

As Malcolm X had discovered in the early 1960s, notions of a unified Third World standing shoulder to shoulder in a struggle for freedom with black Americans quickly vanished when confronted with the complex realities of nationalism and Cold War geopolitics. If the Panthers wanted to move beyond symbolism to forge actual alliances with the Third World, they would need to directly confront the question of what, specifically, these nations could do to help black Americans and vice versa. For the most part, the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular simply ignored this difficult question in favor of sweeping rhetorical and visual statements of solidarity. To the extent that they did address it, BPP leaders in 1967–68 tended to indulge in the same notions of African American exceptionalism that had marked RAM’s approach to the subject. Echoing Robert F. Williams, Muhammad Ahmad, Donald Freeman, and other RAM theorists, Newton insisted that “black people in America are the only people who can free the world, loosen the [yoke] of colonialism and destroy the war machine.” Working from the assumption that “[w]e are the driving shaft … in such a strategic position in this machinery that once we become dislocated the functioning of the remainder of the machinery breaks down,” Newton posited that black anticolonialism in the United States was inherently internationalist and that black Americans were in a unique position to “destroy the machinery that’s enslaving the world.”89 One result of this particular vision of African American exceptionalism was that, like RAM, the BPP’s leaders had little incentive to engage in the difficult and complicated task of building links across borders, languages, and cultures. While it had no effect on their ability to build a coalition in the United States, as the Panthers began to explore overseas links in 1968 this attitude would pose serious problems for the party.

For all its success at fueling the growth of the party at home, the BPP’s anticolonial vernacular also alienated some potential supporters in the African American community. Newton eventually ordered the Panthers to drop their use of profanity as it was likely to preemptively turn off some older and more socially conservative members of the community who might otherwise be receptive to the party’s message. The Panthers’ emphasis on building cross-racial coalitions and their attention to the economic aspects of colonialism also created tensions with groups and individuals, such as Maulana Karenga’s Los Angeles-based US Organization, that identified primarily on ethno-cultural lines.90

The party’s discourse also often clashed with its avowed commitment to gender equality. Women, including Tarika Lewis, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, and Judy Juanita, were involved in the party from early on and made important contributions to the development of the Black Panther. But while images of female warriors were not uncommon, the party’s anticolonial vernacular simultaneously reinforced notions of patriarchy while frequently relegating women to supporting roles in the revolution. The armed women who appeared in party-sanctioned art could easily slide into what scholar Anne McClintock referred to as Fanon’s “eroticized image of militarized sexuality” that “masculinizes the female militant, turning her into a phallic substitute, detached from the male body but remaining, still, the man’s ‘woman-arsenal.’ ”91 As Robeson Taj Frazier noted in his study of radical black internationalism during this period, even in the most revolutionary “representations and articulations, female agency and femininity conformed to male standards; subversive women were dominantly framed in hegemonic masculine and heteronormative terms.”92

Figure 11. 1969. Photo courtesy of Emory Douglas/Art Resource, NY.

In November 1967, to give one example, Eldridge Cleaver wrote an editorial in the Panther newspaper denouncing beauty pageants such as Miss America as “a racist ritual” that served to “perpetuate racism and stereotypes.” But rather than concluding that such exhibitions inherently demeaned women, his solution was to propose a “humanized Miss Third World Contest” to more properly judge the “beautiful world of Blackness.”93 Cleaver’s celebration of “pussy power,” with the corresponding assertion that “revolutionary power grows out of the lips of a pussy,” was based on a similarly sexist notion that women’s most important contribution to the struggle was to give or withhold sex in order to encourage “these males who call themselves men” to take up the gun. Nor were such sentiments confined to Eldridge Cleaver (who also frequently peppered his speeches and writings with homophobic slurs such as “punk”).94 In a nuanced analysis of the party’s aesthetics and iconography, with a particular emphasis of the role played by Emory Douglas, scholar Erika Doss concluded that by “reconfiguring and romanticizing black men as the very embodiment of revolutionary rage, defiance, and misogyny,” the party “reinscribed the most egregious forms of patriarchal privilege and domination, from machismo and misogyny to violence and aggression.”95 As the BPP expanded beyond its original base in Oakland in largely decentralized fashion, with local chapters enjoying a great deal of autonomy, the anticolonial vernacular found in the pages of the Black Panther and elsewhere provided a common vocabulary as important as the gun or the iconic uniform of the black beret, powder-blue shirt, and black leather jacket in cementing the party’s identity. The party’s growth, however, also tested the ability of its leaders to contain the ambiguities and contradictions imbedded in this discourse.