June, 2007

The Black Panther Party and the Communist Party, In Response to the Attack by Charlene Mitchell

An Analysis by Lil Joe

THE BLACK PANTHER
April 27, 1969. Page 14.
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"STATEMENT BY THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY"

We will not try to fight fire with fire because all of the people that fire is best put out with water. Therefore, the Black Panther Party will not fight racism with racism. But we will fight racism with solidarity. We will not fight capitalism with capitalism (Black capitalism), but with the implementation of socialism and socialist programs for the people. We will not fight U.S. government imperialism with more imperialism because the peoples of the world and other races, especially in America, must fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism. All peoples and revolutionaries must defend themselves with organized guns and force when attacked by the pig power structure.
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp/bpp270469_14.htm
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The Black Panther Party (BPP) was a working class cadre of revolutionary socialists that flourished in the working class, inner-city rebellion from the mid 1960s into the mid 1970s. As it is not the consciousness of men that determine their existence, but their social being that determines their consciousness, I will defend the Black Panther Party in its historical context in response to Charlene Mitchell's pseudo-socialist attacks on the working class and socialist legitimacy of the BBP/Panther Party, against the claim, for instance, that when the Panthers criticized the Communist Party (CP) because its broad united front with the Democratic Party, that that Panther criticism is classified by Charlene Mitchell as anti-communism.

Other than the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which is the caretaker of the Trotskyist tradition in the United States, the majority of the socialist and communist organizations critiquing the CP as reformists, revisionist and Stalinists came out of either the SWP, or the CP itself, in the 1950s and 60s to mid 70s in response to the CPs association with the Democratic Party and its policies. Other than to the Republican Party and FBI, the CP in no way represented communism, but opposition to communist revolution, and it was so criticized as a reformist Democratic Party tool by the Panthers, and by the dozen or so communist and socialist organizations throughout the United States, and the world!

The BPP/Panthers was an organization of inner-city working class youth. They were a disciplined organizational formation of working class youth in armed self-defense in context of global workers and peasants armed revolutions they were armed workers in America's inner-city slums advocating Socialist Revolution in context of American inner-city armed rebellion against the State.

The leadership in the BPP, which in the early days included Kwame Toure, as well as Huey Newton, Ray Masai Hewitt, John Huggins, George Jackson, the New York 21, and others were openly proletarian revolutionaries and as such were class-conscious socialists.

It was therefore not just because the Panthers had guns that they were constantly subjected to armed attacks by police and other armed representatives of the capitalist ruling classes in America. The cultural nationalist, reactionaries, such as, US Organization also had guns and paramilitary units, and killed Panthers. The Nation of Islam had a paramilitary organization, the Fruit of Islam, and killed Malcolm X. But neither the US Organization, nor the Nation of Islam was subjected to attacks by the American armed State the way the Panthers were.

Racial nationalists have always presented themselves as a paramilitary, revolutionary movement from Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to the Nation of Islam (NOI) Fruit of Islam (FOI) to the US Organization. Their confrontations with the police were isolated incidents rather than the systemic repression of Panthers. These cultural nationalists, who today call themselves Afro-centric, were not a threat to the American capitalist ruling classes, but its ideological ally.

These cultural nationalists advocated Black capitalism, opposed Black-White working class union solidarity, and they denounced communism as a godless, atheistic ideology of European White men that is alien to Africans. Their ideologies were identical to those of the Ku Klux Klan, J. Edgar Hoover, the American Nazi Party and Richard Nixon as they all advocated capitalism, opposed unions, and denounced communism as a godless, atheistic ideology that is alien to American Blacks! Thus, along with the American capitalist classes and politicians the cultural nationalists were not only not enemies of capitalism, but its ideological and political allies.

The F.B.I., the U.S. State Department, and the House Un-American Activities Committee of Joseph McCarthy, the Democrats and Republicans didn't go after the UNIA, the KKK, the NOI, the American Nazi Party, or US Organization. They went after the Communist Party, the trade unions, the Socialist Workers Party, and the Black Panther Party. The Democrats and Republicans legislated in Congress the Smith Act, the Taft-Hartley Act, and the Rap Brown Act. Rap was a Panther leader in 1968. Elijah Muhammad wasn't brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Paul Roberson was.

See:
The Sedition Act of 1798
http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/sedition/s-text.htm

The Espionage Act:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWespionage.htm

The Smith Act:
http://www.answers.com/topic/smith-act

The Taft-Hartley Act:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAhartley.htm

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/McCarthyism/HUAC_Rise_AntiCommun.html

The Rap Brown Act:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1467-8330.2003.00347.x

The history of workers in America "here by way of the Middle Passage" (Osiris) has been a history of class struggles. One has to understand the culture of America in the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 60s in context of the so-called "Cold War", that is what made the Communist Party what it was in the 60s relative to the Panthers and what made the Panthers what they were. This defense of the Black Panther Party against the Communist Party criticism and Charlene Mitchell's Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism's attack can be understood only in this in historical context.

In consequence of racial slavery, once Civil War abolished it, the majority of the former slaves remained in the Slave States, as sharecroppers - serfs on the lands owned by the previous oowners.

These sharecropping families were poor, isolated and terrorized by the State and Ku Klux Klan. It was only sharecroppers whose children were able to immigrate into the proletariat jobs in the cities, and many of those jobs were in the North. As wage laborers, these new proletarians had money and organizational networks that enabled them to self-organize into labor unions, and form civil rights organizations.

The Socialist Party of the United States and the trade unions they influenced recognized these American working class Blacks as their class brothers, and welcomed them into the Party. See Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Deb's article "The Negro and His Nemesis":
http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/debs/works/1904/negronemesis.htm

Philip Randolph, who the Garvyites dismissed as an "integrationist", because he fought to tear down walls of racial segregation and discrimination, was a Socialist Party activist leader and organizer of Black trade unions, whom the American capitalists and the U.S. government called "the most dangerous Negro in America". See the AFL-CIO biography of Randolph at:http://www.apri.org/ht/d/sp/i/225/pid/225

Black proletarians forced their way into the American working-class, and unions. The White workers thought of Blacks as competitors for jobs and were hostile to them. Check out the racist history of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. They thought of themselves more as "White men," and "Americans," than as proletarians. The lily White, snobbish craft trade unionists like [Samuel] Gompers excluded not just Blacks in general but also the unskilled White workers from the trades unions.

By this racial pragmatism, the White workers, although thinking they were maintaining a racial monopoly on certain jobs were actually setting themselves up for class struggle defeats. Black sharecroppers and capitalists brought others up North to break strikes. It was only then that racist White worker, and trade unionists realized that it was in their own best interest to bring Blacks into the proletariat and into the unions.

It was the Marxists in the Socialist Party, such as Eugene Debs, and Daniel DeLeon in the Socialist Labor Party that fought racism in those socialist organizations. See my Interview by Sharif on the Dilemma of Class and Race in Political Struggles at:
http://www.nathanielturner.com/sharifinterviewsliljoe.htm

The Communist Party was also involved in the struggle to protect Black sharecroppers and proletarians against racists, and the State, for instance the Scottsboro legal lynching, that led the fight for Black civil rights. See B.D. Amis - Black Communist & labor leader:
http://www.pww.org/article/articleprint/6137/

Civil rights movements originated in the cities of the North, challenging segregation and racially discriminating laws. In the 1950s and early sixties Black civil rights movements emerged in Southern cities. Socialist labor organizers such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and the Sleeping Car Porters Union, with substantial Black working class bases, became the organizational networking of the civil rights protests.

The State's vicious response and violent repression of non-violent protesters was teaching Black Americans both in the North, Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton, as well as in the South, Robert F. Williams, the naked brutality of not just the Ku Klux Klan, but of State Power.

The State's FBI attacked the Civil Rights organizations on an anti-communist platform. They knew that Randolph and Rustin were socialists in the Socialist Party, as well as trade unionists. But, the split between the Socialists concerning the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, in which the more radical socialists supported the Revolution and formed themselves into a Communist Party affiliated with the Soviet centered Communist International, were seen by the American capitalists and State as the real threat.

The FBI asserted that the Communists were Soviet agents, who were "outside agitators" and "rabble rousers" that "infiltrated" the Civil Rights movement and its organizations. J. Edgar Hoover accused Martin Luther King Jr. of having a "Communist" adviser. King determined it to be a necessity to expel this "communist" from SCLC.

On the other hand, in contrast to the non-violent principles of the majority of civil rights organizations and leaders, in the civil rights movement in Monroe, North Carolina, there emerged the militant armed resistance, against both the State and its Ku Klux Klan lackeys. These were veterans of World War II and the Korean War organized by and under the leadership of Robert F. William. These civil rights activists opted for armed self-defense, self-organizing themselves into a community militia. They named themselves "Deacons of Defense". The Deacon, led by Robert of Williams, defended not just themselves at protests, but the Black community itself.

Robert Williams was forced to flee the United States to "Communist Cuba". It was in Cuba that Williams organized a literary campaign in the United States called "Radio Free Dixie", and then to China where he published the magazine "The Crusader". Robert Williams wrote the book "Negroes, with Guns.
(See: http://www.afrocubaweb.com/rwill.htm#negroes%20with%20Guns)

An RW biography of Williams states:

In Memory of Robert F. Williams:
A Voice for Armed Self-Defense and Black Liberation

RW #882, November 17, 1996

Born in Monroe, North Carolina, in 1925, Robert Williams grew up hearing stories of his grandparents, who were born into slavery. During World War 2, he was a machinist and led a strike of workers when he was 16 years old. He moved to Michigan where he became an autoworker and fought in the Detroit riot of 1943, when white mobs stormed through the streets and killed dozens of Black people. In 1947, Williams married Mabel Ola Robinson, who shared his commitment to social justice and African-American liberation, and they built a partnership of love and respect that lasted the rest of Robert's life.

Robert Williams made his mark on history after he returned to Monroe in 1955, after being discharged from the Marines. He became the president of the Union County branch of the NAACP and went out to recruit members among laborers, farmers, domestic workers, and the unemployed. In his book, "Negroes, With Guns" Williams recalls, "˜We ended up with a chapter that was unique in the whole NAACP because of working class composition and a leadership that was not middle class. Most important, we had a strong representation of returned veterans who were very militant and didn't scare easy. We started a struggle in Monroe and Union County to integrate public facilities and we had the support of a Unitarian group of white people." Monroe was the southeastern regional headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. But this didn't stop Williams from organizing struggle against segregation.

In 1961, Freedom Riders were coming from all over the country to the South to join the Civil Rights struggle. When they came to Monroe, Williams refused to take their oath of non-violence, but called on people to support them. In August, Freedom Riders started picketing the Monroe courthouse and within days, a number of them were viciously attacked and white racist mobs were mobilized to try and run the Freedom Riders out of town. According to Williams:

At first the victims were all Freedom Riders and the local non-violent students, but soon Negroes were attacked indiscriminately as the mob fanned out all over town. They were massing for an attack against our community.... White people started driving through our community, and they were shouting and screaming and some would fire out of their cars and throw objects at people on the streets. Many of the colored people started arming, exchanging guns and borrowing ammunition and forming guards for the night to defend the community from the mob massing in town. All kinds of people started calling Williams on the phone--reporting on beatings, asking what should be done, volunteering to join armed groups to defend the community.

At one point, when a white couple drove into this whole scene and were threatened by the crowd, Williams let them escape into his house.

That night Robert and Mabel left Monroe. After they left, Williams and one of his supporters, Mae Mallory, were indicted on charges of kidnapping the white couple who Robert had let into his house. The FBI launched a nationwide hunt for the Williamsons and Mae Mallory and back in Monroe they went on a rampage: 'The police used my disappearance as an excuse to raid through the rest of the community; tearing up homes, terrorizing a lot of the people who weren't even in the defense guard, grilling in all-night sessions persons known to be my associates, and confiscating the weapons they found--weapons we possessed legally.'

After leaving the U.S., Robert and Mabel lived in Cuba for five years. From here, they organized "Radio Free Dixie," which reached African-Americans, advocating armed self-defense and Black liberation. Williams also continued to publish The Crusader newsletter which he had started in 1959.

Williams' stand on armed self-defense continued to have a big influence on the Black liberation struggle in the U.S. His example inspired groups in the South like the Deacons for Defense in 1965. And other groups were also influenced by Williams, like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party.

Williams said: "˜When the racists forced me into exile they unwittingly led me onto a greater field of battle...All this time we will further identify our struggle for liberation with the struggle of our brothers in Africa, and the struggle of the oppressed of Asia and Latin America. They, in turn will further identify their struggle with ours."

In 1963, Williams asked Mao Tse-Tung, leader of the Chinese revolution, to speak out on the oppression of Black people in the United States. And in response, Mao issued a Declaration of support for the cause of African-American liberation. In 1966, Williams moved with his family to China and lived there during the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
http://rwor.org/a/firstvol/882/willms.htm

These were the historical circumstances, and international-national context in which Malcolm X broke with the racial mysticism of the Nation of Islam, whose ministers talked the talk about Black self-defense in militant sounding demagogy, but by opposing civil rights street fights with racists and the State as "integrationist", themselves did nothing to actually defend fellow Muslims, let alone the oppressed Black working classes communities. Like the UNIA outfits, the Nation of Islam, wearing military uniforms and rank designations notwithstanding, these outfits never defended Blacks against the KKK attacks, let alone engaged the State in armed combat.

Rather the opposite. The UNIA and KKK leadership cadres admired one another, and endorsed each others program and premises: racial segregation, and ultimately the removal of Africans in America by way of the Middle Passage back to Africa.

The difference in ideological realities is that militant Klansmen, who were killing Africans in America by way of the Middle Passage, advocated military expulsion of Blacks from the United States. The Black back to Africa advocates, however, pretended that Blacks return to Africa was their own idea to go to Africa to separate from Whites, rather than integrate with Whites.

The American Colonization Society was established in Washington at the Davis Hotel on December 21, 1816. Among the delegates attending were Henry Clay, John Randolph of Roanoke, Richard Bland Lee, and the Rev. Robert Finley; colonization mastermind Charles Fenton Mercer remained a member of the Virginia legislature and was unable to be in Washington. Although the eccentric Randolph believed that the removal of free blacks would "materially tend to secure" slave property ...Very few members were slave owners who feared free people of color and wanted to expel them from America, and in fact the Society never enjoyed much support among planters in the Lower South. Despite being antislavery, Society members were openly racist and frequently argued that free blacks would be unable to assimilate into the white society of this country. John Randolph, one famous slave owner, called free blacks "promoters of mischief."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Society

Black Nationalism in America accepted the American Colonization Society (ACS) viewpoint that "integration" was both impossible and undesirable. The "free" Blacks were similar to the "Coloreds" in Apartheid South Africa.

These free Blacks consisted of those who were legally freed by their owners, such as David Walker, those who issued from those freed Blacks who were born free, those who illegally freed themselves such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglas, and of those such as Edward Blyden who immigrated to the United State from the Caribbean.

Wherever from which they hailed, free Blacks did in fact assimilate into the American capitalist system - riverboat laborers, farmers, artisans, or physicians such as Thomas White and John V DeGrasse, religious leaders such as George Liele, scientists and engineers such as Benjamin Banneker, publishers and journalists such as Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm, proletarian abolitionists as Frederick Douglas, petty bourgeois merchants such as David Walker, international shipping capitalists such as Paul Cuffe, and even American capitalist slave owners, such as Thomas Day.

Just as free Blacks were a mix in their assimilation into the American capitalist economy based in layers of capitalist commodity production by wage labor, in the North-Eastern United States there were corresponding and therefore different social strata.

Corresponding to the class interests of the different strata there were different political tendencies and ideologies. The individuals who emancipated themselves from slavery, such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas became abolitionists and fought capitalist commodity production by chattel slave labor, to displace it with capitalist commodity production by wage labor.

On the other hand, the Black capitalists slave owners, wealthy merchants and professionals resented racial limits to their ambition personally, and having no tie to Black chattel they sought a State of their own. Since they knew the U.S. government/State would not permit a Haitian like Black Republic in North America, or even a predominantly Black State in the American Union, the wealthy, and educated Blacks associated with them allied together with the American Colonization Society lobbied the American government to establish a Zionist Black American colony in West Africa.

The Black Zionist "Back to Africa" movement restricted itself to free Blacks, and lobbied for their interests. Whereas, the Black liberationist confronted both chattel slavery and fought for its abolition in the South, and also racial segregation and discrimination in the North from a perspective integrating an emancipated Black people into every occupation and level of American society, the Black Zionists accommodated both socially and politically the existence of slavery in the South and racial segregation in the North and West.

There were therefore two political and ideological trends in the free Black community! The liberationists, who fought for the abolition of both slavery and racial segregation, were denounced as "assimilationists". The implicit charge of assimilation is self-inflicted cultural and even racial social genocide.

The Black back to Africa Zionist's capitulation to the existence of racial slavery in the South, and racial segregation in the North made its militant sounding principle by denouncing "the White man" to justify themselves for not being in the trenches of class warfare - not being involved in the struggles to abolish slavery. Demagogy produced this masquerade of Black militancy and demagoguery denouncing "the White man's country" as irreconcilable with Black interests and the White man as irredeemable racists, on the one hand, and on the other denouncing the abolitionists as "assimilationists" and "lovers of the White man".

Zionism is always a reactionary cultural nationalism of racial naturalism, "a bird of a feather flock together", as though the races of man are different species of primates, and the preaching of outright racial supremacy to justify conquering others:

1. The Hebrew's genocidal conquests in Canaan that established a Hebrew caste system in the creating of the kingdom of Israel in Palestine;

2. The stories of Shadrach, Meshack, Abednego and Daniel in the Book of Daniel in the historical Jewish Diaspora in Babylonia and Ezra and Nehemiah dispatched by the Babylonian political class to retake Canaan from the Samaritan population, establishing a Jewish caste system;

3. Paul Cuffe and Edward Blyden of the "African Diaspora" who were used by British and U.S. imperialism to help establish settler colonies of Sierra Leone and Liberia...

4. Marcus Garvey, an anti-communist against the Russian worker's Revolution, with delusions of grandeur was elected by UNIA Provisional President of Africa, and following German imperialism's defeat in World War I sent a delegation to the League of Nations, to urge the imperialist representatives set him up in a predominately Negro American settler colony Republic in Namibia, as though Sierra Leone weren't big enough for his ambition!

Yes, a bird of a feather do flock together: Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the Provisional President of Africa, as a Black supremacist was later exposed for having a secret meeting with the White supremacis back to Africa preaching Edward Young Clarke, the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/peopleevents/e_factoriescorp.html

5. Elijah Muhammad, an anti-communist who was honored by the Chicago city government whose racial supremacy doctrine culminated in fantasy and science fiction.

On the hard ground back on earth, away from "mother ship" theology, the leaders of the Nation of Islam, including Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were holding meetings with the Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragons and with George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party, who spoke at a NOI national convention where he praised Muhammad as the Black Adolph Hitler, a compliment! It must, at this reading be pointed out, that when Malcolm left the NOI and moved toward socialist revolutionary objectives, that he ended his relations with Rockwell and the American Nazi Party.
See: http://www.malcolm-x.org/docs/tel_rock.htm

The cultural nationalists in the US Organization in the 60s continued the orientation of capitalism, and anti-communism. It was correct that the Communist Party was in the tradition of Dubois, Paul Robeson and Civil Rights, whereas the Socialist Workers Party bent to Black cultural nationalism, or rather Malcolm X's brand of it. So, why then is Charlene Mitchell here attacking the Panthers?

The facade of Black militancy in military uniform wasn't perceived as a threat to American capitalists, the State, nor even to the racists in the Ku Klux Klan. These powerful Whites recognized Black militancy in military uniform to be the capitulation and therefore window dressing facade that it was.

The Black nationalist base is the Black petty bourgeoisie shoe shine stands, mom/pop stores, restaurants, tailor shops, craftsmen, gas station managers, dressmaking shops, barber shops, ghetto news papers, Black professionals, Black colleges and so on. There is nothing wrong with that! The issue is that their ideology corresponds to their interests: it is in their interests to castigate working class Blacks for having so much money collectively, and fail to patronize Black businesses. It is also in their interests to ideologically denounce Jew, Koreans and of course the White man for being the majority in our neighborhoods.

The Black petty-bourgeoisie demand to buy Black, and the Black politicians demand that Blacks vote Black, by which is usually meant vote for the Democrats! Yet, the Black petty-bourgeois businessmen do not restrict their customers to Blacks, nor Black politicians restrict campaign contributions and their voters to Black Democrats! Black Nationalism, just like any other nationalist ideology, including fascism and Nazism is a bourgeois ideology of race hustlers.

This is not to say that that is the case of every Black Nationalist; there are those who call themselves "revolutionary nationalists", and even socialists. They therefore struggle for what they regard as a socialist perspective in the general nationalist movements, as do the All-African People's Revolutionary Party, and individuals such as Baraka. More often than not, they are Maoists, who after all, they say, never forgot he was Chinese.

It was because of the Panther's Marxist-Leninist ideology and advocacy of revolutionary class war against capitalist, rather than denouncing the "White man", and most importantly that the Panthers had a base of popularity and support in the inner-city ghetto slums, that the FBI, COINTELPRO, and local police waged an unceasing armed struggle against the Black Panther Party.

The Hollywood movie "Panthers" misrepresented the truth when it presented Mao tse-Tung's Red Book as no more than an opportunist ploy to sell to radical students to raise money on college campuses. In fact that is a lie. Most Panthers, women as well as men, carried Mao's Quotations in upper coat pockets. These Red Books were read. But so were other books by Mao, and Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Che, Bakunin, Fanon and others by Panther Party members, and other organizations in the Black communist working class districts.

Charlene Mitchell's recounting of the early years of the Panthers in L.A., didn't discuss the Panthers practical role in community political organizing as such, which had to do with Mao's advocacy of building a base in the community struggles against oppression and repression. For instance, the positive role the Panthers played in response to an L.A.P.D. raid on Carver Jr. High School in South Central Los Angeles in 1969.

There existed at the time Black Student Unions (BSUs) in Community Colleges, State Colleges and Universities throughout L.A. County, formed an alliance organization the Black Students Alliance of BSUs that responded to this attack on Black school children by the Pigs by calling for student strikes. The BPP cadres participated in these strikes as the Southern California BPP were in a practical alliance with the Black Students Alliance (BSA). The Black Students Alliance was a federation of college Black Students Unions, its leaders including Ayuku Babu and Harry Truly.

These strikes were organized modeled on the anti-war student's strikes against U.S. aggression, e.g. SDS. The solidarity between SDS, anti-war groups on campuses, with and in support of the BSU's call to shut the colleges and schools down in protest were a success. In protest of the police raids high schools and colleges were struck all over L.A. County.

Reverend Peters, who was an active member in the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) associated with Martin Luther King Jr., was pastor of Victory Baptist Church, around the corner from Carver Junior High School. He graciously allowed the BSA, together with their Panther Party allies to use his Church as headquarters for the student's activities, and to co-ordinate the student's general strike.

Franklin Alexander and Kendra Alexander of the CPUSA participated in these strikes. As the CP's Che-Lumumba Club, they in particular had influence at the South West Community College in South Central Los Angeles.

After about a week the strike was at its height and Franklin at a meeting argued that the strike must be culminated at its success, rather than peter out. I don't recall whether it was Franklin, representing the Communist Party USA's Che-Lumumba Club, Dedan Kamathi and Sabu from Compton Community College, Marvin X from East Los Angeles Community College, Jabali from California State College at Los Angeles, Damu and Josef from South-West College, Harry Carey from U.C.L.A., China, Majid and John Imani from Los Angeles City College, all of whom contributed to the practical political leadership of the strike also had the responsibility of making the strikes at their own college home bases successful.

Los Angeles Community College (LACC) itself became a battlefield, as right wing white students, who called themselves Victory in Vietnam Association, or VIVA, were an anti-anti-war outfit, who also attacked the Black students strike. They had the open support of racist right wing news caster George Putnam on the LA local station KTLA. Thus, the struggles at LACC were as an important center of the storm of Black student protests as was Carver Junior High itself.

At Jefferson High, Bill Graham led the struggle there, and got together with Charles Dubois from Hamilton High, and organized in the model of the BSA Black High School Students into a similar federation of high school rebels into the Black Youth Alliance, or BYA. It was due in large part to the dedication of the kids at Jefferson that the high school student's strikes were successful.

The Black Panther Party's L.A. Chapter was not directly involved in the student's strike, or its leadership. But, they were there as consistent supporters, and had political and friendship relations with many of the student protestors. There was a brief confrontation between Bunchy Carter and several of his Panther associates with Josef, and his BSU associated at South West, that involved the Che-Lumumba cadres, but the issues were resolved in context of the class struggle itself, and didn't affect the Panther/Che-Lumumba/BSA solidarity in pursuing the student's strike to its logical conclusion.

The Communist Party, including the Che-Lumumba Club Negro organizers are well experienced, disciplined and smart strategists. As the student's strike approached its climax, in the battles at Jefferson High and LACC, after a couple of weeks or so Franklin recognized that the strikes were nearing a transitional stage, where they would either peter out in a whimper or be set-up for a bang by the police forces, that in either case would be defined as failure by the media. At a community-student meeting, Franklin made a memorable contribution to the struggle by arguing the protestors must take the moment into their own hands, by culminating the strike of their own accord.

The BSA student leadership was convinced by Franklin's experienced, thus powerful arguments, which had the support of dedicated and respected Panthers who were in attendance. The discussion, with strongly advanced creative suggestions, from Jabali, Dedan, Melvin X , Josef and others evolved dialectically to the perspective of the revolutionaries themselves deciding to go out with a bang, not being beaten by the cops on television as Franklin warned, but by the BSA culminating the strike in an act that would be at once bold and educative: taking over Carver Junior High School by the BSA, bringing the students back to class room but in those class rooms BSA college students would be the teachers!

What would they teach? Black history, liberation and class struggle! What else? After all, the Black students who organized those BSUs and demanded Black Studies Departments had an agenda of getting this education and returning to the hood as high school teachers and Ph.Ds at high schools in the inner-city slums, denouncing economic exploitation and racial oppression!

That was the stated purpose of BSU's fight for Black Studies Departments that would provide education that would provide a perspective to enable them to return to the inner-city slum schools, or low priced lawyers defending individual victims of racist laws and cops, and so on. As it turned out it was mainly the White socialist students in the anti-war movement that became inner city school teachers and public defenders.

Those Black students who exploited the civil rights movements and ghetto rebellions to get affirmative action slots and money grants in the interests of Black folk, who did become MAs, PhDs and lawyers from the Black cultural nationalist milieu ended up selling themselves for the money and prestige of being Afro-centric, professors teaching rich white kids Black history at noted colleges and Ivy League universities, experts on cable network news and C-Span, universities, corporate lawyers, judges, and radio commentators, and their Black consciousness revolutionary activities are celebrations of Kwanza, and so on.

But, in the 60s most of the Black students, such as, those at Cornell University, San Francisco State College, and the BSA, who were associated and worked with the Panthers, were socialists and serious about both learning at the universities, and teaching Black history to downtrodden Black kids, to impart to them the knowledge and dignity they needed to continue the struggle for Black liberation, and socialism. Socialism is Black liberation and socialism is Black liberation.

The Black student's rebellions engendered revolutionaries in the frame of the Black liberation movement, just as SDS and others became revolutionaries in the anti-war movements. The Black students however had never lost their connectivity with the rebellions taking place in the Black communities, fighting racism and police violence.

In this context the members of the BSA voted to take over Carver, taking the children to their respective class rooms and to dismiss the teachers, to themselves teach the children African history, slave revolts, and socialism. Not all the students in the BSA were socialists, but they all considered themselves revolutionaries.

Ronald Freeman, and other members of the Black Panther Party were there with the students, and helped provide security both at the school take over and teaching action, and also back at the Victory Baptist Church, where the BSA student rebels was to regroup and analyze the significance of what they did.

It was decided before the school culmination take over and education action was taken that no one would carry guns because there were children involved, and both the school and the Victory Baptist Church were surrounded by not only the L.A.P.D., bit also by the FBI, and the media. Yet, the police and the FBI stood by and allowed some members of Ron Karanga's Dashiki wearing US Organization to cross their lines with guns including a rifle. In the Church, notwithstanding the presence of Black school children, whether by assignment from the State or US Organization, one of the members of that organization shot Ronald Freeman. The police and FBI agents stepped aside and instead arresting the shooters, raided the Church with guns out, and made everyone get down. It just so happened, however, that Ronald had his Red Book in pocket, which caught the bullet and prevented him from being touched by it! The popularity of Mao's Little Red Book assumed mythical dimensions, so to speak.

The point here is that the Panthers were not opportunists selling Red Books to White revolutionaries as a means of getting guns to fight the cops! The above statement, quoted from a communique of the Central Committee of the Black Panther Party, the rejection of politics of skin (racism) imperialism and capitalism was dialectically placed as the negation of these negatives contrasted to the affirmation of the positives of class politics, proletarian internationalism and the fight for Socialism.

The Panthers never wrote that the lumpinproletariat was a revolutionary class as opposed to the proletariat, but that these class elements are in poverty, Black victims of racism and of the contradictions of capitalism engendered critical thinking among them. This critical thinking inevitably resulted in the break from American racism and anti-communist culture.

People, in the 60s, both Black liberation activists and student anti-war protestors, may have started by reading the Little Red Book of Quotations from Chairman Mao tse-Tung as a Third World revolutionary, but this led to the reading of Mao's Four Essays on Philosophy particularly "On Practice", "On Contradiction" and "Where Do Correct Ideas Come From," and to reading "Combat Liberalism". By reading and discussing these essays in study groups, Black liberation activists, including Panthers such as Masai from L.A., who was to become the BPP Minister of Education, these introduced sophisticated serious studies and discussions on dialectics, materialist epistemology, class struggle and workers revolution as seen from the standpoint of historical materialism and class struggle.

Black liberation activists and students organized study groups, where in addition to Mao the reading lists universally included Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth", Stalin's "Marxism and the National Question", Lenin's "Lecture on The State", "The State and Revolution", and of course Marx and Engel's "The Communist Manifesto". Later, in the 70s those Maoists, who came into ideological conflict with the Communist Party interventions eventually, became familiar with the writings of Leon Trotsky. Study circles came to include Trotsky's "The Transitional Program" and individuals even read on their own Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed" and "In Defense of Marxism"!

The year of 1968 was decisive in that the revolutionary praxis of peasants and workers in national liberation movements in Africa as well as Asia and Latin America, but also and even more importantly in Europe particularly in France. In the year of 1968 several dialectically interconnected events convinced many Black liberation activists and anti-war students and protestors that Marxism is scientific, and that the working class can function as a non-racial independent political force that alone produce the revolutionary socialist vanguard.

1: The Tet Offensive in Vietnam in which the Vietnamese Workers Party co-coordinated armed insurrections: See:
http://www.marxist.com/1968/vietnam.html

2: The Workers and student's French General Strike. See:
http://www.marxists.org/history/france/may-1968/timeline.htm"

3: Upsurge and Massacre in Mexico, 1968 See:
http://rwor.org/a/v20/970-79/975/mex1.htm

4: The solidarity both with the Mexican student and workers class war against the bourgeois government, and with Black Americans fighting the American bourgeois state, including with the Black Power Movement, expressed by Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who as Black American athletes refused to identify their wins with U.S. imperialism, but raised the Black Power fist of defiance! See:
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/Mexico_1968.htm

5: The armed rebellion of working class and unemployed Blacks following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in which they combated the State in some 120 cities across the United States fighting the police and national guards, the Pentagon deployed Vietnam hardened Airborne divisions to Boston, Washington D.C., Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco.

6: The Chicano high school students blow-outs in East Los Angeles, in which students confronted the racist school board and demanded changes in curricula, by city wide student strikes, in which the Brown Beret Party participated similar to Black Panther Party participation in the South Central Los Angeles.

On March 1, 1968, the Brown Berets planned and participated in the East L.A. walk outs or blow outs, the largest and lengthiest in the history of California, in which thousands of students left their classrooms to join the protest for quality education. The Brown Berets were able to unite college and high school students and begin a new stage in the Chicano/a movement. Shortly, after this event, other Chicano students led walk outs all over the Southwest.
http://brownberets.info/history/

Thus, it was the praxis in the class struggle itself that, as Masai used to say forces Black revolutionaries in America not only to pick up the guns ( in order to get rid of the gun [the State] it is necessary to pick up the gun) but also, to recognize the necessity to study revolutionary literatures accumulated in Marxism to form and participate in study groups as an obligation. Panthers, and others such as the BSA, formed study circles, and discussed literature from revolutionaries, liberation movements, and Marxist literature from all over the world, which accompanied the practical community organizing and political confrontations with the State.

The Communist Party in Los Angeles ran a book store on 7th street that carried and sold books from the Soviet Union and even China. But, other than discussions with Mike Davis there was no immediate interaction between Black revolutionaries and the Communist Party as such. Rose Chernin of the Communist Party operated an outfit called the Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, which worked with the Celes King Bail Bondsman, who was also the local leader of the NAACP, to bail revolutionary Blacks and student anti-war activists from jail.

Panthers, and others in the Black liberation movement who in appreciation for Rose bailing them out of jail, attended annual Committee appreciation meetings that honored her, and raised money for the Committee, at the Ambassador Hotel grand ball room, on Wilshire Blvd. This didn't mean however capitulation to the politics and ideology of the Communist Party, but was an issue of respect, and self-disciplined duty. She, Dorothy Healy, who played a central political role debating Black revolutionaries, at least until she left them in 1968, and also Franklin and Kendra were respected as individuals.

The only member of the Communist Party as such with whom the movement had official relations with was Dorothy Healy. She lived in South Central L.A., a Jewish woman and her son Richard, in the midst of the hood as comfortable and secure as all who knew she had deep respect for Black people and they for her. She invited revolutionary Blacks into her home where we debated for hours. A principled woman, and communist leader, Dorothy resigned from the Communist Party in protest of the Soviet military invasion of Czechoslovakia in that wonderful rebellious year of protests, 1968. Dorothy and her son Richard became among the founders of the New Leftist New American Movement party, called NLNAM.

As Charlene Mitchell pointed out in her analysis of the relationship of the Communist Party USA to the Black Panther Party, her brothers Franklin and Deacon Alexander, who were like she was a "red diaper baby" i.e. her parents were in the Communist Party, played a significant role in the Black liberation movement in L.A., sometimes positive, as when dealing with practical issues related to protests, often negative when dealing with theoretical political significance of events. They were pragmatists. Also Franklin's wife, Kendra Alexander played a positive role, and had a great influence on the Black revolutionaries that attended South-West L.A. Community College, a group of bungalow class rooms put in place in response to the "Watts Riot" the Black ghetto rebellion in South Central L.A. in 1965.

Deacon Alexander and Angela Davis were partners, and it was in this context that she was introduced to the Black liberation movement in L.A. in the late 1960s, but this was prior to her becoming "famous" as a member of the Communist Party fired from U.C.L.A. by Governor Reagan's direct intervention against allowing Communists to teach in California State Colleges and Universities. It was in this context that the Communist Party, as an alternative to the Panther Party organized its Black comrades into an all Black collective of the CPUSA, called the Che-Lumumba Club.

The Che-Lumumba Club of the Communist Party had the resources, and the discipline, and Angela Davis's relative celebrity being exploited enabled them to become the dominate group in the movement campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, George Jackson, John Cluchette, and Fleeta Drumgo. George Jackson had a younger brother, Jonathan Jackson who was committed to getting John Jackson, who was a Panther in prison, free from the prison system that was hell bent on killing George Jackson, John Cluchette, and Fleeta Drumgo.

In prison and in solitary confinement, George Jackson used this time to study the political, social and economic writings of Marx and Engels, Nkrumah, Fanon and others. He wrote letters of great insight and critiquing capitalism and the State.

The book "Soledad Brother", had a photograph of himself pictured on a prisoner transfer bus, self-confident. There was also an enlarged photo of George in chains, confidently smiling although surrounded by armed prison transport guards. This photo was both in the homes of American Blacks, plastered on walls at Panther offices around the country, and in socialist and communist bookstores and lecture halls. But, this is not all. Also, this photo of this Black revolutionary Panther was in the homes of Irish nationalists in occupied Ireland, where George was respected, if not loved by Irish revolutionaries, who identified with the American Black revolutionaries, the cover in chains, surrounded by armed prison guards.

Jackson, author of the widely read prison memoir "Soledad Brother", had been thrown in jail for a petty robbery, and became a revolutionary behind bars. He was murdered in August 1971 by guards at San Quentin prison in an alleged escape attempt.

"Stephen Bingham, one of several lawyers working with Jackson, was accused of being part of the escape plot. Bingham fled the country and lived in exile until 1984. When he returned, he was acquitted of all charges related to the escape. Today, he is a welfare rights attorney in San Francisco.

"He spoke to Socialist Worker's Joe Allen about George Jackson's legacy--and his own fight for justice. Read the link:
http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-1/578/578_04_GeorgeJackson.shtml

George Jackson's writings "Soledad Brother" were a best seller not just among Black revolutionaries and socialists, and on the so-called White left, but internationally. It was a shrewd move on the part of the Communist Party to get involved with the Jackson case. However, George Jackson's younger brother, 17 year old Jonathan, thought the Communist Party, or rather that the "Che-Lumumba Club" were opportunists exploiting the Soledad Brothers to advance their own presence and significance in the Black liberation movement.

Jonathan concluded that the Committee to free the Soledad Brother was useless, decided on his own initiative to free his brother himself. It was stupid of the State, and the capitalist owned print and media propaganda machine, masquerading as news, to suggest that Angela Davis, or any other member of the Communist Party, whose line was and is peaceful transition to socialism, would give a shotgun to a 17 year old kid, who loves his brother, to invade a courtroom and kidnap a judge to free his brother.

Politically motivated kidnapping is based on the illusion that the State would capitulate, rather than kill both the kidnappers and the hostage, even a judge! George knew better, having experienced the State's repression and understood from reading Lenin's "The State and Revolution", that the State's fundamental existence is as an apparatus of violence. See:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

Jonathan Jackson acted alone On August 7, 1970, when he entered a Marin County courtroom, with an automatic weapon, forcing the bailiffs to hand their guns over to prison captives Ruchell McGee, William Christmas and James McClain. He took Judge Harold Haley as a hostage. Jonathan demanded the release of the three Soledad Brothers. On the contrary, the police killed Haley, along with William Christmas and James McClain, as well as Jonathan Jackson. They were killed by the police as they attempted to drive away from the courthouse. This confrontation with the State made national headlines.

The State and media associated Angela Davis with Jonathan Jackson, and thereby with Ruchell McGee, William Christmas and James McClain. Jonathan Jackson, William Christmas and James McClain were killed. Ruchell McGee survived, and was charged with the escape plot, as was Angela Davis.

The highest levels in the Communist Party bureaucracy organized the Angela Davis Defense Committee. The slogan initially was, to push credibility among Black liberation activists, to call for the State to "Free Angela", Free Ruchell, and Free All Political Prisoners. Huey's name wasn't mentioned, and Eldridge Cleaver denounced the Free Angela campaign as it omitted Huey, Bobby Seale and others as a sham to divert from the State repression against Panthers.

Ruchell McGee was convicted for Haley's kidnapping and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he is serving in Corcoran State Prison. Now 56 years old, he has lost numerous bids for parole.

The Communist Party separated the politics of Angela's case from that of McGee. Yet, they continued to associate Angela with the Soledad Brothers and George Jackson.

There was made a Hollywood movie, "The Brothers", based on Angela and George, staring Bernie Casey that depicts Angela and George falling in love. Perhaps, in any case, the campaign to Free Angela presented the image of Angels in the minds of Black working class and impoverished masses in rebellion against racial oppression, and that Angela Davis personified what Nina Simone proposed to be 'young, gifted and black'. She was a very pretty, long bush haired natural style, and very educated young Black woman, whose photograph posters pictured her as a Black revolutionary. Angela was popular, the same as the Panther's Erica Huggins and Assata Shakur. But, there were many other Black women and Panther revolutionaries arrested and jailed by the State, such as Peaches Moore, who fought the police raid on Panther Party Headquarters in 1969.

George Jackson was the personification of defiant intellectual freedom and critical thinking, and representative of revolutionary courage. As a Black Panther Party Field Marshall, George Jackson was shot down by the pigs in prison on August 21, 1971.

Aesthics is politics. In reorganization of George Jackson, Archie Shepp, who is the heart of asthetics of Black resistance, in 1972 did an album "Attica Blues", which represented the Attica prisoners revolt and the Governor Rockefeller ordered slaughter of both inmates and guard hostages, also has a track in the album entitled "Blues For George Jackson".

Also, Bob Dylan wrote:

I woke up this mornin',
There were tears in my bed.
They killed a man I really loved
Shot him through the head.
Lord, Lord,
They cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.

Sent him off to prison
For a seventy-dollar robbery.
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key.
Lord, Lord, They cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.

He wouldn't take shit from no one
He wouldn't bow down or kneel.
Authorities, they hated him
Because he was just too real.
Lord, Lord,
They cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.

Prison guards, they cursed him
As they watched him from above
But they were frightened of his power
They were scared of his love.
Lord, Lord,
So they cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.

Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard.
Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards.
Lord, Lord,
They cut George Jackson down.
Lord, Lord,
They laid him in the ground.

http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/jackson.html
---

Already associated with George Jackson, the State's association of Angela Davis with the bold action of Jonathan Jackson was to isolate her from the American political culture as a Communist conspirator, 1950s style anti-communism. But, the State's plot backfired.

The State Courts and FBI put out a warrant to arrest Angela Davis, and made her the most wanted in FBI repressive lists, and consequently jailed her. But this was not the patriotic culturally reactionary 1950s! By persecuting and prosecuting Angela Davis, the State inadvertently gave the Communist Party of the U.S.A. a boon!

The civil rights and the anti-war movements had broken down the propaganda and anti-communism of the 1950s. By the persecution and arrest of Angela Davis the government gave the CP.U.S.A. its first popular celebrity, used both as a defense committee and a recruitment drive since the government framed and murdered Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in the 50s the Cold War politics that isolated and defeated the Communist Party.

In the 1950s capitalist movies and television networks demonized Khrushchev and the Soviet Union respectively as an EVIL "dictator" and an "EVIL" empire: godless atheists, a "1984" police state, and about brainwashing in "Red China". The Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial, Sputnik, the Korean War and beginning of the Vietnam War and such was daily on the network news and movies, manipulating Americans and especially of children growing up in the 1950s.

News and television propaganda in the homes were reinforced in school books, and fear of nuclear war the children's fears were reinforced by bomb drills, telling innocent children to duck under their wooden desks with butts facing the window as if that would protect them from incineration or fallout from nuclear bomb explosions. American politicians and news and media propagandists associated America with "democracy" and "freedom", which of course is nothing but words, was embellished by right-wing preachers, pulpit propagandists who asserted that the Soviet Union was dominated by "godless communists".

The U.S. Democratic as well as Republican politicians and pulpit propagandists thereby contrasted America as a "Christian nation", free and democratic to the Soviet Union as "totalitarian police State". The General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party was presented as an evil "dictator".

George Orwell's "1984", a work of science fiction was presented to gullible American workers as the realities of the Soviet Union, and other anti-Soviet literature emerged. American members of the Communist Party U.S.A. were depicted as Soviet agents, and spies, rather than what they were, loyal American workers and trade unionists how fought for worker's democracy and socialism and against capitalist exploitation and its bourgeois totalitarian State.

In the 1940s and 50s, the critical thinking and communist novelists, writers, script writers, movie directors and even actors in Hollywood, were viciously attacked by the FBI, and the House Un-American activities Committee (HU-AC).

The HU-ACT anti-communist cadres raided Hollywood in response to powerful movies critical of capitalism and/or the Press as propaganda, such as "Modern Times", "Imitation of Life", "The Great Dictator", "Citizen Kane", "Meet John Doe", "High Noon", "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", "Jesse James", "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town", "All About Eve", "Dead End", "Grapes of Wrath", "Tales of Manhattan", "A Face in the Crowd", "Viva Zapata", and "The Salt of the Earth".

Get the DVDs and watch these movies, and also watch Woody Allen's "The Front", and read "The Hollywood Ten" biographies article at:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/blacklist.html

Aesthetics, as said previously, is politics. The classes that own the productive forces and the press and media, owns the movie making studios and movie theatres as well. The movie studio owners and producers collaborated with the HUAC and the FBI. These capitalists, although not in industrial or agricultural commodity production by wage slaves, had the same class interests in stomping critical thinking in capitalist America.

In the name of "freedom", "democracy" and "national defense", the American ruling classes, represented by the State, and in these cases specifically by the HUAC and FBI, attacked free speech of artists.

Aesthetics is politics and politics are part and parcel of the culture. The attacks on American writers, directors and actors in the movies of the 40s and 50s, in politics was accompanied by the presentation of explicitly a-political but actually pro-capitalist presentations on television sit-coms of American workers as a happy-go-lucky middle class, with working class women who had held jobs during World War II to go back into the kitchen, such as "The Life of Reilly", "Ozzie and Harriet", "Donna Reed Show", and "Leave It To Beaver".

World War II brought women into industries in response to the capitalists need for labor power. The capitalist government needed war to emerge from the Great Depression, as we discussed already. But, this war snatched American workers from industry, to kill and get killed in this imperialist war.

As the wars in Europe and Asia, against German and Japanese imperialisms advanced, women and Blacks replaced White men in industry. This change in economic conditions of women and Blacks enabled women workers to have money income independent of men (husbands), which provided the economic independence of women that enabled the feminist movement of the 1970s as well as the Black civil rights and liberation movements in the 60s and 70s. The first feminists in America at this time were civil rights activists, and anti-war activists.

The unintended consequence of bringing women into the economy was an economic liberation of women as workers while their husbands were in Europe and Asia. They were fighting to advance the predatory interests of U.S. imperialism.

Now with relative economic independence, American working class women achieved sexual freedom from fear of pregnancy by the invention of birth control pills. These economic and sexual independence of women overthrew the myth of female inferiority, and the place of working-class women as either in bed with their legs spread, or consequently barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.

The capitalist cultural response was to produce the so-called "film noir" genre. These films presented independent women as evil vicious bitches, as in e.g. "The Postman Rings Twice" and "Double Indemnity", but many others.

The "Red Scare" was in the 1950s subliminally suggested in Science Fiction Movies, such as "Invaders from Mars". State leaders were "recruited", or rather abducted by Martians, into agents in service of alien invaders by inserting alien items into the back of their necks.

In context of the HUAC attacks on State Department officials, this made government , in particular movie at this time politicians and police chiefs, and army generals and so on suspect. Similarly in the movie "The Body Snatchers" one's own parents, friends, and lovers were displaced by "aliens".

Yet, it slipped past an antidote science fiction movie, "The Day Earth Stood Still", where the alien represented a savior Interstellar Leviathan State, which disciplined humanities tendency toward self-destruction by global thermonuclear war. In this sense, the stories of an individual alien, referred to in the language of Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra", and Hitler's "Aryanism", the "superman" - appropriation of American children into nationalist patriotic superiority the 1950s in and by "The Adventures of Superman: Fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way", standing in front of an American flag, waiving in the background.

For a sense of the explicit anti-communist propaganda in American culture in the 1950s, even into the early 60s, See:

"I Married a Communist", (1949)
http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=96058

"I Was a Communist for the FBI", (1951)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043665/

"Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight",(1958)
http://www.zpub.com/notes/masters.html

"The FBI Story", (1959)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_FBI_Story

"Manchurian Candidate", (1962)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200001/ai_n8896111

"None Dare Call It Treason"
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/526

Yet, in the 60s the American culture was changing.

In the context of the US imperialist war in Korea, the "Manchurian Candidate" brainwashed Americans into believing that there was such a thing as "brainwashing". It doesn't exist. Yet, even if it did exist, it would have been cultural “the assimilation of American workers by press, media and movies into a culture of anti-communist, into an irrational fear of Russia and China.

In context of the rebellious youth's "counter-culture", rather than isolating the Communist Party, as the government intended, the FBI, and nightly news propaganda campaigns to persecute and smear Angela Davis, as a "Communist", and associate her with George Jackson as a "murder accomplice", they failed. George Jackson was a Field Marshal and member of the Black Panther Party, so by associating Angela Davis with George Jackson, and thereby wrongly associating the Communist Party with the Black Panther Party, the government and media's campaign made Angela a heroine and tended to legitimize the Communist Party as a revolutionary cadre.

Not only workers in the Black communities, but in the Chicano, Indian liberation, feminists and anti-war movements, who also had organizations attacked by the State, themselves identified with Angela Davis as a fellow revolutionary, and thereby with the Communist Party as such as well. The governments attack on the Communist Party by persecuting and abducting Angela Davis did not isolate and repress the Party, but to the contrary it provided to it a celebrity!

There were other women in the Black liberation movement, such as "Peaches" Moore, who as I mentioned elsewhere, was one among many Panthers at the Central Avenue office who fought back the police raid, and Erika Huggins, who was framed along with Bobby Seale in New Haven, Connecticut. I was on trial in Compton for electioneering, i.e. passing out leaflets denouncing American elections as a sham. Word got to us that Erika's husband, John Huggins, who was Deputy Minister of Information of the BBP, along with Bunchy Carter, were killed by members of Karanga's US Organization. The Police, rather than protecting Erika, raided her home, where she and John's new born baby were resting. A similar thing happened to my wife, Sharon Johnson who was not a Panther, and neither was I, but while I was away at a meeting in West L.A. she was home asleep with our new born baby, when the Compton police sent some twenty police to raid our apartment, she in bed with hands in the air, and our baby in the crib crying. We all know how the FBI and Chicago police raided the home of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, shooting them in their respective beds as they slept. Fred and Mark were Panthers.

Black revolutionaries considered themselves communists and socialists but were not in the tradition of the Communist Party. Most were "Maoists", as were for that matter most youth groups on campuses who were in the anti-war movements. The SDS, was the major such organization at the national level. The Progressive Labor Party made progress in the SDS, and brought forth a campus cadre organization of campus recruits. The Revolutionary Union, the October League, and the Revolutionary Communist Party also emerged from the anti-war activists, from studying "Marxist-Leninist" literature of the Maoist milieu. The ethnic liberation organizations, feminists, and anti-war activists in the majority of cased were in solidarity with the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, and the Chinese government's opposition to "Soviet Revisionism" and "capitalist restoration" in the Soviet Union, which politics placed them not only outside the Soviet Oriented Communist Parties, including the Communist Party U.S.A., but in opposition to it.

Thus, the praxis of cosmopolitan class warfare changed the consciousness of Black liberation activists into working class class-conscious socialist revolutionaries! This a theoretical what Masai and the Panthers called a "class analysis" understanding of the so-called "cultural nationalists", of the kind of "Black nationalists" who assassinated Malcolm X, John Huggins, Bunchy Carter and other Panthers. It was understood theoretically that those individuals and organizations, which "collaborated with U.S. imperialism" (i.e. the State) are its agents.

In international politics, Mao tse-tung described these bourgeois nationalists who collaborate with U.S. imperialism as "running dogs" and "lackeys". Kwame Toure called them neo-colonial stooges.

In the 1970s, the gain of the civil rights victories, most importantly for the leaders of it was Voting Rights and racial districting. Many became Democrats and ran for office, at city, county, state, and federal levels.

Where the bourgeois Black cultural nationalists once advocated that the Black working poor have a "nationalist duty" to "buy Black", this is augmented by the demands of these nationalists that the oppressed Blacks have a racial nationalist obligation to "vote Black". Invariably, this means working class Blacks must vote for Democrats, and at every level.

The Democratic Party is a Party of Capital, the political representatives of the domestic industrial capitalists, although it masquerades as the representatives of the so-called "common man". This masquerade arose in the 1930s on the basis of Roosevelt's Keynesian economic policies, calling those policies of government public works spending "the New Deal", which included getting America into World War II. These Keynesian policies enabled American agricultural capitalists and industrial capitalists to restart from the Great Depression.

The public works and welfare spending, ostensibly to "help the poor", actually helped the rich, by enabling agricultural capitalists to sell food to government work program employees and welfare recipients on one hand, and selling food rations to feed American soldiers on the other; and at the same time enable domestic industrial capitalists to produce and sell consumer industrial commodities to American customers and war related industries to sell their guns and killing machines for use in the War. In both agriculture and industry these Keynesian policies together with America's entry into the War engendered booms that led to hiring workers who also became consumers and the decreasing of the surplus populations by getting them killed in the War.

Only a fool among the workers would believe that the Keynesian domestic and militarist policies were a "New Deal", on behalf of American workers and the poor, rather than agricultural and industrial capitalists.

The tragedy is that the American Communist Party cadres believed it. It was accepted by the leaders of the Communist Party U.S.A. in the wider ideological context of the alliance of the Soviet Union with the British and American imperialists in a so-called "United Front Against Fascism".

The Bulgarian Communist Party ideologist Georgi Dimitrov wrote the apologetic to justify both the alliance of self-styled "Marxist-Leninist", i.e. Stalinist Communist Party dominated Soviet government with the French, British and U.S. imperialist war against German, Italian and Japanese imperialist on one hand, and more relevant to this article the Moscow ordered subordination of Communist workers to capitalist domination the economy by forcing its influenced trade unions to submit to capitalist exploitation and tyranny, and its political representatives in governments in Britain, France, China and the United States.

The Chinese Communist Party refused to subordinate the workers to capitalists or peasants to landlords. This is why Charlene Mitchell wrote, in her attack on the Panther Party below:

"The Black Panthers" Maoist influence, especially the ultra-leftism that is common among Maoists, led to a distorted notion of the concept of the "united front." The united front, first enunciated by the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov in the 1930s struggle against Nazi Germany, holds that the immediate tasks of Marxist-Leninists is to work to unite broad sections of the population around concrete programmatic demands that advance democratic rights. It holds that agreement on long-term goals and philosophy are not the basis for broad unity. Thus, Communists can disagree with non-communist about the necessity to destroy capitalism, but that disagreement should not hinder the ability of both forces to work for decent housing, full employment, peace, and other general democratic demands. In the words of Henry Winston, "instead of linking theory with practice", the Black Panther Party turned the concept of the united front into a sectarian caricature of Marxist-Leninist principles.“

What Charlene Mitchell is calling a disagreement with "non-communists" parties was in actuality, agreements with capitalists parties. Moscow directed "communist" parties to unite with capitalist parties in countries in which the Soviet Union had a united front against "fascism". Moscow was united with Washington's Democratic Party governed state in opposition to the German state.

The case in point is that the Communist Party became lackeys of the Democratic Party. Their assignment in the American working class was to subordinate working class interests to national interests.
See: No strike pledge
http://www.marxists.org/archive/glaberman/1999/wages/conclusion.htm

The Socialist Workers Party opposed the capitulation to democrats. The Black Panther Party criticizing the Communist party in the 1960s was consistent with these the Socialist Workers Party critcizing the Communist Party in the 30s and 40s.

Correspondingly, the quintessential critique of Stalinist popular front politics and ideology is the Trotskyist political and ideological tradition of opposition to Stalinism. In America, the care taker of Trotsky's body of critical literature and inheritance of revolutionary theory is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

In the mid 60s-mid 70s, the Socialist Workers Party in Los Angeles had a book store and "Militant Labor Forum". In New York, Malcolm X spoke at the SWP Forums, and it was they who published Malcolm's speeches. Ideologically, the SWP sided with the racial Black nationalists. When Black liberation activists visited SWP book stores, what they needed to be communist revolutionaries was Trotsky's alternative of Marxist literature of class struggle principles and politics.

Inherent in Trotskyism is explication of the antinomy of racial nationalism and proletarian internationalism. Instead of discussing and debating this antinomy, and selling to them Trotsky's "Transitional Programm" and "In Defense of Marxism", or any other Marxist Trotskyist literature, what the SWP members at the store discussed was racism, and sold to these Black revolutionaries was reactionary nationalist Black literature. This literature was in libraries, and could be found in most book stores, such as the writings of, or about, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Harold Cruse, John Hope Franklin, and other writers of Essays and novels.

True, as well as Trotsky's "The Russian Revolution", and C.L.R. James "Black Jacobins" were also available at SWP book stores. But, as writings on history, these books, along with e.g. Dubois' "The Souls of Black Folks" and "Philadelphia Negro", E. Franklin Frazer's "Black Bourgeoisie" are classics that are available in Public Libraries. They are not political writings calling for the overthrow of bourgeois governments and destruction of capitalism.

Rather that presenting Trotskyist anti-Stalinist writings, by Trotsky and others, denouncing nationalism as bourgeois, and "united fronts against fascism" as Communist Party betrayals of class-conscious trade unionists, socialists, anarchists and communists, the SWP capitulated to reactionary racial politics of Black Nationalism, rather than as revolutionaries of principles respectfully challenging these Black authored books, and racial organizations working in and with the Democratic Party.

Though sectarian and often hysterical, it wasn't until the Workers League, briefly, and more long term the Sparticist League, presented Trotskyist literature by direct intervention in the Black liberation and anti-war movements. The Sparticist League was a disciplined, principled, intellectual cadre of true revolutionary Leninists in the ideological sense, but in ideology only.

Though they regarded themselves as incipient "Bolshevik-Leninists", unlike the real Lenin and Russian Bolsheviks the Sparticist was without a presence in the working class, and had no strategy to overthrow the government and expropriate the productive forces in America. Also, unlike the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party, which respectively had a presence in the American working class since playing significant roles in CIO and Teamsters, the Sparticist League and Workers League emerged initially as a faction in the SWP, the "Revolutionary Tendency", in opposition to the SWP capitulation to Cuba's "Stalinists", and its capitulation to race politics of "Black nationalism", but the workers in the SWP stayed in the SWP.

The Revolutionary Tendency (RT) faction formed in the SWP, in the late 1950s and early 60s. It was led by Tim Wolforth, on the philosophical grounds of Trotskyist Orthodoxy, and by Jim Robertson, on the basis of revolutionary principle. The Trotskyist movement, as Marxists and Leninists generally, operated in the international context: proletarian internationalism. The RT leaders were associated with the British Socialist Labour League (SLL), led by Jerry Healy. The SLL was itself associated with the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) led by Pierre Lambert, the International Committee for the Fourth International.

The Socialist Workers Party, in the U.S., was led by James P. Cannon, whose personal organizational experiences included the founding of the Communist Party U.S.A. With the expulsion of the "Left Opposition", led by Trotsky, Cannon split with the CP as well, following Trotsky to found the Forth International. The Trotskyists regarded the bureaucratic government and Party leaders in the Soviet Union corrupted by power and privileges, and that consequently the once "healthy workers" state in the Lenin period, 1917 -1924 degenerated. The Stalinist ascendancy in the Soviet Union resulted in the Betrayal of the Revolution, manifested internationally by capitulation to capitalistic imperialist nations in the betrayal of revolutionary workers and socialists in those countries under the doctrine of "Socialism in one country", the Soviet Union alone. These betrayals were expressed in the doctrines of "united front against fascism".

To Trotsky and the Trotskyists, the Stalinist betrayals indicated the necessity to restore the revolutionary legacy of Marx's "First International", Engels and the "Second International", and Lenin's revolutionary Communist Third International. Trotsky with his small cadre of revolutionary Leninists created the Fourth International. Trotsky developed its Marxian theoretical basis by making a thorough analysis and revolutionary critique of Soviet Communism in "The Revolution Betrayed", and "The Third International after Lenin".

Trotsky also made a series of analysis and critiques of Stalin's international betrayals of the working classes and toiling masses in China, which led to the slaughter of Communists by the Chinese bourgeois Nationalist Kuomintang, as well as of the CP betrayals in the Spanish Civil War, the French CP's popular front policies, and of betrayals of workers and socialists by herding Communist Parties into "United Front's Against Fascism", throughout Asia and Europe, and in America.

Georgi Dimitrov's pamphlet, "The United National Front Against Fascism", was studied by Panthers and their allies in preparation for the 1969 Oakland Conference. Panthers and others in the Black liberation movement, who understood Malcolm X's critique of the Democratic Party as "fox" compared to the Republican Party as "wolf", still lacked the historical and theoretical concept of the Democratic Party as a capitalist class party. Yet, they, as Patrick Henry said of the American Constitutional Convention said of it, "smelt a rat", or rats!

The united front, first enunciated by the Bulgarian Stalinist Georgi Dimitrov in the 1930's struggle against Nazi Germany, was nothing but the presentation in Marxian language of abandoning Marxism and Leninism. Dimitrov's nationalist theory of "national united fronts against fascism", in the United States meant the subordination of the workers to capitalists.

In American electoral politics, since the Roosevelt "New Deal", and the Roosevelt regimes alliance of the U.S. imperialism with the Soviet Union against German imperialism, the CPUSA has to this day been lackey foot soldiers of the Democratic Party. So is its offshoot the Committee of Correspondence of Democracy and Socialism. Thus, rather than being in opposition to the Panther's call for a "united front against fascism", everyone who was at the Conference knows that Communist Party members and representatives where mingling all over the place.

Based on its history in the class struggle, and participation in the Fourth International, the SWP understood the class betrayals and theoretical fallacies inherent in popular front alliance of worker organizations with their national bourgeoisie. Yet, the SWP leadership's paternalistic capitulation to "Black nationalism", and lack of presence in the Black liberation movement, excluded them from playing a role at the United Front Conference in Oakland, 1969.

The Sparticist League did intervene with their news papers and book tables, but were regarded and isolated "Trotskyite sectarians", and regarded as such from the Stalinist point of view, of Panthers and others. Progressive Labor Party, as Maoists intervened, actively and was attacked at Bobby Hutten Park, physically.

Charlene Mitchell's attack on the Panthers considered as being "Maoists", and as such, supposedly, "ultra-leftists". Such labels intimate that the Panthers, because they were real deal worker-communists and therefore to the left of the C.P.U.S.A., the implication is that the B.P.P. were adventurists, similar to the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), the Students For a Democratic Society (SDS), Weathermen, and "Weather Underground", the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and even the Symbioses Liberation Army (SLA) and Black Liberation Army, led by Cleaver.

In actuality, whether the shoot-out between Huey Newton and Oakland police which left one cop dead and Huey wounded and was used by the State's courts to send Huey to prison; the police attack on Eldridge Cleaver and Li'l Bobby Hutton which killed Li'l Bobby, the police ambush and murder of Li'l Tommy Lewis, Steve Bartholomew, and Robert Lawrence at Adams Boulevard and Montclair by police ostensibly because they "looked suspicious", the murder by cops of Franco Diggs in Long Beach, the murders of John Huggins and Bunchy Carter at U.C.L.A., and John Savage, a Panther in San Diego murdered in each instance by US Organization members, the raid of Panther headquarters and leaders homes in New York, the frame-up of the "New York 21", as well as the pre-dawn police and FBI raid on Panther Party office on Central Avenue in South Central L.A., and so on.
(See: http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Chapter_History/BPP_Pieces_of_History.html )

These were in each case unprovoked murder of Panthers by the State. Yet, in her statement, disassociating the CP from the BPP, Charlene Mitchell not only doesn't denounce the State for killing and framing Panthers, but by calling the Panthers "Maoists" and "Ultra leftists" she intimates that the BPP brought these repressive State attacks on themselves by provocation! And then Charlene Mitchell, Franklin and Kendra Alexander, and Angela Davis as CP cadre had the gall to form a Che-Lumumba CP led "National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression"!

Charlene Mitchell wrote:

- In December 1969, shortly after the policee assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, The Los Angeles police raided the Black Panthers headquarters in South Central LA. The Panthers held off the police during a gun battle that lasted for more than four hours. During the battle, the Panthers requested members of the African American community to come and witness their surrender, hoping to forestall a police murder of their members. The Che-Lumumba Club, with other community activists, took the initiative in organizing the community to witness the arrests of the Panthers. Afterwards, members of the Communist party with the leadership of CP activist Rose Chernin, played a significant role in raising bail money and funds for the legal representation of the jailed Panther members.-

This is true, but does not tell the entire story of the politics of this event.

During the Panther armed resistance to the FBI and L.A.P.D. terrorist assault on the Panther office, it went out over the news, particularly the Black radio station KGFJ. The masses of South Central L.A. heard of it and went to the location. The press and media were present, and this prevented the massacre.

At the same time, members of the U.C.L.A. BSU "Chrysti Farlice" understood the politics of State repression as political, not just racial. The U.C.L.A. BSU, which was part of the Southern California BSA, wrote a political leaflet explaining the politics of class war and the function of the State in it, which also called for a mass community meeting that, was to take place that evening at a rather large Church in South Central L.A. The purpose of this meeting was to organize a massive working class political protest against the State. The Black community was presented as what it in substance was and is: working class. Thus, the slogan around which the political protest was to be organized was that the attack upon the Panthers was an attack on that organization and on the Black community as an attack on the working class. I wrote the leaflet, but that is not important. It was the issue, not leaflets or personalities, but anger at the police attack that brought a couple thousand members of the community to the protest organizing meeting.

At the same time, Democrats in the California Legislative Assembly, in particular Mervin Dymaly, saw an opportunity to advance themselves/himself at the expense of the Panthers, so went to the shoot-out location and got hit by a cop. He was of course put on television and radio news as the news.

The united front ideology, which calls for the "unity" of Communists and Democrats, against a "common enemy", even as Malcolm X called for such "Black unity", was exploited by the C.P. Panthers nationalistic tendencies and ignorance of the Trotskyist critique of the Stalinist betrays in guise of "united front against fascism" enabled Franklin Alexander, at the community meeting, as a CP member and lickspittle of the Democratic Party, to give an emotional demagogic speech turning over the leadership of the protest against the State to a representative of the State! In the form of a "challenge" to Democrat Dymaly to lead the protest, the politics of the protest became the politics of the Democratic Party!

The Communist Party acted as the trained cadre that they were. In that way, faking as "Black militants", rather than as Communist Party cadres, Franklin Alexander and Angela Davis presented themselves as the "Che-Lumumba Club", and by name recognition and celebrity status Angela as a tool of the Communist Party was inadvertently the tool of the Democratic Party, therefore the State. Rose Chernin, by her Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, working with King Bail Bondsman, used their access to money to manipulate the dependency of Panthers in jail to get out of jail.

Still, the Panthers continued to think of themselves as revolutionaries:

"The Black Panther Party is informing and calling on all the peoples of the communities across the country to scorn and denounce the actions of this capitalist-racist government's attempts to try and destroy the Black Panther Party which has chapters and branches across the nation. Scorn, denounce and destroy the lies by capitalists and racists, from the Nixons, the Rockefellers, and all their pig lackeys, to the bootlicking cultural nationalists and black capitalists. They are the real conspirators where we see their obvious attempts to destroy the Black Panther Party's revolutionary leadership. They, of course, try to do this by murders, jailing, unfair court trials, the forcing of Eldridge Cleaver into exile, and the temporary imprisonment of the Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton in California."
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp/bpp270469_14.htm

The problem is that Americans don't know what a revolution is.

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Malcolm X in opposition to the non-violent Negro civil rights movement, advocated in his "Message to the Grassroots" armed self-defense, and association with the Black working poor, as "Black revolution", and "revolutionary nationalism".

Of Martin Luther King Jr., for instance Malcolm X said: "He got the peace prize, we got the problem.... If I'm following a general, and he's leading me into a battle, and the enemy tends to give him rewards, or awards, I get suspicious of him. Especially if he gets a peace award before the war is over." Armed self-defense and denouncing "the white man", however, is not revolutionary. Yet, toward the end of his life by assassination by cultural nationalists of the NOI, Malcolm X came to realize:

"It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a radical conflict of black against white or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter."
http://www.malcolm-x.org/quotes.htm

Similarly, King said: "These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions" See:
http://www.nathanielturner.com/commemorationmarchwashington.htm

These socialists in the Black liberation movement were in practical as well as political solidarity with the Cuban government, and the Marxist factions of the Palestinian resistance - the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the African liberation wars, such as the MPLA in Angola against the imperialists lackey UNITA.

Masai, as the Minister of Education of the Black Panther Party and leading Marxist-Leninist theoretician played a vital role in orienting Black socialists from militant rhetoric of Black Nationalism to class struggle, revolutionary socialist politics and internationalism. Masai, Elaine Brown, and (if I recall correctly) Erica Huggins visited North Vietnam on a mission of solidarity, and also to the People's Republic of China.

The cultural nationalists in America were being self-discredited by killing Panther leaders -such as John Huggins and Bunchy Carter - and association with "Black" capitalists" and Democratic Party "Black" politicians. These "Black Democrats" were part of the same State Power that sick police, FBI and troops to kill Black revolutionaries, targeting the socialist Black Panther cadres in particular. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark for instance.

Panthers regarded themselves as the cadres of the revolutionary vanguard party. They, together with the Black Student Unions aligned with the Panthers, as did the Black Students Alliance in L.A., and the San Francisco State College BSU in the Bay Area. Together they organized a founding convention for the formation of a multi-racial multi-ethnic National United Front Against Fascism, which Bobby Seale called a "Rainbow Coalition". Charlene Mitchell writes about this, as we shall see below.

On the other side of the class divide, the US Organization and their cultural nationalist allies on campus never engaged in class warfare - or rather they opposed those Blacks who did by denouncing the Panthers as "integrationists". These cultural nationalists had nothing in common with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, though they initially intimated that they were a "Black American" version of it.

On the contrary, the cultural nationalists, who now call themselves "Afro-Centrists", consist of demagogic speeches at public meetings, where the speakers denounce "the white man" and today also Jews and Korean merchants in "the Black community", advocating Black capitalism "buy Black" campaigns. The Panthers and their allies in the Black working class communities dismissed this "Black capitalism" as "cockroach capitalism".

Masai described the cultural nationalists as "bourgeois nationalists", who had politically more in common with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang Nationalist regime than they had with Mao tse-Tung and the Chinese People's Liberation Army, or even the Chinese youth in the Red Guard. The Chinese were Marxist-Leninists, and the Panthers, and also Baraka's "Unity Press" was Marxist-Leninist-Maoist and as such were the proletarian revolutionaries in the Black liberation movement.

Though not as politically and intellectually advanced and sophisticated as the Black Trotskyists, such as in the Sparticist League, and even those in the Socialist Workers Party, yet it was the Black Maoists who were the ones who introduced and legitimized Communism in the Black liberation movement.

The Socialist Workers Party lacked the ability, following the repressive 1950s, any more than did the Communist Party, to come out strongly and openly as Communists. Rather, it was the factions in these two "official" Communist Marxist Parties that came forth in the 1960s, that declared the legitimacy of Communism and Marxism to the American working classes and toiling poor masses.

There were three factions in the Communist Party that revolted against the "revisionist" accommodation and submission of the CPUSA to the US State, and in opposition to "Soviet revisionist" accommodation to U.S. imperialism at the international level. The Chinese Communist Party, and in fact Mao tse-Tung in particular was politically opposed to "Khrushchev"s revisionism" and doctrine of international "peaceful co-existence" with U.S. imperialism.

One faction of revolutionary communists in the CPUSA organized around Bill Epton, a Black Communist revolutionary who became a founder and leader of the China oriented Progressive Labor Party, a man admired by Malcolm X.

"William Leo Epton Jr. (January 17, 1932, New York City". February 3, 2002), more popularly known simply as Bill Epton, was a Maoist African-American communist activist. He was Vice Chairman of Progressive Labor until approximately 1970, and chairman of its Harlem branch until that position went null upon Epton's incarceration for incitement to violence in 1964. Epton was "the first person convicted of criminal anarchy since the Red Scare of 1919", reportedly for a crime of three words: "Burn, baby, burn".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Epton

Read for yourself the Court room speech by Bill Upton, "We Accuse". Also, read the messages of international solidarity with Upton, including such principled activists and writers. See:
http://www.mltranslations.org/US/epton.htm

Upton was in Harlem in the streets with the oppressed people fighting oppression and violence. The other revolutionary faction in the CPUSA, which rejected Khrushchev's Revisionism, and oriented to Mao's version of Stalinism, was Nelson Peery, who is still around and as revolutionary as ever!.

"Nelson Peery (born 1925) is an American political activist and author. Peery spent over 60 years in the revolutionary movement, and has been active in the Communist Party USA (CP-USA), the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Marxist-Leninist Party (POC), the Communist League (CL), the Communist Labor Party (CLP), and the League of Revolutionaries for a New America (LRNA)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Peery

Yet, it was a relatively insignificant fellow called Michael Laski, whose parents were relatively well off who left him the money to open a book store in the heart of Watts, within which were giant posters of Mao, Stalin, Lenin and Marx- selling books from these authors who influenced most the intervention of communist literature into the Black liberation movement. This is because, among his Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist) [CPUSA (M-L]) there was of this Party of four a brilliant Black revolutionary who called himself Robere.

In the heart of the Slauson gang's territory, across the street from Edison High School, he rented a building and with an initial few folk started a live-in commune/organization which they called the "United Front". In their imaginations, more than in actuality, the four members of the CPUSA (M-L) were the class party cadre, and the United Front their "mass organization" base area.

Ndugubidi, Nubi, Naffiti, and Masai were introduced to "Marxism-Leninism" as members of this organization collective. There were about 30 members of this organization when I met them in 1966 or 67. The members had completely memorized Mao Tse-Tung's "On Contradiction", "On Practice", "Where Do Correct Ideas Come From", and "Combat Liberalism".

In 1967 or 68, the Democratic Party Black elected officials, along with the anti-communist US Organization, together with "the Sons of Watts", and other poverty pimps who worked for federal anti-poverty programs, paid of course, and other opportunists put together a "Black power conference" held at Jefferson High in South Central L.A. The United Front went to participate in the Conference, dressed in Maoist military clothing.

These communist-Maoists denounced the gathering, quoting Mao that "you cannot defeat U.S. imperialism by collaborating with its agents". Masai was there among these communist protestors.

Members of the cultural nationalist anti-communist, US Organization, viciously, physically attacked the United Front comrades. When they returned to the United Front building, there was a confrontation with Robere, who was forced to leave L.A. Soon the United Front dissolved.

Masai now on his own joined the BBP, and as a proficient Marxist-Leninist he rose in its ranks to become the Panther Party's Minister of Education. Functioning as a leader in the working class opposition to capitalism at the national level changed Masai, and in reciprocity with and from those changes changed the thinking in the Panther Party, which now became class-conscious Marxist-Leninists.

Huey P. Newton and the Panthers were clear in understanding the world revolution. It's not a race struggle, but a class struggle.
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bpp/bpp270469_14.htm

Black liberation activists were socialist comrades who were serious about achieving the socialist objectives. This seriousness engendered critical thinking that these comrades in arms approached theory: they read, and argued passionately critical analysis of the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Che Guevara, Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxemburg, C.L.R. James, Eric Fromm, and Leon Kamenev; Josef Dietzgen, Raya Dunayevskaya, Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Kwame Nkrumah, Amílcar Cabral, Muhammad Babu, Michael Bakunin, Paulo Freire, Nicolai Bukharin, Walter Rodney, and others.

END
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Communist Party and the Black Panther Party

by Charlene Mitchell
October 28, 2006

A NYU Symposium On the occasion of the James & Esther Jackson Papers Given to Tamiment Library

In discussing the relationship between the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party it is important to note that the Black Panther Party had a relatively short life on the national scene. The BPP was founded in Oakland, California in 1966, but didn't actually become a national organization until 1968-69, the result of a confluence of events, including the murder trial of Huey Newton, the armed Panther protest at the California State Assembly, and the publication of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. By early 1972, the Black Panther Party had shut down most of its branches and moved active members to Northern California, where they attempted to build a political base. (1) So, after 1972, the Black Panthers were essentially a local organization with little presence outside California.

These years, 1968-1972, were also years of tremendous political unrest within the United States. It was the beginning of the post-Civil Rights Movement, when African Americans were searching for directions and political vehicles to take them beyond formal legal equality. This search led to the formation of many political organizations within the African American community, socialism, Pan-Africanism, cultural nationalism, and political nationalism were ideologies that were debated within the community. At the same time the anti-Viet Nam War movement moved to the center stage of political debate within the U.S. and sparked a broad level of activism, especially among youth. The political upheaval of those years forms the backdrop for the Communist party's relationship with the Black Panther Party.

Throughout the relationship the Communist Party consistently advocated for right of the Black Panthers to exist as a legitimate expression within the African American community and within the broader political debate taking place in the U.S. A scan of the Communist Party's two newspapers, the Daily World, published in New York, and the People's World, published in San Francisco, reflect consistent, supportive coverage of the activities of the Black Panthers, beginning with their demonstration at the California State Assembly, the Huey Newton's trials and the trials of other Panther members.

At the same time the Communist Party clearly expressed its criticism of many aspects of the Black Panthers politics, ideology, and tactics. The general thrust of that critique is contained in the book Strategy 2 for a Black Agenda, written by the Communist party's chair, Henry Winston. The center of Winston's critique included four main points.

1. (1) The Panthers' designated the lumpenproletariat, or society's declassed elements, as being the leading revolutionary force in capitalist society. The Communist Party consistently held that the working class was the leading revolutionary force in capitalist society, while holding that the African American people, who are overwhelmingly working class, constitute a critical part of the U.S. working class and that the struggle against racism was central to any advance in society.

2. (2) The influence of Maoist theories on the Black Panthers' politics led them to denigrate the role of the Soviet Union and the Socialist countries in the struggle for National Liberation and the fight against imperialism and further led them to equate the international role of the Soviet Union and U.S. imperialism.

3. (3) The Black Panthers' Maoist influence, especially the ultra-leftism that is common among Maoists, led to a distorted notion of the concept of the "united front." The united front, first enunciated by the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov in the 1930s struggle against Nazi Germany, holds that the immediate tasks of Marxist-Leninists is to work to unite broad sections of the population around concrete programmatic demands that advance democratic rights. It holds that agreement on long-term goals and philosophy are not the basis for broad unity. Thus, Communists can disagree with non-communist about the necessity to destroy capitalism, but that disagreement should not hinder the ability of both forces to work for decent housing, full employment, peace, and other general democratic demands. In the words of Henry Winston, "instead of linking theory with practice, the Black Panther Party turned the concept of the united front into a sectarian caricature of Marxist-Leninist principles. (2)

4. (4) The Communist Party's initial relationship with the Black Panther Party developed in Oakland and Los Angeles before the Panthers had achieved national notoriety. A community organization called "Youth for Jobs," an offshoot of the Dubois Clubs, was formed in the Bay Area and worked with the Panthers from the beginning. Around the same time the BPP was being formed in Oakland, the Communist Party formed the Che-Lumumba Club. This was an all African American collective within the South Side section of the Communist Party in LA. It was formed to provide a political and ideological base within the Communist Party for young African Americans who were becoming politically active in the new militant movements of the mid-1960. Some of the early members of the Che-Lumumba Club who went on to play prominent roles in the Party and the Left included myself, Franklin and Kendra Alexander, and Angela Davis.

At the time there was a militant movement within the African American community that was strongly influenced by Black Nationalism. It was mainly young and they were often not accepting of people who came from multiracial organizations. People who came from multiracial or interracial organizations were often looked upon with suspicion, consequently only organizations comprised solely of black people were completely accepted. The Che Lumumba club did not exist in a political vacuum. The Che-Lumumba members made it clear that they were going to remain members of the Communist Party, but within the Communist Party they going to set up a Black collective. They were open members of the Communist Party and were tied to the Party in every way. They had representatives on the Communist Party's section committee, the district committee and national committee.

Several years later, Franklin Alexander, a founding member of the Che-Lumumba Club, remarked that, "It was the view of the Party when we created the Che-Lumumba Club, that in [that] moment of history there was need for an all-black collective in the Party to concentrate its activities in the Black community including work with its organized militants. It was a period when nationalist sentiment among our people couldn't be ignored and required a Black response to our problems." (3)

During the post-Watts Rebellion era in Southern California a significant number of African American protest organizations were active in the community. They included Che-Lumumba, the Black Panthers, Los Angeles SNCC, the Black Panther Political Party (a separate organization from the Bay Area Panthers) the US organization, the Black Congress, and others. Given the brutal nature of the Los Angeles Police Department, it was only natural that defending the African American community against police brutality was a major focus of many of these organizations. The Che-Lumumba Club also became very active in the fight against police brutality and were among the initiators of an organization called TALO, which was the Temporary Alliance of Local Organizations. TALO began following the police on night patrols and always included someone who had prestige within the African American community - judges, doctors, or ministers.

In Southern California several members of the Communist Party joined and assisted in the organization of the Los Angeles branch of the Black Panther Party. They helped them secure offices, (4) organize political education classes, and organize the community in response to actions of police brutality. However 1968 witnessed a purge within the Black Panther Party, which had succumbed to near-paranoia over police and government infiltration. In their efforts to "cleanse" their ranks they mandated that no Black Panther member could belong to any other political organization. Consequently, the two Communist Party members who had joined the Panthers eventually resigned from the BPP. (4) In December 1969, shortly after the police assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, The Los Angeles police raided the Black Panthers headquarters in South Central LA. The Panthers held off the police during a gun battle that lasted for more than four hours. During the battle, the Panthers requested members of the African American community to come and witness their surrender, hoping to forestall a police murder of their members. The Che-Lumumba Club, with other community activists, took the initiative in organizing the community to witness the arrests of the Panthers. Afterwards, members of the Communist party with the leadership of CP activist Rose Chernin, played a significant role in raising bail money and funds for the legal representation of the jailed Panther members.

The connections between the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles and the Bay area were atypical of the national relations between the two organizations. Part of this had to do with the particularity of California. Also, by 1969 the Black Panther Party was, with the exception of their survival programs, was devoted most of its time to defending its members from attacks against government forces. However, depending on local cadre in each organization, there were close contacts in other cities as the Panthers spread across the United States. For example in Chicago, Communist party leaders such as Claude Lightfoot and Ishmael Flory helped organize protests and rallies in response to the Fred Hampton, Mark Clark murders. CP lawyers who had been the legal defense for the Smith Act defendants were among the attorneys in the NY Panther 21 cases.

The Communist Party's position had always been that the Panthers were a legitimate force within the African American community and within the progressive movement as a whole, and consistently acted on that belief. In the late 1960's there was an anti-war meeting in Montreal between peace activists in the U.S. and Canada at which representatives of the Vietnamese peace movement were present. In the broader North American movement there was a debate about the role of anti-imperialist forces. There were those who wanted to display the NLF flag and others who felt that we had to demonstrate loyalty to the U.S. The Maoists took the position that to negotiate was tantamount to selling out. A few on the left including some from the Communist Party argued that all Vietnam could reasonably do at that point was to negotiate with the United States otherwise the alternative would up the ante by escalating the war. It was a long and serious debate which found its way into the Montreal conference. The conference organizer from Montreal, didn’t want to have speakers from the US or Canada who might have been accused of being terrorists. so it was a question of whether Bobby Seale, accused or not, should speak because it was feared that he might offend the broader peace forces in Canada. It became a question of what position the U.S. communist would take. We defended the right of Bobby to speak. One of our delegates proposed that we take it to the Vietnamese and ask them to help us decide this question. The Vietnamese delegation wanted Bobby Seale to speak. Bobby gave a very good speech as he discussed the relationship between racism in the US and the war being waged against the Vietnamese. Bobby whose working class background helped him to be one of the more logical thinkers in the Panthers so it was good that it was Bobby who spoke. Of course the Royal Canadian Mounted Police interrupted the Conference to challenge the legality of some of the Americans to visit Canada. We were told to either leave Canada or be arrested and then deported. Of course, we left.

As the Black Panther Party continued to come under attack the Communist Party helped to organize in their defense. In January 1970, the Communist Party initiated the organization of the Emergency Conference to Defend the Right of the Black Panther Party to Exist. This initiative had its origins in a meeting in Chicago in February 1970 attended by Angie Dickerson, Dick Gregory, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Father James Groppi, Ossie Davis, Bobby Rush (Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party; comedian and activist Dick Gregory; and representatives of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, and William Patterson and myself of the Communist Party's Black Liberation Commission. The intent of this initiative was to build a broad coalition of individuals and organizations that could unite in defense of the democratic rights of the Black Panther Party. The building of the Emergency Committee was a reflection of the Communist Party's "united front", based on organizing a large political force around political demands with which all could agree. As a representative of the Communist party, I was the main organizer of the Conference and we utilized space in the offices of the American federation of Journeymen, Crafts and Allied Industrial Unions in Chicago. The Emergency Conference was held in March 1970 with more than 500 people and included representatives from the Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Committee to defend the Bill of Rights, the Latin American Defense Organization, the United Auto Workers District 65 in New York, the Urban League, the American Friends Service Committee, the New York Hospital Workers Union, and many other labor union locals and religious organizations.

Some of the recommendations that arose from the conference were the planning of mass demonstrations, a national speaker's bureau, and a national fundraising mechanism to raise bail funds and pay for legal assistance.

Ultimately the work of the Emergency Committee was hampered by the non-cooperation of the Black Panther Party. In direct opposition to the united front concept, the Panthers demanded that they control the finances of the Emergency Committee and that the Committee endorse the Panthers political program. This was simply unacceptable in a united front organization. In Ohio, the Panthers attempted to block an Emergency Committee attempt to hold a local rally on the basis that the local Panther chapter had not "Ok'd" the meeting. The Panther leadership even withdrew from the first initiative of the Emergency Committee, which was to launch a national petition campaign. The petition protested "The savage police activities, based upon official policies of Federal, State, and City governments, [that has] resulted in innumerable beatings, frame-ups, arrests and murders of black Americans, the classical example of which is the Black Panther Party."

The petition had started with the signatures of Ruby Dee, Dick Gregory, William Patterson, Shirley Chisholm, and Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The Panthers withdrew largely based on the fact that they weren't in control of the finances. In an August 1970 personal letter to David Hilliard, then Panther National Chief of Staff, I wrote explaining, "The Continuations Committee has sought in every way to cooperate with and seek the cooperation of the Black Panther Party" and has "continually tried to help in mobilizing people for events programmed by the Black Panther Party." I further attempted to assure him that "any rumor…that the Continuations Committee or any people connected with it are using or attempting to use the repression against the Panthers for some devious, opportunistic reason" was erroneous.

It became clear that without the Panther’s cooperation there was no way the Emergency Committee could continue its work. Later that year Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party, had been accused of involvement in an attack on a courthouse in California and the Communist Party immediately went into gear toward building a broad-based united front campaign to win her acquittal. Although the Black Panther Party supported the demands for Angela’s freedom, their demand was often couched in the same narrow, sectarian tenor that marked their participation in the Emergency Committee. Thus, in a speech in Chicago in February of 1971, Huey Newton called for Angela’s freedom, but cautioned people not to financially contribute to her defense in any way that could end up in the hands of the Communist Party.(5) In a more brazen sectarian fashion, Eldridge Cleaver, writing in the Black Panther newspaper, claimed the Angela Davis Defense Committee was formed by the Communist Party "in collusion with the U.S. fascist" to divert attention, resources, and support from the trial of Bobby Seale, who was then being tried in New Haven, Connecticut for conspiracy to commit murder.

I responded to Cleaver with an open letter criticizing his anti-communism and noting that "to play that particular game of the enemy does a distinct disservice not only to Angela, but also to Bobby, Ericka [Huggins] and all political prisoners. This is not to say that there can be no differences between the CPUSA and the BPP." I outlined some of those differences, adding that California Communist Party leader Franklin Alexander had recently called for the mobilization of half a million people to protest the opening of Seale’s trial in New Haven and the Panthers had "negated that motion by insisting on absolute adherence to the program of the BPP." I added that, "we both know that this insistence bears no resemblance to the concept of [a] united front, which necessarily starts from maximum unity around…minimum issues. I concluded the letter by noting that, "The line of the Communist Party is and will continue to be that while we are determined to free Angela - Bobby, Ericka, the [NY] Panther 21, the Soledad Brothers and all political prisoners must also be free. You will find this theme in virtually all statements issued by our Party, by our comrades working in the Angela Davis defense committees, and of course by Angela herself."

The Black Panther Party made significant contributions to the struggle for African American equality in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, including their work that helped popularize the idea of socialism in the African American community. They brought needed, though often incorrectly, attention to that sector of the African American community whom capitalism had cast aside. However their efforts were often hamstrung by their ideological weaknesses – especially their narrow sectarianism, which precluded them from politically operating within a broad democratic front.

The Black Panther Party was an important part of the history of the struggles of African Americans for freedom, equality and human dignity. Theirs is a history that the youth who want to work for radical change would do well to critically study.

1. (1) Forbes, Flores. Will You Die with Me. Atria Books: NY, 2006, p. 65.

(2) Winston, Henry. Strategy for a Black Agenda. P. 211.

(3) Stern, Sol. "The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee." The New York Times on the Web.
(http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/08/home/davis-campaign.html )

(4) Davis, Angela. Angela Davis: An Autobiography. Random House: NY, 1974, pp. 191-195.

(5) Chicago Defender. 2/22/7, p. 4.