Dark History of the BPP....

[RadioRaheem84]

I know that in the US, some grassroots political organizations get tangled up in violent crime due to the social conditions and relations of the inner city. Unions seek out mob help for organizing funds because the government is so vehemently anti-union.

But what about the BPP? They were the target of COINTELPRO which brought them to their knees, but why the insistence of starting altercations and murdering police when their prime objective was self defense? Why did Huey Newton order the beating, execution and humiliation of other members? Mysterious deaths? Embezzling of funds?

Their story to me just reflects the history of any revolutionary social organization that ends up in the same muck due to capitalist government repression.

First the movement starts off spirited and works to acheive some aims, then the organization runs into repression, then sabatoge, then outright terrorism, then they turn inward and fall into corruption to stay affloat.

Is this the history of the BPP or am I being too generous? Were some of them just violent thugs using the guise of revolution to comitt crimes?

[RadioRaheem84]

Found an excellent account of their history:

http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/

[A Marxist Historian]

I know that in the US, some grassroots political organizations get tangled up in violent crime due to the social conditions and relations of the inner city. Unions seek out mob help for organizing funds because the government is so vehemently anti-union.

But what about the BPP? They were the target of COINTELPRO which brought them to their knees, but why the insistence of starting altercations and murdering police when their prime objective was self defense? Why did Huey Newton order the beating, execution and humiliation of other members? Mysterious deaths? Embezzling of funds?

Their story to me just reflects the history of any revolutionary social organization that ends up in the same muck due to capitalist government repression.

First the movement starts off spirited and works to acheive some aims, then the organization runs into repression, then sabatoge, then outright terrorism, then they turn inward and fall into corruption to stay affloat.

Is this the history of the BPP or am I being too generous? Were some of them just violent thugs using the guise of revolution to comitt crimes?

No. They were no such thing. That they were runnning around "murdering police" is just a COINTELPRO lie. And they never started altercations with the police, instead they stood militantly up for their rights, as Panther leaders put it, with a law book in one hand and a shotgun in the other. All perfectly legal at the time under the California penal code.

The police had very little luck in proving the COINTELPRO lies about them in court, but a lot better luck with things like murdering them in their beds like Fred Hampton.

The piece on MIA is fairly good, but it doesn't make it quite clear enough that virtually all the police charges against them were frameups. Probably because the author assumed that everybody knew that, that being common knowledge among radicals back them. He forgot that contemporary radicals don't remember what was happening and have to be re-informed sometimes.

It is true that Huey Newton had a theory about the lumpenproletariat as the vanguard of the revolution, and this had some unfortunate consequences. And bad stuff started to happen as the party degenerated and Newton spiraled into drug addiction. But the BPP was *never* into the "thug life."

They just thought that people from that life could make good revolutionaries as they had suffered extreme repression. Like Malcolm X for example.

The Panthers' ten point program includes a line from the Red Book about how revolutionaries should never steal even as much as a needle and thread from the people.

-M.H.-

[RadioRaheem84]

I am all for the Black Panther movement. I am just trying to understand the history of the Party and there is a lot of disinformation out there about the Party behaving like a mob family at the latter half of their heyday history.

This isn't about defaming them, this is about understanding their history.

[A Marxist Historian]

I am all for the Black Panther movement. I am just trying to understand the history of the Party and there is a lot of disinformation out there about the Party behaving like a mob family at the latter half of their heyday history.

This isn't about defaming them, this is about understanding their history.

Yes, there is a lot of disinformation. And bad stuff did happen in the last few years of the Party, as Newton spiraled ever deeper into drug addiction and the Party had lost any prospects for the future.

The real root of the corruption was that after the split, the Newton wing of the BPP slipped off the revolutionary path and went reformist, getting ever deeper into Democratic Party reform politics. They launched Ron Dellums's career as the main Bay Area black leader, and played a big role in getting Lionel Wilson, a quite conservative and fairly corrupt black politician, elected Mayor of Oakland.

So for quite a while, you had lots of ex-Panthers and semi-ex Panthers in the municipal bureaucracy in Oakland, the perfect recipe for corruption.

And Cleaver's Black Liberation Army flamed out in the opposite direction. Cleaver himself was always a dubious character, as you can tell from reading his famous book, Soul on Ice, where he confesses to having been a rapist. Mumia Abu-Jamal commented about Cleaver once that he'd never met a rapist in prison who had really reformed.

-M.H.-

[RadioRaheem84]

Cleaver himself was always a dubious character, as you can tell from reading his famous book, Soul on Ice, where he confesses to having been a rapist. Mumia Abu-Jamal commented about Cleaver once that he'd never met a rapist in prison who had really reformed.



What's an "insurrectionary" rapist? He called himself that in the book.