The Black Panther Party and the Struggle for Human RightsAuthor(s): Meredith Roman

Source: Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men , Vol. 5, No. 1, The Black Panther Party (Fall
2016), pp. 7-32
Published by: Indiana University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/spectrum.5.1.02

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 The Black Panther Party
and the Struggle for
Human Rights

Meredith Roman

ABSTRACT: This essay illuminates how the Black Panther Party

conceived of the African American liberation struggle as a struggle
for human rights. In seeking to understand the elision of the Panthers
from broader discussions of human rights, it contemplates the criti-
cal roles played by J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence program
(COINTELPRO), Cold War geopolitics, the party’s rhetoric of “pigs”
and armed revolution, and US White supremacy that equates human-
ity with whiteness. Reconceptualizing the Black Panthers as human
rights activists is not merely an academic exercise, but rather con-
tains the potential to foster greater support for the Black Lives Matter
movement.

INTRODUCTION

In a 2012 memoir titled Panther Baby Jamal Joseph recounts how his teenage
friends convinced him that he had to kill a White police officer in order to join
the Black Panther Party (BPP). The images of the Panthers on his grandmother’s
television affirmed his friends’ claim as true. However, when Joseph attended his
first BPP meeting in September 1968 in Brooklyn, he discovered that the Panthers
were not talking about killing “whitey.” Rather, as Joseph recalls, they were using the
term “human rights” to discuss the BPP’s struggle to end police brutality, uplift the
community, and gain decent housing for the people. Joseph’s mention, albeit brief,
of the BPP’s invocation of human rights suggests just how central the rhetoric was
to the party’s conceptualization of the African American freedom struggle. Joseph’s
recollection also alludes to the success of the US media in eliding this rhetoric and
framing the Panthers as a gang of gun-toting, anti-White hoodlums ( Jeffries, 2004;

Spectrum, 5(1), 7–32. Copyright © 2016 Trustees of Indiana University and The Ohio
State University. doi: 10.2979/spectrum.5.1.02

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8 SPECTRUM 5.1

Jeffries & Nissim-Sabat, 2007; Rhodes, 2007; Davenport, 2010). Floyd W. Hayes,
III (2007) laments just how few people are aware that the Panthers fought for
human rights and sought to establish an antiracist democratic society. Popular and
scholarly narratives of the 1960s (and blockbuster Hollywood movies like Forrest
Gump) continue to portray the Black Power movement in an overwhelmingly neg-
ative manner, as the “civil rights movement’s ‘evil’ twin”; and representations of the
Panthers as violent, racist thugs remain central to that portrayal ( Jones & Jeffries,
1998; Morgan, 2006; Joseph, 2009).
Contrary to these popular misrepresentations, Huey Newton and Bobby
Seale identified the objective of the BPP, when they established the organization
in 1966, as “promot(ing) the achievement of all our human rights, including the
right to defend ourselves against any threat to the actual achievement of those
rights” (“In Unity, There Is Survival,” 1972, p. D). This essay uses the Black Panther
newspaper, along with the recollections of former Panthers like Joseph, to explore
the human rights rhetoric of the BPP from 1967 through March 1971, when the
“COINTELPRO-induced” Newton-Cleaver feud left the party fatally divided
(Cleaver, 2001, p. 62). In the summer of 1971, the newspaper stopped printing
the party’s 10-Point Platform and Program, and in 1972 most chapters ceased to
exist, as Newton called remaining members to Oakland to regroup. Prior to its
division and subsequent decline, the BPP operated as a movement of “world-his-
toric importance” that exercised tremendous influence on US activists of various
ethnicities and internationally on groups in Europe, the Caribbean, Israel, India,
and Australia (Clemons & Jones, 1999; Lazerow & Williams, 2008; Angelo, 2009;
Stastny & Orr, 2014). During this roughly four-year period from 1967 through
early 1971, Panther leaders and rank-and-file members spoke frequently of human
rights in the pages of the Black Panther. They framed the struggle for African
Americans’ liberation as a struggle for human rights and as “the fight for human
dignity” (Lewis, 1970, p. 8).
The Panthers defined human rights primarily in terms of social and eco-
nomic rights and endeavored to address the gross disparities in housing, education,
health care, and employment that the US civil rights movement had left largely
untouched. They also identified equal protection before the law that, on a most
basic level, meant safety at the hands of law enforcement officials was imperative
to securing Black people’s human rights. In this way, the Panthers fashioned them-
selves as the heirs to Malcolm X not only with regard to the advocacy of armed
self-defense, but also in applying the concept of human rights to the Black liber-
ation struggle. Malcolm X instructed that invoking human rights, as opposed to
civil rights, allowed Black Americans to internationalize their movement and take
their grievances beyond the domestic jurisdiction of the United States (Malcolm X,

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 Roman / The Black Panther Party 9

1965; “The Heirs of Malcolm Have Picked Up the Gun,” 1970, p. 1; Harris, 2008).
A high price was to be paid domestically, however, in invoking human rights. Since
the early 1950s, American anticommunism had stigmatized human rights dis-
course as un-American, treasonous, communistic, and Soviet-inspired, a reality that
encouraged leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People in 1953 to remake the organization as quintessentially “American,” con-
cerned with pursuing political and legal rights alone (Anderson, 2003). Moreover,
by the time of his assassination in 1968, the media maligned Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., as “un-American” because he had taken up the banner of human rights,
with economic justice at its core—a development that is of course silenced in the
national celebrations of the King holiday ( Jackson, 2007). The BPP rejected the
notion that a human rights movement was inconsistent with American traditions.
They purposefully drew on the rhetoric of the American Revolution to legitimize
their struggle for self-determination and denounced leaders of the Soviet Union as
“renegade revisionists” who colluded with US imperialists to oppress the “progres-
sive people of the world” (“Washington/Moscow Collaboration Intensified,” 1969,
p. 8; “Soviet Revisionism Betrays,” 1969, p. 11).
The BPP connected their struggle for self-determination with the plight of
these “progressive people of the world” as manifested in their conception of African
Americans as a colonized people, the American ghetto as an internal colony, and
the police as an occupying army (Cleaver, 1968, p. 11; Seale, 1970a, p. 14; Newton,
1970a, p. 3; Newton, 1973/2009, p. 146). The Panthers’ decision to reject con-
ceptualizing the liberation struggle in strictly racial terms, as Jamal Joseph quickly
learned, does not mean that they abandoned any notion of connection with the
African diaspora. To the contrary, they identified persons of color, and especially
persons of African descent, as the primary victims of capitalist exploitation world-
wide, in spite of the gains of the US civil rights movement and the decolonization
of the African continent (Singh, 2004; Plummer, 2013). The BPP built on the dias-
poric focus of the Garvey movement, Malcolm X, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which as the July 3, 1967 issue of
the Black Panther announced, remade itself into a “Human Rights organization con-
cerned with human rights not only in the United States but throughout the world”
(p. 4). The Panthers, like other Black Power leaders, rejected the “domestication”
of Blackness that US leaders demanded of African Americans in return for their
freedom (Grant, 2014; McDuffie, 2015). Given the Panthers’ transnational orien-
tation, they referred to not only Malcolm X, but also Frantz Fanon as their “spiritual
father,” whose ideas, especially those articulated in Wretched of the Earth, informed
party policies (“Nature and History of the Black Panther Party,” n.d., p. 3). By invok-
ing human rights, the BPP sought to have the American people and the world, as

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10 SPECTRUM 5.1

former Panther Safiya Bukhari (2010) of the New York chapter recalled, recognize
people of African descent as full human beings.

LITERATURE REVIEW

This article builds on and is indebted to the rich scholarship regarding the BPP
that has burgeoned in the past twenty years, partly in response to Hugh Pearson’s
(1994) sensationalized and damning depiction of the party. The indispensable
essay collection edited by Charles E. Jones (1998) titled The Black Panther Party
Reconsidered combines the research of scholars like Jones and Judson Jeffries with
the writings of former Panthers to correct many misconceptions surrounding the
BPP. The Panthers’ community programs and services have since received atten-
tion in several monographs (Alkebulan, 2007; Witt, 2007; Nelson, 2011), and we
have gained a greater understanding of how the party often operated as a local orga-
nization in cities across the country (Burke & Jeffries, 2016; Jeffries, 2007, 2010;
Lazerow & Williams, 2006, 2008), even as it exercised substantial international
influence (Cleaver, 1998; Clemons & Jones, 1999; Smith, 1999; Spencer, 2009).
Scholars continue to complicate one-dimensional depictions of the BPP by doc-
umenting the progressive nature of gender politics in some chapters and by spot-
lighting the diverse actors who comprised the party’s ranks that, in addition to the
sometimes overstated “lumpen” or criminal element, included a large number of
college and high school students and veterans (Countryman, 2006; Murch, 2010;
Williams, 2013). Moving beyond the old paradigm that pathologized internal party
weaknesses, scholars attribute the BPP’s demise not only to state repression and
exploitation of those weaknesses, but also to a series of government concessions
and policy changes that diffused the conditions that allowed the Panthers to garner
support (Bloom & Martin, 2013).
Scholarship on the international human rights movement and what historians
have termed a “human rights revolution” has likewise proliferated in the past two
decades (Ishay, 1997; Cmiel, 2004; Borgwardt, 2005; Iriya, Goedde, & Hitchcock,
2012). However, as Samuel Moyn (2010) acknowledges in his foundational history
of human rights, African Americans’ contributions to and engagement with that
revolution have received little attention. To be sure, just as most scholars of geno-
cide studies disregard the charges of genocide that several African American activ-
ists like William Patterson, Paul Robeson, and later the Panthers themselves leveled
at the US government since the signing of the United Nations Convention for the
Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948 (Dagbovie, 2010), the BPP’s
human rights discourse continues to be disregarded except among some scholars
of the organization (Grady-Willis, 2006; Jeffries, 2007; Nelson, 2011). In seeking

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 Roman / The Black Panther Party 11

to understand the elision of the Panthers from broader discussions of human rights,
this essay contemplates the critical roles played by J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintel-
ligence program (COINTELPRO), the Cold War geopolitics mentioned above,
the Panthers’ own rhetoric of “pigs” and armed revolution, and the ideology of US
White supremacy, which equates humanity with Whiteness. As suggested by the
narrative that follows, reconceptualizing the Black Panthers as waging a movement
for human rights is not merely an academic exercise. Rather, it contains the poten-
tial to facilitate greater understanding of and broader support for a movement like
Black Lives Matter.

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE BLACK PANTHER

The BPP published the first issue of The Black Panther on April 25, 1967 in
response to the police murder of a 22-year-old, unarmed African American man
named Denzil Dowell in Richmond, California, on April 1. Richmond authori-
ties dismissed Dowell’s death as “justifiable homicide.” The party’s own investi-
gation disproved the officers’ claim that Dowell was fleeing in a stolen car when
they shot him in the back. Dowell’s murder and the helplessness of his grieving
family (which Huey Newton stressed they had seen so often among families of
the victims of police brutality) encouraged Panther leaders to develop a method
of “inform(ing) the community about the facts and mobilize them to action.”
Newton (1973/2009) elucidated that “Lacking access to radio, television, or any
of the other mass media, we needed an alternative means of communication” (p.
151). The first two pages of the newspaper’s first issue, which assumed the form of
an 8 ½ by 14-inch, four-page newsletter, legitimized the perspective of Dowell’s
family rather than that of the police and detailed the findings of the party’s inves-
tigation (Douglas, 1988). Thereafter, The Black Panther was published monthly
in 1967 and on a weekly basis beginning in 1968 (Abron, 1993; Hilliard & Cole,
1993). By 1970 members nationwide sold roughly 139,000 copies of the paper
per week ( Jones, 1988). Yet, this was not without some effort on the part of the
BPP, since police units and FBI agents throughout the country expended con-
siderable effort trying to stop its production and dissemination. Their tactics of
repression ranged from arresting Panthers who were selling the newspaper on
various bogus charges and confiscating their stacks of papers to intimidating air-
line companies and shipping unions into “losing” or destroying newspaper ship-
ments (Dynamite, 1969, p. 3; Seale, 1970b; “The FBI’s Covert Action Program,”
1976; Friedman, 2007). The Black Panther “functioned as a dissident press,” since
beyond helping to expand membership, cement the party’s identity, and provide
a source of income, the newspaper provided alternative views of political, social,

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12 SPECTRUM 5.1

and economic developments that contested the interpretations of the establish-

ment press (Davenport, 1998).

THE POLITICS OF THE “PIG”

Indeed, The Black Panther facilitated the BPP’s efforts to name human
rights and the restoration of human dignity as indispensable to African
Americans’ freedom. The newspaper challenged the dehumanizing representa-
tions of African Americans and the concomitant devaluing of Blacks’ lives in
a mainstream press that prided itself on objectivity. The Black Panther demon-
strated that this supposed objectivity really constituted the (subjective) White
American perspective. African Americans, The Black Panther declared, will no
longer tolerate being looked at, referred to, or treated like “animals in the zoo”
(Keys, 1969, p. 4; Nichols, 1970, p. 9). To this end, the Panthers flipped what
Frantz Fanon (1968) called the oppressor’s zoological terminology of dehu-
manization on the oppressor himself. They referred to the latter using the term
“pig,” which they sometimes replaced with the terms “dogs,” “wolves,” “beasts,”
and “wild animals.” In this way, the party challenged the moral superiority that
the police, supported by the mainstream press, had long claimed for themselves
in their dealings with Black people. As Mumia Abu-Jamal of the Philadelphia
branch remarked, police officers routinely committed violence against unarmed
Black men, while the BPP fed children breakfast and organized free clothing
drives, and yet, “strangely enough,” the mainstream or “mad media” depicted
the Panthers as “the racists, the ‘Black fascists,’ the hoodlums” (as cited in Cook,
1969, p. 9).
As analysis of The Black Panther reveals the term “pig” was inseparable from
the party’s conceptualization of Black liberation as a struggle for human rights.
The BPP did not use the term indiscriminately to describe all police officers or all
White people. They defined “pigs” on a national and international level as those
men (this was primarily a masculine term), White or Black (or more specifically
“Negro”), who violated people’s human rights (“What Is a Pig,” 1968, p. 14;
Douglas, 1969, p. 4; Donna, 1970, p. 10). As Dr. Curtis Powell (1969) of the New
York chapter maintained, “The pigs are not in the streets to protect human life or
human rights, but they are there only to protect property” (p. 19). Other items in
The Black Panther similarly explained “a policeman is a pig when he fails to treat
other human beings with respect,” someone who “places value on VIOLENCE
against other human beings” (Hilliard, 1969b, p. 9; “Maced by a ‘Negro’ Security
Guard,” 1969, p. 10). Although they most often associated the term “pigs” with
police officers, an association that Emory Douglas cemented with visual images

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 Roman / The Black Panther Party 13

of the police as literal pigs walking upright, the Panthers also defined them as
those landlords and firefighters who violated the people’s human right to decent
living conditions (“Blacks Suffer Because of Pigs’ Neglect,” 1970, p. 2). They fur-
thermore condemned as “pigs” those businessmen who subordinated “HUMAN
RIGHTS” to profits and property rights (Heady, 1968, p. 4). The Black Panther
observed that the media sensationalized the party’s use of the term “pig” and por-
trayed its members as “thugs and hoodlums,” while ignoring that they referred to
Whites who supported Black liberation as “brothers and sisters” (“We Accuse,”
1969, p. 8; Jones, 1969, p. 17).
To be sure, the Panthers intended the term “pig” to eliminate Black peo-
ple’s fear of those police officers who seemed invincible and terrorized their
communities (Brown, 1992, p. 253; Bloom & Martin, 2013, p. 154). Eliminating
this fear was central to the revolution of consciousness that the BPP sought to
inspire among many African Americans whom they lamented existed in a type
of “living death” (Newton, 1970b, p. 11, 1973/2009; Monges, 1998). As Fanon
(1968) instructs in Wretched of the Earth, the struggle for liberation must be pre-
ceded by the oppressed people’s recognition that their lives are of no lesser value
than the lives of the oppressor. This discovery, he adds, “shakes the world in a
very necessary manner” (p. 45). By encouraging African Americans to recognize
their humanity, the BPP sought to “shake the world in a very necessary manner,”
since such a discovery would lead them to mobilize for their “Human Rights”
(The Black Panther frequently capitalized the term), and to cease committing
violence against other African Americans as a function of the colonized men-
tality (Foster, 1970, p. 3). To this point, The Black Panther stressed that author-
ities feared Black people who are aware that they are human (“Peoples’ News
Service,” 1969, p. 17). “We are becoming rich, in the recognition of our own
humanity,” the newspaper declared, despite the efforts of the establishment to
demonize them (Major, 1970, p. 3).

HUMAN RIGHTS AND PHYSICAL SECURITY

As suggested by the justifiable homicide that served as the inspiration behind

The Black Panther’s establishment, the BPP initially focused on securing Black peo-
ple’s human rights by ending “police brutality and murder of black people,” a goal
outlined in point seven of the 10-Point Platform and Program and reflected in the
inclusion of “Self-Defense” in the organization’s original name. As James Baldwin
(1972) put it, the Panthers emerged out of a genuine need to protect Black people
from the police. The front page of The Black Panther’s second issue (dated May 16,
1967) implores “bloods” to “‘please, please, please’ obtain a picture, the name, or

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14 SPECTRUM 5.1

the badge number of any ‘cop’ who brutalizes you or violates your Human Rights”
and report it to the Panthers, who will address it accordingly. Contrary to the
vision of the country’s (White) founders, The Black Panther emphasized that the
“rule of man over man instead of the rule of the laws of Human Rights and Justice”
prevails in the United States, “where Human Rights are being daily violated, there
is denial of Due Process of Law, and there is no Equal Protection of the Law”
(“Message to America,” 1970, pp. 12–13). As Newton (1973/2009) remarked,
“there were enough laws on the books to permit Black people to deal with all their
problems, but the laws were not enforced” (p. 110). Thus, the Panthers sought
to raise the legal consciousness of African Americans through their police patrols
and “The Pocket Lawyer of Legal First Aid” that they gave to new recruits, which
became a regular feature of The Black Panther (1967, p. 5; 1968, p. 15; 1969, p. 22;
1970, p. 10).
Yet, the BPP recognized that arming African Americans with knowledge of
the law would not automatically guarantee that law enforcement officials would
respect their human rights. They also advocated that African Americans arm
themselves in self-defense against the indiscriminate violence of law enforcement
officials until they actually enjoyed equal protection before the law. In Executive
Mandate No. 3, which Huey Newton (1968a) issued in the wake of repressive acts
directed at the party and at Eldridge Cleaver in particular, the Minister of Defense
ordered all Panthers to arm themselves in defense against “those who kick our
doors down with no authority and seek to ransack our homes in violation of our
HUMAN RIGHTS…” (p. 1). Newton’s use of full capitalization further reflects
the party’s rejection of the equation of human rights with Whiteness alone and of
the consequent lesser value attached to Blacks’ lives in US society. Members took
notice. When quoting from Newton’s mandate in the future, they retained the full
capitalization of “HUMAN RIGHTS” (“Pigs Vamp on People,” 1969, p. 8). They
also replicated the rhetoric of human rights when they spoke of the repression that
they faced. One Panther member, for example, testified that “Pigs are daily violat-
ing our inalienable human rights,” while claiming to uphold the law (R. Williams,
1968, p. 7). In a statement he released from the San Francisco city jail, Bobby Seale
(1969) condemned US leaders for attempting to prevent them from attaining
“basic human rights” (p. 4). The Black Panther regularly documented instances in
which law enforcement officials nationwide “violated, ignored, and disregarded”
the people’s “right to be treated as ‘human beings.’” Police attacks on the Panthers’
Free Breakfast for Children rallies and programs served as prime examples (“Des
Moines Breakfast for Children Rally Attacked by Pigs,” 1969, p. 4; “L.A. Pigs Vamp
on Free Breakfast Program,” 1969, p. 6). In the wake of the escalation of political
repression directed against the BPP in 1969 and 1970, The Black Panther reminded

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 Roman / The Black Panther Party 15

readers that they possessed “the human right to kill in defense of our lives” ( June,
1970, p. 5). As Michael D. (1970a) of the Colorado chapter declared, “Basic human
rights are not negotiable—either you take your foot off my neck, or I’ll snatch your
leg off ” (p. 7).
The BPP, as the above discussion suggests, deliberately drew on the discourse
of the US Constitution and American Revolution to legitimize their advocacy of
self-defense to secure the inalienable rights of Black Americans (Baldwin, 2006).
While foreign revolutionaries like Fanon and Mao Tse-Tung served as sources of
inspiration for the Panthers, the Party’s 10-Point Platform and Program directly
references “only two external sources of authority in legitimating its demands: the
U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” (Malloy, 2013, p. 549). As
David Hilliard posited in The Black Panther, “Our struggle for freedom is legitimate,
because what we’re demanding has already been written out in the Constitution”
(1969b, p. 9). The Panthers frequently drew direct comparisons between them-
selves and the patriot rebels of 1776 (Newton, 1967, p. 3; L. Williams, 1968, p. 15).
A March 1968 article quotes extensively from a speech given by Patrick Henry and
insists that Malcolm X or any Panther leader could have delivered it. The article
highlights the hypocrisy of how Henry is hailed as a “patriotic hero,” while “today, if
any Black Man has courage enough to pick up the gun in defense of his basic human
rights he is called a rebel and a communist, and the pig is set nibbling at his heels
in search of a reason to silence the voice of truth” (“Inspiring Speech,” 1969, p. 9).
Contrary to the efforts of US authorities to “silence the voice of truth” and
to paint the BPP as un-American, the Panthers were American patriots in a more
literal sense as well. A sizable number had served in the military and some had even
fought with distinction and received awards for their service in Vietnam ( Jeffries
& Nissim-Sabat, 2007). Even when the BPP spearheaded efforts to rewrite the
Constitution at a plenary session in Philadelphia in September 1970, and at the
Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in November in Washington,
DC, they justified such a revision by insisting that in its current form it allowed
for the violation of the inalienable human rights that it was supposed to uphold.
Although the Panthers identified African Americans as most in need of a new
Constitution, since “we have had our Human Rights denied and violated perpet-
ually under this Constitution—for hundreds of years,” they claimed all oppressed
minorities, women, youth, the elderly, and soldiers needed a new Constitution that
“will guarantee and deliver to every American citizen the inviolable human right to
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (“Message to America,” 1970, pp. 12–13;
Katsiaficas, 1998).
In addition to drawing on the country’s founding documents, the Panthers
also legitimized their advocacy of self-defense by comparing the threat posed to

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16 SPECTRUM 5.1

African Americans’ physical security with that which the Jews of Nazi Germany
faced. This strategy is unsurprising when considering that the most definitive
international human rights documents of the twentieth century were inspired by
the Jewish Holocaust, namely the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
and the aforementioned Genocide Convention, a reality that the BPP implicitly
acknowledged (“Why We Petition the United Nations to End Genocide,” 1970,
p. 15). Although the policies of Nazi Germany had precedent in the practice of
Western imperialism in Africa, Asia, and the Americas for centuries, Western lead-
ers overlooked these similarities and instead held up Nazi Germany as the antithe-
sis of human rights, if not the embodiment of evil itself (Cesaire, 1955; Mazower,
2000).
The Black Panther from its very beginnings contended that there was little
difference between Nazi and American racial policies. A cartoon from one of the
newspaper’s first issues (dated July 20, 1967) juxtaposed racism in Nazi Germany
“1933–1945” with racism in the United States “1620–????” (p. 15). The Black
Panther denounced as “Nazi justice” the chaining and gagging of Bobby Seale
on the order of Judge Julius “Adolf ” Hoffman during the trial of the Chicago 8
(Zayd, 1969, p. 9; O. Williams, 1969, p. 10). A recurring headline in 1968 and
1969 exposed “Gestapo Tactics” on the part of law enforcement officials across the
country, who were also referred to as “storm troopers,” “gestapo police,” “German
gestapo,” and “gestapo” (“Brother Dynamite Says: Police Use Gestapo Tactics,”
1967, p. 21; Newton, 1968b, p. 6; “The People Speak,” 1969, p. 13; “Rejection of
People’s Demands by Chief Pig Kelly,” 1970, p. 15). Others specifically announced
that the “Gestapo Invades Roxbury Home,” or posited that “It Seems to Be the
Blood of Black People, Especially the Blood of the Panther, That Feeds the Gestapo
Police” (1970, p. 6; Michael D., 1970b, p. 9). In discussing their experiences during
a traffic stop in Northern California, Shirley Neeley, Melvin Newton, Brenda Curry,
and John Higgins accused the police of treating them in a manner that was “remi-
niscent of Hitler’s Strongmen during his reign of terror. They showed us no respect
as HUMAN BEINGS to say the least as CITIZENS” (1968, p. 22). Headlines
reported that “Storm Troopers Invade Community” (1971, p. 5), as articles urged
African Americans to arm themselves in self-defense in order to avoid suffering a
similar fate as Jews in Nazi Germany (Chuma, 1968, p. 2). The police murder of
Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, and the military-style ambush of the
Panthers’ headquarters in Los Angeles in early December 1969, seemed to serve
as further evidence that Hitler’s goal for the Jews was the goal that US authorities
had for Black people (Gilmore, 1970, p. 2; R. Hilliard, 1970, p. 8). As Michael Hill
(1969) of the New York chapter warned in a striking headline, “No Black People,
Genocide is not impossible” (p. 2).

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 Roman / The Black Panther Party 17

HUMAN RIGHTS AND A CAPITALIST CRITIQUE

By 1969, the Panthers’ advocacy of human rights expanded beyond the ini-
tial focus of gaining the physical security of African Americans at the hands of law
enforcement officials into a more scathing attack on US capitalism. From the out-
set the BPP had worked from the conviction that US capitalism was based on the
dehumanization of African Americans (R. Williams, 1968, pp. 12–13). By 1969,
they took a more pointed look at how the distribution of wealth in the country
left poor people, in general, but African Americans in particular, without access
to basic human rights. The most obvious manifestation of this development was
the BPP’s creation of what ultimately amounted to over 30 community programs
and services, ranging from the aforementioned Free Breakfast for Children and
Free Clothing Programs to the Free Busing to Prison service and Free Health Care
Clinics. These initiatives, which were also informed by the Black self-help tradition,
helped broaden the base of the BPP’s support and instill greater discipline among
its members, while evoking the greater wrath of Hoover and the US government
(“The FBI’s Covert Action Program,” 1976; Alkebulan, 2007, pp. 28–31; Witt,
2007; Murch, 2010, pp. 169–170, 183–184, 229).
Reflecting the ideological impetus that informed the implementation of these
programs, the number of articles in The Black Panther that condemned capital-
ism for placing profit above human rights increased precipitously. The newspaper
made clear that capitalism was the enemy of the people and that contrary to the
“American fable” all poor and oppressed people in the “democratic” United States,
and most especially Black people, were deprived of their inalienable human rights
( Jolly, 1969, p. 13; E. Williams, 1969, p. 18; L. Williams, 1969, pp. 4–5; “Up from
Capitalism,” 1969, p. 16; “Why Pigs Perpetuate Racism,” 1969, p. 5; “Capitalism vs.
Human Life,” 1970, p. 5; “Tales of Terror,” 1970, p. 5). Accordingly, the Panthers
revised point three of the 10-Point Platform and Program regarding “an end to
the robbery by the white man of our black community.” As Education Minister
Raymond “Masai” Hewitt explained, “We want to put an end to the robbery by the
capitalists—no matter what his color. Black, white, pink, purple, striped or polka
dot” (“Interview with Masai,” 1969, p. 16). Although The Black Panther published
this interview on May 31, the 10-Point Platform and Program did not reflect this
calculated revision until the July 5, 1969 issue. The Panthers argued that President
Nixon’s support of Black capitalism and cultural nationalism confirmed that neither
will guarantee respect for Black people’s human rights. As Fred Nolan (1968) of the
Boston branch reasoned, “The truth is, just because you have a black hand picking
your pockets, doesn’t make the exploitation stop any quicker than it did with a white
hand.” All the Afro wigs and pseudo-African garb that capitalists now produced

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18 SPECTRUM 5.1

will not, he added, “contribute anything to Black freedom” (p. 15). Nelson Malloy
(1970) of Winston-Salem similarly admonished that Black capitalism amounted to
simply replacing the White exploiter with a Black one (p. 6). The Panthers insisted
that contrary to their critics’ claims they did not believe that socialism would auto-
matically eliminate racism, but rather it would provide more favorable conditions
for its eradication and for building a society that guaranteed respect for the human
rights of all citizens (“On Earl Ferrell and Criticism of Cuba,” 1969, p. 9).
Consistent with their escalated attack on capitalism, articles that focused
on decent housing as a human right, point four of the 10-Point Platform and
Program, first appeared consistently in The Black Panther in 1969 (Harris, 1969, p.
8). This development reflects the Panthers’ decision to work and live in econom-
ically destitute communities across the country in order to better mobilize them
(Monges, 1998; Williams, 2013). Former Panthers recall how they were not always
prepared for what they found. For example, on a visit to Brooklyn, Aaron Dixon
(2012) recounted his shock at seeing the dire poverty of Brownsville, which he
stressed was even worse than that found on Chicago’s Southside. Articles in The
Black Panther betray this shock and disgust (“Housing Conditions, Capitalism
and Our Children,” 1970, pp. 1–2; “Inhuman Housing Conditions in Jersey City,
N.J.,” 1970, p. 3; “After Checking into the Situation,” 1970, p. 2; “The People vs. the
Landlords,” 1970, p. 9). A representative article condemned the “squalid” condi-
tions in which African Americans lived: “no human being should be subjected to
looking at them, much less living in them.” The article questioned all the money
that the “piggish establishment” spends exploring outer space and committing
“genocide” against our “brothers of color” in Vietnam, while not providing African
Americans with “decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings” (“‘Squalor’
in Black Communities,” 1969, p. 4). The newspaper documented how too many
African Americans lived in “Wretched Conditions in the ‘Land of Plenty’” (1970,
p. 2), including the elderly (Brother Mathew Harding, 1970, p. 2).
The Panthers connected these “subhuman” housing conditions to the plight
of persons of African descent worldwide who “receive the worst of everything.
The people are tired of being oppressed, and being forced to live like animals”
(McQueen, 1970, p. 3). A photograph of a Black mother holding her emaciated
child amid dilapidated buildings asked readers to consider whether it was taken in
“Brownsville, U.S.A. or Capetown[,] South Africa” (“Brownsville,” 1970, p. 2). Ella
Jenkins (1971) of the New Haven Tenants Association stressed that, “We are Black,
it is true—but we are also human. We would like to live as decently as anyone else.”
Jenkins compared the conditions in which they lived to a barn (p. 3). Headlines
such as, “People of 39 and 35 Mt. Pleasant have taken a stand on their human right

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 Roman / The Black Panther Party 19

to decent housing” highlighted how African Americans nationwide were mobiliz-

ing to reclaim their humanity (Ellis, 1970, p. 2).
BPP leaders had informally charged the US government with committing
genocide since its establishment (as mentioned earlier) and accused authorities of
readying African Americans for the concentration camps used to detain Japanese
Americans during the Second World War. By 1970, The Black Panther connected
the charges of genocide to the deplorable, rat-infested projects to which the party
had turned its attention (Fultz, 1970, p. 9; “We Find the Slumlords Guilty of
Genocide,” 1970, p. 6). As Ronald Tyson (1970) of the Boston branch observed,
“When one walks through Boston’s South End, he is confronted by a scene that
quickly reminds him of Berlin or London after World War II. Block after block of
burned out, boarded up, semi or fully demolished housing, makes up a large part of
the area… leading the people to suspect genocide: genocide in the form of failure
or deliberate refusal to provide shelter that’s fit for the housing of human beings” (p.
3). Monk Teba (1970) of the Illinois chapter compared the Cabrini Green Housing
Projects in Chicago to “the Warsaw Ghetto of Poland in 1942,” while other articles
condemned housing projects (like jails) as concentration camps (p. 5; “Isolation
within Isolation,” 1968, p. 4; Weatherby, 1969, p. 2; “Concentration Camps Tools
of Oppression,” 1969, p. 4; Hyson, 1970, p. 5). In his poignant 1970 pamphlet titled
“Capitalism plus Dope Equals Genocide,” Michael Cetewayo Tabor of the New
York chapter argued that many African Americans tried to escape the squalid con-
ditions of these housing projects by abusing drugs, thereby paying for their own
genocide.
Indeed, The Black Panther reported that the human rights violations or
genocidal conditions that African Americans faced in terms of inhumane housing
conditions negatively affected their health and, thus, rendered even more imper-
ative their attainment of the human right to quality medical care (“Death of 4
Month Old Baby,” 1970, p. 9; “New York’s Lincoln Hospital,” 1971, p. 2). While
the newspaper consistently condemned the “pig style” of the US health care
system for subordinating human rights to profit (Satchel, 1969, p. 3; “Medicine
Must Serve the People,” 1969, p. 17; “Health Care-Pig Style,” 1970, pp. 9, 15;
“Preventative Health Care Program Implemented,” 1971, p. 2), decent medical
care as a human right did not command the attention that housing did in The
Black Panther until after the Newton-Cleaver division of the party in March 1971,
when the charge of genocide expanded beyond housing and policing to include
medical issues such as sterilization and sickle cell anemia (“Sterilization Another
Part of the Plan of Black Genocide,” 1971, p. 2; “Fight Sickle Cell Anemia Black
Genocide,” 1971, p. H).

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20 SPECTRUM 5.1

SILENCING THE PANTHERS’ HUMAN RIGHTS STRUGGLE

Multiple factors explain why the Black Panthers are elided from discussions
of human rights activism. One of the first reasons relates to Cold War geopolitics.
US leaders’ initial support for an international human rights agenda in the 1940s
did not reemerge until the 1970s, when the ignominious end of the Vietnam War
fueled the desire among American conservatives and liberals alike to redeem the
country’s moral authority worldwide (Mitoma, 2013; Keys, 2014). However, since
American anticommunism, as discussed earlier, had effectively stigmatized social
and economic rights as “un-American” and communistic, the version of human
rights that US leaders supported and that prevailed globally in the 1970s focused
on violations of political and civil rights, eschewing the social and economic rights
that had been integral to the formulation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (Cmiel, 2004). This definition of human rights conveniently privi-
leged the manner in which White intellectuals in the Soviet Union defined human
rights, which they did almost exclusively in terms of civil rights at the expense of
economic and social concerns—a reality that several Soviet activists identified as a
major weakness of their movement (Alexeyeva, 1985). As historian Samuel Moyn
(2010) explains, human rights assumed a “antitotalitarian, truncated form” that
excluded any movements “for collective liberation from racial inequality or colonial
legacies” (p. 106). This scenario deliberately disadvantaged members of the African
diaspora. Moreover, by the 1970s many African and Asian leaders’ enthusiastic sup-
port for the concept of universal human rights, evidenced at the 1955 Bandung
Conference, was largely replaced by claims of cultural relativism motivated by
authoritarian leaders’ desire to consolidate their power (Burke, 2010).
The lack of attention to the Black Panthers as human rights activists is also
the legacy of COINTELPRO, that is to say, of the US government’s campaign
to “disrupt, discredit and destroy” the BPP ( Jones, 1988; Churchill, 2001). The
party quickly became the primary target of COINTELPRO’s “Black Nationalist
Hate Groups” operation, with Hoover denouncing the Panthers publicly in June
1969 as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Accordingly, the
Panthers constituted “the target of 233 of the total 295 authorized ‘Black Nationalist’
COINTELPRO actions” (“The FBI’s Covert Action Program,” 1976, p. 188). Jamal
Joseph (2012) emphasizes how he wept openly when he read COINTELPRO
documents that revealed the tactics FBI and law enforcement officials used to turn
party members against one another. As historian Kenneth O’Reilly (1989) argues,
“Hoover’s pursuit of the Black Panther party was unique only in its total disregard
for human rights and life itself ” (p. 294). Many former Panthers like Dhoruba Bin
Wahad (1993) of the New York chapter contend that the government declared

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 Roman / The Black Panther Party 21

war on the Panthers precisely because they waged a struggle for human rights.
Kathleen Cleaver elucidates that US leaders attempted to “minimize the interna-
tional, broad concept of human rights that motivated us and turn it into something
smaller and less threatening” (as cited in Day & Whitehorn, 2001, p. 289). As evi-
denced throughout this essay, the recollections of Kathleen Cleaver and Dhoruba
Bin Wahad are consistent with the charges that The Black Panther routinely leveled.
Articles repeatedly condemned US leaders and the mainstream media for attempt-
ing to “vilify,” “isolate,” and commit genocide against the BPP because they were
fighting for human rights (“Rap to Young,” 1968, p. 5; Walls, 1970, p. 7). As Candi
Robinson (1970) of the information ministry in Oakland wrote with regard to the
shooting death of Panther ally Carl Hampton in Houston, Texas, at the hands of
police, “We know that the racist pigs with all of their repressive weapons given the
go ahead by that homicidal agent, Nixon; will do anything to stop the people from
having any of their basic human rights” (p. 21).
The Panthers’ discussions of human rights, as Robinson’s comment reminds
us, coexisted with the use of the term “pig,” a practice discussed earlier, and irrev-
erent references to US leaders as murderers. Such colorful rhetoric contributes
to the lack of attention to the Panthers as waging a movement for human rights.
Authorities cited this rhetoric as justification for greater repression, which many
White Americans supported either actively or silently. To the charge that their dis-
course of resistance was profane, the Panthers “countered that extreme oppressive
conditions warrant extreme rhetorical responses in order to mobilize opposition to
political tyranny” (Monges, 1998, p. 141). And such rhetoric did not translate into
practice throughout the country. Although the Panthers spoke of armed insurrec-
tion, the party most often preached and practiced self-defense and serve the people
programs ( Jones, 1998; Jeffries, 2010). As Molefi Kete Asante (2015) instructs,
“the threat of violence with its potentiality is a more effective strategy for gain-
ing change” than actually committing violence. Yohuru Williams (2008) likewise
notes, “all too often, getting a ‘little piece of this earth’ for so-called minorities has
involved threatening to destroy everyone else’s piece” (p. 258). However, the FBI
and the press blurred “the distinction between verbal violence and frustration and
hard-core revolutionary activity” (O’Reilly, 1989, p. 297). As Jane Rhodes (1999)
avers, “the press failed to differentiate between the theatrics and hyperbole of the
Black Panther Party and any real threat that they posed to individual whites and
national safety” (p. 114).
This is best evidenced in the Panthers’ calls to “Off the Pig.” Not only was this
famous exhortation meant to convince Black people that resistance was possible,
but also to encourage police to be more reluctant to violate the human rights of
any Black person (Widell, 2008; Rahman, 2008). Just as importantly, the primary

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22 SPECTRUM 5.1

way that the Panthers sought to “Off the Pig” was by signing petitions to gain com-
munity control of the police (“Petition Statement for Community Control of the
Police,” 1969, p. 16; “A Case for Community Control,” 1969, p. 5; Brown, 1970,
pp. 6, 14). In an argument disturbingly relevant to 2016, David Hilliard (1969a)
expressed hope that the decentralization of the police will transform pigs into
“brothers” because “pigs,” Black (“Negro”) and White, “have been conditioned
to kill black people” (p. 5). Thus, in their quest to restore the humanity of Black
people, the Panthers also recognized the urgency of rehumanizing law enforcement
officials or transforming pigs into police officers (i.e., individuals who respected the
human rights of African Americans). The BPP’s “unviolent” tactics, which included
their petition campaign for community control of the police, are often overlooked
or not treated seriously (especially for the period prior to 1972) not simply because
of the party’s own rhetoric and the legacies of COINTELPRO and the Cold War,
but also because of the nonviolence or self-defense dichotomy that obscures “the
complexity and flexibility” of the Black liberation struggle (Crosby, 2011).
The failure to conceive of the Panthers as leaders of a human rights movement
is also inextricably linked to mainstream White America’s persistent rejection of
any notion of Black self-defense. This tragic reality manifested in the 2013 acquittal
of George Zimmerman, the adult man who shot and killed the unarmed, 17-year-
old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. As Robin Kelley (2013) points out, US
politicians and advocates of gun rights insisted in 2013 that Sandy Hook school
teachers and administrators (and by implication school authorities nationwide)
should have been armed in order to prevent the tragic shooting death of school
children. At the same time, they did not insist that Martin too (and by implication
other young African American men who could be hunted by the Zimmermans of
the world) should have been armed to prevent his tragic death. Martin, like other
Black children and youth, was not presumed innocent (Kelley, 2013).
As Kelley’s analysis suggests, the lack of attention to the Black Panthers as
human rights activists is furthermore connected to America’s continued disavowal
of Black people’s humanity, a systemic disavowal that encouraged the Panthers
to invoke the language of human rights in the first place. As critical race theorists
maintain, in the White supremacist society of the United States, Black people, like
other non-White groups, are viewed as a race while Whites are not raced but treated
as the norm or simply human. Such a scenario empowers the voice of Whites as
objective; it gives them the ability to speak for all of humanity. In contrast, the views
of non-Whites are dismissed as inherently partial since they can only speak for
members of their so-called race rather than humanity as a whole (McBride, 2005;
Dyer, 2005). To this point, Bobby Seale (1970b) accused the media of deliber-
ately misrepresenting the BPP’s clenched fist as a Black chauvinist salute when the

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 Roman / The Black Panther Party 23

party intended it more broadly to mean “All Power to the People.” Tommie Smith
(2007), the 1968 Olympic gold medalist in the 200-meter dash who raised his fist
on the medal stand in Mexico City, likewise condemns the media’s distortion of the
clenched fist’s significance. Under the US racial regime, in other words, Black peo-
ple can only advocate for other Black people, thereby rendering their demands for
human rights as superficial or disingenuous at best. It was for this reason that Afeni
Shakur of the New York chapter reminded members of the jury in the Panther 21
trial of the BPP’s fundamental purpose. In her opening statement in the fall 1970,
Shakur admonished her “brothers and sisters” on the jury to “judge us as human
beings concerned about other human beings” (as cited in Asbury, 1970, p. 53).

CONCLUSION

As the BPP evolved ideologically through Black nationalism, revolution-

ary socialism, internationalism, and intercommunalism, the discourse of human
rights endured ( Jeffries, 2002). The Panthers consistently viewed Black liberation
as inseparable from the struggle for human rights. The concept of human rights
furthered the Black Panther Party’s efforts to forge transnational connections with
the African diaspora and larger third world. It also facilitated their alliances with
non-Black groups in the United States, while still maintaining the integrity of an
all-Black organization. Leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) hailed
the BPP as the leading Black organization fighting for human rights and called on
all human rights organizations to support them (“Free the N.Y. Panther 21,” 1969,
p. 4). The Panthers’ advocacy of Black power for Black people, Brown power for
Brown people, Red Power for Red people, Yellow power for Yellow people, and
White power for White people served as one of the most common expressions of
their commitment to establishing a society that advanced the well-being of human-
ity as a whole (Goodwin, 1969, p. 11). It was this commitment to notions of human
universality that ultimately encouraged Newton to advocate for the creation of a
collective human identity that defied the artificial divisions erected by US impe-
rialists for the purpose of efficient exploitation (Rodriguez, 2006). If the Panthers
actually espoused the anti-White racism that authorities accused them of and
spurned anti-racist alliances, then US leaders would have deemed their threat to the
national and international status quo as minimal.
Although BPP members differed in opinion on tactics and methods, espe-
cially as it concerned the role of guerilla warfare in the liberation struggle, most
generally derived feelings of empowerment from the concept of human rights. Even
Eldridge Cleaver (1969), the main advocate of guerilla warfare by May 1968, envi-
sioned the end goal of making the United States a beacon of human rights. The

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24 SPECTRUM 5.1

numerous articles cited throughout this essay that were authored by different rank-
and-file Panthers bear witness to the multitude of voices that contributed to the
party’s human rights project. Within the context of the Cold War, the Panthers’
demands for human rights in conjunction with their critique of capitalism rendered
them a danger to a US government that intended to define human rights violations
almost exclusively as the practice of communist regimes. This perverse Cold War
reality allows some human rights scholars and conservative politicians to herald
Ronald Reagan as a champion of human rights without any regard for his egregious
record of human rights violations as it pertained to persons of color domestically
and globally, first as the governor of California and then as president of the United
States.
The accusations that Black Lives Matter constitutes a racist, anti-police move-
ment are strikingly similar to the systematic attacks on the Black Panthers 50 years
earlier as anti-White cop killers. The persistent murder of young Black men at the
hands of law enforcement officials (and vigilantes) and the continued non-pun-
ishment of these murderers remind us of the enduring success of COINTELPRO
policies in derailing the Panthers’ efforts to secure the human rights of persons of
African descent. Adopting a more nuanced view of the Black Panthers as activists
for human rights does not mean romanticizing an organization that had many
faults. However, it does require a de-romanticization of the United States as a space
where human rights abuses against Black people are absent. The widespread adop-
tion of a more complex view of the Black Panthers as human rights activists will
allow the United States to move toward an understanding of Black Lives Matter as a
human rights’ initiative and toward dismantling the White supremacist conditions
and institutions that necessitate its existence.

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30 SPECTRUM 5.1

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32 SPECTRUM 5.1

Witt, A. (2007). The Black Panthers in the Midwest: The community programs and services of the
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MEREDITH L. ROMAN holds a PhD in history from Michigan State University.

She is currently an associate professor of history at the State University of New
York, College at Brockport. Her research and teaching focus on anti-racism, resis-
tance to state violence, radical movements, and the Black diaspora in Europe.
(mroman@brockport.edu)

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