Black Revolutionaries Of The Past, A Balanced View
As a political activist, I am a product of the '60s and early '70s - specifically of the Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party. As years pass between those days and the present, some of the new generation of activists tend to paint men and women who fought in the '60s and '70s, in the front lines of Black empowerment, in idyllic shades of red, black and green.
Because it is true that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it, failing to accurately assess the virtues and defects of past Black revolutionaries can hinder the activists of today from evolving to higher levels of effectiveness. In the Black Panther Party, we had our pluses and minuses. First I will touch on our pluses.
We were ideologically strong. By ideology I mean commonly accepted truths that we live by and act on. Politics is war without bloodshed; war is politics with bloodshed. Upon this basic axiom we built an understanding of world and national politics . This axiom banished the naiveté, political illusions and sentimentality fostered by the religious idealism of the Civil Rights movement.
We knew that the Black struggle was about power. We knew that the quest for greater power over lands, resources and peoples had always guided the actions of Black people' s adversaries . Therefore, we understood why "Christian love" and "Judeo-Christian ethics" have never influenced how white power rules America. We memorized Frederick Douglass' statement: "Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and it never will."
In football, two opposing teams must have an overall game plan and individual plays to hope to win. Similarly, on the political playing field an oppressed people must have an overall strategy as well as tactics for particular situations, if they are to achieve their economic and political goals.
Members of the Black Panther Party, and of the Black Power movement in general, studied the successful strategies and tactics of oppressed peoples in different parts of the world. We put into practice the theories of the foremost revolutionary thinkers of this century. Regardless of what we might have eventually come to think about the societies these theoreticians built, what was important was that they did achieve their people's liberation from the old societies of racial, colonial, and/or class oppression. Or, at the least, they had led formidable movements toward that end. Foremost among these scientists of revolution were Lenin, Mao, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral and Malcolm X.
One of the most beneficial lessons we learned from these revolutionaries was the importance of organization and discipline, and how to build a disciplined and dedicated organization. The very founding of the Black Panther Party was inspired by Malcom X's short-lived Organization of Afro-American Unity.
We lived and worked under a constant cloud of danger. Twenty eight members of the Black Panther Party had been murdered by the police by 1970. In Chicago, a hit team of FBI agents and local police murdered Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois chapter, while he was sleeping in bed. Mark Clark, Bunchy Carter, John Huggins, Jake Winters, Bobby Hutton - we all knew by heart the names of these and other martyrs. Pervasive police surveillance, harassment, and their vicious hatred of us, filled us with certainty that we could join these martyrs any minute.
The constant possibility of being shot down in the street, murdered in your bed, or beaten half-dead at a police station, effectively separates the insincere from the sincere.
Frantz Fanon, the eminent Black psychiatrist, noted that as fire purifies and tempers steel, so the fires of intense danger and fear, when faced and overcome, not only purify the minds of revolutionaries, but also purge their organizations of the faint-hearted, the slack, the ego-trippers and the opportunists. People who have motives other than striving to serve and liberate their people usually cannot motive ate themselves to face daily threats of death.
On the minus side, when we perceived ourselves besieged by our enemies, we became too insular. We stopped relying on the people, and instead relied on each other. We began to lose patience with leading "the masses" to transform Black America's social, political and economic situation. We began to believe that our own immense sacrifices, our individual victories over fear in fighting capitalism and racism, were substitutes for a mass movement.
Some of us had a tendency toward oversimplifying. "You're either part of the problem or part of the solution" was a popular phrase. In reality some people were neither.
Another minus was that our leaders imported from foreign revolutions the tendency of building the cult of personality. The top leader of the Panthers, the late Huey P. Newton, became a demigod. At one time he proclaimed himself "Supreme Commander." Later he became "Supreme Servant of the People."
If Brother Huey had actually been all-knowing and all-wise, then his deification would have been okay. But no leader anywhere fits that description. And while it is good to some extent for members of an organization to unite themselves around their leader, uncritical acceptance of every pronouncement from the top eventually , inevitably, harms the leader, the members and the movement.
Finally, and most damaging, was our failure to devise a means to counter and neutralize COINTELPRO. That was the federal government's "counterintelligence program" designed to disrupt, discredit, neutralize and destroy the Black movement and espeically the Black Panther Party . Our sometime romantic acceptance o f Third World theories of armed struggle rendered us vulnerable to COINTELPRO agent-provocateurs. These inf il trators prodded party members to commit illegal acts and informed on them afterwards. Eventually, fighting court cases consumed more party funds and energies than serving the people.
No future Black organization can succeed without a workable plan to counter internal and external sabotage by Black infiltrators and the white secret police agents who are their masters. In the end our failure to counter the federal, state and local secret police proved disastrous to many of us personally, and was a major cause of the decline of our movement.
In the 1990s, reasons for a reconstituted Black movement abound: the crack epidemic, school dropouts, the moral-spiritual vacuity of the teenage underclass, the dire need for Afrocentric schools, AIDS, homelessness, and inner city violence and crime. These internal problems, along with external threats posed by the resurgence of white racism and militarism, present considerable challenges for a renewed political activism.
With a clear-eyed understanding of the realities of the past, future activists will be better prepared for victory over the challenges facing not only Black people, but people in this country of all races.
Ahmad Abdur-Rahman is a political prisoner who has served almost 21 years in the Michigan prison system for a murder that he did not commit, under a law that has been repealed. He is the elected imam of the Lakeland Men's Facility's Muslim prisoners. Write to him as follows: Ahmad A. Rahman, #130539, 141 First St., Coldwater, MI 49036.