Abstract
Of the repression carried out against the New Left, none was more extreme than that which was visited upon the Black Panther Party. The BPP had aroused an extraordinary mass following in a very short time, leading the FBI to brand it as the greatest danger to US “national security.” Lee Lew-Lee’s 1996 documentary film All Power to the People! The Black Panther Party and Beyond shows both the achievements and the vulnerabilities of the BPP. The official response was in effect to criminalize a whole sector of the population, drawing on deeply ingrained racist traditions and using as a new pretext the “war on drugs.” The resulting rise of mass incarceration and its impact are shown in Ava DuVernay’s 2016 film 13th.
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- 1.
On the role of US government agencies in the King assassination, see William F. Pepper, The Plot to Kill King (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016).
- 2.
Winston A. Grady-Willis, “The Black Panther Party: State Repression and Political Prisoners,” in Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered] (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 374.
- 3.
See for example Hampton’s 27 April 1969 speech, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995 [1970]), 138–144.
- 4.
See Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988). Both authors are interviewed in Lew-Lee’s film.
- 5.
See Grady-Willis, “The Black Panther Party: State Repression and Political Prisoners”; also Churchill and Vander Wall, eds., Cages of Steel: The Politics of Imprisonment in the United States (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1992).
- 6.
See Jim Vander Wall, “A Warrior Caged: The Continuing Struggle of Leonard Peltier,” in Cages of Steel, 244–69.
- 7.
The CIA’s long-delayed acknowledgment of its role in this process was reported in the New York Times, 17 July 1998, A1. For background, see Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (London: Verso: 1998).
- 8.
The Black Panthers Speak, 61, 82.
- 9.
Ibid., 277.
- 10.
Chris Booker, “Lumpenization: A Critical Error of the Black Panther Party,” in Jones, The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered].
- 11.
Right-wing and mainstream critics, following the lead of David Horowitz, have built up a cottage industry of decontextualized horror stories about certain Panthers or former Panthers. I would not wish to question the severity of some of the cases they describe, but I do question the critics’ sense of proportion. They routinely disregard, on the one hand, the many ways in which state repression set the tone for people’s interaction and, on the other, the numerous examples of BPP members who, despite enormous imposed hardships (especially in prison), have maintained their integrity.
- 12.
Eldridge Cleaver, “An Open Letter to Stokely Carmichael,” in The Black Panthers Speak, 105.
- 13.
The Black Panthers Speak, 139.
- 14.
She says this to Oprah Winfrey in an interview that accompanies the film.
- 15.
The racial dimension of voter-suppression is expertly illuminated by journalist Greg Palast. See his 2016 book and dvd, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. http://www.gregpalast.com/.
- 16.
Report of The Sentencing Project to the United Nations Human Rights Committee Regarding Racial Disparities in the United States Criminal Justice System, August 2013 (http://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Race-and-Justice-Shadow-Report-ICCPR.pdf), 1.
- 17.
Abolition of prison-slavery was a central demand of the “millions4prisoners” march of August 19, 2017 and of a work stoppage at a number of prisons around the country in August/September 2018.
- 18.
Michelle Alexander, who is extensively interviewed in 13th, describes how Nixon hatched the war on drugs, in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), 40ff. The political agenda underlying the drug war is discussed in The Roots of Mass Incarceration: Locking up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernández, eds., special issue of Socialism and Democracy, 28:3 (November 2014).
- 19.
Jed S. Rakoff, “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty,” New York Review of Books, November 20, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/.
- 20.
Steve Martinot, “Probing the Epidemic of Police Murders,” Socialism and Democracy, 27:1 (March 2013).
- 21.
See Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “The Abuse Goes On: The Corrupting Dynamics of Power in a Texas Prison” (2017), http://rashidmod.com/?p=2374. Regarding the assumption that extreme methods must be used to maintain order, there is an extraordinary memoir from a 1971–72 Massachusetts experience that shows exactly the opposite: Jamie Bissonette et al., When the Prisoners Ran Walpole (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2008).
- 22.
Report in Miami Herald, June 25, 2014, http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article1972693.html.
- 23.
For reports by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, see http://rashidmod.com/?page_id=166. For reports by Keith “Malik” Washington, a leader of the anti-slavery drive, see http://sfbayview.com/?s=keith+malik+washington.
- 24.
Albert Woodfox, released in 2016 from Angola Prison in Louisiana, had been held in solitary for 43+ years. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson has been in solitary, in five different state systems, for most of his nearly 30 years of incarceration. For a brief overview of the practice, which routinely victimizes over 80,000 prisoners in the US, see http://solitarywatch.com/facts/faq/.
- 25.
National Public Radio report (2016), http://www.npr.org/2016/12/05/504458311/video-calls-replace-in-person-visits-in-some-jails.
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Wallis, V. (2020). From Black Liberation to Mass Incarceration: A Documentary Journey. In: Socialist Practice. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35066-6_10
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