"Black Panthers". The FBI called them the most dangerous adversary of the American state.
One of the most serious domestic political problems for the United States of America has always been interracial controversy. Despite the fact that racial discrimination of the African-American population is formally a thing of the past, in reality, the enormous differences in the level and quality of life between the “white” and “black” population of the United States still persist. Moreover, the dissatisfaction of African Americans with their social position causes constant unrest and riots. More often than not, another act of actual or alleged police brutality against a dark-skinned person becomes a formal reason for the unrest. But even on the occasion of killing an African-American “street guy” by policemen, it is impossible to gather thousands of people for mass riots if people, of course, are so unhappy with their social position that they are ready to rebel for any reason and even risk their lives just to throw out all the negative emotions, all my hate. So it was in Los Angeles, in Ferguson, in many other American cities. At one time, the Soviet Union missed a wonderful opportunity to seriously weaken the United States by encouraging and supporting the national liberation movement of African Americans.
Racial segregation and the struggle of African Americans for their rights
American citizens are still alive and even not so old, having found a regime of real racial segregation that existed in the USA right up to the 1960s. In those years when American information resources accused the Soviet Union of violating human rights, there was severe discrimination on the basis of skin color in the very "citadel of democracy". African Americans could not attend “schools for whites”, and in public transport in the city of Montgomery (Alabama) the first four rows of seats were allocated for “whites” and blacks could not be placed on them, even if they were empty. Moreover, African Americans were obliged to give up places in public transport by any “white”, regardless of the age and gender of the latter and their age and gender. However, as the anti-colonial movement developed in the world, the self-awareness of black people in the United States grew. The Second World War played an important role in the pursuit of African Americans for equality with "whites", during which hundreds of thousands of black soldiers fought in the ranks of the American army and, just like their "white" colleagues, shed their blood. After returning to their homeland, they did not understand why they did not deserve the same rights that “white” citizens enjoy, including those who did not fight. One of the first examples of demonstrative resistance to racial segregation was the act of Rosa Parks. This woman, who worked as a seamstress in Montgomery, did not give way to a “white” American on the bus. Rosa Parks was arrested and fined for this act. In the same 1955 in Montgomery, the police arrested five more women, two children and a large number of African American men. All their guilt was identical to the act of Rosa Parks - they refused to give way to public transport on a racial basis. The situation with the passage in the buses of the city of Montgomery was resolved with the help of a boycott - almost all negros and mulattoes living in the city and state refused to use public transport. The boycott was supported and widely advertised by Martin Luther King - the notorious leader of the African American movement. Finally, in December 1956, the law on bus segregation in the city of Montgomery was repealed. However, the discrimination of African Americans in secondary and higher educational institutions has not disappeared. In addition, segregation in public places was maintained. In Albany, Georgia, in 1961, the African-American population, on the initiative of Martin Luther King, attempted to campaign for segregation in public places. As a result of the dispersal of the demonstrations, the police arrested 5% of the total number of all black residents of the city. As for secondary schools, even after black children were officially allowed to attend by higher authorities, local administrations and racist organizations created all sorts of obstacles for African Americans, as a result of which it was not safe to let children go to school.
Against the background of the struggle of the African-American population against segregation, which was largely influenced by the pacifist ideas of Martin Luther King, the gradual radicalization of African-American youth took place. Many young people were unhappy with the policies of Martin Luther King and other leaders of the anti-segregation movement, because they considered it too liberal and not capable of bringing about a real change in the social and political position of the black population. In the African American movement formed two main paradigms that define the ideology and political practice of specific movements and organizations. The first paradigm - integrationist - was to demand equality for the rights of “white” and “black” Americans and the integration of the black population into American society as its full component. The origins of the integrationist paradigm were formed in the 1920-ies. in the “Harlem Renaissance” - a cultural movement that led to the flourishing of African-American literature of the first half of the twentieth century and contributed to improving the understanding of the “white” population of the US about African Americans. It was in the mainstream of the integrationist paradigm that Martin Luther King and his supporters of the Civil Rights Movement carried out their activities. The integrationist paradigm suited the conformist part of the African American population of the United States, focused on "inclusion" in the social and political life of the country without radical transformations and in a peaceful way. However, this position did not satisfy the interests of a large part of African-American youth, in particular, representatives of radical social groups who did not believe in the possibility of the “systemic integration” of the black population into the social and political life of the United States.
"Black radicalism"
The radical part of African Americans rallied around the nationalist or segregationalist paradigm and advocated isolation from the “white” population of the United States, the preservation and development of the African components of African American culture. In 1920-s. this position was reflected in the activities of Marcus Mosiah Garvey and his movement for the return of African Americans to Africa - Rastafarianism. Also, the “black Muslims” can be attributed to the nationalist paradigm of the African-American movement - the influential community “Nation of Islam”, which united the part of African Americans who decided to accept Islam as an alternative to Christianity — the religion of “white slave owners”. The concepts of African theorists had a great influence on the development of the nationalist paradigm of the African-American movement, above all - the theory of the negridus - the uniqueness and exclusivity of African peoples. The Senegalese writer, poet and philosopher Leopold Sedar Senghor (then he became president of Senegal), Martinique native poet and writer Aime Sezer and French Guiana poet and writer Leon-Gontran Damas stood at the origins of the Negro concept. The essence of the Negro concept is to recognize the African civilization as original and self-sufficient, not needing improvement through the adoption of European culture. In accordance with the concept of the negro, the African mentality is inherent in the priority of emotions, intuition and a special feeling of "belonging". It is ownership, and not the desire for knowledge, as among Europeans, that lies at the heart of African culture. The followers of the Negro concept believed that Africans possess a special spirituality that is alien and incomprehensible to a person brought up in European culture. Originating as a philosophical and literary movement, the Negritus gradually became politicized and formed the basis of the numerous concepts of “African socialism” that had spread throughout the African continent after the beginning of the process of decolonization. In 1960-s. Many representatives of the African-American movement, who shared the guidelines of the nationalist paradigm, became acquainted with left-wing political concepts that were common among American students in this period. So the anti-imperialist and socialist slogans were included in the political phraseology of African American nationalists.
The birth of "Panther": Bobby and Hugh
In October, Auckland's 1966, a group of radical African-American youth, founded the Black Panthers Self-Defense Party, which was destined to be one of the most famous stories US political organizations of a radical sense. At the root of the Black Panthers were Bobby Seale and Hugh Newton - two young men who shared the idea of "black separatism", i.e. the nationalist paradigm in the African-American movement mentioned above. It is worth to tell a little about each of them. Robert Force, better known as Bobby Force, was born in 1936 year and at the time of the creation of the "Black Panthers" he was already thirty years old. A native of Texas, he moved to Oakland with his parents as a child, and at 19, he joined the United States Air Forces. However, three years later, Sil was kicked out of the army for poor discipline, after which he got employed as a metal cutter at one of the aerospace industry enterprises, completing secondary education in parallel. After receiving a school certificate, Sil entered college where he studied engineering and, at the same time, learned the basics of political science. It was during his college years that Bobby Forces joined the African American Association (AAA), speaking from the standpoint of "black separatism", but he was more sympathetic to Maoism. In the ranks of this organization, he met Hugh Newton - the second co-founder of the Black Panthers party.
Hugh Percy Newton in 1966 was just 24 of the year. He was born in 1942 in the family of a laborer, but poor origins did not kill the natural craving for learning in Newton. He managed to enroll in Auckland Merriti College, then studied at the law school in San Francisco. Like many of his peers, Hugh Newton participated in the activities of youth black gangs, stole, but did not give up his studies and tried to spend the proceeds from crime by means of his education. It was in college that he met Bobby Silom. Like Bobby Seal, Newton sympathized not so much with “black racism”, to which many representatives of the right-wing, nationalist wing of the African American movement were inclined, but rather towards left-radical views. In its own way, Hugh Newton was a unique person.
He managed to combine the “dashing” image of a “street guy”, prone to crimes, prone to such social evils as alcoholism and drug addiction, with a constant burden of knowledge, with the desire to make a better life for their fellow tribesmen - at least Hugh himself understood Newton and his associates in a revolutionary organization.
Malcolm X, Mao and Fanon - Three Black Panther Masterminds
At the same time, the ideas of Malcolm Ix, the legendary African American leader whose assassination in 1965 was one of the formal reasons for creating the Black Panthers Self-Defense Party, had a great influence on his socio-political positions. As you know, Malcolm X was shot by black nationalists, but many African American politicians accused US intelligence agencies of killing Malcolm, since only, according to the comrades of the murdered man, was the physical destruction of the radical speaker, who was very popular in the African American environment. At the beginning of his political activities, Malcolm Little, who took the pseudonym "X", was a typical "black separatist". He advocated the most rigid isolation of the black population of the United States from "whites", rejected the doctrine of non-violence promoted by Martin Luther King. However, later, delving into the study of Islam, Malcolm X made a hajj to Mecca and a trip to Africa, where under the influence of Arab political figures belonging to the white race, he moved away from primitive black racism and reoriented to the ideas of the internationalist association of “black” and “white” against racism and social discrimination. Apparently, for the rejection of the ideas of “black racism”, he was killed by the activists of the “Nation of Islam” - the largest organization adhering to the ideas of “black separatism”. It was from Malcolm X. that the Black Panthers borrowed an orientation towards violent resistance to racism, an armed struggle against the oppression of the African-American population.
The Black Panthers party was initially formed not only as a nationalist, but also as a socialist organization. Its ideology was formed under the influence of both “black separatism” and negrit here, and of revolutionary socialism, including Maoism. The Black Panthers' sympathies for Maoism were explained by the very essence of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary theory. The concept of Maoism, more than traditional Marxism-Leninism, was suitable for perception by the oppressed masses in the Third World countries. Since African Americans were actually the “third world” within American society, being extremely socially disadvantaged and representing a multimillion-dollar mass of chronically unemployed or temporarily employed people, the Maoist understanding of the revolution most corresponded to the real interests of the Black Panthers. The meaning of the concept of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat could hardly be explained to young blacks from the slums of American cities, since most of them never had a permanent job and could not classify themselves as working class. Even the concept of creating “liberated areas” could well be realized by “Black Panthers”, at least in the southern United States, where in some localities African Americans make up the overwhelming majority of the population. In addition to the Maoist literature, the leaders of the Black Panthers also studied the work of Ernesto Che Guevara on the partisan war, which also played a prominent role in shaping the political views of the organization’s activists.
The ideas of Franz Fanon (1925-1961), one of the most significant figures in the African national liberation anti-colonial movement of the mid-twentieth century, had a great influence on the ideology of the Black Panthers. It is noteworthy that Franz Fanon himself was a man of mixed origin. A native of Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, which became one of the centers of the Afro-Caribbean national revival, he was Afro-Martinist after his father, and his mother had European (Alsatian) roots. During World War II, Fanon served in the French army, participated in the liberation of France, and was even awarded the Military Cross. After the war, Franz Fanon received a higher medical education at the University of Lyon, at the same time studying philosophy and becoming acquainted with a number of prominent French philosophers. Later he joined the national liberation struggle of the Algerian people and became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. In 1960, he was even appointed ambassador to Algeria in Ghana, but around the same time Fanon became ill with leukemia and left for treatment in the United States, where he died in the 1961 year, having survived only to 36 years. In his political views, Fanon was a consistent supporter of the anti-colonial struggle and the complete liberation of the African continent, as well as the African-American population, from the oppression of the colonialists and racists. The program work of Franz Fanon was the book “The Curse of the Branded,” which became for many activists of the Black Panthers a real guide to action. In this work, Fanon emphasized the "cleansing" force of violence, singing an armed struggle against the colonialists. According to Fanon, this moment is very important for understanding the essence of the ideology of African-American (and African in general) political radicalism, it is through death that the oppressed (“Negro”) realizes the finality of oppression - after all, the colonizer, racist, oppressor can simply be killed and then his superiority is dispelled . Thus, Fanon asserted the priority of violence in the struggle against colonialism and racism, since he saw in him a means of liberating the oppressed from slave consciousness. “Black Panthers” took Fanon’s ideas about violence and that’s why they proclaimed themselves to be an armed party, focused not only on social and political activities, but also on armed struggle against the enemies of the African-American people and the “reactionary forces” within the African-American movement itself.
Patriots of the Black Quarters
The Black Panther leaders considered themselves convinced Maoists. The political program of the party, dubbed the “Ten Point Program,” included the following theses: “1) We are striving for freedom. We want to get the right to determine the fate of the black community; 2) We are committed to full employment for our people; 3) We seek to end the exploitation of the black community by capitalists; 4) We strive to provide our people with decent housing suitable for people; 5) We want to provide for our people an education that can fully reveal the true nature of the cultural decline of white American society. We want to learn our true history, so that every black knows his true role in modern society; 6) We advocate that all black citizens be exempted from military service; 7) We seek to immediately end the brutality of the police and the unjust murder of black citizens; 8) We advocate for the release of all black prisoners in the city, county, state and federal prisons; 9) We demand that the fate of the black defendants be decided by citizens, equal to their social status and black communities, as prescribed in the US Constitution; 10) We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. ” Thus, the requirements of a national liberation nature were combined in the Black Panther program with social demands. As they “left out”, the Black Panther activists also drifted towards the rejection of the ideas of “black separatism”, allowing the possibility of cooperation with the “white” revolutionary organizations. By the way, the White Panther party appeared in the United States, although it did not reach either the level of fame, number or scale of activity of its “black” role model. "White Panthers" were created by a group of American left-wing students after talking with representatives of Black Panthers. The latter, when asked by white students how the African-American liberation movement can be helped, answered “create white panthers”.
Black Panther activists have created their own unique style, gaining worldwide fame and winning the sympathies of African-American radical youth for decades to come. The emblem of the organization was a black panther, never attacking first, but defending to the last and destroying the attacker. The party adopted a special uniform - black berets, black leather jackets and blue sweaters with the image of a black panther. The number of the party in two years reached two thousand people, and its branches appeared in New York - in Brooklyn and Harlem. The Black Panthers were joined by the most politically active Afro-American youth who sympathized with the revolutionary socialist ideas. By the way, in her youth, active participation in the organization was taken by the mother of the famous rapper Tupac Shakur Afeni Shakur (her real name is Ellis Fei Williams). It was thanks to the revolutionary views of the mother that the world famous rapper got his name - Tupac Amaru - in honor of the famous Inca leader who fought against the Spanish colonialists. So called the boy who was born in 1971 year, advised “comrade Geronimo” - Elmer Pratt, one of the leaders of the “Black Panthers”, who was in the close circle of Afeni Shakur and became the “godfather” of Tupac. Assata Olugbala Shakur (real name - Joanne Byron) - the legendary terrorist from the Black Panthers party, who participated in a shootout with the police in 1973 and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1977. Assate Shakur was lucky enough to escape from prison in 1979, and in 1984 she moved to Cuba, where she has been living for more than thirty years. It is noteworthy that the American special services are still searching for Assat Shakur in the register of the most dangerous terrorists, despite the respectable age of a woman - sixty-eight years.
Since the Black Panthers positioned themselves as a political party of the African-American population, claiming the revolutionary liberation of the ghetto inhabitants, positions were introduced in the party on the model of the government. Robert Sil became chairman and prime minister of the party, and Hugh Newton became minister of defense. It was the subordinate of the brave Hugh Newton who was armed with the militants of the Black Panthers, whose tasks included the defense of the Negro quarters from arbitrariness by the American police.
The militants of the “Black Panthers” followed the police patrols in cars, while they themselves did not violate the rules of the road and behaved in such a way that from the point of view of the law there was not the slightest complaint about them. The police generally became the main enemy of the Black Panthers. Like any young people from socially disadvantaged areas, the founders and activists of Black Panther hated the police since childhood, and now ideological motivation has been added to this adolescent hatred - after all, the repressive mechanism of the American state was associated with the police, including its racist manifestations. In the lexicon of the Black Panthers, the police were called “pigs,” and from that time, the African American militants would not call them that, which made the police very angry. In addition to combating the arbitrariness of the police, the Black Panthers decided to put an end to criminal offenses in the African-American neighborhoods, primarily with the drug trade. The drug trade, according to party leaders, brought death to the black population, so those African Americans who took part in it as dealers were seen as enemies of the liberation of the black population. In addition, the Black Panthers tried to prove themselves in the organization of social initiatives, in particular - they organized charity canteens in which low-income representatives of the African-American population could eat.
Fredrik Newton, wife of Hugh Newton, in an interview with reporters, recalled that the Black Panthers "demanded an end to segregation and discrimination in hiring, built social dwellings so that slum dwellers had decent shelter. We protested against the police lawlessness and arbitrariness of the courts, and also hired buses to take the poor relatives to a prisoner visit. None of us received money for the work - food for the poor and money for charity we collected bit by bit. By the way, the “Breakfast Program” that we have invented has spread throughout the country. It was we who were the first to say in 70's that children cannot study normally unless they are fed in the morning. So, in one of the churches in San Francisco, we fed babies every morning, and the government listened to us and made school lunches free. ”(A. Anishchuk. Black panther in make-up. Interview with Fredrika Newton - Hugh Newton's widow // http: / /web.archive.org/).
Eldridge Cleaver became Minister of Information for the Black Panthers Party. His role in the organization of the Black Panthers is no less significant than the role of Bobby Sil and Hugh Newton. Eldridge Cleaver was born in 1935 year and at the time of the party's creation was an 31-year-old man with considerable life experience. A native of Arkansas, who later moved to Los Angeles, Cleaver has been involved in youth criminal gangs since his teenage years.
In 1957, he was arrested for committing several rapes and put in prison, where he wrote several articles promoting the idea of "black nationalism." Cleaver was released only in 1966. Naturally, a man with such views did not stand aside and supported the creation of the Black Panthers party. In the party he was involved in public relations, however, like all activists, he participated in the “patrolling” of the streets of African-American neighborhoods and clashes with the police. Robert Hutton (1950-1968) became the treasurer of the Black Panthers party. At the time of the party's creation, he was only 16 years old, but the young man quickly gained prestige even among the more senior associates and he was entrusted with the financial affairs of the organization. Bobby Hatton became one of the most active members of the party and participated in many demonstrations, including the famous action against the ban on wearing firearms. weapons in public places.
"War with the police" and the sunset of the party
In 1967, Mr. Hugh Newton was arrested on the charge of killing a policeman and placed in custody. However, after a month of 22, the charges against the “Minister of Defense of the Black Panthers” were dropped, since it turned out that the policeman, most likely, had mistakenly shot their own colleagues. Hugh Newton was free. However, in 1970, most of the Black Panther business units in American cities were already defeated by the police. The fact is that when Martin Luther King was killed in April 1968, the Black Panthers, who generally treated him without much sympathy, decided to take revenge. After all, after all, Martin Luther King was, albeit a liberal pacifist, an integrationist, but still a fighter for the equality of blacks. During a shootout with the police, seventeen-year-old Black Panther treasurer Bobby Hatton was shot dead. Another leading Panther activist, Eldridge Cleaver, managed to emigrate and find refuge, first in Algeria, then in France and in Cuba. Bobby Seale received four years in prison. In August, 1968 had a Black Panther shootout with police in Detroit and Los Angeles, and later a shootout in Indianapolis, Detroit, Seattle, Auckland, Denver, San Francisco and New York. Only during 1969 were 348 party activists arrested. In July, 1969 police attacked the Black Panthers office in Chicago, entering an hour-long firefight with the panthers. In December, a five-hour 1969 police and Black Panther fight broke out in Los Angeles, where the authorities again tried to cover the local office of the African American party. By the end of 1970, 469 Black Panther activists were arrested. Ten activists died during the skirmishes during this time. It should be noted that in addition to the Black Panther militants, 48 police officers also became victims of 12 shootouts. However, Hugh Newton did not lose hope for the revival of the former power of the movement. In 1971, he went to China, where he met with representatives of the Chinese Communist leadership.
In 1974, Newton strongly quarreled with Bobby Silom, after which, as a result of the proceedings, Newton's guards brutally beat Force with a whip, after which the latter was forced to undergo medical treatment. In 1974, Mr. Hugh Newton was again accused of murder, after which he was forced into hiding in Cuba. The socialist government of Cuba was sympathetic to the "Black Panthers", so Hugh Newton was able to stay on the island until 1977, after which he returned to the United States. In 1980, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, where he defended his thesis on “The War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.” In 1982, the Black Panther Party ceased to exist. The further fate of its leaders and leading activists took shape in different ways. Hugh Newton rethought the strategic mistakes of the movement, summed up the Black Panthers' nearly twenty years of struggle, being active in the field of African American public charity. 22 August 1989 Mr. Hugh Percy Newton was killed. As in the case of Malcolm X, the leader of the Black Panthers was fired not by a white racist or a policeman, but by an African American — drug dealer Tyrone Robinson, who was part of the rival Black Guerrilla Family. For this crime, Robinson received an 32 year in prison. Bobby See departed from active political activities and engaged in literature. He wrote his own autobiography and cookbook, promoted ice cream, and in 2002, he began teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia. Eldridge Cleaver refused to actively engage in political activities back in 1975, returning to emigration from the United States. He wrote the book "Soul in Ice", in which he spoke about his youth in battle and outlined his social and political views. Cleaver died in 1998 in a medical center at the age of 63. Elmer Pratt (1947-2011), aka “Geronimo”, the godfather of rapper Tupac Shakur, was released from an American prison in 1997, after serving 27 for years in prison - after being convicted of kidnapping and murder in 1972. Citizen Carolyn Olsen. After his release, Elmer Pratt engaged in human rights activities, emigrated to Tanzania, where he died of a heart attack in 2011.
Life imprisonment is serving in the American prison Mumia Abu-Jamal. This year, he "passed" over sixty. Before the adoption of Islam, Mumia Abu-Jamal was named Wesley Cook. In the 1968 year, at the age of 14, Mumiah Abu-Jamal joined the Black Panthers and has since taken an active part in their activities until 1970, when he left the party and began to complete the previously abandoned school course. After receiving education, Mumia Abu-Jamal worked as a radio journalist and, at the same time, worked as a taxi driver. In 1981, he was arrested for killing a policeman. Despite the fact that there was no direct evidence, and the policeman himself was shot under very strange circumstances, Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted and sentenced to death, which was later replaced with a life sentence. For almost 35 years, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been in an American prison - now he's 61 a year, and he has been imprisoned in 27 years. Over the decades spent in detention, Mumia Abu-Jamal gained worldwide fame and became a symbol of the struggle for the release of political prisoners and unjustly convicted American justice. His portraits can be seen at rallies and demonstrations in support of political prisoners in many countries around the world, not to mention the fact that in the African-American environment Mumiah Abu-Jamal has become a real “icon” of the movement: he is dedicated to rappers, his name is known to almost every young African American.
The ideology and practical activities of the Black Panthers have had a great influence not only on the subsequent history of the African American liberation movement, but also on the African American culture as a whole. In particular, many former Black Panther activists are at the forefront of African-American musical culture such as gangsta rap. Hugh Newton's book "The Revolutionary Suicide" is very popular among radical young people in many countries of the world - and not only among African Americans and Africans. About the very party "Black Panthers" was shot several films, written scientific, journalistic and artistic books.
It is known that in our time in the United States of America operates the New Party of Black Panthers - a political organization that proclaims itself the ideological heir of the classic "Black Panthers" and is also focused on protecting the rights and freedoms of the black population of the United States. After the high-profile events in Ferguson, where riots broke out after the murder of a young African American by police, which were only suppressed with the help of armed national guard units, a representative of the New Party of Black Panthers, Crystal Mohammed, saidNewsthat African Americans are hoping for Russia's support, because only with the help of Russia can the United Nations Security Council get the truth about the true situation of the African American population in the United States. Meanwhile, the support of the African-American national movement — at least moral and informational — would be very useful for Russia, since it would provide additional trumps in the political confrontation with the United States, would make it possible, on occasion, to point out to “human rights defenders” that their own political legal system, discrimination of blacks in which framework has not been eliminated until now.
Racial segregation and the struggle of African Americans for their rights
American citizens are still alive and even not so old, having found a regime of real racial segregation that existed in the USA right up to the 1960s. In those years when American information resources accused the Soviet Union of violating human rights, there was severe discrimination on the basis of skin color in the very "citadel of democracy". African Americans could not attend “schools for whites”, and in public transport in the city of Montgomery (Alabama) the first four rows of seats were allocated for “whites” and blacks could not be placed on them, even if they were empty. Moreover, African Americans were obliged to give up places in public transport by any “white”, regardless of the age and gender of the latter and their age and gender. However, as the anti-colonial movement developed in the world, the self-awareness of black people in the United States grew. The Second World War played an important role in the pursuit of African Americans for equality with "whites", during which hundreds of thousands of black soldiers fought in the ranks of the American army and, just like their "white" colleagues, shed their blood. After returning to their homeland, they did not understand why they did not deserve the same rights that “white” citizens enjoy, including those who did not fight. One of the first examples of demonstrative resistance to racial segregation was the act of Rosa Parks. This woman, who worked as a seamstress in Montgomery, did not give way to a “white” American on the bus. Rosa Parks was arrested and fined for this act. In the same 1955 in Montgomery, the police arrested five more women, two children and a large number of African American men. All their guilt was identical to the act of Rosa Parks - they refused to give way to public transport on a racial basis. The situation with the passage in the buses of the city of Montgomery was resolved with the help of a boycott - almost all negros and mulattoes living in the city and state refused to use public transport. The boycott was supported and widely advertised by Martin Luther King - the notorious leader of the African American movement. Finally, in December 1956, the law on bus segregation in the city of Montgomery was repealed. However, the discrimination of African Americans in secondary and higher educational institutions has not disappeared. In addition, segregation in public places was maintained. In Albany, Georgia, in 1961, the African-American population, on the initiative of Martin Luther King, attempted to campaign for segregation in public places. As a result of the dispersal of the demonstrations, the police arrested 5% of the total number of all black residents of the city. As for secondary schools, even after black children were officially allowed to attend by higher authorities, local administrations and racist organizations created all sorts of obstacles for African Americans, as a result of which it was not safe to let children go to school.
Against the background of the struggle of the African-American population against segregation, which was largely influenced by the pacifist ideas of Martin Luther King, the gradual radicalization of African-American youth took place. Many young people were unhappy with the policies of Martin Luther King and other leaders of the anti-segregation movement, because they considered it too liberal and not capable of bringing about a real change in the social and political position of the black population. In the African American movement formed two main paradigms that define the ideology and political practice of specific movements and organizations. The first paradigm - integrationist - was to demand equality for the rights of “white” and “black” Americans and the integration of the black population into American society as its full component. The origins of the integrationist paradigm were formed in the 1920-ies. in the “Harlem Renaissance” - a cultural movement that led to the flourishing of African-American literature of the first half of the twentieth century and contributed to improving the understanding of the “white” population of the US about African Americans. It was in the mainstream of the integrationist paradigm that Martin Luther King and his supporters of the Civil Rights Movement carried out their activities. The integrationist paradigm suited the conformist part of the African American population of the United States, focused on "inclusion" in the social and political life of the country without radical transformations and in a peaceful way. However, this position did not satisfy the interests of a large part of African-American youth, in particular, representatives of radical social groups who did not believe in the possibility of the “systemic integration” of the black population into the social and political life of the United States.
"Black radicalism"
The radical part of African Americans rallied around the nationalist or segregationalist paradigm and advocated isolation from the “white” population of the United States, the preservation and development of the African components of African American culture. In 1920-s. this position was reflected in the activities of Marcus Mosiah Garvey and his movement for the return of African Americans to Africa - Rastafarianism. Also, the “black Muslims” can be attributed to the nationalist paradigm of the African-American movement - the influential community “Nation of Islam”, which united the part of African Americans who decided to accept Islam as an alternative to Christianity — the religion of “white slave owners”. The concepts of African theorists had a great influence on the development of the nationalist paradigm of the African-American movement, above all - the theory of the negridus - the uniqueness and exclusivity of African peoples. The Senegalese writer, poet and philosopher Leopold Sedar Senghor (then he became president of Senegal), Martinique native poet and writer Aime Sezer and French Guiana poet and writer Leon-Gontran Damas stood at the origins of the Negro concept. The essence of the Negro concept is to recognize the African civilization as original and self-sufficient, not needing improvement through the adoption of European culture. In accordance with the concept of the negro, the African mentality is inherent in the priority of emotions, intuition and a special feeling of "belonging". It is ownership, and not the desire for knowledge, as among Europeans, that lies at the heart of African culture. The followers of the Negro concept believed that Africans possess a special spirituality that is alien and incomprehensible to a person brought up in European culture. Originating as a philosophical and literary movement, the Negritus gradually became politicized and formed the basis of the numerous concepts of “African socialism” that had spread throughout the African continent after the beginning of the process of decolonization. In 1960-s. Many representatives of the African-American movement, who shared the guidelines of the nationalist paradigm, became acquainted with left-wing political concepts that were common among American students in this period. So the anti-imperialist and socialist slogans were included in the political phraseology of African American nationalists.
The birth of "Panther": Bobby and Hugh
In October, Auckland's 1966, a group of radical African-American youth, founded the Black Panthers Self-Defense Party, which was destined to be one of the most famous stories US political organizations of a radical sense. At the root of the Black Panthers were Bobby Seale and Hugh Newton - two young men who shared the idea of "black separatism", i.e. the nationalist paradigm in the African-American movement mentioned above. It is worth to tell a little about each of them. Robert Force, better known as Bobby Force, was born in 1936 year and at the time of the creation of the "Black Panthers" he was already thirty years old. A native of Texas, he moved to Oakland with his parents as a child, and at 19, he joined the United States Air Forces. However, three years later, Sil was kicked out of the army for poor discipline, after which he got employed as a metal cutter at one of the aerospace industry enterprises, completing secondary education in parallel. After receiving a school certificate, Sil entered college where he studied engineering and, at the same time, learned the basics of political science. It was during his college years that Bobby Forces joined the African American Association (AAA), speaking from the standpoint of "black separatism", but he was more sympathetic to Maoism. In the ranks of this organization, he met Hugh Newton - the second co-founder of the Black Panthers party. Hugh Percy Newton in 1966 was just 24 of the year. He was born in 1942 in the family of a laborer, but poor origins did not kill the natural craving for learning in Newton. He managed to enroll in Auckland Merriti College, then studied at the law school in San Francisco. Like many of his peers, Hugh Newton participated in the activities of youth black gangs, stole, but did not give up his studies and tried to spend the proceeds from crime by means of his education. It was in college that he met Bobby Silom. Like Bobby Seal, Newton sympathized not so much with “black racism”, to which many representatives of the right-wing, nationalist wing of the African American movement were inclined, but rather towards left-radical views. In its own way, Hugh Newton was a unique person.
He managed to combine the “dashing” image of a “street guy”, prone to crimes, prone to such social evils as alcoholism and drug addiction, with a constant burden of knowledge, with the desire to make a better life for their fellow tribesmen - at least Hugh himself understood Newton and his associates in a revolutionary organization. Malcolm X, Mao and Fanon - Three Black Panther Masterminds
At the same time, the ideas of Malcolm Ix, the legendary African American leader whose assassination in 1965 was one of the formal reasons for creating the Black Panthers Self-Defense Party, had a great influence on his socio-political positions. As you know, Malcolm X was shot by black nationalists, but many African American politicians accused US intelligence agencies of killing Malcolm, since only, according to the comrades of the murdered man, was the physical destruction of the radical speaker, who was very popular in the African American environment. At the beginning of his political activities, Malcolm Little, who took the pseudonym "X", was a typical "black separatist". He advocated the most rigid isolation of the black population of the United States from "whites", rejected the doctrine of non-violence promoted by Martin Luther King. However, later, delving into the study of Islam, Malcolm X made a hajj to Mecca and a trip to Africa, where under the influence of Arab political figures belonging to the white race, he moved away from primitive black racism and reoriented to the ideas of the internationalist association of “black” and “white” against racism and social discrimination. Apparently, for the rejection of the ideas of “black racism”, he was killed by the activists of the “Nation of Islam” - the largest organization adhering to the ideas of “black separatism”. It was from Malcolm X. that the Black Panthers borrowed an orientation towards violent resistance to racism, an armed struggle against the oppression of the African-American population.
The Black Panthers party was initially formed not only as a nationalist, but also as a socialist organization. Its ideology was formed under the influence of both “black separatism” and negrit here, and of revolutionary socialism, including Maoism. The Black Panthers' sympathies for Maoism were explained by the very essence of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary theory. The concept of Maoism, more than traditional Marxism-Leninism, was suitable for perception by the oppressed masses in the Third World countries. Since African Americans were actually the “third world” within American society, being extremely socially disadvantaged and representing a multimillion-dollar mass of chronically unemployed or temporarily employed people, the Maoist understanding of the revolution most corresponded to the real interests of the Black Panthers. The meaning of the concept of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat could hardly be explained to young blacks from the slums of American cities, since most of them never had a permanent job and could not classify themselves as working class. Even the concept of creating “liberated areas” could well be realized by “Black Panthers”, at least in the southern United States, where in some localities African Americans make up the overwhelming majority of the population. In addition to the Maoist literature, the leaders of the Black Panthers also studied the work of Ernesto Che Guevara on the partisan war, which also played a prominent role in shaping the political views of the organization’s activists.
The ideas of Franz Fanon (1925-1961), one of the most significant figures in the African national liberation anti-colonial movement of the mid-twentieth century, had a great influence on the ideology of the Black Panthers. It is noteworthy that Franz Fanon himself was a man of mixed origin. A native of Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, which became one of the centers of the Afro-Caribbean national revival, he was Afro-Martinist after his father, and his mother had European (Alsatian) roots. During World War II, Fanon served in the French army, participated in the liberation of France, and was even awarded the Military Cross. After the war, Franz Fanon received a higher medical education at the University of Lyon, at the same time studying philosophy and becoming acquainted with a number of prominent French philosophers. Later he joined the national liberation struggle of the Algerian people and became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. In 1960, he was even appointed ambassador to Algeria in Ghana, but around the same time Fanon became ill with leukemia and left for treatment in the United States, where he died in the 1961 year, having survived only to 36 years. In his political views, Fanon was a consistent supporter of the anti-colonial struggle and the complete liberation of the African continent, as well as the African-American population, from the oppression of the colonialists and racists. The program work of Franz Fanon was the book “The Curse of the Branded,” which became for many activists of the Black Panthers a real guide to action. In this work, Fanon emphasized the "cleansing" force of violence, singing an armed struggle against the colonialists. According to Fanon, this moment is very important for understanding the essence of the ideology of African-American (and African in general) political radicalism, it is through death that the oppressed (“Negro”) realizes the finality of oppression - after all, the colonizer, racist, oppressor can simply be killed and then his superiority is dispelled . Thus, Fanon asserted the priority of violence in the struggle against colonialism and racism, since he saw in him a means of liberating the oppressed from slave consciousness. “Black Panthers” took Fanon’s ideas about violence and that’s why they proclaimed themselves to be an armed party, focused not only on social and political activities, but also on armed struggle against the enemies of the African-American people and the “reactionary forces” within the African-American movement itself. Patriots of the Black Quarters
The Black Panther leaders considered themselves convinced Maoists. The political program of the party, dubbed the “Ten Point Program,” included the following theses: “1) We are striving for freedom. We want to get the right to determine the fate of the black community; 2) We are committed to full employment for our people; 3) We seek to end the exploitation of the black community by capitalists; 4) We strive to provide our people with decent housing suitable for people; 5) We want to provide for our people an education that can fully reveal the true nature of the cultural decline of white American society. We want to learn our true history, so that every black knows his true role in modern society; 6) We advocate that all black citizens be exempted from military service; 7) We seek to immediately end the brutality of the police and the unjust murder of black citizens; 8) We advocate for the release of all black prisoners in the city, county, state and federal prisons; 9) We demand that the fate of the black defendants be decided by citizens, equal to their social status and black communities, as prescribed in the US Constitution; 10) We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. ” Thus, the requirements of a national liberation nature were combined in the Black Panther program with social demands. As they “left out”, the Black Panther activists also drifted towards the rejection of the ideas of “black separatism”, allowing the possibility of cooperation with the “white” revolutionary organizations. By the way, the White Panther party appeared in the United States, although it did not reach either the level of fame, number or scale of activity of its “black” role model. "White Panthers" were created by a group of American left-wing students after talking with representatives of Black Panthers. The latter, when asked by white students how the African-American liberation movement can be helped, answered “create white panthers”.
Black Panther activists have created their own unique style, gaining worldwide fame and winning the sympathies of African-American radical youth for decades to come. The emblem of the organization was a black panther, never attacking first, but defending to the last and destroying the attacker. The party adopted a special uniform - black berets, black leather jackets and blue sweaters with the image of a black panther. The number of the party in two years reached two thousand people, and its branches appeared in New York - in Brooklyn and Harlem. The Black Panthers were joined by the most politically active Afro-American youth who sympathized with the revolutionary socialist ideas. By the way, in her youth, active participation in the organization was taken by the mother of the famous rapper Tupac Shakur Afeni Shakur (her real name is Ellis Fei Williams). It was thanks to the revolutionary views of the mother that the world famous rapper got his name - Tupac Amaru - in honor of the famous Inca leader who fought against the Spanish colonialists. So called the boy who was born in 1971 year, advised “comrade Geronimo” - Elmer Pratt, one of the leaders of the “Black Panthers”, who was in the close circle of Afeni Shakur and became the “godfather” of Tupac. Assata Olugbala Shakur (real name - Joanne Byron) - the legendary terrorist from the Black Panthers party, who participated in a shootout with the police in 1973 and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1977. Assate Shakur was lucky enough to escape from prison in 1979, and in 1984 she moved to Cuba, where she has been living for more than thirty years. It is noteworthy that the American special services are still searching for Assat Shakur in the register of the most dangerous terrorists, despite the respectable age of a woman - sixty-eight years.
Since the Black Panthers positioned themselves as a political party of the African-American population, claiming the revolutionary liberation of the ghetto inhabitants, positions were introduced in the party on the model of the government. Robert Sil became chairman and prime minister of the party, and Hugh Newton became minister of defense. It was the subordinate of the brave Hugh Newton who was armed with the militants of the Black Panthers, whose tasks included the defense of the Negro quarters from arbitrariness by the American police.
The militants of the “Black Panthers” followed the police patrols in cars, while they themselves did not violate the rules of the road and behaved in such a way that from the point of view of the law there was not the slightest complaint about them. The police generally became the main enemy of the Black Panthers. Like any young people from socially disadvantaged areas, the founders and activists of Black Panther hated the police since childhood, and now ideological motivation has been added to this adolescent hatred - after all, the repressive mechanism of the American state was associated with the police, including its racist manifestations. In the lexicon of the Black Panthers, the police were called “pigs,” and from that time, the African American militants would not call them that, which made the police very angry. In addition to combating the arbitrariness of the police, the Black Panthers decided to put an end to criminal offenses in the African-American neighborhoods, primarily with the drug trade. The drug trade, according to party leaders, brought death to the black population, so those African Americans who took part in it as dealers were seen as enemies of the liberation of the black population. In addition, the Black Panthers tried to prove themselves in the organization of social initiatives, in particular - they organized charity canteens in which low-income representatives of the African-American population could eat.
Fredrik Newton, wife of Hugh Newton, in an interview with reporters, recalled that the Black Panthers "demanded an end to segregation and discrimination in hiring, built social dwellings so that slum dwellers had decent shelter. We protested against the police lawlessness and arbitrariness of the courts, and also hired buses to take the poor relatives to a prisoner visit. None of us received money for the work - food for the poor and money for charity we collected bit by bit. By the way, the “Breakfast Program” that we have invented has spread throughout the country. It was we who were the first to say in 70's that children cannot study normally unless they are fed in the morning. So, in one of the churches in San Francisco, we fed babies every morning, and the government listened to us and made school lunches free. ”(A. Anishchuk. Black panther in make-up. Interview with Fredrika Newton - Hugh Newton's widow // http: / /web.archive.org/).
Eldridge Cleaver became Minister of Information for the Black Panthers Party. His role in the organization of the Black Panthers is no less significant than the role of Bobby Sil and Hugh Newton. Eldridge Cleaver was born in 1935 year and at the time of the party's creation was an 31-year-old man with considerable life experience. A native of Arkansas, who later moved to Los Angeles, Cleaver has been involved in youth criminal gangs since his teenage years.
In 1957, he was arrested for committing several rapes and put in prison, where he wrote several articles promoting the idea of "black nationalism." Cleaver was released only in 1966. Naturally, a man with such views did not stand aside and supported the creation of the Black Panthers party. In the party he was involved in public relations, however, like all activists, he participated in the “patrolling” of the streets of African-American neighborhoods and clashes with the police. Robert Hutton (1950-1968) became the treasurer of the Black Panthers party. At the time of the party's creation, he was only 16 years old, but the young man quickly gained prestige even among the more senior associates and he was entrusted with the financial affairs of the organization. Bobby Hatton became one of the most active members of the party and participated in many demonstrations, including the famous action against the ban on wearing firearms. weapons in public places. "War with the police" and the sunset of the party
In 1967, Mr. Hugh Newton was arrested on the charge of killing a policeman and placed in custody. However, after a month of 22, the charges against the “Minister of Defense of the Black Panthers” were dropped, since it turned out that the policeman, most likely, had mistakenly shot their own colleagues. Hugh Newton was free. However, in 1970, most of the Black Panther business units in American cities were already defeated by the police. The fact is that when Martin Luther King was killed in April 1968, the Black Panthers, who generally treated him without much sympathy, decided to take revenge. After all, after all, Martin Luther King was, albeit a liberal pacifist, an integrationist, but still a fighter for the equality of blacks. During a shootout with the police, seventeen-year-old Black Panther treasurer Bobby Hatton was shot dead. Another leading Panther activist, Eldridge Cleaver, managed to emigrate and find refuge, first in Algeria, then in France and in Cuba. Bobby Seale received four years in prison. In August, 1968 had a Black Panther shootout with police in Detroit and Los Angeles, and later a shootout in Indianapolis, Detroit, Seattle, Auckland, Denver, San Francisco and New York. Only during 1969 were 348 party activists arrested. In July, 1969 police attacked the Black Panthers office in Chicago, entering an hour-long firefight with the panthers. In December, a five-hour 1969 police and Black Panther fight broke out in Los Angeles, where the authorities again tried to cover the local office of the African American party. By the end of 1970, 469 Black Panther activists were arrested. Ten activists died during the skirmishes during this time. It should be noted that in addition to the Black Panther militants, 48 police officers also became victims of 12 shootouts. However, Hugh Newton did not lose hope for the revival of the former power of the movement. In 1971, he went to China, where he met with representatives of the Chinese Communist leadership.
In 1974, Newton strongly quarreled with Bobby Silom, after which, as a result of the proceedings, Newton's guards brutally beat Force with a whip, after which the latter was forced to undergo medical treatment. In 1974, Mr. Hugh Newton was again accused of murder, after which he was forced into hiding in Cuba. The socialist government of Cuba was sympathetic to the "Black Panthers", so Hugh Newton was able to stay on the island until 1977, after which he returned to the United States. In 1980, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, where he defended his thesis on “The War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.” In 1982, the Black Panther Party ceased to exist. The further fate of its leaders and leading activists took shape in different ways. Hugh Newton rethought the strategic mistakes of the movement, summed up the Black Panthers' nearly twenty years of struggle, being active in the field of African American public charity. 22 August 1989 Mr. Hugh Percy Newton was killed. As in the case of Malcolm X, the leader of the Black Panthers was fired not by a white racist or a policeman, but by an African American — drug dealer Tyrone Robinson, who was part of the rival Black Guerrilla Family. For this crime, Robinson received an 32 year in prison. Bobby See departed from active political activities and engaged in literature. He wrote his own autobiography and cookbook, promoted ice cream, and in 2002, he began teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia. Eldridge Cleaver refused to actively engage in political activities back in 1975, returning to emigration from the United States. He wrote the book "Soul in Ice", in which he spoke about his youth in battle and outlined his social and political views. Cleaver died in 1998 in a medical center at the age of 63. Elmer Pratt (1947-2011), aka “Geronimo”, the godfather of rapper Tupac Shakur, was released from an American prison in 1997, after serving 27 for years in prison - after being convicted of kidnapping and murder in 1972. Citizen Carolyn Olsen. After his release, Elmer Pratt engaged in human rights activities, emigrated to Tanzania, where he died of a heart attack in 2011.
Life imprisonment is serving in the American prison Mumia Abu-Jamal. This year, he "passed" over sixty. Before the adoption of Islam, Mumia Abu-Jamal was named Wesley Cook. In the 1968 year, at the age of 14, Mumiah Abu-Jamal joined the Black Panthers and has since taken an active part in their activities until 1970, when he left the party and began to complete the previously abandoned school course. After receiving education, Mumia Abu-Jamal worked as a radio journalist and, at the same time, worked as a taxi driver. In 1981, he was arrested for killing a policeman. Despite the fact that there was no direct evidence, and the policeman himself was shot under very strange circumstances, Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted and sentenced to death, which was later replaced with a life sentence. For almost 35 years, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been in an American prison - now he's 61 a year, and he has been imprisoned in 27 years. Over the decades spent in detention, Mumia Abu-Jamal gained worldwide fame and became a symbol of the struggle for the release of political prisoners and unjustly convicted American justice. His portraits can be seen at rallies and demonstrations in support of political prisoners in many countries around the world, not to mention the fact that in the African-American environment Mumiah Abu-Jamal has become a real “icon” of the movement: he is dedicated to rappers, his name is known to almost every young African American.
The ideology and practical activities of the Black Panthers have had a great influence not only on the subsequent history of the African American liberation movement, but also on the African American culture as a whole. In particular, many former Black Panther activists are at the forefront of African-American musical culture such as gangsta rap. Hugh Newton's book "The Revolutionary Suicide" is very popular among radical young people in many countries of the world - and not only among African Americans and Africans. About the very party "Black Panthers" was shot several films, written scientific, journalistic and artistic books.
It is known that in our time in the United States of America operates the New Party of Black Panthers - a political organization that proclaims itself the ideological heir of the classic "Black Panthers" and is also focused on protecting the rights and freedoms of the black population of the United States. After the high-profile events in Ferguson, where riots broke out after the murder of a young African American by police, which were only suppressed with the help of armed national guard units, a representative of the New Party of Black Panthers, Crystal Mohammed, saidNewsthat African Americans are hoping for Russia's support, because only with the help of Russia can the United Nations Security Council get the truth about the true situation of the African American population in the United States. Meanwhile, the support of the African-American national movement — at least moral and informational — would be very useful for Russia, since it would provide additional trumps in the political confrontation with the United States, would make it possible, on occasion, to point out to “human rights defenders” that their own political legal system, discrimination of blacks in which framework has not been eliminated until now.
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