Black Panther History, Legacy Revisited

A dive into the history of the Black Panthers once again reverberated loudly into the present — from the Black Lives Matter movement to the backlash against critical race theory to the killing of Tyre Nichols — as educators and community members gathered online to hear award-winning author Kekla Magoon talk about her new book, Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People.

That book talk took place Tuesday night, in a video-streamed event co-hosted by the Edgewood bookstore Possible Futures, the Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective, and Students for Educational Justice.

Magoon began by painting a picture, of a visit to Oakland, Ca. in the 1960s. There, she said, you might have seen young Black people relaxing in a field, reading paperbacks. At an intersection without a stoplight, someone else in a uniform might be directing traffic where there was no light, because ​“a few young community members took matters into their own hands.” 

Later that evening, a Black person might have been pulled over by police. During the stop, a third pair of headlights might arrive. Five people in uniforms with rifles might step out of the car and make sure the arrest, if it happened, went OK. Then they might follow the patrol car to the police station and pay bail. 

The next day, the same uniformed people might help elderly folks at the bank cash their Social Security checks and get that cash home. ​“To be mugged at that moment would mean losing an entire month’s income,” Magoon said. The folks cashing their checks were glad for the protection.

All that, plus a host of education, community services, and community organizing, was the Black Panthers. ​“If you have a different image in your mind,” especially a threatening one, she added, ​“I urge you to reconsider” it — but also to consider why that image is there.

The Black Panther Party (BPP), Magoon continued, was formed by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966. Its 10-point program lobbied for freedom, full employment, economic justice, decent housing, education that told the truth about American history, exemption for all Black men from military service, an end to police brutality, the release of all Black people from prisons and jails, all-Black juries at trials of Black people, and, in sum, ​“land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.”

Magoon described most of the BPP members as skewing young and female, with their primary activity as ​“community organizing.” Those members that carried guns did so to try to prevent, not incite violence. In a more specific way, they were ​“responding to the same challenges” as the civil rights movement.

Magoon then broadened the conversation. In talking about the civil rights movement, she said, history tends to downplay the violence involved in it, and specifically the violence inflicted on nonviolent protestors. ​“The civil rights movement was steeped in violence,” she said. At a protest, ​“there was always a chance you could be injured or killed.”

“How long can you stand still in the face of such violence? How long can you take it?” she said. And ​“what does it look like … when a new determination takes root?”

She pointed to uprisings across the country, from Cleveland to Watts, sometimes sparked by episodes of police brutality. ​“Black people had been holding back their anger … but their patience was wearing thin,” she said. ​“The Black Panthers tossed a lasso” around that rage. ​“They invited Black youth to channel that anger … into something positive.” For the BPP, there was ​“no more wait and see. No more waiting and hoping.” Instead, they offered ​“action — in the form of community organizing.”

Some young Black people arrived at BPP education classes ready to fight. Instead, they got books. She retold a story of one student responding to that with outrage. ​“I told you to arm me!” he shouted.

“I just did,” the teacher said.

“Self-defense was never about violence,” Magoon said. It was about ​“education and discipline.”

Facing History

Magoon also explained how she came to study the history of the Black Panther Party. Born in 1980, she grew up in a predominantly White neighborhood, where the Panthers were never mentioned, and all she knew was the prevailing image of them as a violent, dangerous organization. It took until her 20s to learn about what the BPP’s work had been, and about, say, its free breakfast program. She was ​“more than a little angry” that the truth had been ​“deliberately kept from me,” she said.

She began by addressing it in fiction, starting with the young-adult novel The Rock and the River, published in 2009. For that and subsequent novels — she has published 12 — she traveled to Oakland several times and visited libraries and archives around the country to learn more about the Panthers. That got her thinking about, and working on, Revolution in Our Time.

“This country is so set in its ways when it comes to telling history,” she said. Publishing the book was difficult. She had a vision for a large, thick book with many photos to ​“override the scary snap image of Black men with guns,” she said. As years passed, ​“more than once I set the manuscript aside, feeling hopeless,” but ​“I couldn’t let it go.”

Then, with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the same questions the Black Panthers asked in the 1960s once again became the ​“subject of national conversation,” she said. ​“And suddenly there was space again to tell my story.”

To Magoon, the parallels between the BPP and BLM were many. ​“Civil rights revolution has always been in the hands of the young.” But, she added, the Black Panthers knew that political education was the key, learning about revolutionaries of the past, so future leaders would know the history of the struggle they were taking up. ​“The revolution is an inheritance, not an invention,” she said.

She noted how the kind of education the Panthers espoused has gone on to shape the way American history is taught — at least in some places. ​“We can have pride in our history without erasing the things we are not proud of,” she said, responding to the backlash in some parts of the state and country against teaching history from the perspective of critical race theory. ​“This is a moment that demands our courage,” she said. ​“We must push back against their attempts to steal our stories out from under us.” In that effort, she said, sharing a book can be as powerful as marching, and every effort counted.

“A single raindrop isn’t much,” Magoon said. But ​“what is a rainstorm except millions of tiny raindrops, doing their work?” In championing the everyday work of everyday people, she also championed incremental change, done from the ground up.

“We have a hero worship problem in our culture,” she said. ​“Behind every Dr. King or Rosa Parks were a thousand nameless protestors whose work was just as important.” The civil rights movement happened ​“one story at a time,” she said. ​“Everyone who has ever made a difference in the world has started small,” and ​“the answer doesn’t have to be the same for all of us.”

“What small thing can you do, back in your community, to bring about the change you seek?” she asked. ​“The revolution will come. It has already begun in our minds and hearts,” and with diligent effort, someday we might see it reflected in laws and policies. 

“As the Panthers would say, all power to the people,” she said.

Generational Work

The conversation then moved to a question-and-answer session, moderated by educator Daisha Brabham. The first question: ​“What advice do you have for students who feel they don’t really have a space in the revolution?”

Magoon divided that idea into two separate issues: first, not having space because one felt excluded; and second, not knowing what part one could best play for themselves. 

“I feel a certain guilt or stress about not going to protests,” Magoon said, even as she knew that it wasn’t the best way to put her skills to use. ​“I think sometimes we feel like there’s not space for us because we trying to fit into the wrong spot,” she said. It was important to know ​“who you are and how best you fit,” adding that ​“there’s always somewhere you do fit,” and in the search for that spot, ​“it’s okay to be uncomfortable.”

She related how when Malcolm X was ​“lost and scared and confused” as a teenager, ​“he had no idea that he had this power in him.… He thought the world was out to get him and he made choices accordingly that almost screwed up his life.”

“We don’t know the future,” she added. ​“We don’t know what’s possible.” One seeking to enter the effort just had to keep pushing ​“until you’ve figured it out.”

A discussion among a few participants led to the way older and younger generations — people who have been in the struggle for a long time and people who have just joined it — can’t always see eye to eye on the best way forward. Magoon talked about footage she saw once of younger activists talking to Malcolm X in the 1960s; at the time, they believed that they would see the success of the movement soon, that the effort would be finished by 1970. Malcolm X disagreed. He argued back to the younger activists that it would be a struggle of generations. Looking back on that moment closer to the present day, the elders of the movement were gracefully critical of their younger selves. ​“Malcolm was so much more right about the state of race relations than we were and we couldn’t see it,” she related one of them saying. Meanwhile, because the young activists believed the work would be done in their lifetime, they ​“failed to train the next generation.” The Black Panthers, she added, did not make that mistake.

After a brief discussion of the stories of women in the Black Panther Party — particularly Ericka Huggins, her husband’s death in the political struggle, her move to New Haven and central role in the May Day Black Panther trials in 1970, her time in prison, and her long career as an educator in Oakland afterward — and the expression of many of the Black Panthers’ ideas in art, the conversation turned to the recent killing of Tyre Nichols by police in Memphis.

“You talked about how it was about harnessing that rage” to create change, a questioner asked. What about ​“the emotions we’re all feeling in the aftermath of an other life being snuffed out?”

“So much has changed” in ​“how we connect” and ​“how we protest,” Magoon said — particularly in the proliferation of videos of police brutality, starting with Rodney King in 1991 and multiplying from there, ​“more and more, because we have cameras in our pockets.”

It is tempting to ask ​“how we pull ourselves together” when ​“we don’t have a single unifying organization like the Black Panther Party,” she said. But she pointed out that the BPP wasn’t exactly a unity. There were disagreements and fractures within the party, conflicts about how best to pursue its goals. She said that in hindsight one can draw an arc through the history of the Black Panthers, but it didn’t feel that way to party members at the time. There was a lesson in that.

“It’s never going to feel like we know what we’re doing in the moment,” she said. Thus it was advisable to ​“have a little bit of grace for ourselves,” she said. ​“We can be haphazard and that’s OK.” She returned to the theme of individual, everyday, incremental change.

“We have to go into every day that we have to do something to make the world a better place. It sounds corny but it’s true,” she said. There was no magic solution; ​“as long as we’re showing up and trying to be part of the good, then we will be.”

“It’s a tough time,” she concluded. It’s ​“okay to be sad and confused. We’ll figure our way together.”

Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People is available at Possible Futures. The Edgewood bookstore is also planning a book club around the book for February; contact the store for details.