By John Pickard, Brentwood and Ongar LP member
Huey P Newton, with Bobby Seale, was a founder member of the US Black Panther Party, in Oakland, California, in 1966. Fourteen years later, he wrote a doctoral thesis for The University of California Santa Cruz, outlining the measures taken by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to destroy the Black Panthers.
I didn’t know Newton’s doctoral thesis even existed, until it was flagged up in a post in the Left Horizons Facebook Group, but once found, its 100 or so pages – effectively a short book – is well worth reading, particularly with the back-drop of the unprecedented and broad Black Lives Matters protests in the USA today. Newton did not aim in this thesis to give a detailed history of the Black Panther Party, he only set out to catalogue the highly ‘illegal’ methods of the state, and particularly the FBI, to destroy the party.
This is not the place either for a historical analysis of the BPP, which was shot through with contradictory political trends and tendencies, as were its membership and leaders. What is clear, however, is that once the party took off, it was seen by the capitalist state and the FBI as a threat to the status quo. There was first of all the ‘outrage’ of seeing young black men exercising their rights to bear arms in public – as white people had been doing for years – and giving an example to black youth that they can fight back. Then there were the ‘social’ programmes aimed at promoting self-reliance, self-confidence and self-respect in the black neighbourhoods, the very opposite to what the capitalist state would have for these communities.
Citations from public records and Congressional hearings
Newton’s accounts of FBI intrusions and methods are not just the fanciful ramblings of a conspiracy fantasist. In a lengthy list of sources, he cites official documents, evidence given in court and statements made to various Congressional hearings on the FBI and the Black Panthers.
His account details, from public records, the efforts of the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” the Black Panther Party. “The whole study”, Newton suggests, “shows the lengths to which, so far at least, a government can go in a constitutional democracy before it must choose between destroying a dissident political organization, or in the process of doing so, the very fabric of constitutional democracy”.
He outlines many of the methods used: disinformation (‘fake news’ in modern terms), informers, harassment, provocateurs, false letters and bank accounts, tax investigations and many others. But far more devastating, he writes, were the brutal deaths of his personal friends: “Bobby Hutton, murdered by the Oakland police in 1968; Alprentice Carter, murdered in Los Angeles in 1969 by men working in association with the FBI; and George Jackson, who was murdered at San Quentin Prison in 1971.”
Newton himself spent “a total of three years (1967 to 1970) in prison, has been arrested numerous times, has spent the last thirteen years in court (an average of two trials per year), and from 1974 to 1977 was in involuntary exile as a protection from physical abuse and death.”
Martin Luther King targeted by FBI
The main vehicle used by the FBI was the ‘counter-intelligence project, abbreviated as COINTELPRO and this organisation had Martin Luther King in its sights as well. Newton cites the public testimony of William Sullivan, who was in charge of the FBI campaign against King. “No holds were barred”, he said, “We have used [similar] techniques against Soviet agents. [The same methods were] brought home against any organization which we targeted. We did not differentiate.”
According to Newton, the Party differed from other organisations representing black and poor people in several important respects. First, he wrote, “the Panthers embraced from the outset an explicitly socialist ideology”, which they came to name “revolutionary intercommunalism.” In was in essence, he argued, “despite certain differences…basically socialist or Marxist…”
This was bad enough for the state, but Party members also began to patrol the community with loaded weapons on public display. They were “not pointed toward anyone”, Newton adds, and they were dressed in leather jackets and berets.
“The patrol participants were careful to stand no closer than ten feet from the arrest, to stay within the presumption that they were not interfering with the arrest. The Party had always urged self-defense against poor medical care, unemployment, slum housing, underrepresentation in the political process, and other social ills that poor and oppressed people suffer.”
Brutalising black communities with impunity
It was the sight of armed black activists more than anything else that captured the public imagination internationally as well as in the USA. Here were black youth – wearing what amounted to a ‘uniform’ – facing down the police who were used to brutalising black communities with complete impunity. The picture above shows Newton and Seale (with shotgun) on a BPP poster of the time. In his book, Seize the Time, Bobby Seale described one of those first confrontations on the street between the police and an armed group of Black Panthers.
The Panthers were not seeking a gunfight – they were making the simple point that the brutality was no longer going to go unchallenged. “My name is Huey P. Newton,” Seale quotes him as saying, “I’m the Minister of Defence of the Black Panther Party. I’m standing on my constitutional rights. I’m not going to allow you to brutalize me. I’m going to stop you from brutalizing my people. You got your gun, pig, I got mine. If you shoot at me, I’m shooting back.”
Establishment seriously alarmed
The Californian state law allowed for anyone bear arms, but of course the lawmakers had not expected that this right would be exercised by poor black people. Not surprisingly, the establishment was seriously alarmed by this development and with the sensational media interest, to some it extent took attention away from the social aspects of the BPP programme.
What Newton terms community “survival programmes” included “a free breakfast program for school children, health clinics providing free medical and dental service, a busing program to take relatives of prisoners on visiting days, and an escort and transportation service for residents of senior citizen housing projects, as well as a clothing and shoe program to provide for more of the needs of the local community. It was these broad-based programs, including the free food programs where thousands of bags of groceries were given away to the poor citizens of the community, that gave the Party great appeal to poor and Black people throughout the country.”
Social programmes raised support for BPP
The director of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, was fully aware of the potential of a party offering these benefits and support in the black community. “The most active and dangerous Black extremist group in the United States” he said in an interview, “is the Black Panther Party (BPP). Despite its relatively small number of hard-core members . . . the BPP is in the forefront of Black extremist activity today. Moreover, a recent poll indicates that approximately 25 per cent of the Black population has a great respect for the BPP including 43 per cent of Blacks under twenty-one years of age.”
The FBI was also concerned about the influence of the Panthers through the circulation of its newspaper. According to an FBI memo “The BPP newspaper has a circulation in excess of 100,000 and has reached the height of 139,000. It is the voice of the BPP and if it could be effectively hindered, it would result in helping to cripple the BPP.”
As the former assistant director of the FBI asked on his retirement in 1974, “How much of this dissent and revolution talk can we really stand in a healthy country? Revolutions always start in a small way. …”
One of the major goals of the FBI was to sow dissension within the Party. A 1970 memorandum from FBI Headquarters to the San Francisco field office of the FBI, is cited by Newton. What the head office proposed was:
“A wide variety of alleged authentic police or FBI material could be carefully selected or prepared for furnishing to the Panthers. Reports, blind memoranda, LHMs [letterhead memoranda] and other alleged police or FBI documents could be prepared pinpointing Panthers as police or FBI informants; ridiculing or discrediting Panther leaders through their ineptness or personal escapades; espousing personal philosophies and promoting factionalism among BPP members; indicating electronic coverage where none exists; outlining fictitious plans for police raids or other counteractions; revealing misuse or misappropriation of Panther funds…”
False letters sent out to create dissent
Many fake letters were indeed sent here and there by FBI agents, one prime aim being an attempt to create a personal breach between two key leaders, Huey Newton himself and Eldridge Cleaver, who spent some time in exile Algeria. The implementation of this plan, according to Newton, “could not help but disrupt and confuse Panther activities”.
One of the main types of disinformation used was the create a rumour that such-and-such a person was an FBI informant. The use of “snitch-jackets” in this way, was “widespread”, according to Newton. The FBI also provided whole stories for newspapers and magazines, which were printed without change, as if they were bona fide news items. We know the same practice is followed here in Britain, where MI5 or the police have ‘planted’ news through their contacts in the billionaire media outlets and printed them without question.
Another way of spreading dissent was to spread stories about BPP leaders living “lavish” lifestyles on party money. Newton gives an example of the FBI sending “a fictitious letter from a national Black Panther Party officer to Party chapters in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C…mailed from Oakland”
Newton even describes an FBI plan – again, revealed later – to create a fictitious bank account; the plan explicitly mentions the creation “in the name of HUEY P. NEWTON through an appropriate bank which will cooperate with the Bureau confidentially. A photostat of a false ledger card could be prepared and mailed to national headquarters anonymously along with an appropriate letter condemning NEWTON. The account should show regular sizable deposits over a period of several years and have a sizable balance existing.”
Political activity disguised as ‘fighting crime’
Much of the budget for disrupting the Panthers was hidden in projects ostensibly created to fight crime and drug abuse. In fact, one of the main aims of the state in this entire period was to associate the Panthers’ political work with criminal activities. “Between 1968 and 1974,” Newton explains, “the federal budget for enforcing narcotics laws rose from $3m to more than $224m, a seventyfold increase. And this in turn gave the president an opportunity to create a series of highly unorthodox federal agencies.”
According to FBI documents, of 295 documented actions taken by its COINTELPRO organisation to disrupt black groups, “233, or 79 percent, were specifically directed toward destruction of the Black Panther Party. Over $100m of taxpayers’ money was expended for COINTELPRO; over $7 million of it allocated for 1976 alone to pay off informants and provocateurs, twice the amount allocated in the same period by the FBI to pay organized crime informants.”
There are many reasons for the decline of the Black Panther Party: political, social and personal, but there can be little doubt also that the active disruption of the state played a role. The reason why Newton’s thesis is useful reading today, forty years after it was written, is that it gives an insight into the real role of the police as an arm of the capitalist state and is a pointer to what it will do today in the Black Lives Matter movement.
It is a demonstration, if one was needed, that the apparatus of the state is there to protect the interests of the capitalist class, not to keep ‘law and order’ for the majority of the population.
The capitalist class are a tiny proportion of the population, far less even than 1 per cent and, having been forced to concede democratic rights to the majority of the population – rights that were always won through struggle, and not given gratis – this tiny minority can only govern by secrecy and lies, cloaked with heavy smokescreens like the willing press and a tame judicial/legal system. It is because of such a heavy reliance on keeping the majority of the population completely in the dark about what really happens that the capitalist class is so relentless and vicious in its treatment of whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
Newton’s thesis gives a pointer
When it comes to their interactions with the police, any ‘protection’ or useful service that working-class people might get – and it is modest at best – is only a by-product and part of the subterfuge. As a part of maintaining the smokescreen, massive publicity is given to police activity in tracking down (some) murderers and criminals. Given the surveillance capability of the police and secret services today and their access, should they wish to use it, to bank account details, phone records, etc, they could end organised crime in a week if they chose to. But that is not their main purpose. Their fundamental role is to defend the interests of the ruling class and to monitor and disrupt political movements that meet with disapproval.
Newton’s doctoral thesis gives a pointer to measures that are likely to be implemented today against any radical or opposition political movements. There is no reason to suppose that what the FBI did in the 1960s and 1970s – and we only have what it was forced to admit to – it will not still be doing today.
We know that the police in Britain have a track record of infiltrating political groups, even peaceful, legal ones. Thus, the campaign group organised by the Lawrence family seeking justice for their murdered son, Stephen, was infiltrated by the police, trying to discredit it. We know that the police put spies into environmental campaign groups; in one case a police spy lived with an unsuspecting woman activist for years and had children with her until he was unmasked. Yet not one of these highly ‘illegal’ activities has ever been exposed to public scrutiny, much less brought to court or led to punishment.
What it shows is that the concepts of ‘legality’ and ‘law’ in a capitalist society are not absolute; they depend entirely on whose class interests they serve. Just as the capitalist class use ‘legality’ as a device only when it suits them, the labour movement must do the same: what is ‘moral’ and ‘legal’ for us must be defined by what is in the best interests of the working class and nothing else.
We don’t throw up our hands in despair
We don’t draw the conclusion from documents like Newton’s thesis that engaging in political struggle is not worthwhile. We do not just throw up our hands in despair. But it does show that we need to focus on the political aims and programme of a movement – any radical movement, including BLM – and question its direction, its integrity and its leadership.
A movement built around charismatic ‘leaders’ with minimal participation by an active rank and file is more open to state corruption and disruption than one in which the rank and file actively and relentlessly challenge and question the leadership. In modern times that also means having a movement based on real people, as opposed to on-line networking, in which mutual support, respect and loyalty are built through the experience of common struggle over many years.
Huey P Newton’s doctoral thesis, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America, is freely available as a PDF to download here. It might be a good starting point and would at least be a useful component in any labour movement meeting around the BLM issue.
June 30, 2020
