The Black Panthers Remembered
Peter Collier and David Horowitz called their book about the 1960′s The Destructive Generation. Of all those they wrote about, none were considered at the time as more heroic and worthy of emulation than The Black Panther Party, that gang of African-American thugs who hid their murderous activity under the rubric of Marxist-Leninist politics.
To those of us who were 60′s activists, the Panthers were everything we white boys were not—truly committed to “the revolution;” willing to risk their lives in armed struggle against the ruling class; romantic heroes who actually walked the walk and whose lives lived up to their militant rhetoric.
These thoughts came back to me when I read the obituary in today’s papers about the death of Warren Kimbro, a former Black Panther Party member. Kimbro, who was once a killer for the Panthers, from this account, tried hard to make up for his past life. Given orders most likely by Panther leader Bobby Seale, Kimbro murdered Alex Rackley, a Panther whom the members suspected of being a police informer. Before killing 24 year old Rackley, the New Haven, Connecticut branch of the Panthers held him in an apartment for three days, during which time they tortured him brutally. Finally, they drove him to a nearby swamp, where Kimbro shot him through the head. It was a typical gangland killing, justified in their minds as a political act against a would-be informer.
As Rackley was being tortured in the Panther apartment, their national leader Bobby Seale arrived to give a fiery speech at the Yale campus. When he was later arrested and charged with ordering Rackley’s execution, the white New Left sprung into action. Students on campus and others were bussed in from New York City and surrounding areas to hold rallies on Seale’s behalf. Soon radical Yale students proclaimed a student strike. Even Yale’s President Kingman Brewster came to Seale’s defense—famously stating that he was “skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.”
Seale would get off in a hung jury. As for the killer Kimbro, he testified for the prosecution, and claimed that Seale had been at the apartment while Rackley was tortured, although he could not say for sure that Seale gave the execution order. Kimbro served time for the murder, and because he was a prosecution witness, was sentenced to twenty years to life in prison and eventually released on parole. Later Kimbro enrolled at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and became a dean at a Connecticut state university.
While Kimbro repudiated his violent past and led a meaningful life, others of his generation still venerate the Panthers and persist in trying to keep their myth as black heroes alive. Every year or so a new book comes out heralding them, a movie or TV film is made glorifying them as civil rights era fighters for justice, and many academic conferences and panels are held studying them and trying to fit them into our recent history as models of the hidden history of the oppressed.
But when a memory suddenly appears, as it did to mark Kimbro’s passing, it serves us well to look back honestly and accurately at what so many of the New Left believed. Hopefully, today’s would-be radical students will learn the truth about groups like the Panthers and resist glorifying them.
The Black Panthers did their share of damage. But they were a minor problem next to Martin Luther King, Jr. He admittedly accomplished a lot of good with his peaceful actions against the racial bigotry. This is beyond dispute. Rev. King was also unfortunately a self-hating American who accused his own country of waging a racist war against the South Vietnamese. He also advocated radical socialist economic policies. MLK did indeed exclude violent radicals from his movement. However, he opened the door widely to the non-violent ones—and these often credentialed individuals have done enormous destruction during the last four decades. It is time to take a serious look at his legacy. We must reassess both the good and the bad. Racial progress in the United States is essentially stalled until this too long ignored dialogue begins.
Mr. Radosh, perhaps if you actually read one of the books you flippantly dismiss as hagiography you would know that the scholarly treatment the Panthers has received has been balanced but far from celebratory. Two notable books come to mind. On the Black Power Movement in general Peniel Joseph expansive Waiting Til’ the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America and on New Haven Yohuru William’s masterful study of Civil Rights and Black Power in New Haven, entitled Black Politics/White Power Civil Rights, Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven. Two solid edited collections on the party, Liberated Territory: Toward a local history of the Black Panther Party and In Search of the Black Panther Party edited by Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams are also very useful in exploring not only the Panthers social programs but some of the problems inherent in the organization. You should also pick up Jane Rhodes outstanding book Framing the Black Panthers on how the Panthers used media and how the media continues to use the Panthers to convey a flawed declension narrative of the 1960s. All of these studies have been published within the last eight years and reflect the best of the new scholarship on the Party not Hollywood’s treatment of it. Destructive Generation was published over twenty years ago. If you are going to purport to discuss topics of historical nature at least take the time to catch up on the latest literature rather than rehashing the discussion as it stood twenty years ago. This is rather surprising since your other pieces have quite insightful.