Abstract
Fifty years on, the allure of the Black Panther Party is intact. Hagiography even crops up in scholarly circles. Not long ago, a tendentiously whitewashing history by a sociologist and historian was published by the University of California Press (Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, 2013; see Steve Wasserman’s well-informed critique, noting that the book draws primarily on the Panthers’ own propaganda organ, “Rage and Ruin: On the Black Panthers,” The Nation, June 5, 2013).
In her study of Panther iconography, Jane Rhodes struggles to resist the Panthers’ allure. Her effort is partly successful. She notes, as many contemporary accounts fail to do, that the Panthers’ Breakfast for Children program did not begin until the Panthers had already been mobilizing around armed self-defense for two years. While rightly paying ample attention to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) hysteria, and its anonymous and inflammatory intrusions into Panther factionalism, she also cites critics of the Panthers’ militant style like the law professor Randall Kennedy, and interviews reporters, like the New York Times’s Earl Caldwell and New Times’s Kate Coleman, whose appraisals of the Panthers were decidedly mixed. But for the most part, she veers toward giving the Panthers the benefit of the doubt for the sound judgment that, in fact, they lacked.
There are other source deficiencies as well. Weirdly, though much of her material derives from the San Francisco Bay Area, where the Panthers were centered, and she offers ample quotations from the Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Examiner, and the African American Sun Reporter, during her extended discussion of the entire year 1968 she only twice cites the area’s major newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle. She draws only scantily from television or radio. She draws scarcely at all from archives of Berkeley’s left-wing KPFA radio, or that of the public TV station, KQED-TV, which covered the Panthers extensively and avoided sensationalism, or the underground press. She fails to cite the most careful published excavation of a local Panther group, the first-rate 2006 book (Paul Bass and Douglas W. Rae, Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of a Killer) on the New Haven Panthers, and the notorious 1969 case of the torture-murder of a suspected police infiltrator.
Even more problematically, the shortcoming of Rhodes’s book is partly conceptual. A comprehensive diagnosis of a media frame requires two components. First, media frames must be identified in the round. Second, the researcher must compare them with a well-researched, independent appraisal of the given phenomenon. Frame analysis does not substitute for reporting. It will not do simply to tally the emphases, omissions, and tropes of media coverage; there can be no solid assessment of the skew of the frames without constructing a baseline against which to measure it.
On the first score, about the media frames themselves, Rhodes is rather thorough (with the omissions noted above). Discussing a central episode in Panther martyrology, she observes that, contrary to years of Panther propaganda, the police murder of the Panther Bobby Hutton on April 6, 1968, began with an assault on the police instigated by Eldridge Cleaver. She notes that Cleaver later admitted as much.
But too often she bends over backward to take the Panthers at their leaders’ word. For example, she uncritically cites Panther chairman Huey P. Newton’s complaint that the media “de-emphasized” the fact that “armed self-defense . . . was just one form of what Party leaders viewed as self-defense against oppression.” She complains that one writer misses the “clear disjunction” between the Panthers’ “abundant images of guns and weapons” and “the articulation of their political project.” This is disingenuous. The Panthers chose to place on the cover of their 1966 “Platform and Program” a depiction of an automatic rifle. Their 1967 gun-toting spotlight-claiming march into the State Capitol in Sacramento placed guns at the center of their iconography. Why then fault conventional media for their obsession with the Panthers’ guns, military formations, and incendiary slogans (“Off the pig!”)? It’s standard media framing to highlight extravagant rhetoric and to scant coverage of a sketchy political program. It should have come as no surprise to anyone that the media would home in on affirmations like Panther cofounder Bobby Seale’s statement that Blacks “must unify around the gun.”
Rhodes fails to mention the contemporaneous critical appraisal of the Panthers’ attention-getting tactics, first published in the left-wing Guardian (and later reprinted in his book Revolutionary Notes) by the early Black Power advocate and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee veteran Julius Lester. Lester understood that the Panthers’ splashy tactics would be their undoing. They were lionized by the White left and by many Blacks, but they did not create a stable organizational base. As Gil Scott-Heron famously noted in 1970, “the revolution will not be televised.” Inevitably, the spotlight that the Panthers exploited ended up exploiting them, fixing them unfavorably in a magnifying lens where J. Edgar Hoover and local police could contain them as a backlash-inducing freak show.
“The appeal of the Black Panthers to today’s activist generation . . . lies in their apparent resistance to black respectability politics,” Rhodes writes in her new preface. (The book was originally published in 2007.) For all that the Panthers did inspire thousands of young African Americans to defy powerlessness in the face of rampant police violence, she still fails to come to grips with the ways in which they and the media (mainstream and dissenting alike) were parties to a political-cultural coproduction that was, most of all, tragic.