Interracial conflicts have always been one of the most serious domestic political problems for the United States of America. Despite the fact that racial discrimination against the African American population is formally a thing of the past, in reality, colossal differences in the level and quality of life between the "white" and "black" people in the United States persist today. Moreover, African Americans' dissatisfaction with their social status is the cause of constant unrest and riots. Most often, the next act of real or imaginary arbitrariness of the police in relation to a person with dark skin color becomes a formal reason for riots. But even on such an occasion as the murder of an African-American "street guy" by a police officer, it is impossible to gather thousands of people for riots, if people, of course, are not so brought up by their social status that they are ready to rebel for any reason and even risk their lives in order to throw out all the negative emotions, all my hate. This was the case in Los Angeles, Fergusson, and many other American cities. At the time, the Soviet Union missed a wonderful opportunity to seriously weaken the United States by stimulating and supporting the African American national liberation movement.
Racial segregation and African American struggles for their rights
American citizens are still alive and not even so old, having found the regime of real racial segregation that existed in the United States until the 1960s. In those years, when American information resources accused the Soviet Union of violating human rights, in the very "citadel of democracy" there was severe discrimination on the basis of skin color. African Americans could not attend "white schools", and on public transport in Montgomery, Alabama, the first four rows of seats were reserved for "whites" and African Americans could not sit on them, even if they were empty. Moreover, African Americans were obliged to give up their seats in public transport to 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 the black population of the United States grew. The Second World War, during which hundreds of thousands of black soldiers fought in the ranks of the American army and, just like their "white" colleagues, shed blood, played an important role in the desire of African Americans for equality with "whites". Returning to their homeland, they did not understand why they did not deserve the same rights enjoyed by "white" citizens, 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 up her seat on the bus to a "white" American. For this act, Rosa Parks was arrested and fined. Also in 1955, in Montgomery, 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 up their place on 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 blacks and mulattoes living in the city and state refused to use public transport. The boycott was supported and widely publicized by Martin Luther King, the notorious leader of the African American movement. Finally, in December 1956, the Montgomery Bus Segregation Act was repealed. However, discrimination against African Americans in secondary and higher educational institutions has not disappeared anywhere. In addition, segregation persisted in public places. In Albany, Georgia, in 1961, the African American population, at the instigation of Martin Luther King, attempted a campaign to end segregation in public places. As a result of the crackdown on the demonstrations, the police arrested 5% of the total number of all black residents in the city. As for high schools, even after black children were officially allowed to attend by higher authorities, local administrations and racist organizations created all kinds of obstacles for African Americans, as a result of which it became simply unsafe to send children to school.
Against the background of the struggle of the African American population against segregation, which took place, in many respects, under the influence of the pacifist ideas of Martin Luther King, there was a gradual radicalization of African American youth. 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 incapable of bringing about real change in the social and political situation of the black population. In the African American movement, two main paradigms have emerged that define the ideology and political practice of specific movements and organizations. The first paradigm - integrationist - consisted in the demand for equal rights of "white" and "black" Americans and the integration of the black population into American society as its full-fledged component. The origins of the integrationist paradigm were formed in the 1920s. in the "Harlem Renaissance" - a cultural movement that led to the flowering of African American literature in the first half of the twentieth century and helped to improve the perception of the "white" US population of African Americans. It was in line with the integrationist paradigm that Martin Luther King and his supporters in 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 manner. However, this position did not satisfy the interests of a significant part of African American youth, especially those of the radical social lower classes who did not believe in the possibility of "systemic integration" of the black population into the socio-political life of the United States.
Black radicalism
The radical part of African Americans rallied around the nationalist or segregationist 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 the 1920s. this position was reflected in the activities of Marcus Mosia Garvey and his movement for the return of African Americans to Africa - Rastafarianism. Also to the nationalist paradigm of the African American movement can be attributed to "black Muslims" - 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". A great influence on the development of the nationalist paradigm of the African American movement was exerted by the concepts of African theorists, first of all - the theory of negritude - the uniqueness and exclusivity of African peoples. The origins of the concept of negritude were the Senegalese writer, poet and philosopher Leopold Cedar Senghor (then he became president of Senegal), the Martinique-born poet and writer Aimé Sezer, and the French Guiana-born poet and writer Leon-Gontran Damas. The essence of the concept of negrit here lies in the recognition of African civilization as original and self-sufficient, not in need of improvement by borrowing European culture. In accordance with the concept of negritude, the African mentality is characterized by the priority of emotions, intuition and a special sense of "belonging". It is participation, and not the desire for knowledge, as in Europeans, that lies at the heart of African culture. The followers of the concept of negritud believed that Africans have a special spirituality, which is alien and incomprehensible to a person brought up in European culture. Having originated as a philosophical and literary movement, Negro people gradually became politicized and formed the basis of numerous concepts of "African socialism" that spread to the African continent after the beginning of the process of decolonization. In the 1960s. Many representatives of the African American movement, who shared the orientations of the nationalist paradigm, became acquainted with the left-wing radical political concepts that were prevalent during this period among American student youth. Thus, anti-imperialist and socialist slogans entered the political phraseology of African American nationalists.
Birth of the Panthers: Bobby and Hugh
In October 1966, in Oakland, a group of radical African American youth founded the Black Panthers Self-Defense Party, which was destined to become one of the most famous radical political organizations in US history. The origins of the Black Panthers were Bobby Seal and Hugh Newton - two young men who shared the ideas of "black separatism", i.e. that nationalist paradigm in the African American movement, which was mentioned above. It is worth telling a little about each of them. Robert Seal, better known as Bobby Seal, was born in 1936 and at the time of the creation of "Black Panthers" he was already thirty years old. A native of Texas, he moved with his parents to Oakland as a child, and at the age of 19 he enlisted in the United States Air Force. However, three years later, Sil was expelled from the army for poor discipline, after which he got a job as a metal carver at one of the enterprises of the aerospace industry, while completing his secondary education. After receiving a high school diploma, Seal entered college, where he studied to be an engineer and, at the same time, comprehended the basics of political science. It was while studying at college that Bobby Seal joined the African American Association (AAA), which spoke from the position of "black separatism", but he himself 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 was only 24 years old in 1966. He was born in 1942 to a farm laborer's family, but his poor background did not kill Newton's natural urge to study. He managed to enroll in Oakland Merrity College, then attended law school in San Francisco. Like many of his peers, Hugh Newton participated in the activities of youth black gangs, stole, but did not quit his studies and tried to spend the funds obtained by criminal means on his education. It was in college that he met Bobby Seal. Like Bobby Seale, Newton sympathized not so much with "black racism," to which many representatives of the right, nationalist wing of the African American movement were inclined, as with radical left views. In his own way, Hugh Newton was a unique person.
He managed to combine the "dashing" image of a "street guy" prone to crime, subject to such social vices of the lower classes as alcoholism and drug addiction, with a constant craving for knowledge, with the desire to make the life of his fellow tribesmen better - at least, as Hugh himself understood this improvement Newton and his associates in the revolutionary organization.
Malcolm X, Mao and Fanon are the three Black Panther inspirers
At the same time, the ideas of Malcolm X, the legendary African American leader, whose assassination in 1965 became one of the formal reasons for the creation of 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 the American special services of Malcolm's murder, because only they, in the opinion of the murdered comrades, were beneficial to the physical destruction of a radical speaker extremely popular in the African American environment. At the beginning of his political career, 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 the "whites", rejected the doctrine of nonviolence promoted by Martin Luther King. However, later, delving into the study of Islam, Malcolm X made the Hajj to Mecca and a trip to Africa, where, under the influence of Arab politicians belonging to the white race, he moved away from primitive black racism and reoriented to the idea of an internationalist unification of "blacks" and "whites" against racism and social discrimination. Apparently, activists of the "Nation of Islam" - the largest organization adhering to the ideas of "black separatism", killed him for rejecting the ideas of "black racism". It was from Malcolm X that the Black Panthers borrowed an orientation toward 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 negro, and revolutionary socialism, including Maoism. The Black Panthers' sympathy for Maoism was rooted in the very essence of Chairman Mao's revolutionary theory. The concept of Maoism, to a greater extent than traditional Marxism-Leninism, was suitable for the perception of the oppressed masses in the third world countries. Since African Americans were actually a "third world" within American society, being in an extremely disadvantaged social position and representing a multimillion mass of chronically unemployed or temporarily employed people, the Maoist understanding of the revolution was most in line with 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 identify themselves with the working class. Even the concept of creating "liberated areas" could well have been implemented by the Black Panthers, at least in the southern United States, where in some localities African Americans constitute the overwhelming majority of the population. In addition to Maoist literature, the leaders of the Black Panthers also studied Ernesto Che Guevara's work on guerrilla warfare, which also played a significant role in shaping the political views of the organization's activists.
The ideology of the "Black Panthers" was greatly influenced by 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. It is noteworthy that Franz Fanon himself was a person 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 Afromartinian on his father, and on his mother had European (Alsatian) roots. During World War II, Fanon served in the French army, took part in the liberation of France and was even awarded the Military Cross. After the war, Franz Fanon received his medical degree at the University of Lyon, while studying philosophy and meeting a number of prominent French philosophers. Later he joined the national liberation struggle of the Algerian people and became a member of the National Liberation Front of Algeria. In 1960, he was even appointed Ambassador of Algeria to Ghana, but around the same time Fanon fell ill with leukemia and left for treatment in the United States, where he died in 1961, having lived only to 36 years old. According to 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. Franz Fanon's programmatic work was the book Branded by the Curse, which became a real guide to action for many Black Panther activists. In this work, Fanon emphasized the "cleansing" power of violence, praising the armed struggle against the colonialists. According to Fanon, and 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, a colonizer, a racist, an oppressor can simply be killed and then his superiority dissipates … Thus, Fanon asserted the priority of violence in the fight against colonialism and racism, since he saw in it a means of freeing the oppressed from the slave consciousness. The Black Panthers embraced Fanon's ideas about violence and that is why they proclaimed themselves 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 against the “reactionary forces” within the African American movement itself.
Black neighborhood patriots
The Black Panther leaders saw themselves as committed Maoists. The political program of the party, called the “Ten Point Program”, included the following theses: “1) We strive for freedom. We want to have the right to determine the fate of the black community ourselves; 2) We strive for full employment for our people; 3) We strive to end the exploitation of the black community by capitalists; 4) We strive to provide our people with decent housing, suitable for human habitation; 5) We want to provide our people with an education that can fully reveal the true nature of the cultural decline of white American society. We want to learn from our real history so that every black person knows his true role in modern society; 6) We advocate that all black citizens be exempt from military service; 7) We are committed to an immediate end to police brutality and the unjust killing of black citizens; 8) We advocate the release of all black prisoners in city, county, state and federal prisons; 9) We demand that citizens of equal social status and black communities decide the fate of black defendants, as prescribed in the US Constitution; 10) We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. " Thus, the demands of a national liberation nature were combined in the Black Panther program with social demands. As the Black Panther activists drifted to the left, they also drifted towards rejecting the ideas of “black separatism”, allowing for the possibility of cooperation with “white” revolutionary organizations. By the way, the White Panthers party also appeared in the United States, although it did not reach the level of fame, number, or scale of activity of its “black” role model. "White Panthers" were created by a group of American students - leftists after talking with representatives of the "Black Panthers". The latter, when asked by white students, how can the African American liberation movement be helped, answered - "create white panthers."
Black Panther activists have created their own unique style, gaining worldwide fame and winning the sympathy of African American radical youth for decades to come. The emblem of the organization was the 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 sweatshirts 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 African American youth who sympathized with revolutionary socialist ideas. By the way, in her youth, the mother of the famous rapper Tupac Shakur Afeni Shakur (real name - Ellis Fay Williams) took an active part in the organization. It was thanks to the revolutionary views of his mother that the world famous rapper got his name - Tupac Amaru - in honor of the famous Inca leader who fought against the Spanish colonialists. The name of the boy, who was born in 1971, was advised by "Comrade Geronimo" - Elmer Pratt, one of the leaders of the "Black Panthers", who was part of Afeni Shakur's inner circle and who became Tupac's "godfather". Tupac's godmother was Assata Olugbala Shakur (real name - Joanne Byron), a legendary terrorist from the Black Panthers party, who participated in a shootout with the police in 1973 and was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a police officer in 1977. Assata Shakur was lucky to escape from prison in 1979, and in 1984 she moved to Cuba, where she has lived for more than thirty years. It is noteworthy that the American special services are still looking for Assata Shakur in the register of the most dangerous terrorists, despite the venerable age of the woman - sixty-eight years.
Since the Black Panthers positioned themselves as a political party of the African American population, claiming the revolutionary emancipation of the inhabitants of the ghetto, positions in the party were introduced along the lines of government ones. Robert Seal became chairman and prime minister of the party, and Hugh Newton became secretary of defense. It was in the subordination of the brave Hugh Newton that the armed militants of the "Black Panthers" were in charge, whose tasks were to defend the Negro neighborhoods from the arbitrariness of the American police.
The militants of the "Black Panthers" in their cars followed the police patrols, while they themselves did not violate traffic rules and behaved in such a way that from the point of view of the law there were not the slightest claims against them. In general, the police have become the main enemy of the Black Panthers. Like any young people from socially disadvantaged areas, the founders and activists of the Black Panthers hated the police since childhood, and now ideological motivation has been added to this teenage hatred - after all, it was with the police that the repressive mechanism of the American state was associated, including in its racist manifestations. In the lexicon of "Black Panthers" the police got the name "pigs" and from that time on, their African-American militants did not name them otherwise, which made the police officers very angry. In addition to combating police arbitrariness, the Black Panthers have decided to end criminality in African American neighborhoods, primarily drug trafficking. 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 viewed as enemies of the liberation of the African American population. In addition, the "Black Panthers" tried to prove themselves in the organization of social initiatives, in particular - they organized charitable canteens, in which poor representatives of the African American population could eat.
Fredrika Newton, Hugh Newton's wife, recalled in an interview with reporters that the Black Panthers “demanded an end to segregation and discrimination in employment, built social dwellings so that slum dwellers would have decent shelter. We protested against police brutality and arbitrariness of the courts, and also hired buses to take indigent relatives on a visit to prisoners. None of us received money for our work - we collected food for the poor and funds for charity bit by bit. By the way, the "Breakfast Program" invented by us has spread throughout the country. It was we who were the first to say in the 70s that children cannot study normally if they are not fed in the morning. So, in one of the churches in San Francisco, we fed the kids every morning, and the government listened to us and made school breakfasts free "(A. Anischuk. Black panther in makeup. Interview with Fredrika Newton - Hugh Newton's widow // http: / /web.archive.org/).
Eldridge Cleaver became the Minister of Information in the Black Panthers Party. His role in the organization of the Black Panthers is no less significant than that of Bobby Seale and Hugh Newton. Eldridge Cleaver was born in 1935 and at the time the party was formed was a 31-year-old man with considerable life experience. A native of Arkansas who later moved to Los Angeles, Cleaver has been involved in youth crime gangs since his teens.
In 1957, he was arrested for several rapes and imprisoned, where he wrote several articles promoting the ideas of "black nationalism." Cleaver was released only in 1966. Naturally, a person with similar views did not stand aside and supported the creation of the Black Panthers party. In the party, he was engaged in public relations, however, like all activists, he participated in "patrolling" 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 creation of the party, he was only 16 years old, but the young man quickly gained prestige even among his older comrades-in-arms and he was entrusted with the financial affairs of the organization. Bobby Hutton became one of the most active members of the party and participated in many demonstrations, including the famous action against the ban on carrying firearms in public places.
"War with the police" and the decline of the party
In 1967, Hugh Newton was arrested on charges of murdering a police officer and taken into custody. However, 22 months later, the charges against the "Black Panther Defense Minister" were dropped, as it turned out that the policeman was most likely shot by his own colleagues by mistake. Hugh Newton was released. However, in 1970, most of the structural units of the "Black Panthers" in American cities had already been 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 police, 17-year-old Black Panther treasurer Bobby Hutton was shot dead. Another leading Panther activist, Eldridge Cleaver, managed to emigrate and find refuge, first in Algeria, then in France and Cuba. Bobby Seal received four years in prison. In August 1968 g.there were shootouts between the Black Panthers and the police in Detroit and Los Angeles, and later - shootings in Indianapolis, Detroit, Seattle, Oakland, Denver, San Francisco and New York. During 1969 alone, 348 party activists were arrested. In July 1969, police attacked the Black Panther office in Chicago, engaging in an hour-long firefight with the Panthers. In December 1969, a five-hour battle between the police and the Black Panthers broke out in Los Angeles, where the authorities again tried to cover up the local office of the African American Party. By the end of 1970, 469 Black Panther activists had been arrested. During this time, ten activists were killed in shootings. It should be noted that in addition to the militants of the "Black Panthers", the victims of 48 shootings were also 12 police officers. Nevertheless, Hugh Newton did not lose hope of the revival of the former power of the movement. In 1971, he traveled to China, where he met with representatives of the Chinese communist leadership.
In 1974, Newton had a violent quarrel with Bobby Seal, after which, as a result of the proceedings, Newton's guards severely beat Seal with a whip, after which the latter was forced to undergo medical treatment. In 1974, Hugh Newton was again accused of murder, after which he was forced to hide in Cuba. The socialist government of Cuba treated the Black Panthers with sympathy, 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, with a thesis on War Against the Panthers: A Study of American Repression. In 1982, the Black Panthers Party ceased to exist. The further destinies of its leaders and leading activists developed in different ways. Hugh Newton rethought the strategic mistakes of the movement, summed up the nearly twenty years of the Black Panther struggle, and was active in the field of African American public charitable work. On August 22, 1989, Hugh Percy Newton was assassinated. As in the case of Malcolm X, the Black Panther leader was shot not by a white racist or policeman, but by an African American drug dealer Tyrone Robinson, who was part of a rival leftist group called the Black Guerrilla Family. For this crime, Robinson received 32 years in prison. Bobby Seal retired from active political activity and took up literature. He wrote his own autobiography and cookbook, advertised ice cream, and in 2002 took up teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia. Eldridge Cleaver gave up active political activity back in 1975, returning to the United States from exile. He wrote the book Soul in Ice, in which he spoke about his combat youth and outlined his socio-political views. Cleaver died in 1998 at the medical center at the age of 63. Elmer Pratt (1947-2011), aka "Geronimo", godfather of rapper Tupac Shakur, was released from an American prison in 1997 after serving 27 years in prison after being convicted of kidnapping and murder in 1972 citizen Carolyn Olsen. After his release, Elmer Pratt was engaged in human rights work, emigrated to Tanzania, where he died of a heart attack in 2011.
A life sentence is serving in the American prison Mumia Abu Jamal. This year he "passed" over sixty. Before converting to Islam, Mumia Abu Jamal was called Wesley Cook. In 1968, at the age of 14, Mumia Abu-Jamal joined the "Black Panthers" and since then took an active part in their activities until 1970, when he left the ranks of the party and began to complete the previously abandoned school course of education. After receiving his education, Mumia Abu-Jamal worked as a radio journalist and, at the same time, moonlighted as a taxi driver. In 1981 he was arrested on charges of killing a police officer. 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 commuted to life imprisonment. For almost 35 years, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been in an American prison - now he is 61 years old, and he went to prison at the age of 27. Over the decades spent in prison, Mumia Abu-Jamal gained worldwide fame and became a symbol of the struggle for the release of political prisoners and unjustly convicted by American justice. His portraits can be seen at rallies and demonstrations in support of political prisoners in many countries of the world, not to mention the fact that in the African American environment Mumia Abu-Jamal has become a real "icon" of the movement: rappers dedicate songs to him, almost every young person knows his name African American.
The ideology and practical activities of the "Black Panthers" had a great influence not only on the further history of the African American liberation movement, but also on African American culture in general. In particular, many former Black Panther activists are at the forefront of the gangsta rap movement in African American music culture. Hugh Newton's book Revolutionary Suicide is very popular with radical youth in many countries around the world - and not only among African Americans and Africans. Several films have been shot about the Black Panthers party itself, scientific, journalistic and fiction books have been written.
It is known that in our time in the United States of America there is 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 sensational events in Fergusson, where riots broke out after the murder of a young African American by a police officer, which was suppressed only with the help of armed units of the National Guard, a representative of the New Party of Black Panthers, Crystal Muhammad, said, according to RIA Novosti, that African Americans hope for Russian support, since only with the help of Russia is it possible to convey to the UN Security Council the truth about the true situation of the African American population in the United States. Meanwhile, support for the African American national movement - at least moral and informational - would be very useful for Russia, since it would provide additional trump cards in the political confrontation with the United States, would give the opportunity to point out to the "defenders of human rights" on the glaring imperfection of their own political -the legal system, in which discrimination against African Americans has not been eliminated to this day.
