What Can We As Azanian Revolutionaries Learn From The Challenges That Were Faced By The Black Panther Party, which was formed in 1966 ...
What Has Really Changed In The Black World ...
( From The Doctoral Thesis of Huey P. Newton - War Against The Panthers: A Study Of Repression In America HUEY P. NEWTON / Doctoral Dissertation / UC Santa Cruz 1 Jun 1980 WAR AGAINST THE PANTHERS: A STUDY OF REPRESSION IN AMERICA A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of: DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS )
III. FORMATION AND PURPOSE OF THE PARTY:
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?
By 1966, the United States had experienced a recent series of disruptions in several of its major urban Black population centres—Harlem, Watts, Chicago and Detroit1 Numerous organizations and leaders representing groups of Black people—e.g., SCLC (Martin Luther King, Jr.), the Black Muslims (Elijah Muhammed and Malcolm X), CORE (James Farmer), NAACP (Roy Wilkins)—had repeatedly articulated the causes of these riots or urban rebellions: high unemployment, bad housing, police brutality, poor health care, and inferior educational opportunities.
Their consensus on the ills that caused or contributed to the violent explosions in inner cities was confirmed by official investigating bodies such as the Kerner and McCone Commissions.2 While all groups were generally in agreement on the specific maladies of the society affecting Blacks, they were in disagreement as to the best solution for ending them.
The Black nationalists favoured separatism; traditional liberals, integration and passage of new legal guarantees; and some of the more activist-oriented demanded "revolution now." Amidst this clamour for social justice, the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California, in 1966.
A. Ideology of Revolutionary Inter-communalism
The Party differed from other organizations representing Black and poor persons in
several respects. First, the Panthers embraced from the outset an explicitly socialist
ideology, which it soon named "revolutionary inter-communalism." In essence, the Party acknowledged that it was, despite certain differences, basically socialist or Marxist because it followed the dialectical method and sought to integrate theory and practice. As the founder of the Panthers observed:
We are not mechanical Marxists and we are not historical materialists.
Some people think they are Marxists when they are actually following the thoughts of Hegel. Some people think they are Marxist-Leninists but they refuse to be creative, and are, therefore, tied to the past.
They are tied to a rhetoric that does not apply to the present set of conditions. They are tied to a set of thoughts that approaches dogma...If we are using the method of dialectical materialism we don't expect to find anything the same even one minute later because "one minute later" is history. If things are in a constant state of change, we cannot expect them to be the same.
Words used to describe old phenomena may be useless to describe the new. And if we use the old words to describe new events we run the risk of confusing people and misleading them into thinking that things are static.3
This espousal of revolutionary inter-communalism by the BPP obviously influenced the perception of others about it, especially, as will be shown, the federal government.
Of equal importance, however, is the effect this ideology has upon the actions of the Party and the decisions of its leadership.
Revolutionary inter communalism provided an important paradigm for interpreting the world, much as a belief in laissez-faire capitalism affects the actions of corporate decision makers who embrace it.
Thus, to the BPP, government opposition to its existence was expected as partial confirmation of its raison d' etre. On a more personal level, the BPP leadership felt toward their ideology and its likely opponents that "truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels."4
"Revolutionary intercommunalism" not only served to pit the BPP and government law enforcement against each other in ideological struggle, [but also] it gave the Party a perhaps unexpected asset in its struggle for survival. The popular conception of ideology, especially one embracing terminology that seems foreign to traditional democratic politics, is that it is rigid and doctrinaire.
Yet to the BPP leadership, its ideology, despite the sound of dogma it may have conveyed to others, served it as a pragmatic methodology for interpreting events. A central tenet of revolutionary inter-communalism, for example, is that "contradiction is the ruling principle of the universe," that everything is in a constant state of transformation. Recognition of these principles gave Party leaders an ability to grow through a self-criticism that many other radical political organizations seemed to lack. Thus, in 1970, Newton could say of the Party:
In 1966 we called our Party a Black Nationalist Party (BNP). We called ourselves Black Nationalists because we thought that nationhood was the answer. Shortly after that we decided that what was really needed was revolutionary nationalism. That is, nationalism plus socialism. After analyzing conditions a little more, we found that it was impractical and even contradictory. Therefore we went to a higher level of consciousness.
We saw that in order to be free we had to crush the ruling circle and therefore we had to unite with the peoples of the world. So we called ourselves Internationalists. . . We sought solidarity with what we thought were the nations of the world.
But then what happened? We found that because everything is in a constant state of transformation, because of the development of technology, because of the development of the mass media . . . and because of the fact that the United States is no longer a nation but an empire, nations could not exist, for they did not have the criteria for nationhood. Their self-determination, economic determination, and cultural determination has been transformed by the imperialists and the ruling circle.
They were no longer nations. We found that in order to be Internationalists we had to be also Nationalists, or at least acknowledge nationhood. Internationalism . . . means the interrelationship among a group of nations. But since no nation exists, and since the United States is in fact an empire, it is impossible for us to be Internationalists.
These transformations and phenomena require us to call ourselves
"intercommunalists" because nations have been transformed into communities of the world. The Black Panther Party now disclaims internationalism and supports
intercommunalism.5
B. Strategy for Building Community Institutions:
The Survival Programs
A second distinguishing characteristic of the Party has been its specific strategy to achieve revolutionary intercommunalism: the building of "survival" or community service programs.6 The purpose of these programs is to enable people to meet their daily needs by developing positive institutions within their communities and to organize the communities politically around these programs. This, of course, is nothing new when one thinks of certain minority or ethnic communities in the United States, such as the Jews or Chinese. Historically, one way these groups have affected their rise from deprivation is by developing communal associations, ranging from fraternal and religious bodies to political machines. The function of these community associations or institutions has been described by Cloward and Piven as "provid[ing] a base from which covert ethnic solidarity evolves into the political force required to overcome various forms of class inequality.
They are therefore an important device by which the legitimate interests of
particular groups are put forward to compete with those of other groups."7
Unfortunately, as Cloward and Piven concede, "the Black community"—and this was especially true in 1966 when the Party was forming—"lack[ed] an institutional
framework in private social welfare [as well as in other institutional areas], and the separatist agencies of other ethnic and religious communities [were] not eager to see this deficiency overcome.... "8 Hence the BPP emphasized the importance of its survival programs.
1. The Police Patrols
An early survival program focused on the issue of police brutality, which was a major
concern, nationally and in Oakland, California. Applying knowledge of California law,
Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale organized police patrols to respond to arrests of citizens that were regularly broadcast over the police officers' short-wave radio. Several Party members equipped with a shortwave radio in a car intercepted the calls, rushed to the scene of the arrest, and, armed with a law book, informed the person being arrested of his constitutional rights. Party members also carried loaded weapons, publicly displayed but not pointed toward anyone, and 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.9
These initial contacts between Panther patrols and Oakland police resulted in the arrests of Party members and [in] considerable publicity.10 Media portrayals of these confrontations gave the impression that the Panthers were primarily an armed insurrectionary group.
One of the reasons for this distorted image was astutely noted by Erik Erikson:
You have all seen the now traditional picture of young Huey Newton like a latter day American revolutionary with a gun in his hands, held not threateningly, but safely
pointing upward. To a man of my age, it was, not too long ago, almost impossible to imagine black men carrying guns openly—black vigilantes, black nightriders in automobiles, keeping an eye on (of all things) the law.
Most readers of the news, of course, did not and do not know that according to California law, every citizen then had the right to carry a gun, one gun for self-defense and joint defense.
But those who created that law certainly did not envisage anybody but white men doing so, nor did they envisage anybody but potential lawbreakers as the ones to be patrolled vigilant citizens in an ill-defined and frontier territory. . . . [What the BPP did] was to show how the black man's territory has never outlived the frontier state and is still the land of undefined laws; and that arbitrary violence in this territory often comes not from roving outlaws but from those charged with the enforcement of the law. Inclined to disregard the rights of black citizens, they break the law under the guise of defending it. [The BPP] made of the police, then, the symbol of uniformed and armed
lawlessness. But [it] did so by ingeniously turning the white man's own imagery (especially dear to the American West and the Western) around against the white world itself. And in arming [themselves] and [their] brothers against that world, [the BPP] emphasized a disciplined adherence to existing law. In fact, [the BPP] patrol member travelled equipped not only with a gun but also with a law book.
The book and the fire—it cannot escape us—what an elemental pair of symbols this has been in revolts as far removed from each other as that of the Germans in Luther's day and that of the Zionists in our own.11
The image of Blacks armed for self-defense against police brutality catapulted the Party nationally into the public consciousness and gave an erroneous impression that it advocated armed confrontation. Ironically, however, the single event most responsible for projecting this violent image was itself a pristine case of a group legally petitioning the government for redress of grievances.
The BPP learned in April 1967 of the shooting by Richmond, California police of Denzil Dowell, a twenty-two-year-old Black. Official police accounts claim that the youth was running from the police after they had flagged him down in a stolen car. He reportedly jumped one fence, ran across an automobile junkyard, and was about to jump another fence when an officer shot him. No one claimed that Denzil Dowell was armed. Since he was shot while in the commission of a felony, the police claimed that it was justifiable homicide.
But the police account suffered from factual inconsistencies. The victim suffered a hip injury, which made him an unlikely fence-jumper. Moreover, no oil or
debris was found on his shoes or clothes, which, had he really run through the automobile junkyard near where he was found, would almost certainly have been present. Finally, several people had witnessed previous threats made by the police to Denzil Dowell, who was apparently viewed by some Richmond law enforcement personnel as a troublemaker.
When BPP members went with Denzil Dowell's family to the sheriff of Contra Costa County to complain about the shooting, they were advised to go to the state capitol in Sacramento and get the law changed that permitted officers to shoot at suspects fleeing the scene of a felony. Party leaders saw this buck-passing as further confirmation of their belief that armed citizen patrols of the police and the arming of the citizenry as guaranteed by the Constitution were the most effective deterrents to excessive use of police force.12
Soon after the shooting of Denzil Dowell, an East Bay legislator, Don Mulford, gave the BPP another reason to carry their grievances to the state capitol. Mulford introduced a bill to repeal the law that permitted citizens to carry loaded weapons in public places so long as the weapons were openly displayed.13 Obviously, the law Mulford sought to repeal was integral to the BPP's police patrols, which was why it was tagged the "Panther Bill" in numerous media reports.
Passage of Mulford's bill, which the Panthers viewed as almost certain, would make it a crime for a citizen, not otherwise licensed, to carry a loaded weapon in a public place, whether openly displayed or concealed. In response to the introduction of this legislation, the BPP sent a delegation to the capitol to protest this attempted disarming of the citizenry. The delegation carried loaded rifles and shotguns, which they publicly displayed. They entered the state capitol, a public place, to make their protest by delivering Executive Mandate No. 1.14
The legislature responded to this protest by promptly passing the law, which was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan. But the gathering of armed Black men on the capitol steps was photographed and published in newspapers and on television throughout the nation.
These photographic representations served as a stimulus for Party popularity and growth among young Blacks, hostility by the government, and fear by much of the white citizenry recently racked by a series of Black urban riots.
What never became clear to the public, largely because it was always deemphasized in the media,15 was that the armed self-defense program of the Party was just one form of what Party leaders viewed as self-defense against oppression.
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.16
The Panther means for implementing its concept of self-defense was its various survival programs, symbolized best by the police patrols and the free breakfast program for school children. In addition to these programs, however, the Party early initiated 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.17 For one of the first times since the organized slave rebellions before the Civil War, Blacks were responding to an organization that tried to build community institutions and did so under the banner of a political ideology that directly challenged democratic capitalism.
2. Use of Democratic Reforms by the Party to Build Community Institutions
The Panthers, despite their explicit repudiation of democratic capitalism as a system that was inherently incapable of permitting Black and poor people from enjoying full and equal participation in it, did not eschew democratic means of reform, nor did they discourage Black capitalism.
To the contrary, from its very inception, the Party utilized existing legal machinery in order to bring about social change and encouraged indigenous Black financial enterprises. In addition to the legal police patrols already mentioned, the Party frequently filed civil law suits seeking relief for its members, wand Black and poor people generally, from various injustices.18
The Panthers also turned to the ballot box, first by running members for mayor and city council in Oakland in 1972 and 1974, and comings surprisingly close to victory. In 1976, Party involvement was admittedly credited by two successful Black candidates for their elections, to the offices of Mayor of Oakland and Supervisor of Alameda County, the first two Black persons to be elected to these positions in Oakland's history, despite a sizeable Black population that had resided there since World War II.19
Moreover, the Party incorporated some of its main survival programs such as its Intercommunal Youth Institute and Seniors Against a Fearful Environment (SAFE).
The Youth Institute, a school for more than one hundred Party and other children from the first through the eighth grades, was incorporated as the Educational Opportunities Corporation.20 SAFE was an escort and busing program in
which young Blacks took seniors out into the community—a combination of Black and gray power that to some extent provides both groups what they need and desire—people power.21 The device of incorporation allowed both survival programs to avail themselves of tax-deductible contributions and some limited government benefits.
The Party also advocated growth of indigenous community businesses, even though they were capitalistic. This is because the Party recognized that Black capitalism has come to mean to many people Black control of another one of the institutions in t thee community. This positive quality of Black capitalism should, the Party felt, be
encouraged.
Since the people see Black capitalism in the community as Black control of local
institutions, this is a positive characteristic because the people can bring more direction and focus to the activities of the capitalist. At the same time, the Black capitalist who has the interest of the community at heart will respond to the needs of the people because this is where his true strength lies.
So far as capital [in] general is concerned, the black capitalist merely has the status of a victim because the big capitalists have the skills, make the loans„ and in fact control the Black capitalist. If he wants to succeed in his enterprise, the Black capitalist must turn to the community because he depends on them to make his profits. He needs this strong community support because he cannot become independent of the control of the corporate capitalists who control the large monopolies.
The Black capitalist will be able to support the people by contributing to the survival programs of the Black Panther Party. In contributing to such programs he will be able to help build the vehicle which will eventually liberate the Black community. He will not beable to deliver the people from their problems, but he will be able to help build the strong political machine which will serve as a revolutionary vanguard and guide the people in their move toward freedom.22
A practical application of the Party's view toward Black capitalism and the use of legal means of reform occurred in Oakland, California, in 1971.
A group of small Black-owned retail liquor stores and taverns asked the BPP for support in a boycott against Mayfair Supermarkets because Mayfair purchased alcoholic beverages from companies that excluded Black truck drivers.
The BPP joined in the boycott, and within a period of days, Mayfair ended its discriminatory practices. The Party then asked the group of Black businessmen who had solicited Party help to make a nominal continuing contribution to one or more survival programs.
The businessmen, who had approached the Party initially through an organization called the California State Package Store and Tavern Owners Association (Cal-Pak), declined to contribute except via a single gift. The Party rejected Cal-Pak's offer, stating, . . . a continuing trickle of support is more important to the community than a large, once-only hush mouth gift. We will not be paid off; we will not be quiet. We will not go away. . . Why should the Black community nourish a Black profiteer who has no concern for his brother?23
It was considered important to the Party's concept of building community institutions that contributions from the Black businesses not only be continuing, but that they come from the association representing them. This would, in the Party's view, constitute participation through a united front and build Cal-Pak as a community institution along with the survival programs. Since the Party had been asked for assistance in the Mayfair boycott by representatives of Cal-Pak, it also followed logically that Cal-Pak should support the survival programs.
When Cal-Pak refused, the Party called for a boycott of the liquor stores of the president of Cal-Pak, Bill Boyette, and picketed the two liquor stores he
owned. Five months later, Cal-Pak and the Party reached an agreement.
Congressman Ronald Dellums, who helped negotiate the settlement, announced at a press conference in January 1972 that:. . . an agreement has been reached of great importance to all of the people in the Bay Area and, in particular, the Black population of this area.
This agreement, between the Black Panther Party and the Ad Hoc Committee
for Promotion of Black Business, officially ends the boycott of Boyette's
Liquor Stores by the Black Panther Party. . . The United Fund of the Bay
Area, Inc., sponsored and created by the Ad Hoc Committee for the Promotion of Black Business and the Cal-Pak Liquor Dealers, has already begun the task of collecting funds from Black businesses and individuals for programs of special need in the Black community.
Operating as a non-profit social vehicle for the Black community, this new organization will make disbursements to various significant organizations in the Black community on a regular and continuing basis. Among the programs that
will benefit are the survival programs of the Black Panther Party.24
This willingness by the Party to use democratic means of reform and to support Black capitalism was criticized by some as inconsistent with the Panther ideology of
revolutionary intercommunalism. This is partly because progressive people quite
correctly observe that "It is very clear, upon reflection, what function law serves within any culture. It protects the culture's ideology. Under capitalism it protects property, the men who own it and guard it."25 From this observation, it is only a brief inferential step to the conclusion that, because law is a product and perpetuator of corporate interests in this country, it cannot be a force for significant socioeconomic change. But while this conclusion is logical in a mechanistic-sense, it is illogical, and therefore wrong, in a dialectical sense:
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life... [I]f somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is basis, but the various elements of the super-structure: political
forms of the class struggle . . . constitutions established by the victorious class . . . judicial forms, had even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants. . . also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.26
In sum, the Panthers combined a unique blend of elements that set them apart from
traditional civil rights and minority organizations: a revolutionary ideology that argued
for the necessity of fundamental socioeconomic change, a practical series of survival
programs that served the community and fostered institutional growth and consciousness, and a willingness to employ creative legal means within the democratic system to achieve their ends. It was these unique elements that made the Panthers popular with many Blacks and, at the same time, a nemesis to the federal government.
1 See, e.g., James Reston, "The Shame of the Cities," New York
Times, 24 July 1966, p. 10E, col. 5.
2 For example, Report of the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders, 1968; California Governor's Commission
on the Los Angeles Riots, "Violence in the City—End or Beginning,"
1965.
3 Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People (New York: Random
House, 1972), pp. 25-26; see also Appendix C. [Publisher's
note—New York: Writers and Readers, 1995.]
4 Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (New York: Bantam Press,
1977), p. 82.
5 Newton, To Die for the People, pp. 31-32.
6 At a seminar at Yale University in 1971, Newton was asked by a student, "What [do] you do to relate to People on the human level, how [do] you set yourselves up as examples as the kind of thing you are talking about. I mean, what do you actually do?"
He answered that the Party has "a series of survival programs—survival until the people become more self-conscious and mature. . . These programs are open to everyone in the community. We have health clinics; we have a busing program for parents and relatives and friends of prisoners who would not be able to visit the prison. . . because they do not have the money. . . Now these are reformist kinds of programs, but they have been integrated into the rest of our revolutionary program. . . We know they won't solve the problem. But because we are interested in the People, we serve the People."
(Erik H. Erikson and Huey P. Newton, In Search of Common Ground [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973], pp. 87-
88.) The Party's platform and program, originally adopted in 1966, and amended in 1976, are reprinted in Appendices A and B.
7 Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, The Politics of
Turmoil (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 195.
8 Ibid.
9 Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1973), pp. 120-121.[Publisher's note—
New York: Writers and Readers, 1995.]
10 Ibid.
11 Erickson and Newton, In Search of Common Ground, pp. 45-46.
12 A detailed account of this incident is found in the chapter
entitled "Denzil Dowell," in Newton, Revolutionary
Suicide, pp. 137-144.
13 California Penal Code, Sections 12031 and 171.c.
14 The full text of Executive Mandate No. is found in Newton, To
Die for the People, pp. 7-8.
15 To be sure, the media was often assisted in emphasizing the
violent image of the Party by the FBI and other federal
agencies. See Chapter IV.
16 Affidavit of Huey P. Newton, filed in Black Panther Party v.
Donald C Alexander, Commissioner of the Internal
Revenue Service, No. C-74-1247, U.S. Fed. Ct. (N.D. Cal.
1974)
17 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, pp. 163-170.
18 For example, Black Panther Party v. Kehoe, 42 C.A.3d 645,
117 Call. Rept. 6 (1974) (public records act suit to compel state agency to make "public" complaints it receives from consumers concerning abusive collection agency practices); Black Panther Party v. Granny Goose, No. 429566, Alameda I Superior Ct. (1972) (suit against ten major employers in Oakland, California to compel them to comply with California's "pay while voting" statute, which requires employers to post notices before certain elections informing their employees that they are entitled to up to two hours off work with pay in order to vote).
19 A confidential IRS memorandums candidly noted that, "as early as 1968 the Black Panther Party supported and ran candidates. . . . In 1972 the political machinery of the BPP proved its effectiveness with a massive registration drive.
This campaign was conducted through the BPP newspaper. . . Success was achieved when six of the nine candidates running on the BPP slate were elected to the board of directors of Model Cities in Oakland. Four other Panther members were also elected to [the] antipoverty council in Berkeley. Two BPP officers, Bobbie [sic] Seale and Elaine Brown, ran for the positions of Mayor and Councilwoman of Oakland, respectively.
Although they were defeated, the BPP had attained enough votes to
demonstrate that they could be a viable force." (Memorandum from IRS Revenue Agent Chinn to Group Manager and District Director of San Francisco District,
No. FA-1464, December 1, 1975.)
20 The IRS noted that "although some of the [BPP] programs have
been terminated . . . or cut back due to lack of funds, a major step has been achieved through the construction of the Community Learning Center building [i.e., EOC]. Most of the Panther activities are now concentrated at the
Center." (Ibid., Appendix, p. iv.)
21 Hager, "Panthers, New Image—Joining the System," Los
Angeles Times, 5 December 1972, p. 1, col. 1.
22 Newton, To Die for the People, p. 106.
23 Ibid., p. 111.
24 Ronald Dellums, quoted in Newton, To Die for the People, p.109.
25 George Jackson, "From Dachau, Soledad Prison, California," in
Robert Lefcourt, ed., Law Against the People (New York:
Vintage Books, 1971), p. 227.
26 Friedrich Engels, Letter to J. Bloch, quoted in William Franklin
Ash, Marxism and Moral Concepts (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), p. 124.
A more contemporary revolutionary has affirmed this same principle: "Some people think . . . that in the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the productive forces are the principal aspect; . . . and in the contradiction between the economic foundation and its super-structure, the economic foundation is the principal aspect; and there is no change in their respective positions.
This is the view of mechanistic materialism, and not of dialectical materialism. True, the productive forces . . . and the economic foundation generally manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But under certain conditions, such aspects as relations of production theory and the superstructure in turn must manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role, this must also be admitted..." (Mao Tse-tung, "On Contradiction," quoted in Ash, Marxism and Moral Concepts, p. 124.)
IV. RESPONSE OF THE GOVERNMENT TO
THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY
A. The Administration's Propaganda War Against the Panthers:
Making the Political Criminal
Upon Richard M. Nixon's election as president in 1968, the administration addressed itself, in the words of former White House Counsel John Dean, to the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration. Stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.1
A "White House Enemies List" was drawn up by officials of the Nixon administration. In its original form, this list contained the names of only a few minority political parties or organizations, among them the Panthers, whom the administration linked with "Hughie [sic] Newton," and "George Wallace" of the American Independent Party.2 Interestingly, though their expressed ideologies were quite opposite, both organizations shared the common feature of having strong grassroots support and active involvement by [their] members, in contrast to the established Democratic and Republican parties.3
The Enemies List was then incorporated into a detailed plan, commonly known as the Huston Plan, after its White House designated coordinator, Tom Charles Huston.4 This plan was approved in 1970 by the former director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA).5 It advocated blanket presidential authorization for such practices as wiretapping, mail covers, and black-bag jobs or break-ins. Its main purported function was to improve interagency cooperation among the major intelligence agencies.6 Although this proposed plan was first approved, but allegedly later disapproved by President Nixon because J. Edgar Hoover decided not to continue to cooperate,' the tactics advocated had already been employed by various federal agencies, particularly the FBI, against the Panthers.
Just why the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies focused early on the Party as an "enemy" organization is not difficult to understand. At the start of World War II, President Roosevelt directed the bureau to refocus its resources on priorities it had purportedly given up in 1924—the investigation of political organizations and affiliations.8 Distinctions between foreign espionage and domestic dissident groups
became blurred during the height of the war; in fact, "vigilance and caution grew into xenophobia and distrust of anyone who veered noticeably from the political mainstream."
9. The Cold War followed, with President Truman's establishment of the Federal Employee Loyalty Program.10 The bureau, having built up a large contingent of agents to guard the nation's internal security, channeled them into loyalty/security investigations. Thus, the FBI took on officially "the role of a kind of ideological security police, an arbiter of what was inside the boundaries of legitimate political discourse and what [was] outside."11 In the absence of any effective challenge to this role, the bureau continued, essentially unabated.
Not surprisingly, when the Panthers became publicly visible in 1967 and 1968, the FBI felt justified, if not compelled, to devote their full panoply of resources to investigating the organization. In part, this was in response to the BPP's ideology. As the chief of the FBI's counterintelligence program admitted in describing the genesis of the program within the bureau that concentrated on the Panthers:
We were trying first to develop intelligence so we would know what they were doing [and] second, to contain the threat . . . . To stop the spread of communism, to stop the effectiveness of the Communist Party as a vehicle of Soviet intelligence, propaganda and agitation.
12. A more flamboyant assessment was provided by Edward Miller, former assistant director of the FBI in charge of the Intelligence Division, upon his retirement in 1974:
Rome lasted for six hundred years, and we are just coming on to our two hundredth.
That doesn't mean that we have four hundred to go. We have to step back and look at ourselves protectively. . . . How much of this dissent and revolution talk can we really stand in a healthy country?
Revolutions always start in a small way. ... Economic conditions are bad; the credibility of government is low. These are the things that the home-grown revolutionary is monitoring very closely. The FBI's attention must be focused on these various situations. If it weren't, the Bureau wouldn't be doing its job for the American people.... The American people don't want to have to fool around with this kind of thing and worry about it; they don't want to have to worry about the security of their country. . . . We must be able to find out what stage the revolution is in.
13. The FBI was also aware of and disturbed by the Panther's efforts to build community institutions. Indeed, the one survival program that seemed most laudatory—that of providing free breakfasts to children—was pinpointed by J. Edgar Hoover as the "real long range threat to American society.14 The ostensible reason for this was that children participating in the program were being propagandized, which simply meant they were taught ideas, or an ideology, that] the FBI and Hoover disliked. Yet Hoover was not so naive as to believe an overt ideological war was any longer sufficient to garner the support or non-interference necessary for the bureau to destroy the Panthers. A better rationale or cover for the public would have to be employed. This new cover for secret police operations was, as the Huston Plan suggested, a crusade against criminals and terrorists.
Now, the administration would fight "crime," not ideologies.
This technique for destroying controversial political organizations is, of course, not new: History should teach us . . . that in times of high emotional excitement, minority parties and groups which advocate extremely unpopular social or governmental innovations will always be typed as criminal gangs and attempts will always be made to drive them out.15
Internal FBI and other police agency documents make clear this objective of pinning the label "criminal" on the BPP and its leaders, and trying to link criminal activity to the Party's efforts at getting support for various survival programs. A 1974 memorandum to the director of the FBI from the special agent in charge of the San Francisco office stated that the local FBI office has continued to follow Newton's and his associates' activities. ". . . Primarily, the . . . office has been pursuing Hobbs Act and/or ITAR-Extortion cases on Newton and/or his associates. Although investigations to date, including contacts with other law enforcement agencies," . . . has failed to develop information indicating that Newton and his associates are extorting funds from businesses. . . . This office is of the opinion that Newton is or has been extorting funds from legitimate businesses. . . .
In addition to the contacts noted above [i.e., the Alcohol, Tobacco, Tax and Firearms Section of the Department of Justice in Oakland, California, the Oakland Police Department, the Berkeley Police Department and various informants], the San Francisco Office is selectively contacting pimps and narcotics pushers in the Oakland area in an attempt to develop further intelligence and positive information concerning possible Federal violations on the part of Newton and his associates. This matter will continue to receive vigorous investigative attention. 16
Interestingly, the bureau and others seem to feel that any contribution from a business, whether considered legitimate or not, to the BPP survival programs could not be voluntary; it would have to come from extortion. Despite a failure to obtain any evidence of extortion, the bureau continued to hold the opinion that it took place and to try to develop information for a Hobbs' Act prosecution. In 1973, for instance, the assistant attorney general who figured prominently in the Watergate investigations, Henry E. Peterson, wrote the acting director of the FBI regarding Newton and the BPP:
During the course of filming a movie in Oakland, California, Harvey Bernhard [a film director], was contacted by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale who threatened to picket the filming site unless a $5,000 contribution was made to the Black Panther Party. We note that Bernhard now states that while he gave $5,000 to Newton, he does not feel that he was extorted in any way and that he did not wish to testify.
In light of this, and considering that Max Julian [an actor in the film], who was present when Bernhard met Newton, cannot recall any discussion of money or picketing, there is insufficient evidence to warrant prosecution and further investigation is not warranted.17 Extortion was not, of course, the only crime federal law enforcement agencies tried to pin on the BPP. In his book Agency of Fear, Epstein described how high-level intelligence officers in the Nixon administration used a narcotics cover to expand domestic counterintelligence operations:
Under the aegis of a "war on heroin," a series of new offices were set up, by executive order, such as the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence, which, it was hoped, would provide the president with investigative agencies having the potential to assume the functions of "the Plumbers" on a far grander scale.
According to the White House scenario, these new investigative functions would be legitimized by the need to eradicate the evil of drug addiction.18
The Nixon administration's exploitation of the narcotics menace to justify expansion of federal investigative agencies achieved extraordinary success:
Between 1968 and 1974, the federal budget for enforcing narcotics laws rose from $3 million to more than $224 million—a seventyfold increase. And this in turn gave the president an opportunity to create a series of highly unorthodox federal agencies.19
The utility of narcotics cover appears in numerous internal law enforcement documents concerning the BPP. Various agencies claim within their reports, in fact, to be investigating narcotics use by Panther leaders, especially Huey Newton. When, for example, Newton and some close friends took a one-week Caribbean cruise for a vacation, the FBI sent at least one clandestine agent, who submitted the following report:
[An unidentified informant] stated that his company has recently experienced a heavy increase in bookings aboard the "Starward" [the cruise ship taken] by Blacks, and he suspicions [sic] that this increase is due in part to the availability of narcotics at Porte Prince [sic] and Port Antonio. He stated that his suspicions have been buttressed by the recent confiscation of several pieces of luggage filled with narcotics from a "Starward" passenger. Inasmuch as reliable sources have identified Newton as a user of cocaine and he is possibly the user of other narcotics, will alert customs personnel to be on the lookout for narcotics in the possession of Newton and any of his party upon their return to Miami.20
Not content merely to alert Customs, the FBI noted that "the information has been
disseminated to State Department and CIA. Copies of attached being furnished to the Department (Internal Security and General Crimes Section) and Secret Service."21
Indeed, in April 1973, the FBI requested that "all San Francisco agents be aware of either the purchase or use of cocaine by Huey Newton. Any information obtained in this regard should be immediately furnished to both the OPD [Oakland Police Department] and the appropriate Federal Narcotics agency. "22 Six months later, the bureau seemed less interested in Newton's possible use of cocaine than they were about narcotics dealers he might have been hitting-up for contributions to community survival programs.
Source reports from contacts with various and unidentified Negro dope dealers that the big time dope dealers in the Berkeley and Oakland area are out to get Huey Newton. Source reports that Huey is apparently ripping off certain dealers, pimps and whores for large amounts of money and the talk is that "they" are going to get Huey. Source was instructed to determine some hard facts concerning these rumours and to report same immediately.23
B. The Superagency Approach to Crushing Dissent
By 1973, this process of employing the narcotics and crime covers reached its climax with the creation of a new intelligence super-agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency. At the time of its formation, the DEA employed more than 4,000 agents and analysts— including some fifty-three former (or detached) CIA agents and a dozen counterintelligence experts from the military or other intelligence agencies. The DEA had the authority "to request wiretaps and no-knock warrants, and to submit targets to the Internal Revenue Service."24 With its contingent of former CIA and counterintelligence agents, it had the talent to enter residences surreptitiously, distribute "black" (or misleading) information, plant phony evidence, and conduct even more extreme clandestine assignments.
The origin of DEA and its intended purpose are explained by Epstein as follows: According to [those] familiar with the plan, [G. Gordon] Liddy proposed . . . to detach agents and specialists who could be relied upon by the White House from the BNDD
[Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs], the IRS, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division, and the Bureau of Customs. This new office would operate directly out of the executive office of the president.
The beauty of the Liddy plan was its simplicity: it did not even need approval from Congress. The president could create such an office by executive decree, and order all other agencies of the government to cooperate by supplying liaisons and agents. Congress would not even have to appropriate funds, according to those familiar with the Liddy plan: The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which was located in John Mitchell's Department of Justice, could funnel monies via local police departments to finance these new strike forces.
The new office would have. wire-tappers from the BNDD; Customs agents, with their unique "search authority"; IRS agents who could feed the names of suspects into the IRS's target-selection committeefor a grueling audit; and CIA agents for "the more extraordinary missions." In addition, since it would control grants from LEAA, this new office could mobilize support from state and local police forces in areas in which it desired to operate.
The most important feature of the Liddy plan, however, was that the White House agents would act under the cloak of combating the drug menace. Since public fears were being excited about this deadly threat to the children of American citizens and their property, few would oppose vigorous measures even if its agents were occasionally caught in such excesses as placing an unauthorized wiretap.
On the contrary, if the dread of drugs could be maintained, the public, Congress, and the press would probably applaud such determined actions.
Krogh and the White House strategists immediately saw the advantages to having the new office operate its agents under the emblem of a heroin crusade ... and Liddy's option paper, much modified in form to remove any embarrassing illegalities, was sent to the president with the recommendations of Krogh and Ehrlichman.
Finally, in December 1971, the president ordered Ehrlichman and Krogh to create the permanent White House-controlled investigative unit envisioned in the option paper drawn up by Liddy.
The new unit was to be known as the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement.25 On January 28, 1972, the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), the permanent investigative force which ostensibly would operate against narcotics traffickers, was officially created by an executive order of the President:
Since there was virtually no precedent for an agency like the Office of Drug Abuse and Law Enforcement, [ODALEdirector Myles J.] Ambrose had to proceed step by step, in assembling his strike forces. The first step was to appoint regional directors who would superintend and select the federal agents and local police on each strike force in each of the thirty-three target cities he selected. . . .
Fifty other lawyers, many of whom Ambrose knew personally, were deployed in instantly created field offices of the new organization.
Four hundred investigators were requisitioned from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and the Bureau of Customs, and Ambrose requested more than a
hundred liaisons from the Internal Revenue Service, as well as specialists from other agencies of the government.
This was all accomplished during the first thirty days of existence of this new office, in what Ambrose himself referred to as a "monumental feat or organization." . .. The new strike forces had little resemblance to more conventional law-enforcement forces.
These highly unorthodox units, which were being controlled from the White House through the president's special consultant Myles Ambrose, included not only trained narcotics and customs officers but also Immigration and Naturalization Service officers; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms control agents; probation officers; state troopers; and local police officers. . . . With the authority of court-authorized noknock warrants and wiretaps they could strike at will in any of the target cities and against virtually anyone selected as a target. By March 1972, the strike forces had become operational.26
There was some resistance to Law Enforcement Assistance Administration officials to using LEAA money to finance ODALE operations. They argued that Congress never intended for LEAA grants to be used to bypass the appropriations process:
So with White House assistance, the new office established a series of local organizations, with such names as "Research Associates," through which grants could be made by LEAA. The money was then channelled back to selected strike forces, with these organizations acting, in effect, as money conduits.27
The California conduit for these laundered funds was the Organized Crime and Criminal Intelligence Branch (OCCIB) of the State Department of Justice, which had already been set up in 1970 by California Attorney General Evelle Younger. A report circulated by the OCCIB in 1972 identified among its prime targets the Black Panther Party.28 The creation of a new superagency to direct the counterintelligence activities against the BPP and other dissident groups was an indication of how badly the federal government wanted to destroy the Panthers. The successful extent of coordination between law enforcement agencies intent on getting the BPP is not yet clear, largely because documents showing this direction have yet to be discovered. Still, the general method of operation described by Epstein appears to have been employed against the Party, at least if one focuses on just three agencies for which some documented information is available: the FBI, IRS, and CIA.
