These days, nobody's surprised when a near-autistic student shows up at a public place with a small arsenal and starts blasting his way through a gathering of innocents. On some level, it's perfectly okay for a lone wingnut to express rage meaninglessly. If, however, the mass murderer writes a manifesto critical of our culture hoping to foment revolution, there's a chill factor. It's inacceptable that an American could kill not out of semi-suicidal self-and-other-contempt but on behalf of an improved situation post-bloodbath. In the 1960s, though, many Americans had hope that a revolution with or without violence would birth a more equitable society. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is here to refresh our collective consciousness of that promising era, at Opera Plaza in San Francisco, Shattuck in Berkeley, and Piedmont in Oakland, opening Oct. 2.
As a white person, I always get a particular thrill hearing black people express rage over centuries of white-skinned domination, terror, and trickery. The sort of voice of the tall man in a hat shown talking in a group on the street: "We're not gonna get nothin'. Not by sittin' round here doin' these sit-in demonstrations or nothin'." Someone off-camera naively asks, "Well, how are we gonna do it?" He answers with gusto, "By violence. Violence. By uprisin'. Havin' a revolution. Just put blood, you know. Let everybody bleed a little bit." The way the word blood is stretched into two savory syllables is redolent of the payback white people, when considered as a pampered, clueless socio-economic group, so richly deserve.
The saddest thing about MacArthur genius grantee Stanley Nelson's new documentary is how little has changed, or how much has changed but not the way one might've hoped. In light of the recent spate of shootings of young black men by white cops, the neverendingness of this battle is obvious. Walter Cronkite's face isn't shown, but that might be him announcing in 1966 that "relations between police and Negroes throughout the country are getting worse," and that "one of cities most troubled by animosity is Oakland, California." The story of the Black Panthers, like other great tales of the 60s revolution, is a local story.
Jamal Joseph, one of the film's redoubtable talking heads, explains: "The thing that led to the Panthers was what we were seeing on television every day: attack dogs, fire hoses, bombings. Now we have emergence of voices within the community that say, we're not going to continue to turn the other cheek." One of the Panther 21, Joseph earned degrees and wrote plays in prison, going on to chair Graduate Film at Columbia University. So yeah, some things have changed. Cut to handheld footage of velvet-throated Stokely Carmichael with a microphone addressing a crowd: "You tell all the white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead. We want black power. We want black power." Wow, yeah, right on.
Another talking head evokes the Zeitgeist. "This was a revolutionary time, 50 countries gained their independence in the 50 years before the founding of the Black Panther Party. This is when people are getting drafted to go and fight in Vietnam. So if somebody comes and says, Well, if you're going to fight, why not fight right here in L.A. or in Oakland? That made a lot of sense." It didn't hurt that the leaders were extremely charismatic. A young Huey Newton is shown saying with boyish simplicity, "We use the black panther as our symbol because of the nature of a panther. A panther doesn't strike anyone, but if assailed upon, he'll back up first. But if the aggressor continues, then he'll strike out." Sounds reasonable.
Wearing the uniform Black Panther black beret over his mini-Afro and flashing dimples at a press scrum, Newton clearly enunciates the California Penal Code numbers then permitting a non-felon to openly carry a gun or rifle weapon on public property, and yes, he also cites the Second Amendment. The point wasn't aggression but accountability. Today there are dash-cams, then there were Huey and the brothers. Old and withered Ray Gaul of the Oakland Police appears to admit he found them "intimidating." Well, yeah. In response, white legislators decided to revise the penal code, so Huey and co-leader Bobby Seale took their guns to Sacramento, where then-governor Ronald Reagan was meeting with schoolchildren on the lawn. A scene unimaginable today. The rest is history.
Meticulously documenting the tragic arc traced by the Panthers, this necessary film echoes the rise and fall of other revolutionary groups, including the anti-neo-Nazi Red Faction Army in Germany. The beginning is benign, but "the authorities" never let go that easily, if at all, not if they can help it. In the U.S. today, there is no meaningful political solution to any of the multitudinous crises we face. There's not even any more rhetoric, only sound bites and shenanigans by the very rich who control the media. The Black Panthers whisks us back to an optimistic moment in the 60s when we still believed we could change the system. Power to the people, Baby.