[News] The Black Panther Party and Black Anti-Fascism in the United States

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/the-black-panther-party-and-black-anti-fascism-in-the-united-states/ 



  The Black Panther Party and Black Anti-Fascism in the United States

January 26, 2017


        Today’s guest post comes to us from Robyn C. Spencer, author of
        the new book /The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and
        the Black Panther Party in Oakland
        <https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-revolution-has-come?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blog%20post&utm_content=b-BlackAntiFascism_Jan17>/.

Fascism has been thrust into the mainstream political vocabulary of the 
United States after the election of President Donald Trump on a platform 
grounded in xenophobia, corporate dominance, and right wing white 
nationalism.  After the election, search engines and online dictionaries 
reported a dramatic increase 
<http://college.usatoday.com/2016/11/14/troubling-words-looking-up-trump-merriam-webster/> 
in users seeking to define the term. News outlets from /Al Jazeera/ 
(“The Foul Stench of Fascism in the Air 
<http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/11/foul-stench-fascism-161110100340474.html>”) 
to /Forbes/ (“Yes, a Trump presidency would bring fascism to America 
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/05/31/yes-a-trump-presidency-would-bring-fascism-to-america/#4ba2503d2a75>”) 
  to the /Washington Post/  (“Donald Trump is actually a fascist 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-actually-a-fascist/2016/12/09/e193a2b6-bd77-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.96b8b4cc50b8>”) 
published articles analyzing how Trump fits into fascist paradigms. Most 
recently, /The Nation/ (“Anti-Fascists Will Fight Trump’s Fascism in the 
Streets 
<https://www.thenation.com/article/anti-fascist-activists-are-fighting-the-alt-right-in-the-streets/>”) 
chronicled the long history of anti-fascist organizing in Europe and the 
United States to inspire activists engaged in resistance at this 
political moment. Black history has been marginalized in this burgeoning 
contemporary discourse about fascism. Analyses of the US as fascist have 
a long history in the Black intellectual tradition. Black thinkers like 
Harry Hayward, Claudia Jones, George Jackson and Kuwasi Balagoon used 
fascism as an analytical framework 
<https://libcom.org/library/black-radical-tradition> to understand the 
rise of segregation in the South after Reconstruction; white populism at 
the turn of the 19^th century; land and labor struggles in the Black 
Belt South, and the evolution of capitalism in the 1970s.

The Black Panther Party played a prominent role in the modern history of 
Black anti-fascism. Panther leaders were deeply influenced by “The 
United Front Against Fascism,” a report by Georgi Dimitroff delivered at 
the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in July-August 
1935.

By 1969, the Panthers began to use fascism as a theoretical framework to 
critique US political economy. They defined fascism as “the power of 
finance capital” which “manifests itself not only as banks, trusts and 
monopolies but also as the human property of FINANCE CAPITAL – the 
avaricious businessman, the demagogic politician, and the racist pig 
cop.” The /Black Panther/ newspaper began to feature excerpts from 
Dimitroff’s writings and articles with titles such as “Fascist Pigs must 
withdraw their troops from our communities or face the wrath of the 
armed people,” “Students Struggle Against Fascism,” and “Medicine and 
Fascism.”  The Panthers advertised local showings of films like 
/Z/ about fascism in Greece and used their iconic artwork as a cultural 
tool to visually demonstrate anti-fascist resistance 
<http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/BPP_Newspapers/pdf/Vol_III_No7_1969.pdf>.

In July 1969 close to 5,000 activists from organizations like the Black 
Students Union, Communist Party USA, Los Siete de la Raza, Southern 
Christian Leadership Conference, Students for a Democratic Society, 
Third World Liberation Front, Young Lords, Young Patriots, Youth Against 
War and Fascism, and the Progressive Labor Party flocked to Oakland, 
California’s Municipal auditorium in response to the Black Panther 
Party’s call for allies to gather and strategize against fascist 
conditions in the United States.  This United Front Against Fascism 
<https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/207569> (UFAF) 
conference was an important moment in the history of the Black Freedom 
movement and the New Left. The Panthers hoped to create a “national 
force” with a “common revolutionary ideology and political program which 
answers the basic desires and needs of all people in fascist, 
capitalist, racist America.” At the opening session, Seale called for 
unity of action arguing that “we will not be free until Brown, Red, 
Yellow, Black, and all other peoples of color are unchained.”

The Black Panther Party, the International Liberation School, and the 
National Committees to Combat Fascism, “Poster for the National 
Conference for a United Front Against Fascism,” Student Digital Gallery, 
accessed January 23, 2017, 
https://digitalgallery.bgsu.edu/student/items/show/6582

On the first day of the UFAF Panther leaders, activist professors, 
movement lawyers, labor activists, radical politicians and others 
addressed the crowd in the large auditorium until midnight. The second 
day was organized into workshops on fascism and women, workers, 
students, political prisoners, political freedom, health and religion. 
Vigorous debates erupted between conference attendees over Marxist 
theory; the “male showmanship” of some speakers; the structure of the 
conference; and the implications of community control of the police. 
Some of the most provocative discourse at the UFAF came out of the 
women’s workshop where Panther women discussed male supremacy as a 
reflection of capitalism and argued that “there cannot be a successful 
struggle against Fascism unless there is a broad front and women are 
drawn into it. <http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520293281>” The 
role of state repression in stifling dissent was a central theme and 
many speakers touched on the issue of political prisoners as evidence of 
the operation of fascism in the United States.^The Panthers, under heavy 
infiltration and attack by the FBI’s counterintelligence program by this 
time, positioned combatting state violence as the core of anti-fascist 
organizing.

This orientation was evident on the last day of the conference which was 
devoted to the Panthers detailed plan to decentralize police forces 
nationwide. They proposed amending city charters to establish autonomous 
community based police departments for every city which would be 
accountable to local neighborhood police control councils comprised of 
15 elected community members.  They launched the National Committees to 
Combat Fascism (NCCF), a multiracial nationwide network, to organize for 
community control of the police.

After the conference inquiries about starting NCCF chapters flooded into 
Oakland from Salt Lake City, Utah; Albany, New York; Las Vegas, Nevada; 
Toledo, Ohio; Sunflower, Mississippi; Keatchie, Louisiana; Erie, 
Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; St. Louis, Missouri and Austin, Texas. 
The NCCFs offered a multiracial group of local activists around the 
country a new avenue of involvement in Black Power politics at time when 
the Panthers had launched purges and membership freezes to combat 
infiltration from COINTELPRO. By April 1970, the FBI recorded 18-22 
NCCFs around the country. The story of these NCCF chapters is best seen 
in local BPP history <http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1288>. Each 
chapter evolved differently. Some attracted activists of color and 
eventually dovetailed into de facto Panther chapters like in Louisiana 
and Detroit, and others remained a separate organization that served as 
a base for militant whites allies, like the Berkeley NCCF which rallied 
enough votes to put the Panther’s plan for community control of the 
police on the ballot 
<http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/our_stories/Chapter1/The_iccf.html>.

It is unclear to what extent the NCCFs fueled an increased engagement 
with fascism at the grassroots level and how the solidarity politics of 
the United Front evolved over time. The conference solidified the 
Panthers’ alliance with the Los Siete Defense Committee. The August 16, 
1969 issue of /The Black Panther/ included “Basta Ya,” a newsletter in 
Spanish that was produced by Los Siete supporters which contained 
updates on  the case, and announced community programs initiated by the 
Defense Committee, such as a Panther inspired Breakfast for Children 
Program in the Mission District in San Francisco. The rich potential of 
the Panthers efforts was derailed by COINTELPRO. Several FBI agents 
surveilled UFAF events. One agent, Thomas Edward Mosher, infiltrated the 
Panthers’ pre-conference planning structure, insinuating himself as a 
liaison between groups and attending meetings in leaders’ homes. Heavily 
infiltrated by FBI agents whose goal was to collect information, derail 
political action, foment violence and plant seeds of suspicion and 
decimated by raids and arrests of Panthers nationwide, the Panthers 
shifted gears. In response to critics inside and outside of the BPP 
about the majority white attendance at the UFAF, the Panthers sought to 
find common ground with Black people who could “relate to the social 
practice of 400 years of brutality and murder perpetrated on us by the 
fathers of fascism,” yet felt alienated from the Panthers’ lexicon. The 
history of how the Panthers organized against fascism locally and 
nationally in Panther chapters and NCCF offshoots is essential at this 
political moment but remains elusive in both history and memory.

In late January 2017, fascism remains in the top 1% of words searched in 
the US 
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/americans-worried-fascism-231852728.html> 
according to Merriam-Webster, leading one news article to opine that 
“Americans Worried About Fascism.” Yet the UFAF’s Wikipedia page 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Front_Against_Fascism> is two 
sentences long and does not even acknowledge that the Panthers were the 
main impetus behind the conference. The NCCFs don’t even have a 
Wikipedia page. The history of the UFAF demonstrates that discussions 
about fascism in the US are nothing new. It shifts the discussion of 
fascism away from an American exceptionalist terrain where the US is 
compared with Europe and government structures or despotic leaders are 
analyzed and instead demonstrates the value of unearthing manifestations 
of fascism in the lived experiences of Black people in the US. Perhaps 
most importantly, this brief glimpse into the UFAF’s history reveals the 
multiplicity of tactics that the Panthers used to combat fascism 
including visual culture, political education, and grassroots campaigns 
against state violence. If the growing resistance movement to Trump’s 
fascism is to realize its potential for societal transformation, it must 
draw from the deep well of Black anti-fascist resistance.

/To read more of Robyn Spencer’s work on the Black Panthers/,/pick up 
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-revolution-has-come>/The Revolution Has 
Come 
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-revolution-has-come?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blog%20post&utm_content=b-BlackAntiFascism_Jan17>/for 
30% off <https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-revolution-has-come> using 
coupon code *E16SPNCR*. You can read the book’s introduction here 
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6286-9_601.pdf?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blog%20post&utm_content=b-BlackAntiFascism_Jan17>./

-- 
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