BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION (2015)
Directed by Stanley
Nelson, Jr.
PBS Distribution, 115
minutes, Unrated.
* * **
If you’ve not yet seen this powerful documentary on the
Black Panthers, see it ASAP. If you wonder why you’d want to take a trip—and
not always a pleasant one—back in time, Google “Black Lives Matter” and you’ll
have your answer.
Director Stanley Nelson, Jr. isn’t always entirely on the
level, but his film is remarkably balanced in showing both the attractions and
weaknesses of the Black Panthers from a black point of view. This alone is a revelation.
As one old enough to recall, it often seemed that whites had one of two views
of the Black Panther Party (BPP): romantic or fearful; that is, those who
glorified the BPP and thought everything it did was justified, and those who
agreed with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that they were terrorists. Nelson
shows them as more complex and he—through former Panther William
Calhoun—reminds us of their “youthful vigor.” Like many 1960s social activists,
youthful Panthers were a sometimes volatile mix of idealism, impatience,
insight, and naiveté. It also had what Kathleen Cleaver called the “swagger” of
youth. Several commentators remarked upon the seductive coolness of Panthers in
their shades, leather jackets, and defiance. To fearful whites they were a
raised fist to the face of propriety and comfort—and that was the point! The
BPP actually formed first in Alabama, but it was in the streets of 1966 Oakland
where it took off. As Calhoun observed, there was no difference between how
African Americans were treated in Alabama vis-à-vis Oakland. The BPP was
originally called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, and those automatic
weapons they carried were there because they had, for too long, been gunned
down by racist cops for reasons roughly as good as those that led to Trayvon
Martin’s murder in 2012, or Eric Garner’s in 2014.
Nelson mines archival video and crosscuts it with recent
interviews, talking heads analysis, and voice-overs. He has some superb
footage, like Bobby Seale on a talk show cohosted by John Lennon and Yoko Ono,
old Soul Train episodes, and Ronald
Reagan at his tough-cowboy worst. Numerous movement figures discuss their involvement
in the organization and why they joined. The only reenactments are those
involving FBI head J. Edgar Hoover (Stu Richel) and that’s because Hoover’s role
was crucial in defining and declawing the BPP. Hoover was singularly obsessed
with preventing the rise of a “Black Messiah” and the sight of Panthers ringing
the California legislature carrying automatic weapons firmed his resolve to
crush them. (It also led the National Rifle Association to call for strict gun
control laws!) Huey Newton was railroaded on a manslaughter charge in 1968; though
public pressure forced his release, he was ultimately too volatile to be that
messiah. Ditto Eldridge Cleaver, who escaped prosecution by fleeing to Algeria.
Bobby Seale had his own legal woes, and Stokely Carmichael was never a good
fit. Soon, Hoover’s COINTELPRO spy network exacerbated the rift between Newton
and Cleaver, which split the BPP into irreconcilable factions, one that wanted
to emphasize revolution and the other community service. First, though, the most-promising
messiah, Fred Hampton, had to go, a task accomplished when Chicago police and
the FBI executed him in 1969. One of the more potent messages from the
documentary is that the BPP, for all its revolutionary rhetoric, contained more
victims than rebels. As was the case for most groups on Hoover’s watch list,
civil liberties and legal niceties seldom stood in the way of eliminating “subversives.”
Does Nelson romanticize the Panthers? Though he’s no
doe-eyed worshipper, the objective answer is yes. He assiduously avoids
discussing the fact that many of its leaders were doctrinaire communists, or
that the BPP did, on occasion, precipitate violence rather than simply react to
it. He argues that the Panthers were not anti-white, but ignores lots of
(admittedly heated) rhetoric that took that tone. In a related vein, the BPP’s
relationship to the broader New Left is not developed. Perhaps most glaring is
his gloss of BPP sexism. Let’s just say that women got a more respectful airing
in this film than most got in BPP meetings, and that you’d never guess that Elaine
Brown, who chaired the Panthers from 1974-77, was one of the biggest critics of
Panther sexism.
If Nelson sugarcoats a bit, he doesn’t shy from BPP
weaknesses such as the cults of personality it fostered, the egoism of Newton
and Cleaver, and the very idea that Panthers could win an armed struggle
against the federal government. For the most part, Nelson serves up a
first-rate history lesson. The BPP did not accomplish a revolution, but
remember that Nelson called it a “vanguard.” Black Lives Matter, Martin,
Garner, and others remind us that history’s final chapter is yet to be written.
Rob Weir
Postscript: The NRA’s response to armed Black Panthers shielded
by the Second Amendment spawned an idea for the gun control movement: give
every illegal immigrant a firearm!
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