Introduction
By the middle of the 1960s, young black people in the United States were growing weary of civil rights leaders telling them to turn the other cheek so that they could overcome someday. The inspiring eloquence of Martin Luther King, Jr. had been challenged, even ridiculed by the fiery message of Malcolm X (Jones 267).
For black youth, who increasingly found themselves trapped in overcrowded Northern urban ghettos, many of the old movement slogans and ideas, particularly non violence as a philosophy, were becoming obsolete.
In spite of the gains of the Southern black freedom movement, civil rights organizations and leaders, especially king, were slowly but surely becoming aware of growing dissatisfaction among blacks with the limitations of hard won legislation, especially its failure to ensure economic gains and tackle seemingly intractable forms of Southern and Northern racism. As a result, the call for Black Power became the order of the day.
Beginning in 1964 and continuing each summer through 1968, disillusionment, frustration, and economic disenfranchisement fueled urban rebellions in Black communities across the country. It was within this context that the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP) was formed and staked its claim for leadership of the black masses. In the year 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale officially founded the party in Oakland, California, one of many U.S. cities noted for its racists and repressive police force.
The main targets of their initial organizing efforts were disaffected urban black male youth, and their activities centered on addressing police brutality through armed self defense. Although the actual size of their constituency and membership is a subject of debate, the party had a significant impact on the consciousness and political developments of the late 1960s and early 1970s both nationally and international (Jones 267).
The issues raised by the Black Panther Party were salient for the black communities at the turn of twenty first century. Economic conditions for the majority of the black people had already declined and as a result, most blacks were in a very pathetic state. The decline was in a large measure as was as a consequence of structural adjustments in advanced capitalism in response to global competition and the shift from industrial to service based economies, all of which undermined the security and safety of workers globally.
The social consequences of these changes, including more sophisticated and insidious forms of racism and sexism, demand not only new responses, but also a closer investigation of and learning from past practices of collective organized resistance (Joseph 119).
Apparently, the current feelings of dissatisfaction with traditional black middle class leadership, especially among the young African Americans, are reminiscent of the sentiments that led to the revolutionary youth movement of the late 1960s in which Panthers played a critical role. Yet, in spite of renewed popular interest, the political ideology and inner workings of the BPP still remain hidden from those most likely to take up the mantle of resistance in this era.
The first two years of Black Panther Party’s development were fictionalized, romanticized, and popularized in the recent larger than life Hollywood film titled Panther, complete with a supporting cast that looks like a black entertainment television top forty count down.
Allegedly, then content of many contemporary popular sources influence our collective memory of the Panthers, including movies, hip hop, magazines and music, and mainstream newspapers, may in fact serve to reproduce rather than rectify mistakes and miscalculations of the past.
The goal of this essay is to provide a perspective on an often ignored aspect of history and legacy of the BPP, namely, its gender politics. The gender ideology of the BPP, both as formerly stated and as exemplified by organizational practice, was as critical to its daily functioning as was the party’s analysis of race and class dynamics in black communities.
Rather than the party’s gender politics bring secondary to the larger struggle against racism and capitalism, one may instead that the politics of gender were played out in most aspects of party activity and affected its ability to function as an effective political organization.
Black Panther and Gender Politics
In my view, gender is not to be understood as a discrete category unto itself, but one of several interacting factors such as race, class, color, age, and sexual orientation that together make up individual identities as well as the social terrain upon which our realities are experienced.
As noted by Jones (269), the category of gender was not as fully politicized and theorized during the late 1960s as it is today. One must, therefore, resist the temptation to impose current standards to measure the feminist, nationalist, revolutionary credentials of the BPP. Each of these social theories must be understood as being historically specifically. Clearly, what may constitute feminism or radicalism in one time period may not necessarily be recognized as such in another (Joseph 219).
The ideas about gender and gender roles were far from static within the BPP. As the party spread numerically and geographically, class and gender diversity within its ranks increased.
New members brought new and old ideas with them. Despite the initial self conscious creation by the leadership of a masculine pubic identity for the Panther, some women and men in the party challenged the characterization of the struggle as one solely for the redemption of black manhood and worked within its constraints to serve the interests of the entire community.
Somehow, the stories of the BPP can not be reduced to a monolithic party line on the woman question or a linear progression from an overtly and overwhelmingly sexist organization to a pro black feminist or womanist one. Instead, one must pay attention to internal conflict as well as agreement, overt as well as covert manifestations of this dialogue, change over time, diversity of individual experiences, and internal as well as external influences.
While it can justifiably be argued that the BPP at various points in its history was a male centered, male dominated organization, this point should not negate the important ideological and practical contributions of its female members or of the men who resisted chauvinistic and sexist tendencies.
Indeed, the diversity, both in terms of geography and personnel, of an organization whose existence spanned from Oakland to Algiers and from 1966 to 1982, can not be understood and appreciated through simplistic explanations or superficial head counts of official leadership roles. Undoubtedly, black women were critical players in the BPP, and the party overall had a significant impact on the political life of an entire generation.
Competing Gender Ideologies
The designation, conscious or otherwise, of specific gender based roles for women and men within the Black Panther Party began with the party’s inception. Obviously, this process did not happen in a vacuum. In addition to having their own ideas about the roles that men and women should play in the society and within the party, the founders and members were also influenced by competing ideologies and vice versa.
These competing ideologies could be either supportive of or opposed to the status quo of American society. Three such ideologies that bear mentioning because of their enormous impact on the period are cultural nationalism, feminism, and the black matriarchy or tangle of pathology thesis. These three ideological discourses illustrate historian Francis White’s contention that counter discourse struggles against both dominant and competing oppositional discourses.
In other words, the oppositional rhetoric of the BPP challenged and was challenged by other alternative as well as mainstream perspectives. There were, of course, many other important hegemonic and counterhegemonic theoretical constructs vying for prominence. These three are highlighted because of their impact on the consequences of the period in general and on the BPP specifically (Gore et al. 34)
One of the most popular proponents of black cultural nationalism, at least on the West Coast in the late 1960s, was the Los Angeles based US organization headed by Maulana Karenga. The US organization stressed the necessity for cultural awareness among blacks to be gained primarily through the revival of African traditions, whether real or invented, of dress, language, religion, and familial arrangements as well as the rejection of White supremacy.
The relationship between Karenga, the US organization, and the BPP changed over time just as the panthers’ own ideological positions changed (Ogbar 84). In the early years of the party, Karenga participated in meetings are rallies in support of the BPP. However, over time as their respective ideologies were clarified and contradictions exposed, the BPP became scathingly critical of the US organization.
Mainly, the party’s critique was based on the fact that Karenga’s group promoted cultural nationalism and black capitalism. Drawing on the theories of Frantz Fanon, the panthers repeatedly asserted that cultural pride was a necessary phase in the political development of black people. It, however, did not guarantee black liberation, nor did black skin necessarily identify on as an automatic ally.
The open conflict between the two organizations came to a head in the year 1969 when two prominent panthers were killed by US members in a shoot out at a black student union meeting. This incident sparked numerous articles and political cartoons in The Black Panther that criticized cultural nationalism in general and Karenga in particular.
There were even charges leveled that Karenga himself was on the payroll of the FBI and various other police and government agencies. One major component of the US rhetoric called for women’s submission to traditional male authority, and promoted the notion of complementary gender roles (Ogbar 113).
Conclusion
Based on the arguments presented in this paper, it is obvious that women had a big part to play in the advancement of the Black Panther movement. This is a stand that was, however, refuted by Karenga who regarded men highly and considered women as subordinates.
According to Karenga’s teachings, what makes a woman appealing is femininity and she can not be feminine without being submissive. A man has to be a leader and he has to be a man who bases his leadership on knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. There is no virtue in independence.
The only virtue is interdependence. The role of the woman is to inspire her man, educate their children and participate in social development. In general, male supremacy is said to be based on three things. These are tradition, acceptance, and reason. Equality is, therefore, regarded as false and the devil’s concept.
Works Cited
Gore, Dayo, Theoharis, Jeanne, & Woodard Komozi. Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, NYU Press, 2009. Print.
Jones, Charles. Black Panther Party Reconsidered: Reflections and Scholarship, Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998. Print.
Joseph, Peniel. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, New York, NY: CRC Press, 2006. Print.
Ogbar, Jeffrey. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2005. Print.