2019/09/01 by George Derek Musgrove · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Race, History, and American Society #American Political and Social Dynamics #Communism, Protests, Social Movements
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/705022
openalex publication_date 2019/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/19
Previous articleNext article Free"There Is No New Black Panther Party": The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990sGeorge Derek MusgroveGeorge Derek MusgroveGeorge Derek Musgrove is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland Baltimore County Search for more articles by this author George Derek Musgrove is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland Baltimore CountyPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBlack people are an oppressed community who largely live in Third World conditions—that was true in the '60s and it's still true today—and the Panthers were a natural outgrowth of that fact. There was nothing startling about the formation of the party, and this country is ripe for the rise of another organization like it.1The Black Panther Collective was initiated in 1994 by former members of the Black Panther Party and represents a resurgence of interest in the Panther Party as a vehicle for revolutionary change.2It is best, then, to think of the African American freedom struggle in nonlinear terms, as something capable of reaching back in time … to earlier eras, to propel itself forward.3It was summer 1993 when they first saw them on 125th Street: kids selling T-shirts that read "Resurrect the Black Panther Party" next to an image of deceased party cofounder Huey Newton. "We found out who they were," recalled Shephard "Bro. Shep" McDaniel, a former member of the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party, and "pulled them in a back room." In the early 1990s, Black Power fashion was a lucrative cottage industry. African Americans were spending millions yearly on Kente-patterned fabric, cowry shell jewelry, and Malcolm X hats. If money was being made off the Panther name and imagery, the elder New York Panthers wanted it to go to the men and women who had paid the price to make it famous: their comrades in prison and exile. "Who gave you permission to wear this?," the former Panthers demanded. "Where is the money going?" Those Harlem youngsters were trying to make money, but the T-shirts also reflected a larger goal: they wanted to bring back the Black Panther Party.The Black Panther Party (BPP), arguably the most recognizable symbol of 1960s black militancy, had disbanded more than a decade before. After years of police harassment, disrupted lives, and broken dreams, few veteran Panthers wanted to bring it back. But the young people were persistent. The state of the black community was dire, they argued, with joblessness and working poverty stalking inner-city youth lucky enough to escape the crack and crime epidemics. Political elites in both parties vied to outdo each other in condemning them as criminals and welfare cheats. By force of will and strength of argument, the young people wore down their elders. In 1994, this intergenerational group of activists created the Black Panther Collective, an organization aiming to "continue the revolutionary legacy of the Black Panther Party." They were not alone. Between 1990 and 1998, black activists created eleven "Panther-like" groups, from Los Angeles to Madrid (fig. 1).4Figure 1. Members of the Black Panther Collective in Harlem, New York, 1996. Back row, left to right: Cyril "Bro. Bullwhip" Innis Jr., "Jason," Shephard "Bro. Shep" McDaniel (now known as Sadiki Ojore Olugbala), "Reggie," George Edwards, "Johnny," "Ray." Front row left to right: "Bebe," "Morning Star," two unidentified children, Ashanti Alston Omowale, "Sis. Dee." Picture reprinted courtesy of Shephard McDaniel.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointMost popular and scholarly studies of the Panther-like formations focus on the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) and its discontinuity with the BPP. In its oft-cited report, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center states that the group has "no connection" to the BPP and had "hijack[ed] … the Panther name and symbol." Backed up with quotes from prominent former Panthers, many scholars repeat this claim almost verbatim.5 However, Charles Jones, Clarence Lusane, and Mumia Abu-Jamal identify the NBPP as one group in a larger constellation of Panther-like organizations that were the "projections and legacies" of the Black Panther Party. This inquiry elaborates on their brief treatments of the subject by exploring why veterans of the Black Panther Party and a new generation of younger activists brought back the Panther in the 1990s, what they chose to bring back and what they left behind, how they dealt with the sticky subject of who 'owned' the Panther, and why the sole surviving Panther-like group with a national footprint today, the New Black Panther Party, evolved to be so different from the BPP.To tell this story, this essay necessarily explores the black freedom struggle in the post–civil rights period, particularly the rich political and cultural mobilizations of the 1980s and 1990s, an endeavor that historians are only beginning to undertake.6 The return of the Panther embodied a broader effort by many African Americans to bring back the Black Power Movement. Beginning in 1982 with a series of electoral insurgencies within the Democratic Party and running through the 1997 Million Woman March, African Americans engaged in what I call a "Black Power resurgence," in which they cast off their late 1970s integrationism and embraced Black Power symbols, political strategies, and cultural forms. The graying veterans of the Black Power Movement were critical to these mobilizations. Though many had remained active during the 1970s, their organizational efforts had atrophied as African Americans embraced the new possibilities of a desegregating society. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, many African Americans dusted off their imagery and flooded into (or recreated) their organizations to address new threats to black freedom.7Studying the Panther-like formations forces us to think more deeply not only about post–civil rights era black politics but also about how social movements interact with their own history and how that interaction takes place within history. Leaders of the resurgence, to quote Marx, "conjure[d] up into their service the spirits of the past, assume[d] their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time honored disguise and with such borrowed language." But they faced the dilemma of using Black Power symbols and ideas in conversation and in conflict with the aging activists who had made them famous. They operated, as Clarence Lang notes, "in the long shadow of the sixties," being measured against and negotiating their relationships with the real-world veterans of the Black Power Movement.8They also faced the difficulty of bringing back a revolutionary movement in a reactionary time. The Black Power Movement was influenced by decolonization abroad and revolt at home, pushing its politics leftward. The activists of the resurgence revisited these ideas during an era of triumphant conservatism. This affected the trajectory of the resurgence, transforming what began as a Left/liberal electoral insurgency into a cultural nationalist social movement. Unsatisfied with these options, a small contingent of African Americans embraced the black Left politics of the Panther. They struggled, however, to compete with the more popular cultural nationalism of the late resurgence. As many of the Panther-like groups declined in the late 1990s, adherents of former Nation of Islam (NOI) national spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad colonized the New Black Panther Party in Dallas. Because the NBPP used the same Panther symbols to advance what, under Muhammad's leadership, became a different politics, many BPP veterans mobilized to assert what they believed was the "true" nature of the Panther. They argued, in effect, that there was "no New Black Panther Party."This study is an effort to, in Rhonda Williams's words, trace the "roots, routes, and expressions" of Black Power politics in the period after the Black Power Movement. In so doing, I hope to displace the uncomplicated narratives of the post–civil rights period popular in discussions of the black freedom struggle today. Contrary to these claims, we can trace neither a direct upward line from the Civil Rights Movement to the election of Barack Obama nor a flat line between the Black Power Movement and Black Lives Matter.9The Rise, Fall, and Resurgence of the Panther, 1965–1995Any discussion of the Panther in the post–civil rights period must begin with the recognition that it was, at times, an organization, but just as often, as Jane Rhodes argues, it was a political grammar for revolutionary nationalism.10 As such, we must explore the history of the Panther beyond the organizational bounds of the Black Panther Party during the years 1966–80. In the 1990s the Panther returned, first as historical symbol and them as historical model for contemporary activism.The Panther first appeared in 1965 as the symbol of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an all-black, independent political party founded by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in rural Alabama. The fierce, powerful cat—and the model of all-black, pro-armed self-defense, grassroots activism that it represented—captured the imagination of young activists seeking a militant alternative to the nonviolent direct action of mainstream civil rights organizations. In 1966, activists from Oakland, New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit approached SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael about creating their own Black Panther parties. "We ain't got a patent," he responded. "If local conditions indicate, go for it." They did, and Panther organizations sprouted across urban America. In California alone, activists created twelve different groups, including the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP), founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland.11Though just a neighborhood organization in 1966, the BPP used innovative organizing techniques and media savvy to become the nation's best-known black radical organization. Most other Panther organizations soon affiliated or disbanded. By 1968 the party had ballooned to over 5,000 members in two dozen chapters across the United States and overseas. The BPP leadership struggled, however, to manage this growth. Individual chapters developed their own ideology and organizing agenda, sometimes at odds with party leadership. Even within chapters, cadres divided along lines of class, strategy, and ideology: college students or "SNCC types" struggled to work with "lumpen," black nationalists resisted the Central Committee's growing adherence to Marxism-Leninism, and underground and above-ground factions had different approaches to using violence as political strategy. (These divisions would reemerge in the 1990s when veteran cadres divided over how to respond to the Panther-like formations.) Facing intense police repression that exacerbated these divisions, the party retreated to Oakland in the mid-1970s to become an urban power broker. There it remained until 1980, when ongoing repression and Newton's drug use bankrupted the organization, forcing it to disband abruptly.12The BPP imploded in the midst of a burgeoning "urban crisis" and on the eve of the Reagan revolution. Though black Americans made significant economic gains in the 1960s, three recessions (1973–75, 1980, and 1981–82) and subsequent waves of deindustrialization hit black workers disproportionately hard. In 1975, black unemployment shot up to 15 percent and by 1983 reached a staggering 19.5 percent.13 Increasingly economically insecure themselves, many white Americans turned on their black fellow citizens, attacking the redistributive policies that had only begun to desegregate the society and elevating conservative elected officials intent on gutting social programs believed to serve the black poor.14Determined to protect the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, African Americans staged a Black Power resurgence. It began as a series of discreet campaigns against conservative Democrats and Reagan Republicans—for example, Alabama Black Belt voting rights activists' battles with white Democratic district attorneys intent on prosecuting them for voter fraud, Boston activist Mel King's effort to ride a "rainbow coalition" into city hall, the Congressional Black Caucus's publication of an alternative to the regressive Reagan budget.15 At mid-decade, national civil rights and black electoral operatives harnessed these local insurgencies into what historian Manning Marable has called a national "rainbow rebellion" against the forces of Reaganism. They staged a twentieth anniversary of the March on Washington to draw the coalition together, worked to pull the Democratic Party back to the left through the Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, forced the Reagan Administration to sever its ties with the white supremacist government of South Africa, and spearheaded the first successful effort to reject a Reagan judicial nominee (Jefferson Sessions of Alabama). This electoral revolt declined after Jackson's second run for the presidency in 1988, but local movements continued to score impressive victories.16Though black elected and civil rights leadership had checked the Reagan revolution, they could not address the urban crisis, and economic conditions continued to deteriorate in black communities nationwide. Reagan gutted aide to the poor and cities, and black unemployment remained well above 11 percent through the end of the decade. International cartels abetted by the US intelligence establishment created one of the few growth sectors available to poor black youth by generating a cocaine (later crack) epidemic. Drug dealers' subsequent battles for markets turned many poor and working-class African American communities into war zones, where rising rates of addiction, violence, and an oppressive police response rent the already tattered social fabric.17As African Americans searched for remedies to the turmoil, they generated a renewed interest in black culture and history. Black bookstores, Afrocentric schools, and "rites of passage" programs proliferated. Celebrations of Kwanzaa increased after a late 1970s decline. Thousands of African Americans trekked to Washington, DC—and later Atlanta, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and several other cities—for the National Council of Negro Women's Black Family Reunion. Hip hop artists like KRS-One, Public Enemy, and Tupac Shakur produced what S. Craig Watkins has called "sixties inspired hip hop nationalism," while X Clan, Brand Nubian, and like groups generated "Afrocentric hip hop nationalism." Afrocentric scholars like Francis Cress Welsing, Ben Jochannan, and Jawanza Kunjufu fashioned what one writer has called a "weaponized history" designed to counterbalance white supremacist narratives.18 All in all, more than half of African Americans embraced cultural nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Algernon Austin has noted, a rate far greater than that recorded during the late 1960s.19African Americans' embrace of cultural nationalism boosted the popularity of the reconstituted Nation of Islam. Marginal to black politics in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade NOI leader Louis Farrakhan had become perhaps the most popular black political figure in the nation, a position he leveraged to stage a "Million Man March and Day of Atonement" in 1995. Two years later, three relatively unknown activists succeeded in bringing half a million black women to Philadelphia for a Million Woman March using little more than computer bulletin boards and black talk radio.20 Despite the size of the crowds, both marches suffered from a focus on personal renewal and a lack of follow-through. When the economy recovered and the Clinton Administration, believing that it had domesticated black political insurgency, toned down its policy and verbal attacks on black interests, the energies black activists had channeled dissipated, bringing the resurgence to an end.21Though the resurgence had brought large numbers of Black Power Movement activists back into the national spotlight, former Panthers remained largely silent about their time ion the party during the 1980s. Many were repelled by Newton's drug addiction and authoritarian leadership style; for others the wounds of just-concluded battles were too fresh and investigators still too active. Notably, the only former Panther to pen a book about her time in the party during this period was Assata Shakur, whose exile in Cuba likely gave her the distance to reflect on her experiences. This all would change in 1989, when Newton was murdered outside a crack house in downtown Oakland.22With Newton dead, a broad array of former Panthers reissued or published memoirs, stimulating public discussion of the party and its legacy. Black Classic Press, run by former Baltimore chapter chairman Paul Coates, reissued George Jackson's Blood in My Eye in 1990 and Bobby Seale's Seize the Time in 1991. In 1992, former national chairwoman Elaine Brown published her autobiography, A Taste of Power, and former chief of staff David Hilliard followed with This Side of Glory in 1993. 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