Reviewing Fact and Fiction about The Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s

In honor of Black History Month, I discuss an art book about The Black Panther People’s Party, some novels about Black revolutionaries in the 1960s and 70s, and the film American Fiction.

Art

Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emery Douglas | Rizzoli | 2014 | Archive.org

The Black Panthers People Party was a political party of Marxist-Leninists fighting for Black power. Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emery Douglas examines art and illustrations curated from the Black Panther newspaper

The artist, Emery Douglas, explains how it all started with the pig. Huey Newton wanted a pig to represent the police so the drawing could be updated weekly with another abusive cop’s badge number. He tells the interviewer that it all compounded from there.

Douglas trained in advertising art at San Francisco City Colleges. And while he says his training was professional, he hardly takes any credit for his work. He insists the art was a collective culmination of the people and the party.

After founding in Oakland, CA, the Panthers openly carried assault rifles to protect their neighborhoods. The art reflects this, depicting armed militants waging counter-insurgency against an occupying force (The Pig).

Once it was illegal for Black men to carry assault rifles, the Panthers organized mutual aid, communities, political education, and electoral candidates, always rooted in material analysis. As the party expanded its mission, Douglas grew artistic techniques, experimenting with collage and illustration.

The art was overtly anti-capitalist. This collage juxtaposes the financial papers, corporate logos, and Gerald Ford to evoke the relationship between the market and imperialism.

Here’s Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon laughing as a nuke cracks the center of the world. A message confident that the carnage abroad perpetuated the oppression at home.

The Panther Party was aware of problems right as they started, problems that still lack solutions. Here are illustrations propagating against the prison industrial complex as a new type of slavery. These were made right at the dawn of private prisons in America. Fifty years later, these problems have only gotten worse.

The Party also saw the need for socialized medicine, free clinics, and healthcare for all. The Black Panthers saw guaranteed healthcare as necessary for the health of communities.

Bloated police budgets wasted money on helicopters in the 70s, just like today. Again, imperialism fuels domestic repression. What happens to helicopters after a war? They get purchased by American police departments.

The book gives an excellent introduction to the Panthers. When we consider the party’s propaganda, we see a different story than the one usually presented in media, like the novels considered in this post. It also shows how a revolutionary Marxist party can use propaganda to convince the masses of material inequality created by capitalism.

The party advocated for ending poverty and the draft, funding universal healthcare, and defending against the capitalist class. This edge often gets sanded off the Black Panthers’ story. They approached a rigorous class analysis of America’s class hierarchy and saw that capitalists exploit Black people at home and abroad through imperialism.

I loved this book, and you can check it out for free on Archive.org.

Books

The Spook Who Sat By The Door | Sam Greenlee | Allison & Busby | 1968

When spies retire from spy operations, they often write novels to intervene in domestic politics. It’s a frequent fascination on this blog. I liked this book, but it is quite a strange piece of media, almost a cursed artifact.

The author, Sam Greenlee, claims he was the first Black person hired by the US Foreign Service, then became a trained propagandist for the US Information Agency (USIA). Most reportage assumes this is not something…bad. I do! To be upfront, I think signing up to do regime change in another country is evil.

The University of Chicago Magazine explains how he became a spy.

While in Washington, DC, and looking for a government job to support him while he finished up his graduate thesis on Vladimir Lenin, he was recruited to a junior officer training program that led him to the US Information Agency. “A year later I was caught up in the Baghdad revolution,” Greenlee said, “and writing a thesis was the last thing on my mind.”

Another instance of humanity studies as a recruitment pool for regime change where the spies target scholars theorizing about overthrowing the state. This conference also sounds like chapter two of the novel, where Dan Freeman can outwit the competition because of his ability to present himself. He can read the commanding officer’s psychology and present himself precisely as they wish to see him.

During his years before writing in the 1950s, Greenlee facilitated regime change in Afghanistan, a reoccurring American foreign policy goal, and came into contact with Abdul Kharrim Kassim, explained in the Los Angeles Sentinel.

Greenlee doesn’t mention Kassim was overthrown by widely agreed CIA intervention and the help of a young Saddam Hussein, according to Radio Free Europe.

Thus, Greenlee is the basis for the novel’s protagonist, Dan Freeman, drawing on his experience as the token Black agency directors used to deny accusations of racism. The novel’s second chapter seemed inspired by these events, where Greenlee competes against Black professionals also being recruited for the CIA.

While I loathe praising a regime change propagandist, his novel is fun to read. Dan Freeman is the perfect mercenary. He uses the CIA to learn how to become a spy. With that knowledge, he retires and applies his pedigree toward work at “urban youth” charities in Chicago. He tells his funders he’s “helping Black youth.” And that might be true, but he’s doing that by teaching teenagers how to overthrow the state, guerrilla warfare tactics like rifle combat and small explosives, insurrection against the racist American government! And it seems to work. While the ending is ambiguous, Freeman succeeds.

In real life, the revolution did not happen.

In fact, through the use of criminal informants, law enforcement embedded themselves into activist organizations and criminal gangs. As Greenlee wrote this novel, the FBI and CIA infiltrated the Black Panthers People Party.

This novel became subsumed as another piece of propaganda in the “American race war” narrative of the late 60s. The FBI and CIA both promoted and censored the film, perhaps seeing it for a larger purpose.

Or, to put it another way, why was the novel “required reading” at the FBI academy, according to a quote in Our Weekly?

In perhaps the ultimate accolade, Greenlee had a chance meeting with Notre Dame star athlete and one of the first FBI agents of color, Aubrey Lewis, during which the pioneering Black “G-Man” revealed that “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” was required reading at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.

Greenlee had difficulty publishing the novel. After forty rejections, he published with a British house. But after achieving overseas publication, Dell Press, publisher of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, published an American hardcover and paperback edition.

Greenlee helped adapt the novel into a film during the height of the Hollywood Blaxploitation trend. Yet, since its release, the movie has been suppressed, and one still cannot buy a Blu-Ray.

Was some of the controversy cultivated by the CIA? In declassified CIA documents, there are positive reviews of the film in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Sentinel, all linked here. Why are these in the CIA’s archive? Does it imply the agency placed these stories at these outlets? Strangely, the two most prominent newspapers in the country chose to review an obscure novel about an imaginary Black militant armed insurrection in America.

Perhaps it was an interagency beef with the FBI? The story is J. Edgar Hoover’s worst nightmare. It’s also, more or less Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter, the race war that Black people would “rise up” and indiscriminately murder white people. Race war is an imagined narrative, a boogeyman federal agencies use to heighten tension and keep people divided.

The University of Chicago Magazine explains how the FBI carefully regulated screenings of this film,

Before long Greenlee and his collaborators began to notice theater exhibitors truncating their runs. The manager of the McVickers Theater in the Loop told Greenlee that FBI agents had visited him and encouraged him to pull the film. “They would sit the exhibitor down and gently tell him that this film was dangerous and could cause all kinds of difficulties,” Greenlee said. He also heard rumors that agents had pressured United Artists to stifle the film’s distribution. The Spook Who Sat by the Door had lived up to its name, in Greenlee’s view, spooking those in power in the government and the film industry. Soon the film all but vanished from public view.

The strangest thing I found in my research was an actor in the film. Greenlee even recruited a Chicago Black Panther Party member, David Lemieux, to play Pretty Willie, the white passing gangster.

Lemieux insists he was the second youngest Black Panther Party Chicago chapter member. He’s also a veteran of the Chicago Police Department. In 1982, the same year the Back Panther Party folded, David Lemieux joined the Chicago Police Department and remained a law enforcement officer for 23 years as a detective. He had 25 harassment allegations before retiring in 2008, and today, he takes home an annual $60,000 pension. It is a bizarre and incomprehensible life path for a Black Panther to become a cop, who also just so happens to act in a movie about a Black militant insurrection written by a Fed. Lemieux maintains a cultivated legacy, closely tying himself to the history of the Panthers.

Why would the CIA promote this novel/movie if the FBI wanted to censor it? My guess is it gives an example of a violent representation of what the Black Panthers were doing, ignoring all the positive messages the group presented. In a way, it’s perfect propaganda for racists and Birchers to say, “They made a forbidden movie that will incite race riots!”

Will this novel/film incite riots? Probably not. Like all spy novels, it is a power fantasy, but one of Black power. Despite its suspicious origins, I still enjoyed it. You can borrow a copy for free on Archive.org.

The Kenyatta Novels | Donald Goines | Kensington Publishing | 1974

The Kenyatta novels are also about a Black revolutionary but written from the opposite perspective. That is, Donald Goines was the opposite of a CIA agent. He wrote most of his novels on heroin, some of them in prison. His publishers exploited him, his talent remained unrecognized until he died (and arguably, it’s still not recognized), and his life was abruptly ended when he was murdered at 37.

Anyone who’s read Goines’ novels knows that they’re incredible. The novels are experienced, emotional tragedies of American existence in Detroit during the ’60s and ’70s. His first novel, Dopefiend, is a harrowing look at the symbiosis of addiction and drug dealing inspired by the author’s drug dependence. White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief, remains one of the best novels about the injustice inherent to America’s prison industrial complex.

I recently discovered his series character, Kenyatta, four novels about a Black revolutionary who attempts a domestic revolution. Goines named Kenyatta after the anti-colonialist revolutionary and Kenyan President, Jomo Kenyatta. And while the character captures the leader’s spirit, he does not succeed at overthrowing American repression.

Greenlee wrote from the experience of how to overthrow a state, while Goines puzzles his way through it. He realizes drugs are the key, the weapon the state uses to control urban populations.

Kenyatta is strictly against drug use and sale. In the second novel, Death List, he buys a list of every drug dealer in Detroit from an arms dealer and orders hits on the gangs and the mafia. After the FBI sends an army after him, he retreats to Los Angeles for a year, until Kenyatta’s Last Hit, when he does whatever he can to murder a federal drug supplier.

Kenyatta’s focus is admirable, even if it does get everyone around him killed. Goines was the subject of state repression, not the one carrying it out like Greenlee. He knew a Black American insurrection was impossible. America was built as a fortress to prevent a Black Revolution.

Goines is often said to have inspired gangster rap music and glorified violence. Although, I don’t think that’s true, as every novel I’ve read ends very tragically. The Kenyatta books are different. The author imagines an American Black revolutionary fighting for a better world through the metaphorical prison of addiction and poverty. Goines wrote all four of these novels in the year of his death, and I think they are the author at the top of his game. Finally, back in print, you can listen to all four on Hoopla.

Film

American Fiction | Cord Jefferson | Studio | 2023

While reading, I couldn’t help but think about American fiction. Monk, a Black professor, writes experimental post-modern fiction; he gets fed up with how the publishing industry represents Black people in American literature. His book can’t find a publisher because they imply he’s not Black enough. An “urban” novel, “We Lives in the Ghetto,” is a best seller and they want that.

When he has to pay for his mother’s nursing home, Monk gives it to them. He imagines a gangbanger named Stagg R. Leigh and writes “My Pafology” or “FUCK.” Publishers and entertainment executives portray Black men as violent criminals, gangsters, rappers, slaves, or clowns. So Monk gives them what they want. I notice how The Spook Who Sat By The Door and the work of Donald Goines fit into these troupes.

What’s subversive American Fiction is Monk’s entire interior life. Have you ever seen another movie about a Black writer struggling to publish a novel? Or a Black person dealing with the grief of loss? How about a Black person caring for an elderly parent? American publishers and movie studios deny Black artists the space to tell these stories. Percival Everett is astute to notice that representing all Black existence as trauma porn is diminishing, a subtle erasure (the title of the novel).

Maybe Hollywood is changing. Or perhaps the satire only works because things haven’t changed in American race (and class) relations since the novel’s 2001 publication or 1968.

Pile of the Week

This week’s pile has to go to Monk moving all of his books out of African American Interests to the General Fiction section in the film’s parody of Barnes and Noble.

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