At a time when gun-toting right wing groups advocating government overthrow pose as groups with educational and social benefits (and thus tax exempt), it’s a great time to look at a group who was always portrayed as militants advocating revolution but who actually had social benefits of feeding tens of thousands of children with free breakfasts, the Black Panthers.
Even now, the Panthers is a buzzword on Fox News (a buzz that screams: Alert! Alert!) at a time when African-American anger at police shootings is raising the level of protests and uprisings. And even as Black Lives Matter activists are falsely targeted as advocating violence against the police, there was a whole federal campaign against the Black Panthers in the 1960s, and the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover (again falsely) called it the No. 1 threat to the country.
Of course, it was because they were black panthers. But as Stanley Nelson’s vibrant film “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution,” premiering tonight on “Independent Lens” (PBS, 10 p.m., check local listings) points out, its leaders not only spoke out against injustice (not retaliation to any race); it was making progress in uniting other marginalized groups such as poor whites in an effort to change the system.
Nelson’s Panthers have all the style and sass of a great 60s action movie, in their berets, leather, sunglasses, and guns (their toting of which, they calmly pointed out, were perfectly legal under the second amendment). Kids were fed in neighborhood breakfasts and the demands were simple: decent housing and education, cessation of police harassment among them — demands so familiar and sadly enduring, the film seems much more timely than most history films from the 60s.
The Panthers had its leaders and stars, and it had its share of tragedies — particularly the murders in police raids meant precisely to fulfill the FBI edict to remove leaders.
That the organization faltered after the charade of the Chicago Seven trial, with one leader in exile (Eldridge Cleaver) and another just released from jail but messed up on drugs and ego (Huey Newton) the movement practically imploded.
Yet it takes a strong film during Black History Month like this one to give the organizers credit for standing up and demanding their rights, even as they fed kids not out of a desire to be tax exempt, but to give them a head start.
“I think that one of the calculations of the Panthers and I think was a brilliant calculation,” said Nelson at the TV Critics Association winter press tour last month, “was that a portion of the public would be afraid of the Panthers and would reject the Panthers, but there was another portion of the Panthers who would accept and gravitate to their message. And I think that was a brilliant strategy, and it worked for the Panthers.”
I asked about the comparison to today’s militant tea party groups and Jamal Joseph, a former Panther featured in the film, said “groups that are arming now, the white groups, and even the groups that armed then, are drawing lines and barriers around their own community and what they believed their own culture and values and interests were. Whereas, the Panthers talked about .. all power to the people.
“What does that mean? And we talked about the true disenfranchisement. Before people are talking about the 99 percent and the 1 percent, we were talking about social justice, poverty across all communities. And so people understood that we weren’t arming just to protect black folks and that the whole idea is that you could come by a Panther office on any given day and you’d see everybody in the office from all communities kind of participating, getting the papers, understanding what they could do in their communities. So that’s a big difference, and it’s the reason why an organization like the Panthers would be slammed and hammered and attacked by the FBI and groups like the Minutemen and the White Citizens’ Councils and certain factions of the Klan, nothing would happen to them. One is a real threat to change, changing the total system. The other is not.”
“Obviously there was a racial component to the Black Panthers,” says Nelson, whose previous films include “Freedom Riders” and “Freedom Summer.” “But I think that it’s very clear that part of what the 10 point program spells out and part of what the Panthers believed was that this was a class struggle, and we try to show that in the film over and over again.”