Berkeley in 1969: Black Panthers, the FBI, and the Vietnam War

A review of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin III

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

When I moved to Berkeley in 1969, the Black Panther Party was in its heyday. Only three years earlier, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale had begun building the party around an image and a name they’d appropriated from other Black organizations then active in those turbulent years of the Vietnam War and exploding ghettoes. Yet before the decade of the 1970s was out, the Black Panther Party had all but disappeared. Black Against Empire, Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin’s excellent study of the Panthers and their politics, makes clear why and how they grew into such a force — and why the party collapsed so few years later.

The pivotal event in the history of the Black Panther Party was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Before that day, the Party was just one of hundreds of activist African-American organizations, most of them vanishingly small, in Black ghettoes and on university campuses all across the country. The Panthers were set apart from others by their distinctive black outfits, by carrying guns in public to defend themselves against police brutality, by their outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, and, perhaps most of all, by their willingness to encompass people of other ethnicities. As a result, they had grabbed headlines locally and were growing at a fast pace, attracting African-Americans in their late teens and twenties who were disillusioned by the timidity of their elders in the Civil Rights Movement — but the party’s activities were largely limited to Oakland, Berkeley, and nearby cities. However, when Rev. King was murdered, the Black Panther Party quickly emerged as the leading organization nationwide with the credibility and the activist ideology that could channel the fury and the hope of young African-Americans and attract alliances with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other largely non-Black radical organizations. The Party quickly began opening offices around the country — a total of 68 cities by 1970 — and for three years remained a powerful and ever-present force in the activist politics of the day.

Soon, however, the party’s rapid decline began in earnest. Bloom and Martin emphasize two key factors — the Panthers’ establishment enemies and the shrinking U.S. engagement in Vietnam under Richard Nixon — to which I would add a third: the explosive personality dynamics of the Panthers’ leaders themselves.

The Black Panther Party’s sworn enemies included the FBI, the Oakland police, and, later, police in Chicago and many other cities. J. Edgar Hoover personally led the FBI’s campaign against the Panthers, introducing informers and agents provocateur to trigger violence and sow dissent within their ranks. The Bureau’s efforts went so far as to hand out explosives, spread destructive rumors to undermine the marriages of Panther leaders, and arrange the assassination of key Panther activists. The Oakland police used violent and often illegal tactics, invading Panther homes and offices without search warrants and arresting individual Panthers on transparently trumped-up charges. The most egregious incident took place in Richard J. Daley’s Chicago, when police, acting on information from an informer, illegally burst into an apartment in the middle of the night and murdered Fred Hampton, the local chapter leader, sleeping in his bed. All told, police murdered dozens of Panther activists around the country.

Richard Nixon played a pivotal role, too. “Nixon was the one who rolled back the draft, wound down the war, and advanced affirmative action.” The cumulative effect of these strategic moves was to erode the foundation of the Panthers’ support both in the Black community and among white radicals (whose popularity among young people, it became clear, was largely grounded in fear of the draft). Once regarded not just by themselves but by other self-appointed revolutionary organizations as the vanguard of the revolution, the Panthers increasingly found themselves alone as liberals attacked them and the revolution on the nation’s campuses went the way of the draft. The party was officially dissolved in 1982.

So far as it goes, this analysis of the principal forces that undermined the Black Panther Party is right on target. However, I would argue that the personality dynamics of the party’s leadership played a significant role as well. Judging from my own observations as well as the evidence advanced in Black Against Empire, the three leading figures in the party were all brilliant men. It’s idle to speculate what roles they might have played in society had they been born white in middle-class families — but it’s clear that their life experiences as African-Americans growing up in America in the 1950s and 60s, not to mention the cruel frauds worked on them by FBI agents and informers during the late 1960s and early 70s, wreaked havoc on their mental health. Of the three, only Bobby Seale survived the Panther years whole and sane. Both Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver were, by all accounts, unhinged in the final years of their lives. So far as I’m concerned, no further proof is needed than the bitter feud that erupted between the two of them, which led to dangerous and sometimes violent splits within the Panther organization.

For anyone who lived through those unsettling times on the margins of the day’s events, Black Against Empire is illuminating. Though I crossed paths with a number of the individuals named in the book, and we had a great many mutual friends, I was quite unaware of the Panthers’ early history and of the party’s years of decline. If you have any interest in East Bay history, Berkeley politics, or African-American history and politics, you’ll find Black Against Empire essential reading.

Joshua Bloom, the principal author, is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UCLA. His collaborator, Waldo Martin, is a Professor of History at UC Berkeley specializing in African-American history.

Want to buy a better brain? Better think twice

A review of Amped, by Daniel H. Wilson

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Some of the very best science fiction explores the unintended consequences of breakthroughs in technology, and not those that are merely fanciful but advances that can be seen years ahead by observers of contemporary science. Amped is such a book.

Amped ventures into the near future — sometime around 2030, it seems — to depict American society in upheaval over the brain implants installed in half a million of its least fortunate citizens. The implants “amplify” the brains of the elderly and infirm, accident victims, and those with severe mental illness and mental retardation, allowing them to focus clearly and to make the most efficient use possible of their bodies. These “amps” are smarter, quicker, and stronger than the average bear — and the vast majority of Americans don’t like it one bit. They’re especially upset about the few amps who began with superior intelligence and outstanding physical abilities and have been turned into superbeings. Nobody likes a smartypants, it seems.

But this novel is not speculative nonfiction thinly disguised as fiction, with lame dialogue used to “explain” and cardboard characters created for the sole purpose of illustrating different points of view. Amped is, instead, a skillfully written novel of suspense that charges ahead with breakneck speed. In fact, the book can best be described as a thriller, with enough action, suspense, and plot twists to sate the desire of any Hollywood producer.

Amped’s author, Daniel H. Wilson, sports a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, which some consider the epicenter of the field. This is Wilson’s seventh book. His previous works include Robopocalypse (reviewed here) and How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

Robert Caro’s masterful portrait of Lyndon Johnson’s early days as President

A review of The Passage of Power, by Robert A. Caro

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

There are very few figures in history worthy of multi-volume biographies, much less one that runs to five books, the first four of which alone total nearly 3,600 pages. However, Robert Caro proves conclusively that his subject, President Lyndon Johnson, is fully deserving of the attention. One of the towering figures of the 20th Century, Johnson’s extraordinarily complex personality and the indelible imprint he left on American history literally require years of intensive research and thousands of pages to unravel.

It may be difficult for one who didn’t experience the 1960s as an adult to appreciate the consequential impact of Johnson’s career, both for good and for bad.

Before his ascension to the leadership of the U.S. Senate in 1953 — just five years after his first election to the body, and still in his first term — the Senate was effectively dysfunctional from the perspective of anyone who felt that action was needed to solve the country’s most pressing social and economic problems. During Johnson’s six years as Majority Leader (1955-61), his unrivaled legislative and political skills permitted him to change that dramatically, passing the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction nearly a century earlier and guiding the legislative process as smoothly as could ever be expected of a two-century-old institution hobbled by obscure rules designed to forestall any action.

Later, as President (1963-69), Johnson achieved victories almost universally deemed impossible when he acceded to the office upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy: “his great personal victory in the 1964 election, and his great victories for legislation that are the legislative embodiment of the liberal spirit in all its nobility. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Medicare and Medicaid; Head Start; Model Cities. Government’s hand to help people caught in ‘the tentacles of circumstance.'”

But Johnson’s tenure in the White House was equally dramatic in tragic ways as well. “‘We Shall Overcome’ were not the only words by which it will be remembered. ‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?'” was the other side of the coin. No one who experienced those times can possibly forget either of these emblematic statements.

The picture of Lyndon Johnson that emerges from the pages of this book is, on balance, one of greatness — but greatness alloyed with weaknesses and character flaws reminiscent of the tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides. Johnson, who grew up desperately poor, was venal to an extreme. He built a fortune over his decades in the Senate and the White House by breaking numerous laws and exercising the most heavy-handed of business tactics. His political conduct was equally heavy-handed, alternating between fawning respect for people whose support he craved and transparent scorn for others that sometimes took the form of deliberate public humiliation. Although Caro makes clear that he exercised admirable restraint during the months immediately following his swearing-in as President, Johnson typically treated his staff with extraordinary contempt, screaming at high volume, waving his arms, and subjecting them to insulting demands. He was, as Bobby Kennedy regarded him, a very “nasty man.”

The Passage of Power tells the story of Lyndon Johnson from his first explorations of a possible race for President in the mid-1950s until the middle of 1964, which saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act that confirmed his political genius. But the book focuses most tightly on the four days beginning November 22, 1963, when JFK was killed, “and the rest of the transition period — the period, forty-seven days, just short of seven weeks, between the moment . . .  when [Kennedy intimate] Ken O’Donnell said ‘He’s gone’ and the State of the Union speech on January 8, 1964” — a speech that. given its almost universally exuberant reception may well have been one of the greatest (and certainly one of the most consequential) orations in history.

If, a century from now, historians are still practicing their craft, and people are still reading books, The Passage of Power will stand out as a worthy contribution to the understanding of the contradictions in the American character.

The Passage of Power is the fourth of the five projected volumes of Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. To date, Caro has devoted thirty years of his life to the project, and his wife Ina, his principal researcher, nearly as much. He estimates that the fifth volume will require another two to three years to write.