Panthers: Black Men in Extremis

...In addition to the immediate principle of the Panthers' rights, a broader urgency underlies this concern, because if it becomes a relatively easy matter to bypass the "due process sieve" in dealing with the Panthers, then it becomes just as easy to do so in respect, say, to the whole black community in America, which occupies a position in relationship to police whim and power that ultimately is not any more advantageous than that occupied by the Panthers...

...the Assistant Attorney General, the Vice-President, the head of the FBI, and the chief of the Cleveland Fraternal Order of Police are convinced that the Panthers are "hoodlums," "criminals," "a threat to the internal security of the country," and should be "wiped out...

...From a Panther point of view, of course, what Hilliard and Cleaver speak of would constitute exceptionally powerful symbolic and revolutionary acts--even though one perceives in them a certain nostalgia for the gestures of Nat Turner and, in comparison with modern political revolution, the spectacular simplicities of slave revolt...

...It is the sort of thing which, especially by today's standards, is sufficient to drive even a sleeping car porter into the arms of the Black Panthers...

...One of the reasons the bulk of black men wouldn't take the chance of trying to be that way was, of course, an innate sense of the jeopardy of their relationship to racist American power...

...they are the vanguard movement of an armed black revolution in America...

...and even though one has a fair idea, in any case, of just how long the Panther movement would be able to survive the taking of McClellan's head, to say nothing of Nixon's...

...Well, the Panthers are it, now—in a political and psychological way they see themselves, in extremis, as the embodiment of all the passions of that generation...

...If one listens to the Panthers carefully, one discerns in their voices accents one hears only mutedly in the voices of most young black Americans—accents which, by and large, express a determination to set their own schedule and terms for black liberation, and an admiration for the style of a man like Adam Clayton Powell who—regardless of his liabilities as a representative black politician—seems able to walk through America and say and do what he damn well pleases...

...After all, a value that, at the very least, is equal to martyrdom, is the wisdom of surviving and getting your work done— assuming, in the case of the Panthers, that there is something worthwhile they would like to do, and that they have some idea of how to do it...

...Not only are they, to begin with, in the difficult position of being black, and in the immensely perilous position of, in some sense or other, acting black, but—as some of the young men who admire them say— they are also very bad: it is scarcely possible for any black man in America to act any blacker, or be more endangered...

...Where blacks were concerned, the Pullman car was a sort of America on wheels, because, for several decades, the porter service was the highest to which black men in any large numbers were allowed to aspire...

...After all, every act, however simple, that announces a certain conviction in the worth of PANTHERS: BLACK MEN IN EXTREMIS one's blackness is an act of freedom and defiance--a declaration of independence from the cultural intimidation and power of an American sensibility which, from the beginning, has rested largely upon the tastes, memories, prejudices, fears, political and numerical power of the white mainstream...

...Though he later cleared up and toned down the remark, there must have been more than a little substance to it, for in early January Cleaver, from his exile in Algeria, told Mike Wallace—in what he indicated to be a quite serious vein—that one of the Panther goals was to shoot their way into the Senate, take off the head of Senator McClellan, and shoot their way out again...

...It is hard to believe that the Panthers persist in such language simply because it may be one of the notions they have of how real revolutionaries are supposed to carry on, or simply because it is the only way they know of demonstrating the seriousness and integrity of their beliefs...

...it implies also that, as older people like to say, they do not talk with water in their mouths...

...But despite the unprecedented activities and advances of the more recent civil rights era, the promises of liberalism concerning the ultimate freedom of blacks have not, or not yet, come true...

...What differentiates the Panthers from other black and white radical groups of not entirely dissimilar persuasions is the unconscionable amount of political energy the Panthers have thought necessary to focus upon the police...

...the Panthers have killed some 5 policemen and the police have killed some 15 or 19 Panthers...

...The other thing to say is that, despite some of the language that comes out of JERVIS ANDERSON Washington and the precinct houses, despite, even, some of their styles of operation, the Panthers are not simply a bunch of neighborhood thugs but rather are one of the several current expressions of political radicalism in America...

...Considering some of the mythic regions of their minds in which the majority of white Americans react to the word "black"—to say nothing of blackness itself—chances are that whenever they appear frightened or frantic over terms like black power, black revolution, black beauty, or black culture— even black man—they are reacting more to the sound of the adjective than to the sense of the noun, more to the shadow than to the real act...

...And that, of course, as much of American history shows—from Paul Robeson to DuBois to Garvey to Malcolm X to Medgar Evers to Martin Luther King—seems to many black youths the way in which the more vigorous and irreverent protagonists of black aspiration in America always go...

...TO BORROW FROM THE JEWS—with somewhat different nuance—it's hard to be a black...

...They are eyeball to eyeball with white America, and, they feel, they will forfeit their position as black exemplars and lose the respect of their contemporaries if they so much as blink...

...It must surely have occurred to them by now that neither zeal nor integrity prevented other revolutionists in other times and places from testing at times the drift of the political wind, and recognizing those moments in the life of their struggle when it was more advantageous to their survival to pass the word surreptitiously rather than shout it from the PANTHERS: BLACK MEN IN EXTREMIS housetops...

...And yet, for the Panthers, this is such an excruciating responsibility...

...Over the years, the pleasure the average white passenger derived from the porter's activities was enhanced enormously by the fact that the porter was black...

...yet precisely this feeds the suspicion of a good many libertarians that some among the police may not only be jumping the gun in their haste to get at the Panthers, but also that they may consider this tactic justified on the grounds that the Panthers are not entitled to a fair shake through "the due process sieve of the law...

...and they mean to win the collective black American manhood even "if the earth must be leveled in the attempt...

...scores of Panthers are in prison either serving sentences or awaiting trial...

...those experiences that blacks have undergone as well as those visions they perceive of their rightful status in—or outside of—American history...

...nor does prosecuting political figures the way one prosecutes criminals make politics a crime...

...Ultimately it is a terrible waste...

...they are committed to driving the police (white and black pigs) out of the black communities...

...For almost a century, only a handful of black Americans took their chance of seizing their freedoms that way...

...This is, as we have suggested, quite foolish...

...W W HAT, THEN, IS IT that keeps the Panthers on their collision course...

...All of which only appears to strengthen the claim of certain black radicals that there is a difference of serious consequence between energies and values and attitudes that are "black" and those that are "Negro"—and worse, that white America not only perceives this difference well but also exploits it skilfully to its own comfort and advantage...

...and the way they have chosen to witness to that position promises them no victories except in martyrdom...

...Panther headquarters all over the country have been raided and shot up so frequently that leading liberal, libertarian, and civil rights spokesmen have formed an independent commission to inquire into their relations with the police...

...The very analysis the Panthers have made of the police in the first place suggests the certainty, almost, that they would act the way they have...

...There are some good reasons to believe that if the adjective, or the shadow, were "colored" or "Negro," their response would 'be considerably milder—and, in one or two instances, perhaps even friendly and helpful...

...Perhaps only one thing may be hazarded with a reasonable chance of it turning out to be right, that is to say, endorsed by those who lay down the line for black feeling: it is that acting black is a truthful expression of those vague intuitions into a dim past accumulated from one's antecedents...

...Nor can anyone know better than they know themselves where all of this could lead, how all of it could end...

...One assumes that there is something beyond martyrdom— some shred of social or political good—that the Panthers would like to achieve...

...But that is another story...

...As Gordon Haskell of the NYCLU said the other day, "Observers of American police behavior have long been aware that the one single type of criminal who has the least chance of survival through the due process sieve of the law is the actual `cop killer.' And this has been true, irrespective of the suspect's race, politics, religion or national origin...

...He's black...

...W W HAT IS ONE TO SAY to all this...

...Not even Nat Turner could have made it as far as he did, if he had operated the way the Panthers do...

...even though one suspects that the task of radically extending and redistributing social justice in America may require a force of inspirations that are broader in range than those that were sufficient to nourish plantation insurrection...

...One other thing is fairly certain: whatever acting black may entail in the day-to-day details of social or political living, it can, at any moment of any day or night in America, place one's life or general welfare in serious jeopardy...

...And yet, they go right on...

...As everyone knows by now because the Panthers have made it crystal-clear—their politics begin at the mouth of a gun...

...At least two obvious things...

...Even though, it must be said, none of these men made the naked sacrifice of themselves the Panthers seem to be making...

...the top Panther leadership has been decimated: killed, jailed, or driven into exile...

...And on one of the mornings after Selma, a young urban underclass woke up to find out that they really had nothing to lose—the first generation of its kind, as James Baldwin said, that America had produced...

...No one knows better than the Panthers themselves the enormous price they have had to pay for the bravado of their language and their stance...

...Last December David Hilliard —on whom has fallen the rhetorical duty, if not the mantle, of Eldridge Cleaver—was quoted as saying that they would "kill" Richard Nixon, and only the utter dangerousness of the declaration enabled one to conclude that he must merely have been indulging in metaphor...

...The result of all this, as everyone also knows by now—and perhaps could have predicted—is that the Panthers are locked in a bloody death struggle with the police in several large cities across America...

...The first is that, considering the color of the Panthers, considering the nature of their political mission, the irreverence of their stance, their policy toward the police, and the terminologies in which they couch their hatred and contempt for the police, it is hard to imagine anyone—including the Panthers themselves—being surprised at the way the police have behaved...

...And on this basis alone, it is worth observing that the methods of prevention and prosecution that are appropriate to crime are not always appropriate to politics...

...Obviously, this is not to applaud the police...

...And, as we know, it is in the nature of the arrogance and insecurity of this mainstream sensibility to punish any meaningful black act of independence with one form of American violence or another...

...For example: an American occupation that, almost from the beginning, came to be identified with the position of black men in the society was that of the Pullman sleeping car porter...

...those shades of feeling, taste, judgment, and outlook that were shaped partly above and partly below the surface of American culture...

...This position offers the Panthers no safety except, if they wish, in opting out...

...The eyes of all the young blacks are upon them...

...This brings us to the last point...

...A fair surmise is that the Panthers entertain an image of themselves as the paradigm of the black existence in America—particularly the deferred dream that existence has now bequeathed to a young, restless, energetic, resourceful, and somewhat literate urban underclass...

...Imagine, then, the situation of the Panthers...

...So the Panthers continue going right on, knowing that the boldness of their enterprise is its own reward, and that their triumph—in the eyes of their generation— lies in their martyrdom: murder, maiming, imprisonment, and exile...

...If it is hard to be black—meaning the word to apply to the overwhelming number of Americans of African descent—then there is probably nothing more dangerous in America than acting black, whatever (considering all the differences of cultural opinion that exist among some of the orthodoxies on the black Left) that presently entails...

...It comes as something of a surprise, then, to encounter a woman in one of James Alan McPherson's short stories (published recently in the collection, Hue and Cry), who objects strenuously to the presence of a porter in the vicinity of her sleeping compartment because, among other private reasons, "He's black...

...It is merely to say that those Panthers who are now frantically calling the country's attention to what the police are doing to them must be far more naive than the apparent nature of their enterprise in America led one to believe...

...But an equally compelling reason was that they were in the power of a liberal ideology that told them how much they had gained, how much they were gaining, and how much more they would gain by containing their strivings within the tempo of liberal agitation...

...This, given the limited options that have always been available to the black struggle—or the limited options of which it has availed itself—was not the worst thing black men could have done...

...In their case a part, at least, of being bad implies that they do not believe in concealing from their right hand what their left hand has done, is doing, or is about to do...

...and the American Civil Liberties Union has expressed the fear that there may be a conscious campaign underway to harass the Panthers out of existence...