Black Against Empire by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.

The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.2, ISSUE#10, DEC/2013-FEB/2014

When Civil Rights practices proved incapable of redressing the grievances of young urban blacks in the late 1960’s, the Black Panthers armed themselves and promised to overcome poverty and oppression through revolution. They organized the rage of ghetto youth by confronting the police and resisted repression by winning the support of moderate black, antiwar, and international allies. These allies, like the Party, recognized the limited recourse available for real change through traditional political channels. But as blacks won greater electoral representation, government employment, affirmative action opportunities, as well as elite college and university access; the Vietnam War and military draft wound down; and the United States normalized relation with revolutionary governments abroad, it became impossible for the Panthers to continue advocating armed confrontation with the state and still maintain allied support. The Party, racked by external repression and internal fissures, quickly and disastrously unraveled.

There can be no doubt that individual and organizational contingencies – not least the personal flaws of Newton and Cleaver and the power struggle between them – contributed to the demise of the Black Panthers. But the Black Panther Party was not the only group to die out in the 1970’s. All revolutionary black organizations in the United States declined at the same time.

The revolutionary nationalist organizations drew on deep roots. Without the Universal Negro Improvement Association of the 1920’s, the Nation of Islam, or the Communist Party, it is hard to imagine the emergence of the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Republic of New Africa, or the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, let alone the Black Panther Party. And yet widespread mobilization along revolutionary black nationalist lines was unique to the late 1960’s. In every city with a significant black population, hundreds of young blacks took up arms and committed their lives to revolutionary struggle. That had never happened in the United States before. And it has not happened since.

To this day, small cadres in the United States dedicate their lives to a revolutionary vision. Not unlike the tenets of a religion, a secular revolutionary vision provides these communities with purpose and a moral compass. Some of these revolutionary communes publish periodicals, maintain websites, collectively feed and school their children, and share housing. But none wields the power to disrupt the status quo on a national scale. None is viewed as a serious threat by the federal government. And none today compares in scope or political influence to the Black Panther Party during its heyday.

The power the Black Panthers achieved grew out of their politics of armed self-defense. While they had little economic capital or institutionalized political power, they were able to forcibly assert their political agenda through their armed confrontations with the state. They obstructed the customary (and brutal) policing of black ghettos, creating a social crisis. Drawing broad legal, political and financial support from allies, the Party was difficult to repress. The Black Panthers’ capacity to sustain disruption legitimized their revolutionary vision and attracted members looking to make a real impact.

The Black Panther Party did not spring onto the historical stage fully formed; it grew in stages. Newton and Seale wove together their revolutionary vision from disparate strands. By standing up to police, they found they could organize the rage of young blacks fueled by brutal containment policing and persistent ghettoization. Through their tactic of deploying armed patrols of the police, they generated a local base of support in the Bay Area by May 1967. When the California Assembly outlawed these tactics, the Panthers reconceived themselves as a vanguard party and began advocating violent confrontation with the state. The Detroit and Newark rebellions revealed the depth of rage at ghetto conditions and showed that many young blacks were ready to pick up arms against the state to redress them. The Panthers had the pulse of the streets. When Newton was arrested on charges of killing a police officer in a late-night confrontation in October 1967, the call to Free Huey! became a national and eventually international cause. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the following spring, young people from around the country flooded the Black Panther Party with requests to open new chapters.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Justice Department, and the House Committee on Internal Security all saw the Black Panther Party as a serious threat to “internal security.” Starting in late 1968, the federal government, in coordination with local police departments throughout the country, waged a campaign of brutal repression against the Party.

In 1969, the Panthers made social service, notably feeding free breakfasts to children, the focus of their activities nationally. The Party’s programs met real needs, strengthened community support, and gave members meaningful work. They exposed the failures of the federal War on Poverty and burnished the public image of the Party. In the face of repression, allied support for the Panthers increased.

Nixon won the White House on his Law and Order platform, inaugurating the year of the most intense domestic repression of the Panthers. But the Party continued to grow in scope and influence. By 1970, it had opened offices in sixty-eight cities. That year, the New York Times published 1,217 articles on the Party, more than twice as many as in any other year.(1) The Party’s annual budget reached about $1.2 million(in 1970 dollars).(2) And circulation of the Party’s newspaper, the Black Panther, reached 150,000.(3)

The resonance of Panther practices was specific to the times. Many blacks believed conventional methods were insufficient to redress persistent exclusion from municipal hiring, decent education and political power. Inspired by civil rights victories, young blacks wanted to extend the Black Liberation Struggle to challenge black poverty and ghettoization. As Panthers, they could stand up to police brutality, economic exploitation, and political exclusion. As Panthers, they extended the struggle to break continuing patterns of racial submissiveness. Panthers would not kowtow to anyone, not even police. As a result, they inspired blacks’ self-esteem. In an impressive show of racial unity and pride, most black political organizations fiercely opposed the brutal repression of the Panthers. Even mainstream organizations like the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People mobilized against state repression of the Panthers.

Young men of every race, drafted to fight an unpopular war in Vietnam, found common purpose in the Panthers’ global anti-imperialism. The Panthers drew a line dividing the world in two. They argued that the oppression of draft resisters by the National Guard was the same as oppression of blacks by police and the same as the oppression of the Vietnamese by the marines. Forced to choose sides by the state, many young draftees chose the side of the oppressed. Alienated from the mainstream political leadership that had pursued the war despite popular opposition, many of their friends and family members supported their choice.

The Panthers helped foment a widespread radical challenge in the late 1960s. From riots in the street to the closing of campuses, the questioning of traditional gender and sexual roles, and widespread defiance of the draft, radicals destabilized established rule. The Democratic Party responded by seeking to reconsolidate its liberal base by pushing initiatives advocating an end to the war and championing black electoral representation. The Nixon administration responded by attempting to repress the radicals, on the one hand, and making broad concessions to moderates, on the other. Nixon was the one who rolled back the draft, wound down the war, and advanced affirmative action. In the 1970s, black electoral representation and government hiring ballooned. As a result of these changes, the Panthers had difficulty sustaining broad support among blacks and antiwar activists.

By 1970, the Panthers had reached the pinnacle of their influence. The national headquarters worked hard to maintain the flow of allied support. What was once a scrappy local organization was now a major international political force, constantly in the news, with chapters in almost every major city. The thousands of recruits who flocked to the Party in 1968 and 1969 did not all share the national leadership’s concern with Party discipline. The federal government infiltrated the Party with agent provocateurs, attempting to undermine Party discipline and alienate allies whenever it could. The countervailing pressures became even more difficult for the national Party leadership to manage as the Party grew in influence. The eroding bases of allied support made managing these pressures untenable.

The hard-core right wing was not the main threat to the Party. Rather concessions to blacks and opponents of the war reestablished the credibility of liberalism to key constituencies.(4) It was much easier for the parents of young adults to find Tom Wolfe’s parody of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Panther fund-raiser funny when they believed their children would not be drafted to die in Vietnam. When the government had pursued the war irrespective of the public will, killing countless young Americas, the Panthers’ concerns were not so far afield. But when the Democratic Party began fighting to end the war, the Nixon administration rolled back the draft and created affirmative action programs, the United States normalized relations with revolutionary governments abroad, and black electoral representation ballooned, the Party had to work harder to maintain allied support. Eventually, the politics of armed self-defense became impossible to sustain.

Without the politics of armed self-defense that had driven the explosive growth of the Black Panther Party for three short years, from 1968 to 1970, dedicated revolutionaries in the Party were left with a creed and a mission – to overthrow capitalism and advance self-governance in communities throughout the world – but they had no practical avenue to pursue those ends. Despite the heroism of their advocates, neither guerilla warfare nor social democratic practices provided a viable foundation for insurgent politics in the United States of the 1970s.

On the one hand, those who attempted to wage guerilla warfare were unrealistic politically. Unlike the Balck Panther Party leadership during the peak years, they did not hold a coherent grasp of the political realities and possibilities of the times, nor practical means to build power. It is not difficult to see why some turned to guerilla warfare in the 1970s. The Panthers had built power and organization by standing up to the state and challenging the legitimacy of police violence. While the Party stopped advocating armed challenge of the police in 1971, most Panthers still considered the state and police to be brutal, unjust and illegitimate oppressors. Many of them were still ready to die fighting for their liberation. As allies deserted the Panthers, the guerilla faction naively sought to advance its cause through armed struggle despite the slim chance of success. After several years of losses, most were either dead or in prison.

The social democratic practices of Elaine Brown and others were more realistic and more attuned to the political possibilities. In Oakland, the Panthers did succeed in using the political clout they had garnered in the Party’s heyday to build local electoral power. But the Party no longer had any practical basis for building a broad insurgent movement. Unlike the viable insurgent politics of the Party’s earlier days, the social democratic Panthers could deliver no consequence. They had limited institutionalized power and no longer wielded the capacity to disrupt on a large scale, so they advanced no practical basis for a national movement.

The vast literature on the Black Liberation Struggle in the postwar decades concentrates largely on the southern Civil Rights Movement. Our analysis is indebted to that literature as well as to more recent historical scholarship that enlarges both the geographic and temporal scope of analysis.(5) Thomas Sugrue in particular makes important advances, calling attention to the black insurgent mobilizations in the North and West, and to their longue duree.(6) This work, however, fails to analyze these mobilizations on their own terms, instead seeking to assimilate these black insurgencies to a civil rights perspective by presenting the range of black insurgent mobilizations as claims for black citizenship, appeals to the state – for full and equal participation. This perspective obscures the revolutionary character and radical economic focus of the Black Panther Party.

A newer generation of Black Power scholars, most compellingly Peniel Joseph, challenges this conflation by distinguishing Black Power activism and thought from civil rights activism and thought.(7) Joseph argues that the Black Power movement, perhaps epitomized by the Black Panther Party, was distinct in crucial ways from, ran parallel to, and at times intersected with the Civil Rights Movement throughout the twentieth century.(8) We agree the Black Power – and the revolutionary black politics of the Panthers in particular – followed a distinct and coherent logic and in fundamental ways is best understood as separate from the Civil Rights Movement. Ideologically and practically, revolutionary black nationalism has long ties to previous mobilizations.

Ultimately, however, both of these perspectives fail to answer important political questions. Why did revolutionary black nationalism – and Black Pwer mobilization generally – become so influential in the late 1960s, and why did it unravel so disastrously in the 1970s? The Sugrue approach bypasses this question by conflating radical Black power mobilization with the Civil Rights Movement. While Joseph’s important corrective acknowledges that Black Power was different in significant ways from civil rights activism, by emphasizing the roots and longue duree of Black Power, his approach obscures and does not adequately explain why Black Power as exemplified by the Black Panther Party became the center of Black politics in the late 1960s, influencing the world around it in ways it never had before and hasn’t since.

Our analysis shows that, even as Jim Crow was defeated and civil rights practices lost their political salience, the revolutionary practices of the Black Panther Party tapped into the rage of young blacks. The Panthers provided an insurgent channel for influence, drawing broad support from blacks, opponents of the war, and international revolutionary movements. The ideological and practical roots of Black Power politics had long been present on the political stage. But to the extent that Panther-like practices may have appealed to young blacks throughout the twentieth century, Panther politics were impractical both before and after the late 1960s. Panther practices could receive broad political support only while the majority of Americans opposed to the Vietnam War and draft had no recourse through institutionalized political channels and while most blacks continued to face economic and political exclusion.

The history of the Black Panther Party holds important implications for two more general theoretical debates. First, this history suggests a way out of dead-end debates about how the severity of repression affects social movement mobilization. One common perspective, supported by rich scholarly literature covering various times and places, is that “repression breeds resistance”: When authorities repress insurgency, the repression encourages further resistance.(9) But others pose the opposite argument, with equally rich scholarly support, suggesting that repression discourages and diminishes insurgency.(10) A classic sociological position that seeks to reconcile this apparent contradiction is that the relationship between repression and insurgency is shaped like an “inverse U”: When repression is light, people tend to cooperate with established political authorities and take less disruptive action; when repression is heavy, the costs of insurgency are too large, causing people to shy away from radical acts. But, according to this view, it is when authorities are moderately repressive – too repressive to steer dissenters toward institutional channels of political participation but not repressive enough to quell dissent – that people widely mobilize disruptive challenges to authority.(11)

The history of the Panthers defies the basic premise of this debate: that the level of repression independently explains the level of resistance. The Black Panther Party faced heavy federally coordinated state repression at least from 1968 through 1971. Our analysis shows that for the first two years, from 1968 through 1969, brutal state repression helped legitimate the Panthers in the eyes of many supporters and fostered increased mobilization.(12) Taken alone, this finding would appear to support the idea that repression breeds resistance. But during the second two years, 1970 and 1971, the dynamic gradually shifted. The Panthers maintained the same types of practices they had embraced in the previous two years, and the state maintained a similar level and type of repressive practices. But in this later period, as the political context shifted – increasingly the difficulty of winning support for the Panthers’ revolutionary position – repression made the core Panther practices difficult to sustain and quickly led to the Party’s demise.

The level of repression did not independently affect the level of mobilization in a consistent way across the four years. Instead, the level of repression interacted with the political reception of insurgent practices to affect the level of mobilization. In other words, potential allies’ political reception of Panther insurgent practices determined the effects of repression on mobilization. During the time Panther practices were well received by potential allies, in 1968 and 1969, repressive measures fostered further mobilization. But as these allies became less open to the Panthers’ revolutionary position in 1970 and 1971, repressive actions by the state became increasingly effective.(13)

Our analysis also suggests a way forward in stalled debates of the political opportunity thesis that broad structural opportunities, by conferring political advantage on a social group, generate mobilization. The political opportunity thesis has made a crucial contribution to the sociological study of social movements in recent decades by emphasizing the importance of political context for explaining mobilization.(14) But attention to political context in isolation does not provide much explanatory power in the case of the Black Panther Party. From the classic political opportunity perspective, the late 1960s were the period in which the civil rights movement declined and thus a period of contracting political opportunities for blacks generally. That perspective makes it hard to understand why, even as the insurgent Civil Rights Movement fell apart, revolutionary black nationalism developed and thrived.

Recovering lost insights from early political process writing by Doug McAdam and Aldon Morris about the importance of tactical innovation for explaining mobilization, we designed this study to focus on the development of Panther political practice and influence.(15) We have found that political context, rather than independently determining the extent of mobilization, determines the efficacy of particular insurgent practices. The stepwise history of the Black Panbther Party’s mobilization and influence demonstrates that the relative effectiveness of its practices depended on the political context. Panther insurgent practices – specifically armed self-defense – generated both influence and following when they were both disruptive and difficult to repress. But the Panthers became much more repressible when the political context shifted, making it harder for the Party to practice armed self-defense and sustain allied support. This history suggests that insurgent movements proliferate when activists develop practices that simultaneously garner leverage by threatening the interests of powerful authorities and draw allied support in resistance to repression. Conversely, when concessions undermine the support of potential allies for those practices, the insurgency dies out.(16)

There is no movement like the Panthers in the United States today because the political context is so different from that in the late 1960s. This is not to say that the core grievances around which the Panthers mobilized have disappeared. To the contrary, large segments of the black population continue to live impoverished in ghettos, subject to containment policing, and send more sons to prison than to college. Many young people in these neighborhoods might well embrace a revolutionary political practice today if it could be sustained. But crucially, the conditions for rallying potential allies have changed.

The black middle class has greatly expanded since the Panthers’ heyday. Its sons and daughters have access to the nation’s elite colleges and universities. Black public sector employment has expanded dramatically: city governments and municipal police and fire departments hire many blacks. Blacks have won and institutionalized electoral power both locally and nationally. Most blacks in the United States today, especially the black middle class, believe their grievances can be redressed through traditional political and economic channels. Most view insurgency as no longer necessary and do not feel threatened by state repression of insurgent challengers.

No less important, the United States has no military draft today, and no draft resistance. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may be unpopular, but few people will risk years in jail to oppose them. No New Left exists today to embrace a Black Panther Party as its vanguard. Internationally, the struggles for national independence have almost all been won: the vast majority of the world’s population is no longer colonized, if not yet fully free. Today, with few potential allies for a revolutionary black organization, the state could easily repress any Panther-like organization, no matter how disciplined and organized.

The broader question is why no revolutionary movement of any kind exists in the United States today. To untangle this question, we need to consider what makes a movement revolutionary. Here, the writings of the Italian theorist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci are instructive: “A theory is ‘revolutionary’ precisely to the extent that it is an element of conscious separation and distinction into two camps and is a peak inaccessible to the enemy camp.”(17) In other words, a revolutionary splits the world in two. It says the people in power and the institutions they manage are the cause of oppression and injustice. A revolutionary theory purports to explain how to overcome those iniquities. It claims that oppression is inherent in the dominant social institutions. Further, it asserts that nothing can be done from within the dominant social institutions to rectify the problem – that the dominant institutions must be overthrown. In this sense, any revolutionary theory consciously separates the world into two camps: those who seek to reproduce the existing social arrangements and those who seek to overthrow them.

In this first, ideational sense, many insurgent revolutionary movements do exist in the United States today, albeit on a very small scale. From sectarian socialist groups to nationalist separatists, these revolutionary minimovements have two things in common: a theory that calls for destroying the existing social world and advances an alternative trajectory; cadres of members who have dedicated their lives to advance this alternative, see the revolutionary community as their moral reference point, and see themselves as categorically different from everyone who does not.

More broadly, in Gramsci’s view, a movement is revolutionary politically to the extent that it poses an effective challenge. He suggests that such a revolutionary movement must first be creative rather than arbitrary. It must seize the political imagination and offer credible proposals to address the grievances of large segments of the population, creating a “concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will.”(18) But when a movement succeeds in this task, the dominant political coalition usually defeats the challenge through the twin means of repression and concession. The ruling alliance does not simply crush political challenges directly through the coercive power of the state but makes concessions that reconsolidate its political power without undermining its basic interests.(19) A revolutionary movement becomes significant politically only when it is able to win the loyalty of allies, articulating a broader insurgency.(20)

In this second, political sense, there are no revolutionary movements in the United States today. The country has seen moments of large-scale popular mobilization, and some of these recent movements, such as the mass mobilizations for immigrant rights in 2006, have been “creative,” seizing the imagination of large segments of the population. One would think that the 2008 housing collapse, economic recession, subsequent insolvency of local governments, and bailout of the wealthy institutions and individuals most responsible for creating the financial crisis at the expense of almost everyone else provide fertile conditions for a broad insurgent politics. But as of this writing, it is an open question whether a broad, let alone revolutionary, challenge will develop. Recent movements have not sustained insurgency, advanced a revolutionary vision, or articulated a broader alliance to challenge established political power.

In our assessment, for the years 1968 to 1970, the Black Panther Party was revolutionary in Gramsci’s sense, both ideationally and politically. Ideationally, young Panthers dedicated their lives to the revolution because – as part of a global revolution against empire – they believed that they could transform the world. The revolutionary vision of the Party became the moral cent of the Panther community. To stand on the sidelines or die an enemy of the Panther revolution was to be “lighter than a feather” – to be on the wrong side of history. To die for the Panther revolution was to be “heavier than a mountain” – to be the vanguard of the future.(21) The Black Panther Party stood out from countless politically insurgent revolutionary cadres because it was creative politically. For a few years, the Party seized the political imagination of a large constituency of young black people. Even more, it articulated this revolutionary movement of young blacks to a broader oppositional movement, drawing allied support from more moderate blacks and opponents of the Vietnam War of every race.

When expanding political and economic opportunities for blacks and the growing consensus among mainstream politicians to wind down the Vietnam War opened institutionalized channels for redressing the interests of key Panther supporters, Panther practices lost their political salience. When the political foundation of the Black Panther Party collapsed in early 1971, the practices that had won the Panthers so much influence became futile. No Panther faction was able to effectively reinvent itself.

Even as concessions siphoned off allied support, the state sought to vilify the Party, driving a wedge between Panthers and their allies. Ultimately, nothing did more to vilify the Panthers than the widely publicized evidence of intraorganizational violence and corruption as the Party unraveled. Any attempt to replicate the earlier Panther revolutionary nationalism was now vulnerable to provocation and vilification. The political “system” had been inoculated against the Panthers’ politics.(22)

While minimovements with revolutionary ideologies abound, there is no politically significant revolutionary movement in the United States today because no cadre of revolutionaries has developed ideas and practices that credibly advance the interests of a large segment of the people. Members of revolutionary sects can hawk their newspapers and proselytize on college campuses until they are blue in the face, but they remain politically irrelevant. Islamist insurgencies, with deep political roots abroad, are politically significant, but they lack potential constituencies in the United States. And ironically, at least in the terrorist variant, they tend to reinforce rather than challenge state power domestically because their practices threaten – rather than build common cause with – alienated constituencies within the United States.

No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foothold in the United States again until a group a revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease. This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party and may not happen again for a very long time.

Excerpted from Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire, (Univ. of California Press, 2013) pp.390-401.

(1) – In 1970 the New York Times published 1, 217 articles containing the text “Black Panther” or “Black Panthers,” more than three per day on average, and more than twice the number published any other year, according to a search on ProQuest Historical Newspapers, October 27, 2010. The second highest number of mentions was in 1971, with 553 stories, and then 1969, with 488 stories. Detailed reading of a systematic sampling of these articles shows that they contain little noise: almost all do , this discuss the Black Panther Party. But many mention the Party only in passing. A more conservative estimate of coverage, based on a narrower search for articles in which “Black Panther” or “Black Panther Party” appear in the citation or abstract, yields 421 articles for 1970. Using either measure, the proportions are robust. In 1970, the Panthers received more than double the coverage they received in any other year. Moreover, this level of coverage devoted to leading civil rights organizations during their height, such as the Southern Christian Leadership conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality.

(2) - This budget figure is a conservative estimate based on data in the House Committee on Internal Security report Gun-Barrel Politics: The Black Panther Party, 1966-1971, part 470, 92nd Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 84-87.

(3) - Interagency Committee on Intelligence (Ad Hoc), Special Report[Huston Report], June 1970, 9-10.

(4) - Some have suggested that revolution was “in the air” in the United States during the late 1960s and that it ceased to hold sway in the 1970s. While we generally agree, we do not especially favor the subtler implications of this formulation. Much like the “structuralism” of the political opportunity thesis, this view treats the question of whether revolution was “in the air” as exogenous to movement dynamics. In our view, the advent of effective revolutionary political practices itself makes revolutionary ideology more broadly appealing, putting revolution “in the air.” Thus, while the broad political climate has a strong effect on the reception of a movement’s political practices, it is itself contingent, and highly susceptible to change, often driven by the practices of movement activists themselves.

(5) - See for example the work of Martha Biondi, Jack Dougherty, Douglas Flamming, Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Patrick Jones, Matthew Lassiter, Annelise Orleck, Brian Purnell, and Clarence Taylor.

(6) - Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).

(7) - Among these scholars of Black Power are Matthew Countryman, Judson Jeffries, Jeffery Ogbar, Kimberly Springer, Noliwe Rooks, Rhonda Williams, Yohuru Williams, and Komozi Woodard.

(8) - Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).

(9) - See Harry Eckstein, “On the Etiology of Internal Wars”, History and Theory 4 no.2 (1965): 133-63; Ted Robert Gurr, “A Comparative Study of Civil Strife,” The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Hugh D. Graham and Ted R. Gurr (New York: F.A. Praeger, 1969), 572-632; or for a literary perspective, John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath.

(10) - See, for example, Douglas A. Hibbs, Mass Political Violence: A Cross-National Causal Analysis(New York: Wiley, 1973); Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).

(11) - Ted Gurr writes, “The threat and severity of coercive violence used by a regime increases the anger of dissidents, thereby intensifying their opposition, up to some high threshold of government violence beyond which anger gives way to fear”; Why Men Rebel(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 238. See also Douglas P. Bwy, “Political Instablity in Latin America: The Cross-Cultural Test of a Causal Model,” Latin American Research Review 3 no.2 (Summer 1968): 17-66.

(12) - The periodization is, of course, necessarily imprecise. The state’s repressive actions did not fail through December 1969 and the suddenly all work in January 1970. The political context shifted gradually during the period. The student mobilizations in May 1970 are a clear example of the limits of defining 1970 and 1971 as year in which the Panthers’ anti-imperialist politics lost its resilience, yet they are consistent with the general analysis. The student anti-war movement had been gradually moderating by the fall of 1969, and it continued to do so into 1970. But the hypocrisy of Nixon’s Cambodia invasion after his promises of Vietnamization and the killing of students at Kent State in early May shattered the liberal reverie. The broad national student mobilization in insurgent anti-imperialist terms showed how fragile the moderation of the anti-war movement was and how important the full repeal of the draft and ending of the war would be to put the war protests to rest.

(13) - More recent scholarship has also sought to transcend the narrow debate about the relationship between repression and mobilization. Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol McClurg Mueller, eds., Repression and Mobilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005) seek to further explore the divergence of outcomes, building on the classic works, introducing new variables such as the quality of repression, and accounting for lag effects. In a still-influential article, Mark Irving Lichbach argues that a rational actor model that accounts for the relative return to dissent can explain when repression deters mobilization and whit encourages it. See Lichbach, “Deterrence or Escalation?: The Puzzle of Aggregate Studies of Repression and Dissent,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 31, no.2 (June 1987): 266-97. But Lichbach’s model makes a number of simplifying assumptions that limit its ability to account for the Panther case. Most importantly, Lichbach does not account for the effects of the broader political context on efficacy. In our view, the receptivity of potential allies to a particular set of insurgent practices is crucial in determining the effects of repression.

(14) - See David S. Meyer, “Protest and Political Opportunities,” Annual Review of Sociology 30 (2004): 125-45.

(15) - Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984).

(16) - For a full theorization, see Joshua Bloom, “Pathways of Insurgency: Black Liberation Struggle and the Second Reconstruction in the United States, 1945-1975,” unpublished manuscript.

(17) - Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 462.

(18) - Ibid., 125-26.

(19) - “The Modern Prince,” in ibid., especially 180-82.

(20) - Winning allies allows the movement to make strides in what Gramsci calls the “War of Position”; see “The State and Civil Society,” in ibid, 206-76.

(21) - Huey P. Newton, “Statement by Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, Supreme Servant of the People at the Chicago Illinois Coliseum, February 21, 1971,” Black Panther, April 10, 1971, 2. Note that the revolutionary ideology of the Party persisted beyond its wide political influence. At the time Newton made this statement, the Party was beginning to collapse.

(22) - Our findings generally support the Michelsian “Iron Law of Oligarchy” argument advanced by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward in Poor People’s Movements: Why they Succeed, How they Fail (New York: Vintage, 1977), but with an important difference. Piven and Cloward argue that there is an inherent tension between the power of insurgency to advance poor people’s interest and the tendency of organizations that claim to champion these interests to eschew disruption and become beholden to the elites who fund them. This tension was evident in the conflict between the increasing impetus for the national Panther organization to maintain its reputation among potential allies and the antiauthoritarianism of many Panther members. Our argument departs somewhat from Piven and Cloward’s, however, in our assessment of the effect of social structure on insurgency. Piven and Cloward argue that social dislocation drives the emergence of insurgency. Insurgency, they write, is “always short-lived,” and “those brief periods in which people are roused to indignation” soon subside as the social disclocation resolves (xxi). This perspective, like the political opportunity thesis, gives undue weight to the independent role of structure and psychosocial discontent in determining mobilization. We revise Piven and Cloward’s “Iron Law” argument by putting insurgent practices at the center. Structural dislocations may generate discontent and destabilize existing roles and relations, but they do not independently generate insurgency. Insurgency requires insurgent practices that effectively leverage political cleavages. Our analysis of Black Panther history shows why insurgency is short-lived. Concessions ameliorate the political divisions that feed the insurgency, undermining support for insurgent practices. Whereas the concessions to the Civil Rights Movement directly redressed the targets of insurgency and made civil rights organizations part of the establishment, the “Iron Law of Oligarchy” played out differently with the Panthers. Concessions redressed the interests of Panther allies rather than directly addressing those of the Panthers themselves. The costs of appeasing allies thus made continued insurgency impossible, and the national organization defanged itself, even as some insurgent members threw caution to the wind and fought until they were killed or jailed. We don’t believe that indignation simply waned nor that the social structure restabilized so forcefully as to incapacitate all insurgency. To the contrary, in many historical moments, like the late 1960s United States, when revolutionary black nationalism erupted even as the insurgent Civil Rights Movement declined, new forms of insurgency emerge even as old forms are incapacitated.