1In recent years, following the brief rise to prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement and in conjunction with ongoing debates over policing in the United States, there has been a growing cultural interest in the legacies of Black Power. As the political demands voiced within the Black community were mainstreamed, more and more creators of popular culture turned to icons of the 1960s and 1970s—in many cases, to pander, but in some, to actively engage with them and make them legible for modern audiences. Central to many such depictions is the figure of the Black Messiah, a “racial” political leader who transcends the bounds of “race,” pointing his community—and the wider society—toward a wider consciousness of social and political realities, with potentially revolutionary connotations. At the 2021 Oscars ceremony—one of the more “Oscars so Black” moments in the history of the awards—“consideration” was given to two films that included Black Messiah characters: One Night in Miami…, Regina King’s adaptation of a play about four Black political figures of the 1960s debating the uses of public clout, and Judas and the Black Messiah, a dramatic depiction of the final months in the life of Fred Hampton, a visionary leader of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Chicago, directed by Shaka King. The films received a total of nine nominations, three of which came in the Best Supporting Actor category—for highly-respected young Black actors Lamar Odom, Jr., who portrayed the musician Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami…, and Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield, the martyr Hampton and the traitor William O’Neal in Judas and the Black Messiah. The fact that, in spite of playing the two most prominent characters in the film, neither Kaluuya nor Stanfield received a nomination in the lead category—ostensibly a technicality of the rules of the Academy (Ordoña)—gave rise to widespread, and occasionally deeply ironic, speculation: after all, if both the Judas and the Messiah are merely secondary to the narrative, does that not mean that the system which determines their fates is the main character?
- 1 While this dynamic is very clear in Stanfield’s performance, the film highlights it even further by (...)
2Shaka King’s film presents Hampton at a moment of transition from an effective manager of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party into a leader of a “rainbow coalition” of the oppressed and underrepresented of all “races” against the White power structure. However, Hampton’s story is shown through the eyes of O’Neal, an FBI plant who climbs the Panther hierarchy to eventually betray its leader. Hampton’s death, both in cinematic representation and in historical fact, echoes the murders of several other illustrious Black American political figures—activists, like Medgar Evers; but also movement leaders and ideologues, like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Like the latter two, he dies at a time when he is advancing from an established “racial” platform toward broader, more class-oriented perspectives. In the grand narrative of the history of “racial” relations in the US, this is the fate of the Black Messiah: to become a Black martyr for a cause far larger than himself, eliminated by rampant White American nationalism. Stanfield’s O’Neal, a character so easily reducible to an agent of White supremacy, provides a crucial counterpart to Kaluuya’s Hampton. The story of the Black Messiah would not be a tragedy without a Black Judas, one who puts his own survival above the good of his people, even as he recognizes the evil that he perpetrates.1 In less morally problematic terms, a similar experience was shared by one of the (historical) characters featured in One Night in Miami…: Muhammad Ali, personal friend to Malcolm X and a participant in the imagined hotel-room debate, as well as a “survivor” of America’s war against Black Power. In the somewhat underappreciated 2001 biopic of the famous boxer, directed by Michael Mann, Ali (Will Smith) is presented as a kind of reluctant outsider to the political upheaval of the late 1960s. The film shows him mourning the death of Malcolm X alone and features a passing scene of the killing of Martin Luther King, but these events are shown to coincide with a difficult period in Ali’s career—his suspension from boxing for refusing the draft during the Vietnam War—which he spent in Chicago’s South Side (Montville 171). His actions in the period of urban unrest—that is, the time of Hampton’s increasing political activity and death—are captured in a montage that sees him wistfully contemplate a rioting city from afar, momentarily sidelined by big history. Like Stanfield’s Black Judas, he gives up on the movement for his own benefit, his moral choices more justifiable, because less obviously deleterious, but questionable nonetheless.
- 2 Notably, on the pages of the Black Panther (vol. 2, no. 9, 1968), Huey Newton described himself as (...)
3Thematically, these two figures—the politically active community leader whose vector is pointed well beyond his community and the (at least comparatively) politically passive onlooker who is reluctant to lose himself in the idea of a worldwide revolution—complement one another in dialectical fashion, representing the opposing poles of Black political engagement: selflessness versus individualism. What this dialectical formulation tends to do is reduce the political action of the activist largely to their rhetoric. The Messiah is there to energize his people and make them imagine a different future; but in the context of the struggle against racism, it is only as a martyr that he can be celebrated for it. This is perhaps most evident in figures like Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, “beacons of hope” of a generation, sanctified in their sacrifice (Marable 17–18).2 Nevertheless, the real-world Malcolm X was not murdered solely because he spoke about Third-Worldist political coalitions, but because he moved toward establishing them meaningfully. Likewise, the real-life Fred Hampton may have died as yet another fiery orator the White power structure needed silenced, but his death also belonged among a series of actions engaged in by law enforcement that were geared towards weakening and delegitimizing the Black Panther Party as a communal and national political force, at a time of its greatest expansion. In other words, what is often lacking or underappreciated in the image of the Black Messiah is the degree to which their rhetoric went hand in hand with practical investment in conceiving of and establishing a new community for a common cause—a community that is often sidelined in such narratives.
4For the Black Panthers, the proper name of that community was the lumpenproletariat, the mass of Black people of working age relegated by reasons of “race” to the status of a reserve army of the unemployed. In Volume I of Capital, Karl Marx defines the lumpenproletariat somewhat offhandedly as “vagabonds, criminals, [and] prostitutes” (797), “partly from inclination, in most cases under the force of circumstances” (896). The vagabond—or rather, the practice of vagabondage—is associated in his account with the rise of capitalism through the imposition in the early modern era of the compulsion of labor by means of slavery or indentured servitude in England, or the galleys in France (Marx, Capital 896–899). In a sense, then, lumpenproletarians are perpetual victims of the economic injustice brought on by capitalism. In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx effectively brands the French lumpenproletariat of 1848 vintage as sellouts who betrayed the proletarian for petty reward from the bourgeois, describing Louis Napoleon’s French army in strangely botanical terms as “itself … no longer the flower of the peasant youth [but] the swamp-flower [Sumpfblüte] of the peasant lumpenproletariat” (130). However, as Angela Davis points out—in the context of America’s prison-industrial complex—even at this juncture, Marx’s problem with the lumpenproletariat was not, in fact, simply its readiness to betray what should, by rights, be its own class-interest, but rather its susceptibility to external influences, as a class of systematically expropriated people without a program that was easily swayed and easily radicalized (45–46). Within this formulation is the germ of the idea that, given favorable circumstances, the lumpenproletariat need not be opposed to the revolution, but may in fact ally itself with it.
5Key to this reinterpretation were the experiences of thinkers inspired by Marx who found themselves facing a seeming paradox: the fact that the class they had ascribed the greatest political significance to, one possessed of supposedly the highest degree of class consciousness—the Western proletariat—was all too eager to claim national solidarity over class solidarity when given the choice. More so than any other event, the outbreak of World War I and the nationalist fervor that inspired both industrial workers and their political representatives in its aftermath put paid to the idea that the proletarians were in any way ready to engage in revolution against the ruling classes (Kelley 44). As the events of the immediate post-war period showed, even a politically energized proletariat was no match for the hegemonic concept of the nation. Successful revolutionary movements spearheaded by the working class, like those in Hungary or Germany, were quickly trampled by forces eager to assert independence, dispelling the prospect of an internationalist dissolution under the banner of united workers of the world. Where this did not happen, the proletariat was not nearly as powerful a player on the political stage. The victorious revolution in Russia in 1917, as well as that in China in 1949, placed the proletariat in a leadership position, as an ideological vanguard, but relied on the manpower of the peasantry, including “the poor and poorest peasants” (James et al. 76). As early as 1927, Mao Zedong reinterpreted the notion of the lumpenproletarian in a way that drastically altered the political significance of the class, by equating it with the “utterly destitute” among “poor peasants” (35) and asserting that “[l]eadership by the poor peasants is absolutely necessary. Without the poor peasants there would be no revolution. To deny their role is to deny the revolution. To attack them is to attack the revolution” (39). Painted in broad strokes as a reserve army of the dispossessed, the lumpenproletariat no longer figured as a threat to the revolution, but rather as its potential engine.
6In the early 20th century in the U.S., under the banner of the Popular Front, socialists and communists blazed a broadly concurrent path, engaging with both the working class and the more transient, “politically unreliable” communities of immigrants and “racial” minorities (Denning 4–21). This effort was, to a degree, an application of an injunction from Vladimir Lenin, made as part of his pursuit of an answer to “the Negro question”; their own answers were formulated primarily in terms of national liberation (Kelley 46–49). This seeming conflation of “race” with nationhood—of a struggle for emancipation with a struggle for national liberation—reflected the inadequate degree of engagement with the significance of “race” in Marxist theory up to that point. In these circumstances, the Maoist formulation seemed to provide a useful means for understanding the Black lumpenproletariat as a revolutionary class: between the Civil War and World War II, Blacks were disproportionately represented among the “utterly destitute” sharecroppers in the South; and throughout that period, they were the “vagabonds” exploited as strikebreakers due to the fact that they were commonly denied entry into labor unions (Roediger 176–181). Propelled by economic changes in the U.S., the Great Migration shifted proportions between these two groups, bringing more and more Southern Black peasants into urban centers and proletarian contexts. As the economic landscape realigned during and after the two world wars, the (relatively) isolated destitution of the former peasants changed into the mass destitution of the urban poor, creating the conditions for a mass political movement—first demonstrated by the rise of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a Pan-Africanist organization established before the U.S. entered World War I, which grew into a global movement and became a reference for later Black radical activism (Kelley 23–29). The conditions that elevated the UNIA would only deepen over the following decades: about two-thirds of the Black migrants moved into urban areas in the North, South, and West of the country between the 1940s and 1970s.
7While the postwar political landscape within the Black community was dominated by what Malcolm X described as “the Negro revolution”—largely peaceful resistance to “racial” oppression within the narrow confines of the U.S.—the political activism, both on the left and outside of it, succeeded in raising awareness about the interconnectedness of imperial structures of “race.” Within those structures, the means by which order was maintained was violence. The idea that Blacks themselves could use violence as a means of combating oppression was not new; it had been a part of the philosophy of Black emancipation movements since abolitionism (Kelley 26). However, the contemporary context added a major new wrinkle: the struggle for decolonization of the “Third World,” involving the “colored” peoples of the Earth, often in combat against White empires. One need only consider the degree of engagement in the Black community with ideas of Afrocentrism or with events in newly-established decolonizing states like Ghana or Algeria, or the widespread furore over the political murder of the democratic leader of the formerly Belgian Congo, Patrice Lumumba, to understand that Black Americans tended to also see themselves as colonized “colored” people (Malloy 25–27). The Black Panthers’ Ten Point Program, focused though it was on “domestic” matters of equal treatment within the U.S., echoed these sentiments, demanding that Blacks be exempt from military service for the U.S. so as not to “fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America” (Reed 73). Investment in political events in the “Third World” permeated the culture of the day; references to figures such as the first President of Kenya Jomo Kenyatta and events and developments such as the rise of apartheid in South Africa existed side by side with open advocacy for civil rights in the U.S. Throughout the 1960s, prominent Black artists lent their support to the cause with works explicitly addressed at a lowbrow audience—perhaps the best example being “political” songs in r&b/soul and funk genres by the likes of the aforementioned Sam Cooke (“A Change Is Gonna Come”), James Brown (“Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud”), or Curtis Mayfield (“We’re a Winner”).
8In a way, this internationalism could be seen as another outgrowth of a historical investment in the realities of the colonized world. Already during the 19th century, figures such as Martin Delany looked to Africa not only as a rhetorical reference point in discussions about the historicity of the “darker peoples” but also as a sort of common home for all Blacks in the world (Dawson 21–23). In a similar vein, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the “problem of the color line” not as a peculiarly American issue, but one that involved the White and Black “races” in general (Souls of Black Folk 3). In the context of decolonization, appeals to Afrocentrism and the global struggle against racism gained in poignancy in the post-war period. In 1963, in his “Message to the Grass Roots,” Malcolm X stressed that the Black community and the Third World share a common enemy in the White man and that the anti-colonial cause of newly-emergent states formerly under the control of White empires was a revolution that Black Americans should involve themselves in:
We have a common enemy. … We have a common oppressor, a common exploiter, and a common discriminator. But once we all realize that we have a common enemy, then we unite—on the basis of what we have in common. … The white man knows what a revolution is. He knows that the black revolution is world-wide in scope and in nature. The black revolution is sweeping Asia, is sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America. The Cuban Revolution—that’s a revolution. They overturned the system. Revolution is in Asia, revolution is in Africa, and the white man is screaming because he sees revolution in Latin America. How do you think he’ll react to you when you learn what a real revolution is? (4–9)
9The broad understanding of “Black” in the decolonial context reflected a desire to see the struggle against racism in the U.S. as a “local phase of a world problem” (Du Bois, “Color Line” 263). The question was whether having a common enemy translated into sharing the same struggle. Side by side with Malcolm X’s pronouncements, 1963 also saw the publication of the English edition of one of the most significant works of anti-colonial philosophy—The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. Widely read among the proponents of Black Power, the work set out a program for decolonization that inevitably resonated with the American activists. Fanon described it in terms not dissimilar to those of the dictatorship of the proletariat—as an upheaval in which “the last shall be first,” the “disreputable” colonial subjects overcoming their oppressors and upending the hierarchy of class and “race”:
10In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists. This determination to have the last move up to the front, to have them clamber up (too quickly, say some) the famous echelons of an organized society, can only succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence. You do not disorganize a society, however primitive it may be, with such an agenda if you are not determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered. The colonized, who have made up their mind to make such an agenda into a driving force, have been prepared for violence from time immemorial. As soon as they are born, it is obvious to them that their cramped world, riddled with taboos, can only be challenged by out and out violence. … The violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world, … this same violence will be vindicated and appropriated when, taking history into their own hands, the colonized swarm into the forbidden cities. To blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject. (3–6)
11Fanon’s account of the everyday realities of life of the “colored sectors” of the colonized world aligned broadly with the experiences of the inhabitants of Black ghettoes in the U.S. To a significant degree, the forms of oppression that they faced were very similar, from the persistency of state-sanctioned “racial” violence, through geographical immobilization, to economic and cultural expropriation (Van Deburg 60–61). Fanon’s comments about the ways in which Whites maintained ideological control over the oppressed “races” also correspond with Antonio Gramsci’s observations about the role hierarchical institutions like the school and the church played in ensuring compliance among the dispossessed classes (6). One finds here concern over “true” class consciousness—or the Gramscian “good sense”—as a necessary condition of a successful revolution. Importantly, however, while the plight of Black Americans resembled that of non-White colonized in the Third World, Fanon also noted a substantial difference in their attitudes toward nationalism. After all, where decolonization was a struggle for national liberation, the victory of the anti-racist struggle in the U.S. did not require the physical removal of Whites from the country, or even from access to political power. In the postwar context, Black separatism—ostensibly aligned with approaches to “the Negro question” advanced in the prewar communist doctrine—seemed far less revolutionary than the relatively conservative, assimilationist belief in the right of Black Americans to partake of the good that was America (Van Deburg 25).
12These limitations of the decolonial perspective were clear to members of what became perhaps the most famous organization of the Black Power movement—the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. As Malcolm X’s visit to the 1964 congress of the Organization of African Unity indicated, the alliance between Black America and the newly-established states of the Third World only went so far; no decolonized state would challenge the U.S. directly on its “racial” realities for fear of finding itself on the wrong side of the Cold War (Malloy 29–30). Lasting alliances could, however, be built where the political pressure of the American empire was less palpable. The Black Panthers took this to heart, establishing oftentimes very strong links with communist governments beyond the Soviet bloc, such as Angola or China, and increasingly with radical movements across the globe, including the likes of Fatah and the Red Army Faction (Malloy 143–146, 197–199). Rather than seeking to build a Third-World coalition to rival the U.S., they established contingent ties with like-minded entities—as illustrated by Hampton’s example, they would even ally themselves with Whites (Jeffries 20–22). The choice of allies was decided primarily by the benefits they could bring, as well as by the increased clout and recognition gained by presenting oneself as a serious, movement-leading organization. In part, this somewhat scattergun approach to coalition-building was informed by the sheer variety of contexts the different chapters of the party existed in. An alliance that worked in Los Angeles might not be workable in Chicago; the local equivalents of other radical organizations may or may not share the same politics. Yet, in many cases, these alliances gained significant publicity precisely because they were loudly advertised by the Black Panthers themselves.
13The same logic informed the way the Panthers gained visibility in the mainstream, likewise echoing the often militant posturing of the decolonial movements. The famous armed protest at the California State Capitol in May 1967, enacted in response to an attempt by the Republican Party—spearheaded by Governor Ronald Reagan—to pass a bill that would restrict the right to open carrying of guns in the state, is perhaps the most obvious example. A strategic show of force, the protest presented the party as an organized and coordinated entity with a specific agenda, ready to directly challenge the White power structure. Aside from the obvious rationale of arming oneself against the inevitable White racist backlash, which often took the form of armed assaults—and soon enough, deliberate murder—the open display of arms also served as a powerful symbolic tool for eliciting a public reaction, in what T.V. Reed describes as “the drama of the Black Panthers” (42). The threat that the Mulford Act posed to the Panthers seemed grave at the time: their most visible activities within their own communities consisted to a significant degree of similar kinds of public action that were in equal parts practical and performative. One of the ways in which the party made itself known to the Black community was by engaging in the practice of “patrolling the police”—following police officers in Black neighborhoods with guns in hand, ready to act if the lawmen overstepped their prerogatives. This visible challenge to the status quo was designed to advertise the Panthers as “baad,” dangerous to outsiders, and prepared for anything in the name of justice. The protest in Sacramento was in many ways a failure; it increased public support for the bill, and it did not attract new members to the party (Malloy 69). However, one did not need to brandish a gun to manifest one’s solidarity with the lumpen.
14From the very outset, the leadership of the party realized that to build a valid political movement, they had to bring politics to the people (Jeffries 15–16). To this end, they deployed the “language of the street”—jive and common slang expressions—communicating radical ideas in a way that made them less abstract. In the pages of the party magazine, The Black Panther, one would often find well-measured slogans and statements, such as those crafted in support of the campaign to have party leader Huey Newton freed, cerebral appeals to the memory of Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr., side by side with the denouncement of “pigs”—the police—accompanied by evocative caricatures by Emory Douglas or calls for “guns, baby, guns.” Another method of engaging directly with the lumpen was the practice of recruiting new Panthers among criminals and convicts. Party leaders drew inspiration in that regard from an equally radical antecedent with a much more pronouncedly separatist program—the Nation of Islam; in fact, Malcolm X, the patron saint of militant Black Power, famously owed his rebirth as a political leader to that organization. However, while the Nation of Islam used religious practices and strict discipline to integrate the outcast, Huey Newton and other leaders of the Black Panther Party expressed a clear fascination with what a Black prisoner represented, as someone who was “tired of shit” and therefore primed for direct action (Seale, Seize the Time 132-133).
15In a nod to the legacies of the Great Migration, the Panthers tied these modern “delinquents” of the lumpen to the folk anti-heroes of Black Southern tradition—the Black badmen. Like the badmen—and like Malcolm X in his earlier years—they were highly problematic on the surface level. In Southern stories, badmen were typically men who acted violently in response to a perceived threat, in ways that could often negatively impact their own communities. The badman’s victims could be Black themselves; or their criminal behavior could heighten police interference in the community; or their status could have been gained through the exploitation of other Blacks. Nevertheless, Southern Blacks became invested in their stories, at least in part because they offered glimpses of radical agency in a world that denied their very subjecthood. One prototypical Black badman was Stagolee, or Lee Shelton, a St. Louis pimp who fell afoul of the law after an altercation with a political rival that reportedly culminated in the latter grabbing Shelton’s hat and refusing to give it back, which prompted Shelton to shoot him dead (Brown 21–37). The crime became immortalized in blues ballads, some of which portrayed Stagolee as an obvious villain, for instance for murdering a father in cold blood, while others underscored his “badness,” his readiness to commit violent acts in order to assert himself. For leading Panthers like Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black badman—a lumpen prepared to assert his agency—was a revolutionary only one step away from a political awakening.
16In the foreword to Seale’s 1978 autobiography, James Baldwin reflects:
[T]he world in which we found ourselves at the end of World War II, and, more particularly, the brutal and gratuitous folly with which we ushered in the atomic age, brought into focus, as never before, the real meaning of the American social contract and exposed the self-serving nature of the American dream. And one of the results of this exposure was that the celebrated ‘Negro problem’ became a global instead of a merely domestic matter. … The beacon lit, for [Seale’s] generation, in 1956, in Montgomery, Alabama, by an anonymous black woman, elicited an answering fire from all the wretched, all over the earth, signaled the beginning of the end of the racial nightmare—for it will end; no lie endures forever—and helped Stagolee, the black folk hero Bobby [Seale] takes for his model, to achieve his manhood. For it is that tremendous journey which Bobby’s book is about: the act of assuming and becoming oneself. (Seale, A Lonely Rage xii)
17Referencing both decolonization as a political reality, Fanon’s analysis of its contours on the example of Algeria, and the struggle for “racial” equality in the U.S. by way of the figure of Stagolee, Baldwin lends credence to the outlook advanced by Seale, who famously named his son in homage to Malcolm X, President of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah, and Lee Shelton because “Nkrumah was a bad motherfucker and Malcolm X was a bad n*” (Brown 214). Echoing Mao’s folksy dictum that “[p]roper limits have to be exceeded in order to right a wrong, or else the wrong cannot be righted” (30) as well as Fanon’s belief that “the colonized masses intuitively believe that their liberation must be achieved and can only be achieved by force” (33), the foregrounding of the populist figure of the badman—in place of the martyrological Messiah—seemed designed to capture the spirit of a people on the verge of explosion and express it in a way that combined political commitment and criminal “badness.” By drawing a line between the local Black badman and the African anticolonial fighter, one could highlight commonalities between the oppressed “colored” communities without becoming mired in the unbridgeable political and social gaps that divided them.
18During the 1970s, while the Black Panther Party gradually decomposed under constant, violent assault from the law enforcement—justified to the public by the very criminality that the organization used as a tactic of recruitment and practice of action—Newton developed the concept of intercommunalism: a variation on communist internationalism designed to set aside the idea of nation in favor of the more nebulous and less restrictive community. At the heart of the concept was the idea of the U.S. as a global hegemon and the shared struggle of all oppressed people of the world against a common enemy (Jeffries 78–82). An obvious extension of Malcolm X’s interpretation of the anticolonial struggle, intercommunalism also revived the pre-war, Popular Front notion of “the people,” not as a class marker within a singular national category, but as a supra-national—and non-racial—identification of a broad stratum of the oppressed (Denning 123–136). The fact that “intercommunal” ideas coexisted in the philosophy of the Panthers with cultural elements informing particular identities speaks to the role of the party as the mediator between the global and local levels of the anti-imperialist struggle. From its inception, the Black Panther Party sought to signal its investment in the revolutionary overthrow of White power structures, both in the U.S. and worldwide; yet, on the local level, the Panthers made themselves useful to their communities by engaging in direct support, as part of their Service to the People program or through other forms of welfare aid and advocacy (Jeffries 39). Just as the protest in Sacramento increased the public recognition of the Panthers and served to present them to the Black community as a radical and organized group unafraid to directly challenge the ruling elites, these more practical activities helped enshrine the idea of the party as a communal resource.
19This idea in itself represented an evolution of received Marxist notions, especially of the revolutionary—or vanguard—party. The Panthers described themselves as a revolutionary vanguard of the Black American community, itself the vanguard of the anti-imperialist movement by dint of its presence within the heart of the empire (Malloy 118–119). After 1970, Newton identified the purpose of the Black Panther Party as promoting mass consciousness among Blacks of the nature of the oppression they faced and as acting in service of the survival of the Black community (Malloy 176–177). One can clearly see here the influence of both Lenin’s and Mao’s understanding of the role of the party and the nature of the revolutionary class. Writing around the turn of the twentieth century, Lenin conceived of the party as a facilitator of the formation of the working class as a political force (133–136). In his “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” Mao notes the crucial role of radicalized peasants in pushing through a revolution, placing the Communist Party likewise in the position of a guide, rather than leader (34–37). However, with the prominence the Panthers gave to the figure of Stagolee, the heightened class consciousness of the lumpen, one can also read this application of the notion of the vanguard party as an extension of Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual. According to Gramsci, the main challenge for a revolutionary party in a modern capitalist society is the overcoming of the hegemony of the ruling elites; within the lowest—and thus the most revolutionary—strata, this hegemony is maintained by way of traditional intellectuals educated by the state. In turn, organic intellectuals are rarely formally educated, their formation being owed primarily to their heightened consciousness of the class struggle. The role of the party, then, is to combine the understanding of the organic intellectuals and the knowledge of the traditional intellectuals, fostering the formulation of a “historical bloc” capable of enacting the dictatorship of the proletariat (15–16, 365–366). The Panthers projected the idea of a real change whose actual contours would only be defined in the course of the revolution for which they sought to act as a vanguard. In the absence of that revolution, however, they left the political stage as a messianic beacon of a hope that remained unfulfilled.
20In his biography of Huey Newton, whose career as a public figure largely followed the rises and falls in the history of the Black Panthers, Judson L. Jeffries stresses that his political philosophy was mostly defined by pragmatism. Instead of remaining wedded to a single idea and trying to force it onto reality, Newton would pick and choose elements of ideologies developed in different areas of what might be called a revolutionary imaginary and have them coalesce in the philosophy of the Panthers (126–127). In a largely celebratory narrative, it is easy to put a positive spin on this feature, as representative of the resourcefulness of a revolutionary thinker or the attitude of an intellectual mediating between the received knowledge and the experience of his people. However, it is an inescapable fact that much of this pragmatism was displayed in response to the conditions in which the Panthers—and Newton himself—operated when the party was still an active organization. That they were subjected to ruthless repression and sabotage from law enforcement is a well-documented fact; this repression and sabotage, in turn, is known to have caused rifts and tensions within the organization, limiting its effectiveness and leading to splintering and strife. The investment in the idea of the lumpen and in the figure of the “brother on the block” also had its consequences, which would come to the fore particularly in times of crisis. There were known instances of the use of violence and intimidation within the party as a means of exerting control over its members. Likewise, the Panthers tended to exhibit sexism toward Black women and downplay their role and contributions to the cause (Booker 351–356). Even if these abuses are treated as the result of the repression—for instance, the violence perpetrated in the service of weeding out FBI plants—the fact that they occurred is problematic, to say the least.
21Understandably, modern portrayals of the Panthers—and of the Black Power era, more generally—tend to highlight the repression at the expense of the abuse. It is almost inevitable that, in the process of recovering Black Messiahs, cultural re-readings of the period focus on the ennobling narrative of a just and moral struggle in an immoral and unjust world. Figures like Malcolm X and Fred Hampton are especially useful for this purpose because of their martyrdom. For those who survived the suppression of Black Power, like Seale or Newton, there is much less of a chance for a glowing portrayal in which the enemy is only ever without. It therefore seems significant that Judas and the Black Messiah deliberately foregrounds the complex and morally compromised character of O’Neal, a gesture that helps explain the historical and social conditions of the world inhabited by the messianic Hampton. The story of O’Neal’s betrayal reads like a cautionary tale about how the acceptance of a temporary denial of agency—as in the case of a Black criminal compelled to betray a Black leader to ensure his own survival, rather than giving in to the desire to engage in the political struggle—tends to be followed by a permanent loss of agency. Told against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement and the mainstreaming of the issue of police murder of Blacks, it speaks of the foreclosed possibilities of change embodied in the messianic Hampton. Behind this explicitly “racial” narrative, however, lies a history of state violence against a “rainbow” of oppressed peoples; for Hampton’s vector at the time of his murder was pointed toward an “intercommunal” understanding of the political struggle he was engaged in.
22The context in which the Panthers developed their ideas and their practices has had an obvious impact on the shape that they took. A minority movement in a majority-White country engaged in a global struggle for world dominance was inevitably “overvisible,” as well as “overdetermined from without.” As Étienne Balibar puts it, “[i]t cannot be merely accidental … that Black Americans’ greatest effort to conceive of themselves as a ‘national’ movement like other liberation movements coincided with the Vietnam War and, generally, with the high-water mark of the imperial assertion of ‘white’ American nationalism” (61). Against this global hegemon, the Panthers offered valuable new outlooks on some established concepts, integrating them with the realities of the Black community in the wake of the dissipation of the Civil Rights Movement. As much as they failed, for the revolution they hoped to live to see did not actually happen, they also succeeded in a somewhat less grandiose, but no less momentous way: by exposing the workings of the empire and bringing its repressive and violent truth into the public view. In this, both the spectacular interventions in the public sphere and the grass-roots work within Black communities played a part. As Nikhil Pal Singh argues, in its war against the Panthers, the U.S. showed itself to be a repressive regime driven by racism and a hunger for power (89). Faced by an enemy of this size and determination, the party continued to maintain a presence in the public eye with an urgency belying its practical limitations.
23Therein lies the source of the Black Panther Party’s peculiar brand of Marxism and its attachment to the idea of the “lumpen” and to Black urban and rural folklore and social practices. Inasmuch as the party was to serve as the vanguard of a mass movement against White “racial” democracy, it needed to foster the right—“politically correct”?—class consciousness among the communities that it sought to energize. Public and publicized challenges to the status quo, along with profanity-laced tirades against the key political figures in country and state, helped not only maintain the temperature of protest, but also provide for an active engagement in strengthening the community against White power. Likewise, alliances with other more or less radical movements and organizations along the lines of Hampton’s “rainbow coalition” relied to a significant extent on the recognition that it was primarily class, and not “race,” that would swell the numbers on the revolutionary side. It is, after all, debatable whether a revolutionary movement along the lines of the Black Panther Party at its most militant could ever effectively lead a countrywide revolution in the manner of an anticolonial movement in majority-Arab Algeria or a communist movement in majority-peasant China. The famous and variously ascribed dictum that “every brother on a rooftop can quote Fanon” speaks as much to an investment in the ideology of liberatory violence and mass popular revolt as to a belief in the value of an internationalism without nations and the broad commonality of the social and political plight of the oppressed. The use of the “lumpen,” then, and of the idea of a revolutionary vanguard, emerges as a strategic tool connecting the everyday experiences of Black America, the historical and political realities of the Third World, and the evolving pseudo-/post-/neo-Marxian ideas of the people and of the revolution.