)As Nelson tells it, the early-seventies decline of the Panthers was brought about by the outright war waged against them by the F.B.I.’s In the early seventies, while Newton advocated for doubling down on food and educational programs and leaving the threat of armed insurrection behind, Cleaver continued to argue for outright armed confrontation with the white man.
Brandon Harris on the history of the Black Panther Party, and on Stanley Nelson’s documentary “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of The Revolution.” Yet something like the Panthers still seems far-fetched, impossible in our time.The story of the organization’s rise and fall is told lucidly, in great detail, and without much adornment by Nelson’s documentary.
Their disagreements spilled into public, coming to a head when the two both appeared as guests on a radio program in 1971. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would, for a short time, put itself at the vanguard of that change. Meanwhile, Newton’s wing of the party, focussed on “survival programs pending revolution,” became more circumspect. Stream movies in the A Skype discussion with founding Black Panther Party member Victor Houston will follow the Screening!Change was coming to America and the fault lines could no longer be ignored— cities were burning, Vietnam was exploding, and disputes raged over equality and civil rights.
They were full of African-Americans who had left the South to find better opportunities and the rule of law, only to discover that laws were malleable things that could be shaped to ignore or brutalize them. Cleaver, a literary celebrity for his 1968 memoir “Soul on Ice,” fled to Algeria after his shoot-out, which followed in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and was largely seen as a foolhardy ambush on the police, one which left one of the youngest and earliest members of the Panthers, Bobby Hutton, dead. We were prepared then, as we are now, to give our all in the interest of oppressed people” (Baggins). It’s no small irony that so much of the scholarship that went into Ta-Nehisi Coates’s celebrated essay on the subject, last summer, focussed on the housing discrimination of the era in which many of the Panthers came of age. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution Blair Anderson Omar Barbour Julian Bond (2015) Filmmaker Stanley Nelson examines the rise of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and its impact on civil rights and American culture. Directors Stanley Nelson Genres Documentary Subtitles English [CC] Audio Languages English. Stanley Nelson tells the vibrant story of a pivotal movement that feels timely all over again. The Panthers also had a newspaper that reached one hundred and fifty thousand readers, and popular social programs that provided breakfast, clothing, and health care to many without it. We are currently unable to show movies indoors, as per New York State health regulations.
In protest, on May 2, 1967, twenty-six armed Panthers, led by the co-founder Bobby Seale, invaded the State Assembly chamber, with shotguns and pistols drawn. Less than a year after the armed Panther Patrols emerged, the California governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act, put forward by the California State Assembly with the explicit desire to prevent the Panthers from carrying loaded firearms in public. Interviews with former Panthers dominate, but Nelson also talks to retired policemen who harassed and raided the group, as well as to several journalists who covered them. Reparations for Housing-Wealth Usurpation doesn’t quite have the same ring as Reparations for Slavery, but it might make a more compelling case for future generations of black radicals seeking remunerative justice for the sins of the past.What our staff is reading, watching, and listening to each week.In 1969, when this photograph of Black Panther Party members was taken, outside a courthouse in New York City, the organization had begun to fracture due to clashes with the authorities and internal dissent.
“Relations between police and Negroes throughout the country are getting worse,” a mid-sixties newscaster intones over images of police arresting young black men, which appear at the outset of Stanley Nelson’s “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of The Revolution.” Perhaps this assertion is as true today as it was then, but for the subjects of Nelson’s documentary, the answer to police brutality was one that we don’t hear from many contemporary #blacklivesmatter activists: meet force with force, fire with fire.This credo meant a lot to beleaguered black communities in California, in the mid-sixties. Despite this change in focus, Newton proved to be an increasingly unstable leader, prone to drug abuse and violent, unhinged behavior.A political moment in which the Panthers’ most salient ideas would have been given a thorough vetting by our country’s legislature has never existed, but the ten-point program remains as incendiary and intellectually defensible today as it was then, especially in our era of mass incarceration and structural joblessness.