Reading: We Want Freedom (Mumia Abu-Jamal) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State
There are a lot of elements that Mumia points to, which usually hint at similar themes, that often go neglected by people utilising his work to say that “nonviolence protects the state” without understanding what topics Mumia is discussing.
While he does, at one point, state:
The Richmond demonstration, the newsletter (soon to be reborn as a full-fledged newspaper), and the armed community police patrols would prove irresistible to ghetto youth who had simmered under the glare of overtly racist cops. They longed to join the swelling Civil Rights movement, but had not because they could not bear to join any group which would meekly submit to racist violence, as demanded by some civil rights organizations. The 1967 revolts marked a rise in Black militancy, a psychic change of pace that the middle-class leaders of the southern-based Civil Rights movement could not address, and word spread about the actions of the Black Panther Party. The Black journalist William Gardner-Smith remarked, “The ’67 revolts marked the entry of the tough ghetto youths into the race battle, and the existing organizations, led by intellectuals or the middle-class, could not cope with them—the Panthers had to be born.”
Emphasis mine. This is not an argument that nonviolence isn't useful, it is an argument that the urging of “tolerating racist violence” in the attempt to achieve rights was not something that appealed to people (and also wasn't working). It's a discussion that focuses on assimilation as a tactic and how assimilation requires people to meekly tolerate bullshit they shouldn't have to (racist violence, in this instance) and that people didn't want to assimilate. They wanted to be themselves and to be safe in that identity.
This doesn't exclude nonviolence as a tactic (which, btw, Mumia repeatedly highlights as being part of the tactics in the BPP—the police patrols, though armed, were trained to engage via nonviolence unless they were unable to avoid it; the difference in this kind of nonviolence and the nonviolence of the middle-class... is what kind of risk it came with).
But Mumia also makes comments like this:
The Sacramento demonstration launched the Party into a national orbit, perhaps long before it was ready. The Party was swarmed with applications from young men and women around the nation who wanted to open branches of the new organization in their local communities.
Again, emphasis mine. He's making it clear that there were other issues at play for how its growth could've potentially been a problem (and it can be—we've seen similar issues in other quick-growing movements that haven't figured out how to deal with that growth; this is also, for the record, part of the problem with the Occupy movement came out of that growth because it required having to deal with people who had wide-ranging views, including wannabe capitalists and right-libertarians, rather than a cohesive understanding around the destructive nature of capitalism... and people didn't deal with that in any meaningful way).
For example:
“A law book, a tape recorder, and a gun” were all that were needed, Huey explained. “It would let those brutalizing racist bastards know that we mean business.”5 In accordance with Huey’s study of the law, BPP patrollers agreed to accept arrests nonviolently—to a limit. Newton and Seale promised to “do battle only at the point when a fool policeman drew his gun unjustly.”
And then Mumia goes on to describe the programs the BPP had instituted and later formalised, like Free Breakfast for Children and the free clinics... Free clothing, etc.
Some different tangents. First:
The Free Breakfast for Children Program was, by far, the most popular of all the Party programs. It also served as a unique opportunity for the secular BPP and the Black church to establish a working relationship since most breakfast programs were situated within neighborhood churches and staffed by Panther men and women. Father Earl Neil, a Black priest assigned to Oakland’s St. Augustine Episcopal Church, was an early and vocal supporter of the Black Panther Party and made some interesting comparisons between the Party and the traditional church.
This is so... frustrating for me? I understand that the church is an important element of many people's communities, but I also feel like the programs (that should inherently be secular) that people need routinely get co-opted by people who have a vested interest in ensuring that people maintain a specific view on the way life is. While it is helpful and often assists people in having access to free/cheap spaces, churches can have ulterior motives for providing that assistance.
It makes me wonder if any of the Panthers had any critiques on the relationship with churches and clergy; I'd be interested to read those.
Then, at a different time, Mumia wrote:
Watts took on a meaning to Black Americans that symbolized a kind of resistance that was anathema to the likes of Dr. King or his co-integrationists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The Black Panther Party came into existence, not to support or supplement the major civil rights organizations, but to supplant them.
The major civil rights groups were shocked and stymied by the outrage revealed by Watts. Those who would organize the Black Panther Party looked to Watts as inspiration and an ashy harbinger of things to come.
Which is also interesting in the ways in which a lot of the more 'violent' uprisings in response to continued police brutality (Ferguson, for example) were co-opted by more middle-class and intellectual folks and, as a result, silenced to a degree... especially as Mumia looks to them, in the modern day, for hope (as per the new introduction to this edition).
Which isn't a problem alone for race-related organisations; it's a constant and persistent problem that middle-class and intellectuals co-opt movements and silence the more radical aspects of them. It's just sad and frustrating because we could get so much more if only we'd let people (metaphorically or literally, depending on situation) burn it all down and help us find new imaginations for what could be within the ashes.
And also this list is really interesting to revisit:
Among these programs were the Intercommunal News Service (1967); the Petition Drive for Community Control of Cops (1968); Liberation Schools, later called Intercommunal Youth Institutes, (1969); People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinic (1969); Free Clothing Program (1970); Free Busing to Prisons Program (1970); Seniors Against Fearful Environment (SAFE) Program (1971); Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation (1971); and Free Housing Cooperative Program (1971).
In later years, the Party would initiate other programs including Free Shoe Programs, Free Ambulance Services, Free Food Programs, and Home Maintenance Programs.
While clearly every branch of the Party didn’t offer all of these programs, most did operate the basics: a free breakfast program, a clinic, and a free clothing program. The bigger chapters, such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, tended to provide the widest range of community services, while smaller branches tended to concentrate on the most popular programs.