The often misunderstood legacy of the Black Panther Party

Donna Murch:

I think one of the best ways to understand the Panther Party is to think about the Black Freedom Movement, as having a large geography and time period. So the party is formed year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

But you know, the dismantling of legal segregation in the South did not dismantle the problems of economics, and access in the north and in the West. And one of the central issues about this was both police violence, and people not having equal access to the social welfare state.

So, I would describe the Panthers as emerging in this moment, post-civil rights after the accomplishments of the civil rights movement of the successful passage of the Civil Rights Act, and also the Voting Rights Act.

But I would be remiss to not talk about the global link to the Panthers. They’re formed in 1966. And this is after over a decade of decolonization of African countries winning their independence. And also very importantly, they look to Asia. The Panthers are formed in Northern California, and they were adamant in their opposition to the Vietnam War and American imperialism.

They identified with the Vietnamese, the Viet Minh and with Ho Chi Minh, and they actually looked a lot to Vietnam, to China, and to a vision of anti-colonialism and a socialist state that would serve the people. So, I think that’s one of the most important contexts.

The other thing I really want to stress because the popular representations of the Panthers is wrong. So many people find out about the Panthers through Forrest Gump, they’re represented as anti-white black militants.

But the truth is, is that the party of all the 60s organizations, they had the strongest ties to creating a multiracial coalition, what was called in this period, the rainbow coalition that Jesse Jackson later picks up on. So they united with white radical youth who they called Mother Country Radicals to oppose the Vietnam War.

And this was incredibly threatening to the government of the time, you know, to J. Edgar Hoover in particular, because you basically saw multiracial coalition uniting to stop anti-communism and violence in the global south. So I think that would also be the Panthers legacy, a model of multiracial coalition building.