"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. 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. From 1962 to 1964, the years just before the Watts rebellion, there were sixty-five people killed by the L.A.P.D., including twenty-seven who had been shot in the back. Only one of those deaths was deemed murder. In this context, it is not surprising that four years after the Black Panther Party was founded, in October of 1966, by a loose and very young assortment of Bay Area radicals (their initial mission was to legally follow and monitor police officers with unconcealed weapons), the organization grew to one with headquarters in sixty-eight cities. 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. Yet something like the Panthers still seems far-fetched, impossible in our time.
[For more of this story, written by Brandon Harris, go to http://www.newyorker.com/cultu...f-the-black-panthers]
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