There is No Comparison Between the Black Panther Party and the KKK

Sheriff Dave Clarke from Milwaukee declared on FOX News that Beyonce’s homage to the Black Panthers at the Super Bowl was equivalent to a white band paying homage to the KKK, and asked,”Would that be acceptable if a band, a white band, came out in hoods and white sheets?”

There is no comparison between the terrorist white supremacist KKK and the Black Panther Party. The BPP stood up for equality and Black liberation, only to be terrorized, murdered and and framed-up, by America’s brutal and racist FBI working with local law enforcement. The Black Panthers fought for liberation, the KKK instead seek to terrorize every oppressed minority as well as union activists and socialists. The KKK stand for oppression, the BPP for liberation, There is no comparison.

African Americans have faced brutal political oppression orchestrated by the FBI. In the 1960’s and 70’s the U.S. government liquidated the Black Panther Party For Self Defense through the murders of 38 members, constant police harassment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in bail money, and the frame-up of many other members.

Fred Hampton was a leader of the Chicago Black Panther Party (BPP). He was murdered in his sleep at the age of 21 in a joint assassination carried out by the Chicago Police and the FBI. The operation also murdered BPP member Mark Clark. As a leader of the BPP, Fred Hampton organized a non-aggression pact between Chicago’s street gangs, a successful breakfast program, and a multi-racial Rainbow Coalition unrelated to Jesse Jackson’s later liberal appropriation of the name for the so-called “Democratic” Party. In addition, Fred Hampton gave fiery speeches that were part of building a movement for proletarian socialist revolution. As Fred Hampton said, “Racism is the excuse used; racism is just a byproduct of capitalism.”

This was a point also made by BPP member Connie Mathews in a speech to 500 students at San Jose State University on October 25th, 1969:

“…the reason they divided us up into ethnic groups, into races, because as Fanon has said—capitalism and racism—one is a cause and the other is effect. They did not bring Black people over from Africa as slaves because we are Black. They brought Black people over so capitalism could thrive. When capitalism reached its highest form—imperialism—they had to define methods to keep the division.”

These kinds of teachings were expressly forbidden by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who infamously declared in 1968, “The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries.”By the time of Connie Mathews’ San Jose speech, that repression was already well under way as she pointed out, saying, “I am saying that over the last 6 months Nixon has launched a massive repression against the Black Panther Party that is unheard of.” Fred Hampton was not yet murdered at that time, that came two months later on December 4th, but he was rapidly rising up in the national leadership of the party due in part to FBI and police murders and frame-ups.Among the prominent FBI frame-ups was that of Geronimo Ji Jaga (Pratt), a BPP member in Los Angeles who was finally exonerated (i.e. found innocent) after 27 years in prison. The FBI stated in their own files that they sought to “neutralize Pratt as an effective BPP functionary.” While carrying out Geronimo’s frame-up, the FBI hid evidence of their knowledge that Geronimo was 350 miles from the murders for which he was framed at the time they occurred.Other framed Black Panthers still sit in prison and Black Panther Assata Shakur lives in exile, granted political asylum by Cuba, but with a one million dollar bounty placed on her head by Chris Christie’s state government in New Jersey. In addition, Obama’s FBI has placed Assata Shakur on its most wanted “terrorist” list and is offering an additional million dollar reward. Some have feared a deal between the U.S. and Cuba now that both countries are setting up diplomatic relations for the first time since the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Cuba’s head of North American Affairs, Josefina Vidal, however, has responded by saying:

“Every nation has sovereign and legitimate rights to grant political asylum to people it considers to have been persecuted. … That’s a legitimate right. We’ve explained to the U.S. government in the past that there are some people living in Cuba to whom Cuba has legitimately granted political asylum.”

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie responded, calling Cubans “thugs” and likewise applying typical racist disrespect by using Assata Shakur’s discarded slave name saying:

“So Joanne Chesimard, a cold-blooded cop-killer, convicted by a jury of her peers, in what is without question the fairest and most just criminal justice system in the world … is now, according to an official of the Cuban government, persecuted. These thugs in Cuba have given her political asylum for 30 years. It’s unacceptable.”

In reality, Assata Shakur was not convicted by a “jury of her peers”, she was convicted by an all white jury. Assata Shakur was a victim of America’s racist courts and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations that targeted Black radicals for police murder and judicial frame-up. Police ambushed Assata Shakur and her comrades in 1973. In that attack, police crossfire struck and killed New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, with a bullet from a police revolver killing the cop. James Harper, the slain trooper’s partner has admitted that he lied about seeing a gun in Assata Shakur’s hand. Assata Shakur was supposedly being apprehended for 7 counts, including a bank robbery. She was later acquitted for all of these counts and a jury even decided that the picture the FBI had widely circulated, supposedly showing her during a bank robbery, wasn’t even a picture of her. She and her comrade Sundiata Acoli were, however, wrongly convicted in the death of Werner Foerster.

Before going to trial, Assata Shakur was badly tortured as were other Black Panthers in custody like Ruben Scott who confessed after being tortured. Assata Shakur did not confess.

The torture and murder of political dissidents by the U.S. government did not begin with Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, it was used against the Black Panther Party as well as directly by the U.S. government in places like Vietnam. For instance, before Guantanamo and the Panthers, there were the tiger cages of Côn Sơn Island where U.S. forces and the South Vietnamese puppet government tortured prisoners and murdered 20,000 people. The victims were largely leftists and suspected leftists who opposed the U.S. imposed dictatorship of southern Vietnam. Similarly, the CIA’s torture and assassination under the Phoenix Program in southern Vietnam targeted Communists and suspected Communist supporters. Few prisoners survived their interrogations. The U.S. State Department admits to directly killing 20,000 people under this program and another 20,000 people were murdered by it when the program was turned over to the South Vietnamese dictatorship.

It was in 1977 that Assata Shakur was convicted by an all-white jury that was kept unaware of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign of murder and frame-up against the Black liberation movement. After the conviction, Assata Shakur’s comrades, however, broke her out of prison. She lived underground in the United States for 5 years and by 1984 she was able to escape to the freedom of Cuba.

While Assata Shakur benefits from the gains of the Cuban Revolution living in exile in Cuba, political prisoners who have not been able to escape the United States like Sundiata Acoli, who was arrested in relation to the same incident as Assata Shakur, still sit in prison. In September 2014, Sundiata Acoli, however, won an appeal to grant his release on parole, but the state of New Jersey is still fighting the ruling. Free Sundiata Acoli Now!

A similar case is that of Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald. He was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol in 1969, supposedly for a broken tail light. At that time, the police all across the country, in coordination with the FBI, were carrying out these kinds of stops and then opening fire on BPP members to kill them. In the shoot out that came with this CHP attack, Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald was shot in the head and CHP Officer Leslie Clapp was injured as well. At the trial for attempted murder, CHP Officer Leslie Clapp admitted that he was under orders to shoot and kill members of the Black Panther Party. The judge ordered the jury to disregard this essential fact. An additional charge for the murder of security guard Barge Miller was also placed on Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald. Yet, the one eyewitness against him couldn’t even pick out the picture of Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald when photos of three men were placed before him. Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald fired on Officer Leslie Clapp in self-defense and was framed for the death of Barge Miller.

While all of this went on, the corporate media loyally reported the FBI’s murder campaign against the Black Panther Party in the reverse of reality, with the BPP portrayed as the aggressors. Other FBI operations were used to discredit and murder members of the BPP as well. For instance, on his own initiative, FBI agent “Crazy” Tom Mosher set-up the so-called Guevara guerrilla training base in the Santa Cruz Mountains. From this base FBI agent Tom Mosher carried out various illegal activities like robberies of pot growers and leftists as well as guerrilla activities that were used to get people busted, all while doing his best to associate himself with the BPP. In 1971, an important and well liked member of the BPP, Fred Bennett, was murdered and his body disposed of at this FBI run training camp. FBI agent Tom Mosher then “leaked” a falsified version of what happened to a reporter he worked closely with in his operations named Ed Montgomery of the San Francisco Chronicle. From this falsified FBI information, Montgomery reported that Fred Bennett’s murder had been ordered by BPP leader Bobby Seale because of a personal relationship Fred Bennett was having with a woman in the BPP. This was an obvious lie from a known liar, in part because the BPP had actually approved their relationship. In his article, Montgomery hid the fact that he knew his source was FBI, and instead reported him as a movement source.

Full details of the murder of Fred Bennett may never be known, but what appears likely is that a snitch jacket was placed on him, probably with the participation of FBI agent Tom Mosher himself. This fits with an FBI COINTELPRO memo from FBI headquarters to the San Francisco office on May 11, 1970, urging them to work with local police to plant fabricated documents and other “disruptive disinformation … pinpointing Panthers as police or FBI informants.” In this way, under a climate of fear and anger already created by FBI frame-ups and murders, the FBI also carried out a targeted campaign to incite BPP members to kill each other.While innocent former Panthers sit framed-up in prison, live in exile, or have been put in their graves by the U.S. government; guilty FBI agents and city cops, including the Chicago police and FBI who murdered Fred Hampton in his sleep, have never been prosecuted for their crimes. Revolutionary Leininist-Trotskyists denounce this injustice. At the same time, we do make criticisms of the program of the Black Panther Party. It was a program that lacked a needed orientation to the multi-racial working class as both an agent for change and as a powerful force that can curtail repression by the capitalist state. The revolutionary party, as part of this working class orientation, fights for the leadership of the unions against its current conservative and bureaucratic leadership that is incapable of winning strikes and ties working class hopes to electoral victories of the racist and anti-working class Democrat Party. The Black Panther Party, lacking this needed orientation to the organized working class found itself increasingly under a war of extermination by the capitalist state, and without the strength of industrial unions to shut down production was reduced to a level of alternating between adventuristic military strikes and impotent appeals to the Democrat Party. Yet, it must also be said that such an orientation to labor was also less obvious at that time, a time when the organized working class was far better off than we are today as well as less influenced by the ideological gains of the Vietnam, Black, Chicano, Native American, women’s, and LGBT liberation movements that has had a big impact on the thinking of today’s working class.Another former Black Panther Party member unjustly sitting in prison is Mumia Abu-Jamal. He is currently serving a life sentence in the United States for his political views and journalism under a blatant frame-up murder charge. Mumia managed to survive the wave of FBI and police terror against the BPP in the 1960s and 70s only to be the victim of an attempted police murder in 1981 and then framed-up by the Philadelphia Police and sentenced to death 1982. There have been decades of struggle for Mumia’s freedom that have included an ILWU strike on his behalf on May 1st 1999 that shut down all west coast ports from 6 AM to 8 PM with a 300 strong ILWU contingent marching at the head of a march of 20,000 people demanding justice for Mumia. It was due to these kinds of actions as well as international outrage that Mumia was never executed. In 2011, Mumia’s death sentence was commuted to a life sentence, still a major travesty of justice.I write about the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal in more detail in a piece I link at the end of this article, but a brief synopsis is in order. During the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal, police coerced eyewitnesses into saying what they wanted to hear while the DA’s office illegally hid evidence for the defense and used obviously perjured testimony, including from one eyewitness that wasn’t even there. There were three reasons for the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The first is that he was at the wrong place at the wrong time while a mob hit was taking place against Officer Faulkner, a cop who corrupt officers involved with the mob thought was part of an FBI investigation of their criminal activities. The second reason was that Mumia was Black, working class, and a former Black Panther, so he was an easy victim of police frame-up for cops who wanted to cover-up a murder they were involved in. The third reason was that Mumia, as a freelance journalist, had worked to expose rampant police murders and repression carried out against the leftist and largely Black organization called MOVE in Philadelphia.

In years following Mumia’s frame-up, his journalism behind bars has spread far and wide as an important voice of the voiceless. The continued attempts at his execution up until 2011 by the entire system were intended to silence that voice. The latest move to silence Mumia came in the form of the Revictimization Relief Act signed into law in October 2014 by Governor Tom Corbett. Soon after signing the law, Corbett held a press conference on the site where Officer Faulkner was killed where he stated the law would stunt the “obscene celebrity” garnered by offenders like Mumia Abu-Jamal. The law greatly curtails the free speech rights of Mumia Abu-Jamal and any journalist who would like to report what he or any other inmate says.

It is to terrorize and silence leftists and the Black community that the capitalist class carries out outrageous repression against Mumia Abu-Jamal, Philadelphia MOVE, and the Black Panther Party.

Our demands

Genuine Marxists call for Black liberation through socialist revolution. In addition, we call for labor and other types of action to demand of the racist capitalist government: Free all political prisoners of the U.S. war on the Black liberation movement including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, and Romaine “Chip” Fitzegerald! End the $2 Million Bounty Against Assata Shakur and Drop The Conviction Against Her! Jail the Police, Judges, FBI, and Prosecutors Who Slaughtered and Framed Leaders of the Black Liberation Movement! Jail Killer Cops Who Continue to Murder With Impunity Today! End the U.S. Imperialist Economic Blockade of Cuba! Smash the racist and anti-worker capitalist state in proletarian socialist revolution!

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-Steven Argue writes for the Revolutionary Tendency (Leninist/Trotkyist formation).

The Revolutionary Tendency
https://www.facebook.com/RevolutionaryTendency/