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Encounters, separations, and incursions: Theorizing the Black Panther Party’s challenge to the War on Poverty

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Abstract

This article analyzes a series of encounters between the Black Panther Party and the U.S. government’s War on Poverty, beginning with the Party’s foundation in a North Oakland anti-poverty office in 1966, and culminating with the resignation of six Party members from elected positions on a West Oakland anti-poverty board in 1973. The essay theorizes these encounters as moments in an antagonistic process whereby the Party sought to separate from and launch incursions into the state’s anti-poverty apparatus, which had been established in the mid-1960s by a discrete stratum of state managers who sought to transform riotous energy into labor-power. This essay understands articles published in the Party’s newspaper, documents from its archive, and records of its community service practice as components of an ideological struggle which sought to reproduce anti-capitalist social relations on an extended scale. On the basis of this historical case study, the essay argues that the autonomy of radical social movement organizations from the state should be understood as a process rather than a status. It shows how social movements which view the state as an enemy can struggle in “close-quarters antagonism” within and against it. It situates this argument in relation to debates within the critical social sciences and state theory, and it considers the political and theoretical repercussions of this hypothesis for radical movements which confront the state apparatus of non-profit organizations today.

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Notes

  1. Articles in The Black Panther newspaper and unpublished materials located in archives are cited in footnotes. All other sources are cited in the text and References list.

  2. Exceptional in this regard were the efforts of Kenny Horston to build a Black Panther caucus within the United Auto Workers’ local at the General Motors plant in Fremont, California. See: “Black Panther Caucuses: Exposé…1969,” The Black Panther, February 2, 1969, 16; “An Interview with UAW’s Black Panther Caucus Leader Kenny Horston,” The Black Panther, May 11, 1969, 14. For background on Horston’s work, see Sustar (2018).

  3. While WP architects held a variety of views about the purposes of the WP in general and “community action” in particular, they shared a widespread assumption that work and job training could discipline those who might otherwise revolt (Gillette, 2010, 98–99; Quadagno, 1994, 67).

  4. I use the term “apparatus” to refer to a “system of defined institutions, organizations, and the corresponding practices” (Althusser, 2014 [1969], 77). Within this framework of Althusser’s, what I am calling the “anti-poverty state apparatus” may be understood as one of the ideological state apparatuses. For more on this point, see the discussion below.

  5. I borrow the term “close-quarters” from Nelson (2011, 55), one of the few scholars who has devoted substantial attention to the BPP’s relationship to the WP without drawing reductive conclusions, who has referred to this relationship as one of “close-quarters critique.” “Antagonism” is a Marxist category developed by Mario Tronti (2019 [1966]), among others, to emphasize how political struggle must begin from the working class’s foundation “within and against” capital.

  6. This orientation rhymes with the one that Newton (1972f [1967], 18) espoused concerning other forms of weaponry: “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense teaches that, in the final analysis the guns, hand grenades, bazookas, and other equipment necessary for defense must be supplied by the power structure. As exemplified by the Vietcong, these weapons must be taken from the oppressor.” It should be noted that this is not the only theoretical perspective that one might put into conversation with a reading of the BPP’s practice vis-à-vis the WP. For instance, the analytical framework of marronage, developed by Bonilla (2015, 41–43) in her study of contemporary union militants in Guadeloupe as a “form of strategic entanglement: a way of crafting and enacting autonomy within a system from which one is unable to fully disentangle,” provides another potentially rich framework for studying the BPP’s engagement with the WP.

  7. On this point, see also Scott (1991).

  8. I borrow the category “common sense” from Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings, where the term carries a particular meaning. In Hoare & Smith’s (1971, 322) editorial notes to their translation of selections from Gramsci’s notebooks, they explain that “common sense” for Gramsci refers to “the uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding the world that has become ‘common’ in any given epoch.” A more detailed discussion of the term’s specificity may be found in Thomas (2009, 16n61).

  9. This understanding, which is the author’s own, has been hybridized from the work of several critical social theorists working in different branches of the Marxist tradition. In addition to Althusser, they include Nicos Poulantzas, Mario Tronti, Étienne Balibar, George Jackson, and others. Though these thinkers engaged in debates with one another, and revised their own theses over time, their works share a view of the state as capitalist (separating their theories from those of social theorists such as, for example, Pierre Bourdieu) while also appreciating the complexities of how political subjects come to act in contemporary capitalist societies (a perspective which is by no means limited to self-described Marxists).

  10. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements were, as Marable (2018 [1983], 27) has underlined, “fundamentally working-class and poor people’s movements.” Though the WP was the result of haphazard and uneven planning which spanned across two presidential administrations, a relatively coherent stratum of actors spearheaded its realization in conflict with other state managers and capitalists; see the discussion below.

  11. Kathleen Cleaver (quoted in Spencer, 2016, 71) has suggested that the Party could most accurately be defined as a loose network of revolutionaries.

  12. I propose the term “collective subjectivation” to designate the production of political-organizational subjectivity inimical to the capitalist state. I also put forward the concept “political subsumption” in reference to the uneven attempts by capitalist state managers to incorporate autonomous social movement activity into the operations of the state. The former aims to replace “radicalization,” which relies too heavily on notions of consciousness separate from collective action, while the latter seeks to displace “cooptation,” which implies betrayal by personnel and the extinguishing of political possibility. On subjectivation, see: Read (2003); Mezzadra (2018). On subsumption, see: Harootunian (2015); Tomba (2015; 2017).

  13. This materialist understanding of ideology, understood not as a set of free-floating ideas but as being embedded in institutions and practices, was formulated by Althusser (2014). For a critique and extension of Althusser’s theses to discuss class struggle in the ISAs, see Poulantzas (1974, 299–309).

  14. On the need for resilient organizations, and not merely a correct political perspective, for movements to avoid “slipping back towards” the ideological state apparatuses, see Poulantzas (1974, 308–309).

  15. For YLP members’ experiences working in the anti-poverty programs see Young Lords Party (2011 [1971], 10–15). Regarding the WP and the foundation of the NWRO, see Piven & Cloward (1977, 289–297). On the relationship of grassroots activism across the country to the WP, see the essays collected in Orleck & Hazirjian (2011).

  16. See, for instance, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (1969) resolution passed at its national council meeting of March 30, 1969, which declared the BPP the “vanguard in our common struggles against capitalism and imperialism.”

  17. Self (2003, 53) has found that, though Black trade-union membership was high in the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union and the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, these CIO outfits were “a small presence in Bay Area industry. In the crucial fields of transportation and construction, dominated by the Teamsters and Building Trades, respectively, a nearly solid color line prevailed.” Additionally, Self notes that Black workers were refused admission by Division 192 of the Amalgamated Association of Street, Electric Railway, and Motor Coach Employees, and that Black workers were segregated into separate locals in the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Shipbuilders, and Helpers of America (Boilermakers).

  18. See for instance the case of Luther Smith, Sr. (with whom the Panthers would later have a fractious relationship), whose home was raided by the Oakland police in 1966 (“Nightmare in Oakland,” 1966).

  19. On the influence of Mao and Maoism on RAM, the BPP, and other Black revolutionary organizations, see Kelley & Esch (1999).

  20. Seale is unambiguous on the point of Newton’s employment, but when Newton (1973, 115) himself mentions the North Oakland Center in his memoir, he refers only to studying at the Center “where Bobby was working.”

  21. See also Bobby Seale, “The Ten Point Platform and Program of the Black Panther Party,” The Black Panther, October 18, 1969, 2. Recently Bloom & Martin (2013, 417n8) have cast doubt on this story, finding “no evidence that the Ten Point Program was even written before late April 1967,” the month when it first appeared in The Black Panther newspaper.

  22. Here Newton once again refers to the Center “where both [Hutton and Seale] were working,” without mentioning his own part-time employment.

  23. The Young Lords were also trenchant critics of anti-poverty agencies, in which some of them had worked. See the note above, as well as Young Lords Party (2010 [1969], 9–11).

  24. Memo from Comrade Ericka [Huggins] to Comrade June [Hilliard], re: “Outline of information from skills sheet” (November 1, 1972), Dr. Huey P. Newton Papers, Stanford University (hereafter HPN Papers), Series 2, Box 4, Folder 4. The sum total of these biographical associations of personnel does not constitute a theory of the state; rather, it clarifies the extent to which the War on Poverty was part of the shared state terrain on which late-sixties militants could not but tread. I reject claims such as those made by Cedric Johnson that these entanglements foreclosed the Party’s potential as a revolutionary force. No more than were ex-factory worker Panthers (or factory workers in general) indelibly marked by the managerial spirit of industrial capitalism, ex-state worker Panthers were not bound to reproduce the liberalism of Moynihan or Lyndon Johnson simply by virtue of their employment history.

  25. Bobby Seale, “Black Panthers and Hunters Point,” The Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 4 and 15.

  26. Johnson effectively transposes Adolph Reed, Jr.’s (1999, 246n36) criticism of Robert L. Allen onto the BPP.

  27. As Jackson (1990, 174) pointed out, the mainstream U.S. labor movement had already been a victim of political subsumption carried out by the U.S. state of the New Deal. See also Haider (2020).

  28. Of course, the state was also always present in the forms of schools, militaries, and prisons.

  29. Poulantzas and Althusser were also charged with being “structuralists” and “functionalists.” These terms seem to mischaracterize the core of their contributions to critical social and political theory, given that both insisted on the primacy of class practices over state institutions, as well as the determinant role of class struggle within the structured whole of capitalist society. These principles may indeed have been underemphasized by these authors, owing in part to the main battle they understood themselves to be waging: the one against discourses of alienation and consciousness, which they grouped together under the rubric of “humanism.” Nevertheless, a new season of scholarship has brought attention to this hitherto obscured dimension of their works. See the work of Banu Bargu, Asad Haider, Patrick King, Stefano Pippa, Natalia Romé, and Panagiotis Sotiris, among others.

  30. For reflections in a different key on the relationship of Negri’s later work with Michael Hardt to that of Newton, see Narayan (2019).

  31. “War on Poverty [1],” cartoon, The Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 14; “War on Poverty [2],” cartoon, The Black Panther, November 23, 1967, 11.

  32. Nelson (2011, 50) emphasizes how important the Panther members’ early experiences in state work were for their subjectivation as anti-state activists.

  33. Bert, “The War on Poverty, A Demagogic (Lying) Weapon Against the People,” The Black Panther, July 5, 1969, 17.

  34. Jymbo, “Black Thing Co-Opted,” The Black Panther, October 25, 1969, 5.

  35. Singh (1998, 78) has argued that, “In contrast to the forms of hegemonic power in which the modern state secures the terrains of civil society and its public spheres by the structuring of the population’s moral reflexes, colonial power exercises control through violence and repression in the first instance […] [through armed patrols] the Panthers also showed how they were inured to the possibility of future hegemonic overtures by the state, because of their familiarity with the state as an instance of naked force and violence.” While Singh’s examination is brilliant, my analysis emphasizes that the Party did not only have “familiarity with the state as an instance of naked force and violence.” Members also had firsthand experience with the state as an instance of hegemony, as this article attempts to show, through their relationship with the War on Poverty and their criticisms of subsumptive practices of state managers.

  36. The Party was not alone in positing this continuity. Sargent Shriver (quoted in Gillette 2010, 206), the first director of the OEO, argued for the WP as an extension of the war in Vietnam, seeing both as fights for “freedom” and the “good life.”

  37. For a critique of the way that Black studies was being adopted by the educational apparatus, see “Interview with Masai [Hewitt],” The Black Panther, May 31, 1969, 16. For Party critiques of Black capitalism, see: George Mason Murray, “Cultural Nationalism,” The Black Panther, March 3, 1969, 4; Landon Williams, “Black Capitalism and What It Means,” The Black Panther, March 16, 1969, 4–5.

  38. There is not space here to adequately explore the Party’s rapprochement with Black elected officials, the Black Church, and other forces which they previously worked hard to criticize. Newton’s account in the early 1970s involved a severe self-criticism in which he alleged that the Party had “defected from the Black community” during the period of his imprisonment, and that it was reestablishing relations through its survival programs. For all the Party’s twists and turns, as late as August 1973, well into the BPP’s period of serving the people and running in local electoral contests, the newspaper inaugurated a column called “Inside Out,” designed to expose “the enemy within,” namely, those “mouthing the rhetoric of Blackness and liberation.” See “The Enemy Within,” The Black Panther, August 25, 1973, 2. On “defection,” see Newton (1972c [1971]). More generally see Newton (1972d [1971]; 1972a [1971]; 1972b [1971]). For further consideration of this theme, see Vasquez (2018).

  39. The Panthers’ commitment to multiracial class struggle leaps out to any reader of their newspaper, which, in addition to international coverage of revolutionary movements abroad, featured reports from “white mother-country radicals,” solidarity with the Los Siete de la Raza and the Young Lords Party, as well as dispatches from poor white organizations like the Young Patriots of Chicago and the Bois d’Arc Patriots of Texas.

  40. “Bootlickers Gallery,” The Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 19. See also Bloom & Martin (2013, 93–94).

  41. Aside from Johnson, the only non-Black figure portrayed in the gallery was the Statue of Liberty, included because “her back faces to Harlem.”

  42. “Speech by Field Marshall D.C. at Fillmore Auditorium, S.F.,” The Black Panther, April 20, 1969, 16.

  43. Ray “Masai” Hewitt, “Minstrel Show,” The Black Panther, August 16, 1969, 7. On Black Power and the War on Poverty, see Allen (1969) and Benson (1971).

  44. George Mason Murray, “Cultural Nationalism,” The Black Panther, March 3, 1969, 4; Landon Williams, “Black Capitalism and What It Means,” The Black Panther, March 16, 1969, 4–5, published alongside a cartoon showing the pig-headed tree of “U.S. imperialism” being chopped down with an axe, while a short weed labeled “Black Capitalism” looks on in fear; article corrected and republished March 23, 1969, 2–3, and accompanied by a cartoon of Maulana Karenga of US Organization and U.S. House Representative Adam Clayton Powell holding out empty plates, while Richard Nixon carves out slices from a stack of dollar bills. It’s important to note here that political subsumption continued under Nixon; as the work of Hinton (2016) has forcefully underlined with respect to repression under the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, so too were subsumptive practices wielded by later conservative administrations. While “common sense” suggests a clear division of labor between liberals (carrots) and conservatives (sticks), it would be more prudent to consider the relative weight of each mode of state initiative in any given formation of the ruling bloc.

  45. “Speech by Field Marshall D.C.,” 16. To be sure, this perspective was not the only one ever voiced by the Party, but as Murch (2010, 261n195) recounts, reflecting on her own research process, such conceptions were widely held: “One of my greatest surprises as a young researcher was conducting oral histories with members of the Oakland Party and asking them to explain how they understood the BPP as part of the larger Black Power movement, only to have them deny adamantly that this was the case. Ericka Huggins stressed that this assumption is one of the greatest historical misconceptions about the Black Panther Party. ‘Most young people don’t know that the Party wasn’t a Black nationalist organization. It just wasn’t. It didn’t even continually call itself a Black Power organization…. That might have been where we were conceived […] at that juncture in history. […] Remember, our slogan was “All Power To the People!”’”.

  46. As Murch (2010) shows, the Panthers’ origins were as much in university struggles as anti-poverty work. For an analysis of the process by which Black studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies became elements of state-managed discipline, see Ferguson (2012).

  47. For accounts of this process, see Rooks (2006); Ferguson (2013).

  48. “Interview with Masai,” The Black Panther, May 31, 1969, 16.

  49. The Party’s embrace of Maoist thought and practice is well documented; see Kelley & Esch (1999), among others. see also Alberto Toscano’s (2004) relevant reflections on “separation” and the work of the political philosopher Alain Badiou, whose thinking is also deeply indebted to Mao.

  50. In a striking way, this echoes an argument by Althusser (2011b [1965], 30, 37), who underscored that the ideology of the working-class struggle emerges from within terms set by the dominant bourgeois ideology and struggles to transform it.

  51. “October 1966 [sic] Black Panther Party Platform and Program,” The Black Panther, March 27, 1971, 15. See also Nelson (2011).

  52. The Model Cities legislation, it should be noted, was passed under Johnson.

  53. “What We Want Now! What We Believe,” The Black Panther, May 15, 1967, 3.

  54. Though the Party was officially under the leadership of Seale and Hilliard at this time, Newton and Cleaver were also involved in the development of the programs. Additionally, rank-and-file women members of the Party designed many of the most successful programs, as discussed below. See Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and David Hilliard, “Breakfast for Black Children,” The Black Panther, September 7, 1968, 7. Bloom & Martin (2013, 437n8) note that they were unable to find any evidence that any of these programs were actually initiated in 1968.

  55. Alkebulan (2007, 32) finds reasonable the Party’s own estimation of having served approximately 20,000 children by November 1969.

  56. Diahnne Jenkins, “Socialism: Serving the People,” The Black Panther, November 1, 1969, 19.

  57. Many articles in The Black Panther covered programs in different chapters and branches, as well as the various types of repression they faced. For an early sampling see: “New York Breakfast for Children,” The Black Panther, March 23, 1969, 17; “Richmond Breakfast for School Children” and “Breakfast for Schoolchildren in Double Rock and Hunters Point,” The Black Panther, March 31, 1969, 9; and the entire issue of April 27, 1969.

  58. Whereas Nelson (2011, 70, 105) does not make the comparison to discount the programs, Johnson, who is deeply critical of the Panthers (see also Johnson 2022), follows Crowe (2000, 224), for whom the “relatively short leap” from the War on Poverty’s community action initiatives to the Panthers’ programs indicated an irreconcilable contradiction. Crowe’s account is generally disparaging, pinpointing the former “anti-poverty agent” Seale as the key architect of this turn in Party practice. As shown above, many Panther members had relations with the anti-poverty programs, and it seems disingenuous to say, as Crowe does, that the “models provided by federal liberalism” were unselfconsciously reproduced, given the continuous criticisms the Panthers launched against the War on Poverty in print, and their experiments in practice to demarcate their efforts from those of the state, especially in terms of rejecting means testing and breaking down the barrier between professional expertise and grassroots knowledge.

  59. For a more critical assessment of gender dynamics in the Party, see Matthews (1998). See also Spencer (2016, 94–95).

  60. The critique of professional social workers in the War on Poverty percolated through another social movement organization’s engaged in struggle against the WP: the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) of SDS. See most notably Betty Cooper et al., Is This War? Why Doesn’t the War on Poverty Help Us? (Cleveland: West Side Community Union, 1966), Carol McEldowney folder, 2–B, Students for a Democratic Society Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.

  61. “Statement by Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party and Supreme Servant of the People, on the Occasion of Revolutionary Intercommunal Day of Solidarity,” The Black Panther, March 13, 1971, 2.

  62. The cause-effect relation between state-run and Party-initiated programs is complex. While Crowe (2000, 226) cites several Johnson-era initiatives which offered free meals to public school students in the years before 1968, according to Bloom & Martin (2013, 186) “the U.S. government spent only $600,000 on breakfast programs in all of 1967,” whereas by 1972, “government-sponsored breakfast programs were feeding 1.18 million children out of the approximately 5 million who qualified for such help.”

  63. The Party also hosted an Ideological Institute in Oakland for members from across the country, where it sought to clarify key principles in its own approach to Marxism (Alkebulan, 2007, 40, 47).

  64. Big Man, “Editorial Statement,” The Black Panther, April 27, 1969, 10–11. See also Eldridge Cleaver, “On Meeting the Needs of the People” [reprinted from Ramparts], August 16, 1969, 4; Fred Hampton, “All Power to the People,” The Black Panther, July 19, 1969, 7–8.

  65. Richard (Dhoruba) Moore, “Programs of Survival vs. the Ruling Class,” The Black Panther, November 28, 1970, 9.

  66. “Interview with George Jackson 3-29-71,” The Black Panther, April 3, 1971, 6–7.

  67. Fred Hampton, “All Power to the People,” 7.

  68. For Cleaver (2014 [1969], 112), the only way to combat political subsumption was to create “organizational machinery” of a properly revolutionary type. These arguments tended toward maximalism, ultimately finding immediate armed insurrection to be the Party’s only viable path forward.

  69. For an appreciation of Jackson’s work as a theorist, see Foucault et al., (2007 [1971], 154). On the significance of Foucault’s reading of the BPP, see Vásquez (2020).

  70. If Newton’s writing remains somewhat ambiguous on this score, Jackson clearly emphasizes the need to distinguish the military and political wings of the movement from one another.

  71. Pete O’Neal, “Breakfast for School Children,” The Black Panther, May 11, 1969, 8.

  72. The Dolph, “In Response to Oakland School Breakfast Program,” The Black Panther, April 20, 1969, 13.

  73. “Rules of the Black Panther Party,” The Black Panther, December 21, 1968, 17, point 24.

  74. Brenda Ilyson [Hyson?], “Urban Renewal, People’s Removal,” The Black Panther, April 18, 1970, 8.

  75. “Youth Gather for Survival: Bobby Seale Addresses Black Youth Congress,” The Black Panther, March 25, 1972, 5.

  76. I would like to acknowledge that these and subsequent newspaper clippings about the anti-poverty board elections were helpfully collected in HPN Papers, Series 8, Box 4, Folder 2.

  77. “Panthers Sweep Berkeley Elections!” The Black Panther, June 10, 1972, 2 and 12–13, 12.

  78. “Panthers Sweep Berkeley Elections!” 2.

  79. “Panthers Sweep Berkeley Elections!” 13. See also “Black Panthers Win Elections in Berkeley” (1972).

  80. For the distinction between labor-power as an economic category and the working class as a political force, see Tronti (2019, 103–276, especially 112).

  81. “The Black Panther Party Supports Senior Power,” The Black Panther, July 15, 1972, 11–12.

  82. Because the OEO determined the ultimate decision lay with the “community,” the board itself was able to vote on the question, and it unanimously approved to allow the Panthers to retain their seats. See also “OEO Attempts to Unseat the Community,” The Black Panther, September 16, 1972, 5 and 12.

  83. “‘We Have to Attend to Our People’: An Interview with Comrade Huey P. Newton,” The Black Panther, September 2, 1972, 6 and 12, 12. See also Newton (1980, 45n19).

  84. It is worth noting that, after Bobby Hutton was killed by police in May 1968, years before the Party’s 1972 incursion, several elected board members and staff of the WOPC formed the Black Strike for Justice Committee to picket downtown businesses, demand the indictment of Hutton’s murderers, and call for community control of the police (Self, 2003, 244).

  85. “District 2 Sample Ballot Form Leaflet,” HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 19, Folder 4; “Vote Aug 19, 1972,” HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 19, Folder 4.

  86. “Oakland – A Base of Operation! Part IV: The Power of the Poverty Program Professionals,” The Black Panther, August 19, 1972, A–D, A.

  87. “This Saturday, Aug. 19th Vote,” flyer, HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 19, Folder 4.

  88. Bobby Seale to the Coordinators, “WOPC Elections, August 19th, 1972,” Memo, HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 19, Folder 4; “Cadre Work Sheets” HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 19, Folder 4; Comrade Bobby Seale to Central Committee and Comrade Huey P. Newton, “WOPC Elections,” HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 19, Folder 4.

  89. “Oakland – A Base of Operation! Part IV,” A. This was, of course, a reference to “Vietnamization,” the U.S. strategy of building the capacity and infrastructure of anti-communist South Vietnamese forces. Ferguson (2013, 78) has noted the comparison between Vietnamization efforts and the Great Society, particularly with regard to how McGeorge Bundy’s Ford Foundation engaged with Black Power.

  90. The Oakland Party’s communiques regarding the War on Poverty in 1972–1973 verge on incoherent, further attesting to the impossibility of ascribing a centralized strategic plan to the Party, especially at this point in the organization’s history. In October 1972, the Central Body of the Party agreed to send out a directive to all remaining chapters and branches forbidding them from running for anti-poverty boards or for applying for anti-poverty funds. An exception was made for those already elected, who would need to send “constant reports” and take direction from the Central Body (no such reports could be located in the Party’s archive). Whether the directive from Oakland was ultimately communicated, the Central Body’s decision flew in the face of recent maneuvers in Oakland. Shortly thereafter, Chicago Panthers, following Oakland’s example rather than their dictum, ran in their own Model Cities election in December 1972 – for which the Oakland-based newspaper inexplicably encouraged its readers to vote. In another communication, Seale suggested the Party consider paying stipends to community members for attending study groups around funding issues related to the WOPC. In a press release concerning a new senior services program being launched by the Party the same month as the Central Committee’s decision, Seale announced his hope that the Panthers could win OEO money to run the program. Ruth Jones, a BPP-endorsed member of the WOPC board (and Huey P. Newton’s aunt), announced her support in getting the WOPC to “spend some poverty money” on it. Shortly thereafter, the BPP prepared a formal request to the WOPC for funds, in seeming repudiation of its own mandate. The proposal’s outcome is unknown. See “Notes from Central Body Meeting,” October 2, 1972, HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 4, Folder 2; Bobby Seale to All Central Body Members, “Agenda Items To Be Discussed,” October 1, 1972, HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 4, Folder 2; “Chicago Model Cities Election – Dec. 19th ,” The Black Panther, December 7, 1972, 6; “Black Panthers Call for End to ‘Muggings’ of Senior Citizens,” Press Release, December 4, 1972, HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 18, Folder 4; Bobby Seale to All Central Body Members, Untitled Memo, October 13, 1972, HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 4, Folder 2; “Black Panthers Call for Funding of SAFE Program,” Press Release, January 3, 1973, HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 18, Folder 5; Public Advocates, Inc., “Funding Proposal: Seniors Against a Fearful Environment (SAFE),” HPN Papers, Series 2, Box 18, Folder 5.

  91. The Panthers’ Oakland Community School (OCS) continued into the 1980s (Garcha, 2015; Huggins & LeBlanc-Ernest, 2009). While an innovative incubator for progressive pedagogy and alternative schooling, its practice was distinctly local, in comparison to the mass nationwide force exercised in the Party’s prior service programs.

  92. “BPP Withdraws from Poverty Program: Efforts Frustrated by Govt. Farce,” The Black Panther, November 3, 1973, 5 and 15.

  93. “BPP Withdraws from Poverty Program,” 5.

  94. This is in part evidenced by the elaborate ground game the Party developed to get voters to the polls. See Seale to Coordinators, “WOPC Elections”; “Cadre Work Sheets”; Seale to Central Committee and Newton, “WOPC Elections.”

  95. This approach, outlined by Newton (1972f), may also be compared to one outlined by Tronti (2019, xxiii): “In an enemy society, we cannot freely choose the means we use to fight it. And the weapons of proletarian revolt have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenals.”

  96. Some of the formulations here and above originated in conversation with Dave Mesing, whose influence I wish to acknowledge here. His dissertation (Mesing, 2020) provides a rigorous analysis of the emergence of strategy from the organizational practice of the Black Panther Party.

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Acknowledgements

Components of this research were presented at: The Great Transition: Setting the Stage for a Post-Capitalist Society, Historical Materialism, University of Montréal, May 2018; Graduate Lecture Series, Corso di Perfezionamento in Teoria Critica della Società, University of Milan-Bicocca, May 2019; and the seminar of the Scholars-in-Residence Program, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, November 2020. For criticisms, suggestions, and engagement with drafts of this article, the author thanks Aisha Al-Adawiya, Carolina Bank Muñoz, Malachi Crawford, Stephanie Crease, Brent Edwards, Rebecca Hall, Patrick King, John Krinsky, Rosa Lee, Ben Mabie, Eve Meltzer, Dave Mesing, Salar Mohandesi, Vittorio Morfino, T. Urayoán Noel, Charles Post, Russell Rickford, J.T. Roane, Phyllis Ross, Stefano Sacchetti, Robyn Spencer, Delio Vásquez, and the peer reviewers and editors of Theory & Society.

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Anastasi, A. Encounters, separations, and incursions: Theorizing the Black Panther Party’s challenge to the War on Poverty. Theor Soc 52, 641–675 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09506-z

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