Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon

by Jane Rhodes

The Black Panthers' rise to prominence and notoriety

A potent symbol of black power and radical inspiration, the Black Panthers still evoke strong emotions. Even as scholars unwrap the Panther mystique, a generation of hip-hop performers, filmmakers, and other artists name-check the group and employ its images.

Jane Rhodes's acclaimed study examines the extraordinary staying power of the Black Panthers in the American imagination. Probing the group's longtime relationship to the media, Rhodes traces how the Panthers articulated their message through symbols and tactics the mass media could not resist. By exploiting press coverage through everything from posters to public appearances to photo ops, the Panthers created a linguistic and symbolic universe as salient today as during the group's heyday. They also pioneered a sophisticated version of mass media activism that powers contemporary African American protest, from the work of Black Lives Matter to Beyoncé's 2016 Super Bowl performance.

Featuring a timely new preface by the author, Framing the Black Panthers is a breakthrough reconsideration of a fascinating phenomenon.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, African American

416 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2006

About the author

Jane Rhodes is professor and department head of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century.

Reviews

[Skip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starting with a double entendre title, Jane Rhodes has written a detailed account of how the Black Panther Party was demonized by the mainstream press, which chose to report on the violent rhetoric of party leaders, like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver. Reporting was extremely biased, choosing inflammatory adjectives, creating fear among whites in the 1960s. Most of her book is focused on the period from mid-1967 through 1968 into 1969, starting with the Black Panthers protest at the state Capitol building in Sacramento, which was completely peaceful even though they openly carried guns. However, certain Panthers were eventually prosecuted under an obscure law against disrupting the legislature in session. The incarceration of both Bobby Seale and Huey Newton and the eventual disappearance of Eldridge Cleaver overshadowed the message that blacks should arm themselves to protect against police persecution and targeting, especially in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination which for the BPP finished the movement for civil disobedience. The killing by police of Fred Hampton in Chicago also went unpunished in this era, and the unsolved murders of BPP leaders like Bunchy Carter and John Huggins in L.A. fanned smoldering resentment of the "pigs." The decision to publish their own newspaper was one of strategic importance for the BPP: both to promote their message and party platform as well as to raise much needed funding for party activities, including defense attorney fees.

Jane Rhodes writing is superb and her research top-notch. I was disappointing though that her focus was almost exclusively on the Oakland Panthers, ignoring most of the other important chapters, especially Chicago, New York and New Haven, which merited only 2-3 pages each. Also, there was very little mention of the social programs, probably because of her focus on the media, which chose to ignore the mundane, day-to-day activities to build community in the inner cities.

[Carly · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We might see the great power of the Black Panthers in their ability to create, manipulate, and subvert mass culture."


"To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage."
--Eldridge Cleaver

The Black Panthers are one of the most simultaneously notorious and least-understood movements in American history. It is impossible to analyze the Black Panthers Party without also discussing the media that exoticized and excoriated it. In Framing the Black Panthers, Rhodes seeks to illuminate the relationship between the Black Panthers and the media, whose exploitation and commodification gave the Panthers the visibility that both granted momentum and eventually aided in its destruction. While it's not suitable as an introduction to the history of the Black Panther Party-- I'd suggest Black Against Empire for that --The Framing of the Black Panther Party explores a critical aspect of the story: the Panthers' struggle to harness and control the media and public perception, and their ultimate inability to fully shape or control their image.

Framing the Black Panthers starts by examining the political origins of the Panthers and the way in which the media shaped perceptions of the Civil Rights Movement, such as newspapers' portrayal of Rosa Parks as a spontaneous protester rather than part of a greater movement, or the way that ever-present violence was downplayed in favor of the neater story of nonviolent protest for well-defined civil liberties. Blacks protecting themselves with firearms from white gangs come to lynch them is not a new story. The new element-- and as Rhodes points out, not even this was actually novel-- was in the Panthers' portrayal of the police and the government as yet another racist gang come to invade and attack the black community. And thus the powerful statement the Panthers made with their guns and berets: that the justice system didn't have a copyright on armed and uniformed defenders of its citizens.

The Panthers were a conscious paradox, abandoning nonviolence while portraying themselves as disciplined defenders, simultaneously embracing and rejecting the stereotype of the angry, virile, destructive Black man. Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, in particular, saw Black Power as the reclamation and exaltation of Black manhood, yet employed discipline to escape characterization as "black brute." Rhodes argues that the guns that the BPP so famously embraced were at least partially utilized as a media spectacle to gain attention to the struggle.Their symbols--the guns, the berets, the upraised fists, phrases such as "pig" and "power to the people"--all became cultural touchstones with very different interpretations for different communities, in part because of this paradox. By escaping respectability politics, the BPP became the emblem of Black militancy.

While we want to view the media as dispassionate and unbiased chroniclers of current events, in actuality, they shape the narrative and therefore public perception and reaction. Rhodes highlights the interdependence between the Panthers and the media: the Panthers used the media to gain notoriety and use that notoriety to gain momentum and a modicum of safety from a government that sought to silence them by any means possible. However, the media had their own well-defined agenda: to exotify, sensationalize, and commodify the party while still upholding the viewpoints of their readers. As Rhodes puts it:

"The news media, in particular, had a conflicting social agenda--to appease the power elites of whom they were a part and to uphold societal norms while professing some concern for the problem of racial inequality. [...] Because the press is primarily invested in reinforcing normative values, one should not expect them to seriously interrogate the complexities of a group such as the Black Panthers."

The rise of television eroded media responsibility even more by incentivizing the reduction of complex stories into their most sensational, easily digested elements.

"Most damning, perhaps, was that the media was deeply invested in the self-fulfilling prophecy [of violence] it advanced."

As media portrayal spiraled out of control with violent repercussions, the Panthers sought to control their own image by restricting media access and broadcasting their own voices via the Panther paper, but they had become a "salable commodity," both for those who hawked sensational tales of violence and depravity, and for "white guilt" liberals embracing "radical chic."

Rhodes explores the narrative and symbolic frames that the media employed when reporting on the BPP, including the extreme partisanship of outlets such as the Oakland Tribune and the Golden Gater. Yet the book itself occasionally uses the same sort of phrasing that it accuses these papers of using, promoting, if perhaps unintentionally, its own framing of events. For example, Rhodes calls William Lee Brent's holdup and shootout "a costly mistake" and terms the ex-Panthers who made accusations of sexual abuse "disgruntled", employing language that implicitly dismisses the accusations. The BPP was a complex movement, both flawed and glorious, despite media attempts to flatten it into a simple "good" or "evil." It was constructed as a paradox, and remained one throughout its lifetime, simultaneously promoting "Black self-love" and embracing a patriarchal form of homophobia and sexism. Rhodes dives deep into her subject, exploring the goals and outcomes of the Breakfast Program, the relationships between the Panthers and the Peace and Freedom Party in terms of press gains, the Panthers' worldwide influence, including the Black Panther movement that formed in the UK, and more.

For me, the one place where Framing the Black Panthers fell short was in the paucity of images. The book routinely describes headlines, photographs, and illustrations in words, yet I counted less than twenty photographs in the entire book, shoved together into a section at the center. I found myself performing image search after image search on Google to find the photographs or headlines described in the text. There is something powerful about the images themselves, and I think the book would greatly benefit from showing the images it so carefully describes. For example, take one of the Doonesbury cartoons mentioned, or the famous sketch of Bobby Seale when he was gagged and chained to his chair in court:


I think the book would be much more powerful if the inclusion of visual elements doubled its length.

Framing the Black Panthers is a wholesale indictment of the media, but also an exploration of the complex relationship between media and subject. As is now publicly acknowledged, the BPP, termed by Hoover "The greatest threat to internal security of the country," was under constant assault by the government and by the media. As we again enter an era of Civil Rights struggles, I believe it is critical to understand our own past with the hope that it may give us insight into our future. The media desire for sensationalism fed public fear, which in turn fueled the police's belief that the Panthers "would someday invade their homes for the purpose of killing wives and children" (Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and Law Enforcement). Repercussions of the mutual distrust fed by media frenzy continues to create tragedy today. With the creation of new movements like the Brutality Prevention Project, perhaps Panthers' dream of community defense can finally be achieved, with cellphone cameras instead of guns.

~~I received this book through Netgalley from the publisher, University of Illinois Press, in exchange for my honest review. Quotes were taken from an advanced reader copy and while they may not reflect the final phrasing, I believe they speak to the spirit of the book as a whole.~~

Cross-posted on Booklikes.

[Sarah Schulman]

Very interesting and informative- a good book to read for people interested in movement histories across the board.

[Carol Kean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given how much the media has defined for the masses who and what the Black Panthers are, it's helpful to find a book that specifically addresses the images manufactured by the media, with a comparison/contrast to the facts, which are hard to find. Unless people kept journals and letters, recorded with video cameras, taped speeches, and donated archival material to libraries, and unless historians and hagiographers collect, sift, and present the facts, how do we ever know who said what, who "started it," who "had it coming," and what anyone's intentions are?

Since reading Jason Overstreet's "The Strivers Row Spy" last September (via NetGalley), I've been insatiably curious about Marcus Garvey. Overstreet's novel paints a rather dim view of Jamaica's national hero, a charismatic leader whose followers called him "Your majesty." In 1920s Harlem, in the United States at any time, that sort of thing sounds off putting, if not alarming. Did Garvey really have such an exalted view of himself and his role in leading U.S.-born descendants of slavery to a new country in Africa? The red, black, and green stripes of Garvey's flag wave today at Black Lives Matter protests, and in Boston, and other cities, some have demanded that the flag not be flown, because it incites violence. (You see what I mean about what people are told, what they believe, what conclusions they leap to.)


In 1915 W.E.B. DuBois called for a "negro brotherhood" across the globe, to fight Western imperialism and empower the darker races. Two years later, Marcus Garvey created UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), and his speeches drew crowds of thousands in Harlem. Both men protested injustice and discrimination, both inspired others to work toward a unified front against white supremacy, yet both men hated each other. Garvey extolled black self-sufficiency and repatriation back to Africa.

A great many blacks, however, having been born in America, wanted to stay here. They wanted to make things better here, not start all over in a new place, where the effects of British colonialism were firmly established. In the 1970s, a leader of the Panthers' Kansas City chapter fled to Africa and joined the Cleavers in exile in Algiers. Rhodes writes that "their experiences embody the longings of many African Americans-- to be surrounded and embraced by a nation of black people, to become part of an ancestral community, and to leave behind the hostile gaze of the west."

However many may wish that, the idea does not seem to be spreading. Even when African Americans migrated north in the early 1900s, the southern economy was said to be undermined, and northern stability threatened, because it's in the South that "the Negro is most at home, where he is best understood, and reality best liked." Does the hindsight of the 21st Century suggest that repatriation in Africa would have empowered blacks more than integration has in the United States? I'm still looking for the answer to that. The subject is much too big and too complex for such sweeping generalizations or conclusions.

"The black man has been a serf, a tool, a slave and a peon for all the world and has been regarded as less than a man. That day has ceased," Garvey told a crowd in Madison Square Garden in 1920. He called for backs to reclaim Africa for their own. In creating the Black Star Line, buying a fleet of ships to bring the diaspora back together in the motherland, Garvey attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI got him jailed on a sketchy charge of mail fraud. Newspaper editorials lampooned Garvey for dressing like a medieval king and for failing to grasp that "the whole of Africa never did belong to negroes."

This led me to read a book written in 1890s on the history of Liberia (the nation Garvey targeted), and even then, after Jefferson and Monroe launched the idea of sending free blacks to Africa, the natives there were not accommodating. This is the measure of good literature and good nonfiction: the amount of research it inspires me to take on, trying to learn more about a topic in a book.

Dismissive commentary by the press "was part of the overall discourse of African Americans," writes Jane Rhodes in "Framing the Black Panthers." Newspapers disseminated the prevailing ideologies on race. "Black Americans existed only in narrow and closely definable frames-- as a threat to the social order and political stability, as violent and impulsive, or as politically naive and immature. Articles about the efforts of established groups such as the NAACP were invariably brief and distanced....Thus, the media.... are central purveyors of the framing of black America."

"The media." Rhodes asserts, "had a stake both in maintaining the status quo and in promoting social transformation." We can figure out what the media told the world about the Black Panthers, but even public surveys don't reveal how audiences really interpret the media's message. The FBI "put considerable energy into feeding misinformation to the media,' Rhodes says.

Rhodes provides an extensive bibliography and links to source material. I especially like her chapter on critical memory vs the "nostalgic impulse," with quotes from Houston Baker, e.g., while nostalgia "writes the revolution as a well-passed aberration, critical memory judges severely, censures righteously, renders hard ethical evaluations of the past."

In all, this book pulls together in one place a lot of scholarly research. I'm still in a muddle about Marcus Garvey, but my own research is far less exhaustive and organized as that of Jane Rhodes. Garvey, exiled from the United States after serving his time in jail (for what many say was a bogus charge), had no connection to the Panthers, but the way he has been portrayed in the media strikes me as similar to the negative publicity heaped on the Black Panthers. Anyone who cares to enlighten me can comment on my Garvey posts at my blog, carolkean . wordpress.com.

Thank to NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest feedback.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a product of the era, as well as a factor in the demographic this study represents, I was anxious to delve into this work. Please pardon my reference to the Black Panther Party as "the Panthers"; but that was how I came into knowlededge of them; and it's how I reference them to this day. Professor Jane Rhodes goes indepth about lesser-known details as well as those more commonly known. She talks about how the community work of the organization was ignored by authorities and downplayed by the media in exchange for newsbreaking headlines.

New York Times film critic Caryn James counters "Time Magazine's" claim of whitewashing in her defense of the father/son Van Peebles team's employment of dramatic license in their film, "Panther." The point is made that Mario Van Peebles is an artist -- not an historian. This valid observation naturally causes me to wonder what role the director of "Cleopatra" was operating in when he cast Elizabeth Taylor as the famed pharaoh.

There is mention of "a companion book, Panther:The Pictorial History of the Black Panthers and the Story Behind the Film," that offers a serious look at how the group fit into African American history.

Being a reader who looks for how the author nestles a book's title into the text, I was most enlightened with her explanation about this book's title. Like the majority, I began my read with the impression that Prof Rhodes was going to break down to the reader how the Panthers were framed (as in "set up") by the media as well as local, state and national authorities. Actually, she has done that. But she lets us in on her double entrende, in that the book actually demonstrates how the organization was placed within the framework of the media. Both concepts of framing are covered in this work.

I count myself fortunate for the opportunity to review this revised edition with its references to slavery in America while listening to an extensive audiobook, by a different author, on the topic. The confirmations between them are mind-settling for this reader. This review is of a complimentary digital copy from the publisher provided through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. At the request of the publisher, quoted material has been withheld for comparison to the final text.

Framing the Black Panthers will appeal to both the nostalgic and the scholarly reader. I recommend it to both.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This made me realize just how woefully inadequate my education has been. The people in power get to write the history, and unfortunately that means a lot of things are left out of a public education. This should really be required reading in schools across the country. A great way to fight back against the propaganda being shoved down the throats of students in US public schools. I'm embarrassed by how little I knew of the rich history of what is still today such a strong influence in American history, culture, and politics.

Received for review+

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good for what it is--a comprehensive look at representations of the Black Panther Party and its leaders. Rhodes struggles with sounding authoritative at the beginning and end of the book, but her archival skills and analysis of historical moments (not so much with the past 20 years) are top-notch.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

very revealing portrait of the way the white, mainstream media and the panthers themselves used media methods to get their images across - even when they were at odd, which was much of the time. Helpful history as today's romanticism of the Panthers is obscuring the hard-edged realities

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book regarding the way the Black Panthers have been symbolically portrayed in different media contexts.

[Shannan Harper · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely detailed account about the Black Panther Party, from it's inception. People seem to have the wrong impression regarding the Panther party. In my opinion, it's about correcting Justice and assisting poor African Americans. It's not a group of thugs or gang bangers trying to destroy places and things.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review