Black Against Empire Quotes

“The Panthers saw black communities in the United States as a colony and the police as an occupying army.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“The Party’s embrace of Marxism was never rigid, sectarian, or dogmatic. Motivated by a vision of a universal and radically democratic struggle against oppression, ideology seldom got in the way of the Party’s alliance building and practical politics. In 1971, Huey Newton explained that the Black Panthers were “dialectical materialists,” thereby drawing a dynamic and evolving method of political analysis from Marx rather than any stagnant set of ideas. He argued, “Marx himself said, ‘I am not a Marxist’. . . . If you are a dialectical materialist . . . you do not believe in the conclusions of one person but in the validity of a mode of thought; and we in the Party, as dialectical materialists, recognize Karl Marx as one of the great contributors to that mode of thought.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“At its height, the rebellion can best be described as an insurrection. Large crowds of looters in the early part of July 23 gave way to roving bands of looters and fire bombers, who were much harder to control. Some coordinated their tactics by shortwave radio. Apparently, the rebels saw all government officials as the enemy, and they attacked firemen as well as policemen. By 4:40 P.M. on July 24, rebels had stolen hundreds of guns from gun shops. As police began to shoot at the looters, black snipers started shooting back. Hubert Locke, executive secretary of the establishment Committee for Equal Opportunity, called it a “total state of war.” Police officers and firemen reported being attacked by snipers on both the east and west sides of the city. Snipers made sporadic attacks on the Detroit Street Railways buses and on crews of the Public Lighting Commission and the Detroit Edison Company. Police records indicate that as many as ten people were shot by snipers on July 25 alone. A span of 140 blocks on the west side became a “bloody battlefield,” according to the Detroit News. Government tanks and armored personnel carriers “thundered through the streets and heavy machine guns chattered. . . . It was as though the Viet Cong had infiltrated the riot blackened streets.” The mayor said, “It looks like Berlin in 1945.”55 The black uprisings in Detroit and Newark were the largest of 1967 but by no means the only ones. Urban rebellions rocked cities large and small all across America. According to the Kerner Commission, 164 such rebellions erupted in the first nine months of the year.56”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“The 120 social scientists and investigators hired by the Kerner Commission, working under the guidance of Research Director Robert Shellow, provided a much more perceptive political analysis of the rebellions that the commission never published. In the concluding chapter of the analysis, “America on the Brink: White Racism and Black Rebellion,” the social scientists argued that racism pervaded all U.S. institutions and that blacks “feel it is legitimate and necessary to use violence against the social order. A truly revolutionary spirit has begun to take hold . . . an unwillingness to compromise or wait any longer, to risk death rather than have their people continue in a subordinate status.” Shellow and his team were subsequently fired, and their analysis was removed from the report.46 Powerful evidence supported the Shellow team’s view that many black people in Detroit saw the unrest as political action—that is, as a rebellion. In the Campbell-Schumann survey several months after the incident, 56 percent of the black respondents in Detroit characterized the incident as a “rebellion or revolution,” whereas only 19 percent characterized it as a “riot.”47 In”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“On April 5, 1967, six weeks after the Black Panther Party’s well-publicized confrontation with police while escorting Betty Shabazz, Assemblyman Mulford introduced a bill, AB 1591, in the California legislature proposing to outlaw the carrying of loaded firearms in public.29 In response to the “increasing incidence of organized groups and individuals publicly arming themselves,” Mulford argued, “it is imperative that this statute take effect immediately.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau observed, “The masses of poor Negroes remain an unorganized minority in swelling urban ghettos, and neither SNCC nor any other group has found a form of political organization that can convert the energy of the slums into political power.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“It was not simply what the Black Panthers did—but what they did in the conditions in which they found themselves—that proved so consequential”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“The Black Panther Party sustained disruption as a source of power by leveraging broad political cleavages to draw widespread black, antiwar, and international support in resistance to repression. The Party became repressible only once the state made sweeping concessions to its allies—namely affirmative action, repeal of the draft, and international diplomatic reconciliation.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“As Michelle Alexander observes in The New Jim Crow, there are more black people under carceral control today than there were slaves in 1850. By 2000 the median white family owned ten times the assets of the median black family. Today, a decade and a half later, the median white family owns almost twenty times the assets of the median black family.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“The black panther is an animal that when it is pressured it moves back until it is cornered, then it comes out fighting for life or death. We felt we had been pushed back long enough and that it was time for Negroes to come out and take over.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“Huey Newton was able to go down, and to take the nigger on the street and relate to him, understand what was going on inside of him, what he was thinking, and then implement that into an organization, into a PROGRAM and a PLATFORM, you dig it? Into the BLACK PANTHER PARTY—and then let it spread like wildfire across this country.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“Hoover’s program aimed to drive a wedge between the Party and its nonblack allies. Today, the popular misconception persists that the Black Panther Party was separatist, or antiwhite. Many current internet postings mischaracterize the Party in this way. 28”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“How do you fight white supremacy in the era of “color blindness”?”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“In the weeks leading up to the Detroit rebellion, three incidents exacerbated racial tensions. On June 12, a mob of more than eighty whites waged a miniriot and smoke-bombed the house of an interracial married couple—a black man and a white woman—who had moved into a suburban white neighborhood. On June 23, a black couple—Mr. Thomas, who worked at a local Ford plant, and Ms. Thomas, his pregnant wife—went to Rouge Park in a white neighborhood. A mob of more than fifteen whites harassed them, threatened to rape Mrs. Thomas, cut the wires on their car so they could not leave, and then shot Mr. Thomas three times, killing him and causing Ms. Thomas to miscarry. Six of the whites were arrested, but only one was charged, and he was eventually let off by a jury. In fact, at that time, no white had ever been found guilty of murdering a black person in Detroit.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“the power structure depends upon the use of force without retaliation.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“Radical or revolutionary consciousness . . . is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed—and finally it is the discovery of oneself as one of the oppressed who must unite to transform the objective conditions of their existence in order to resolve the contradiction between potentiality and actuality. Revolutionary consciousness leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“Rebellion reemerged as a political avenue precisely because of the limitations of the civil rights victories. These victories left untouched the economic and material dimensions of black subordination.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“Law enforcement did a lot of shooting during the weekend. They shot looters and also fired at random into crowds, hitting uninvolved bystanders on the sidelines and even some in their homes.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“The Party attracted large numbers of members and supporters, from various classes and races, who wanted to be part of a dynamic liberation movement rooted in the day-to-day struggles of ordinary black people, most of whom were poor and working class.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“Cleaver came across a picture of the white woman that Till had flirted with in a magazine and found her attractive. He saw himself in Till’s shoes, and it distressed him. “It intensified my frustrations,” Cleaver later explained, “to know that I was indoctrinated to see the white woman as more beautiful and desirable than my own black woman.” Cleaver’s emotional turmoil about his attraction to white women was not unusual. While white men often took liberties with black women, a black man who flirted even mildly with a white woman was considered to be making the gravest violation of white supremacy, one that was all too often punished by death. In this context, it is not surprising that many black men associated a sexual desire for white women with a desire to be recognized as human and free.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“Newton points out that military and political power are inextricably linked: without military power, there can be no political power. “Politics is war without bloodshed,” and “war is politics with bloodshed.” He criticizes black politics as toothless and thus powerless. Only by developing a force with real destructive capacity can black people obtain political power: When black people send a representative, he is somewhat absurd because he represents no political power. He does not represent land power because we do not own any land. He does not represent economic or industrial power because black people do not own the means of production. The only way he can become political is to represent what is commonly called a military power—which the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls Self-Defense Power. Black People can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community, throughout the nation. Then we will choose a political representative and he will state to the power structure the desires of the black masses. If the desires are not met, the power structure will receive a political consequence. We will make it economically nonprofitable for the power structure to go on with its oppressive ways. We will then negotiate as equals. There will be a balance between the people who are economically powerful and the people who are potentially economically destructive.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lighted, and the master was there, very calm . . . and our people stopped dead . . . it was the master . . . I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm. It was I, even I, and I told him so, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave of slaves, and suddenly his eyes were like two cockroaches, frightened in the rainy season . . . I struck, and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today. —Aimé Césaire excerpted in Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Black Panther Party booklist”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“Carmichael also criticized the student peace movement and argued that if peace activists wanted to be relevant to most people, they needed to start organizing to resist the draft: The peace movement has been a failure because it hasn’t gotten off the college campuses where everybody has a 2S [draft deferment] and is not afraid of being drafted anyway. The problem is how you can move out of that into the white ghettos of this country and articulate a position for those white youth who do not want to go. . . . [SNCC is] the most militant organization for peace or civil rights or human rights against the war in Vietnam in this country today. There isn’t one organization that has begun to meet our stand on the war in Vietnam. We not only say we are against the war in Vietnam; we are against the draft. . . . There is a higher law than the law of a racist named [Secretary of Defense] McNamara; there is a higher law than the law of a fool named [Secretary of State] Rusk; there is a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. We will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we are going to decide who to kill.89”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“In the summer of 1966, Seale was hired to run a youth work program at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center funded by the federal War on Poverty. Through his role as a social service provider, he came to understand even more clearly the economic and social needs of black youth. Beyond delivering services, Bobby brought his revolutionary nationalist theory to the job and used the opportunity to push up against the ideological bias in the government program. Rather than merely guiding young blacks into a government-prescribed path, he used his authority to help them stand up against oppressive authority, particularly against police brutality. One day Seale’s boss instructed him to take a group of young black men and women on a tour of the local police station. When the group arrived, the police officers pulled out notepads and pencils and started to interview the teenagers about the character of gangs in the neighborhood. Seale protested, instructing his group to remain silent and announcing that his program would not be used as a spy network to inform on people in the community. The officers claimed that they simply wanted to foster better relations with the community. In response, Seale turned the conversation around, creating an opportunity for the teenagers to describe their experiences with police brutality in the neighborhood. It was the first time the young people had had the opportunity to look white police officers in the eye and express their anger and frustration. One teenager berated the police for an incident in which several officers had thrown a woman down and beaten her in the head with billy clubs. “Say you!” said a sixteen-year-old girl, pointing at a policeman. “You don’t have to treat him like that,” Seale said to the girl. “I’ll treat him like I want to, because they done treated me so bad,” she replied. Bobby sat back as the girl grilled the officer about whether he had received proper psychiatric treatment. The officer turned red and started to shake. “The way you’re shaking now,” she said, “the way you’re shaking now and carrying on, you must be guilty of a whole lot! And I haven’t got no weapon or nothin.’”69 The poverty program provided a paycheck, some skills, and an opportunity to work with young people. But Newton and Seale were still searching for a way to galvanize the rage of the “brothers on the block.” They wanted to mobilize the ghetto the way that the Civil Rights Movement had mobilized blacks in the South. They dreamt of creating an unstoppable force that would transform the urban landscape forever. The problem was now clear to Huey and Bobby, but they did not yet have a solution. Huey and Bobby were not the only ones looking for answers.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“The Revolutionary Action Movement advanced a pivotal idea that would become central to the politics of the Black Panther Party. Drawing on a line of thought reaching back at least to the mid-1940s and the black anticolonialism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Alpheaus Hunton, RAM argued that Black America was essentially a colony and framed the struggle against racism by blacks in the United States as part of the global anti-imperialist struggle against colonialism.47 Max Stanford defined the politics of revolutionary black nationalism this way in 1965: “We are revolutionary black nationalist, not based on ideas of national superiority, but striving for justice and liberation of all the oppressed peoples of the world. . . . There can be no liberty as long as black people are oppressed and the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America are oppressed by Yankee imperialism and neo-colonialism. After four hundred years of oppression, we realize that slavery, racism and imperialism are all interrelated and that liberty and justice for all cannot exist peacefully with imperialism.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“In an early proposal for the book in 2000, we elaborated a method of “strategic genealogy” to conduct this analysis. Rather than center our analysis on particular individuals or on dissection of the Party’s organization, we uncovered the political dynamics of the Party by studying the evolution of its political practices.34”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“Black Power meant widely different things to different people. Despite”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

“there are more black people under carceral control today than there were slaves in 1850.”
― Joshua Bloom, Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party