'Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution' And Its Relevance

It’s been nearly 50 years since the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and filmmaker Stanley Nelson’s documentary about the group — The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, airing as part of PBS’s Independent Lens on Tuesday night — reminds us of a time in which young people’s protests against oppression both actual and perceived was more organized, militant, and political.

Newton was only in his mid-20s when he co-founded the Panthers. One of the group’s initial successes was a breakfast program for lower-income children, a project that both did good work and yielded good p.r. for the Panthers. When Newton looked at the local gun laws and saw that it was legal to carry firearms on public property as long as they were openly displayed, some Panthers took to carrying weapons, ostensibly to protect themselves and others from what they considered police harassment — this was not such great p.r., at least as far as the government and the establishment media was concerned.

But the Panthers’ paradoxes — feeding kids hot meals; exercising Second Amendment rights in a way that even today’s current NRA might deem a tad impolitic — exerted a powerful allure to many young, radicalized citizens, black and white. It helped, as Vanguard of the Revolution’s extensive amount of archival footage makes clear, that the Panthers had a super-cool look: the leather jackets, black berets, nimbus Afros — the Panthers mastered media attention in a way that white-founded political groups such as the SDS had not.

Nelson’s film is valuable for the way it summarizes the initial idealism of the Panthers, the way Newton, Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver justified their militancy and calls for “decent housing, education, an end to police brutality and the murder of black people.” The film is also admirable for the frequent inclusion of female members of the party such as Elaine Brown and Kathleen Cleaver, who were attracted to the party’s high-minded goals but who also felt the sting of its male-dominated, sometimes misogynistic, rule. Regarding the sexism that pervaded the Panthers, Brown says ruefully, “We did not get these brothers into revolutionary heaven.”

Nelson also places the Panthers in a pop-cultural context, playing pop hits with black-power slogans by groups like The Chi-Lites, showing footage of Cleaver debating William F. Buckley on the latter’s Firing Line show, and a clip of Seale being warmly greeted by the ultra-middle-of-the-road talk-show host Mike Douglas when the latter’s show was co-hosted by John Lennon and Yoko Ono for a week. (John and Yoko had input in the guest list.)

Vanguard of the Revolution doesn’t shy away from criticism of the Panthers. Felipe Luciano, a poet-activist who was one of the heads of the Latino organization the Young Lords, calls Cleaver “crazy… he got a lot of people hurt.” A former Panther describes Seale as “a maniac,” and Newton’s descent into paranoia and being reduced to “shaking down pimps” to finance his Panther lifestyle is duly noted.

But there’s little doubt J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI infiltrated and did its best to subvert the Panthers in ways that skirted, and perhaps broke, some laws. And the image of Seale — bound and gagged in a courtroom while trying to plead his defense during the 1969 trial of the “Chicago Eight” for incitement to riot — remains a woefully sorry, powerful one.

If you doubt the continued relevance of the Panthers, we need look no further than Beyonce’s Super Bowl half-time show, during which the singer was backed by a phalanx of female singer-dancers dressed in a manner strongly reminiscent of the Panther unofficial uniform. That may be Panther iconography as entertainment, but it carries some small weight as history, too. That’s a history well-explored in this documentary.

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution airs Tuesday night on PBS. Check your local listings for times.