The New Black Panthers Documentary Is Required Viewing

When you think of the Black Panthers, the image that likely comes to mind is one of a group of black men, wearing afros and turtlenecks, berets and leather jackets, fists aloft, many arms of a single organism, presenting a stoic, united front.

According to Stanley Nelson, director of the captivating new documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, we should actually be thinking of an elephant. In the opening scene of Nelson’s film, Ericka Huggins, an early Panther who’s now a professor of sociology, tells a story: Three blind men try to describe an elephant. One touches the animal’s side, another the tusk, another the trunk. They each call the elephant something different, based on three unique impressions. That’s the Black Panthers in a nutshell, Huggins concludes. “We know the Party that we were in, and not the entire thing,” she says. “We were making history, and it wasn’t nice and clean. It wasn’t easy. It was complex.”

Here’s the simple version: The Black Panthers were formed in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in Oakland, California, as a response to entrenched police brutality against black people (sound familiar?). Their mission was to show up wherever police injustice was being served, bearing guns, their presence a warning that things could get ugly. Their goals were set out in a ten-point program of demands, which included such basic requests as access to decent housing, good education, and full employment. Eventually the Panthers took their protests to the state capital in Sacramento, where the national media began to cover the movement. Membership grew. Influential people like the prison memoirist Eldridge Cleaver joined, offering the group a certain amount of cred among both black and white intellectuals. Celebrities like Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda flocked to the cause.

The FBI took note, and made its best effort to undermine the Panthers through a program called COINTELPRO. J. Edgar Hoover, then the Bureau’s director, was particularly concerned about the idea of a Black Messiah, a charismatic figure who might rise from among the Panthers's ranks to take the organization from the fringes of American society to the center. To prevent this, the FBI planted moles, performed raids, and terrorized the group in every way imaginable.

Under incredible pressure, growing too fast for any one leader to manage, the Panther organization started to show its cracks. Newton, who had been in jail for manslaughter since 1967, was released after his conviction was overturned in 1970. Cleaver had since fled to Algeria with his Panther wife, Kathleen, to avoid his own prison sentence, following a shootout with the Oakland police. The two leaders were divided both geographically and on the question of violent vs. nonviolent resistance. Infighting ensued, and eventually the Panthers splintered into two groups. By the early eighties, the organization was basically no more.

But Nelson’s film goes deeper than just the timeline of events; the Panthers, he shows us, contained multitudes. One of the more compelling and disturbing chapters of the film concerns Fred Hampton, head of the Panthers's Illinois chapter and an immensely talented public speaker. Because he had worked with the NAACP, he was adept at building a coalition with black church leaders, as well as with whites and Latin-Americans. His organizing abilities, his passionate, rallying speeches, and his message of racial unity made him a prime target of the FBI, top on their list of possible Black Messiahs. In December of 1969, after a speaking engagement, Hampton fell asleep in his Chicago apartment, where several other Panthers were also staying. The Chicago Police, acting on a tip from a mole about a supply of weapons, busted into the apartment and shot the place up without issuing any warning. Hampton, who may have been drugged, was slaughtered asleep in bed. Later examination showed that only one bullet had been discharged from inside the apartment; from a gun that went off after the Panther holding it was shot through the heart.

Had he lived, the film implies, perhaps Hampton would have been the figure who could have saved the Panthers from their eventual fizzle. But while big personalities are at the center of this story, Nelson’s undertaking is also to show us the depth and breadth of the organization. By the end of the sixties, I was surprised to learn, contrary to the prevailing image of an army of uniformed vigilante men, the majority of the rank-and-file Panthers were actually women. The Panthers’ social agenda included programs that promoted sickle cell anemia research, and that provided breakfast to needy schoolchildren. At their peak, the group was providing about 20,000 meals a week across nineteen different communities. Nelson uses archival footage of Panther rallies to demonstrate that the group’s supporters were often far more diverse than one might expect. And the Panthers and ex-Panthers who appear on camera—Kathleen Cleaver, Emory Douglas, and Jamal Joseph among them—share their personal stories of triumph, exhilaration, hope, and disappointment, lending texture to any simplistic impression of a monolithic Panther front.

As Joan Didion observed in her essay, “The White Album,” when Huey Newton went to jail on what may well have been trumped-up manslaughter charges, the Panthers were quick to seize the opportunity to make a martyr of him. “I wondered if the direction these rallies were taking ever made him uneasy, ever made him suspect that in many ways he was more useful to the revolution behind bars than on the street,” Didion wrote. She was onto something. After Newton was released from prison, after his and Cleaver’s differences of vision had split the Panthers in two, Newton’s behavior became increasingly volatile, paranoid, and often violent. Many long-time Panthers began to back away from the party, resigning from their membership. Toward the end of his film, Nelson lets us see and hear their letters of resignation: thoughtful, painful, wistful missives that sound the death knell of an era.

But that era, of course, isn’t exactly over. To close, Nelson asks the Panthers who have appeared on-screen to each read a point of the group’s original ten-point program. It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads the news that the problems the Panthers came together to address—inequality, violence, lack of opportunity in the black community—loom just as large today as they did fifty years ago.

Nelson doesn’t put too fine a point on it; he leaves us to draw our own conclusions. But it’s the elephant in the room. And yes, it seems like perhaps that pun may have been intended.