Stanley Nelson's 2014 documentary Freedom Summer concluded in 1966 with the image of Stokely Carmichael exhorting a Mississippi crowd to embrace the notion of Black Power. Nelson's new film, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, appropriately begins with the same sights and sounds. One film has passed the baton to the other, much as the nonviolent civil rights movement increasingly gave way to more militant approaches.
The Black Panthers, which opens Friday after playing the Dallas VideoFest last month, provides an evenhanded and long overdue exploration of a complex organization and its complicated times. The doc reminds us why the context of those times is so important: For many in the late 1960s, including the Panthers, the Weathermen and all manner of smaller groups, revolution wasn't just a possibility. It was imminent.
"The Panthers didn't just come out of nowhere," Nelson says by phone. "The idea of armed revolution was very real, and that was the world the Panthers came from."
The popular and irresistibly compelling image of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense -- black men carrying weapons in military garb -- has long overshadowed the full Panthers picture. Yes, the Panthers did carry guns, and insisted on their right to do so in the face of rampant police brutality. As former Panther Elbert "Big Man" Howard recalls of one showdown with police, "We stood back with our weapons, ready to throw down if necessary."
The Panthers were all about open carry long before the phrase was en vogue. They were also media savvy. They knew what would catch the attention of the cameras, and the cameras were more than happy to oblige. The Black Panthers is a goldmine of vintage footage.
The specter of armed force was a big part of the Panther image. But there was a lot more beneath the flashy surface. The party's Free Breakfast for Children Program fed some 10,000 impoverished kids every day before school. In a recent interview, Charles Hillman, a member of the Panthers' Dallas chapter, recalled other local actions undertaken by the party, including a People's Free Pest Control Program and a boycott of a West Dallas store that sold paint thinner and other inhalants to kids looking to get high.
"People see the Panthers as these gun-carrying ex-convicts," Hillman says by phone. "It was an organization that was committed to community development in terms of housing and combatting police brutality."
But the guns and the revolutionary rhetoric were what caught the attention of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover named the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal safety of the country" and created the COINTELPRO program to undermine, harass and incriminate the party. He was especially concerned about the possibility of a messiah figure emerging from the party and building lasting coalitions with other leftist groups.
When such a figure did emerge, he was swiftly eliminated. In 1969, Fred Hampton, the charismatic chairman of the party's Illinois chapter, was killed in his bed during a police raid that was widely seen as an assassination.
The Black Panthers doesn't sugarcoat the tumult and dysfunction that plagued the party and led to its downfall. The Panthers, like most revolutionary organizations of the time, were susceptible to the cult of personality (the subject of another great Nelson film, Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple). The party couldn't survive the clash between its two biggest personalities, Huey P. Newton (who was gunned down on the streets of Oakland in a drug-related killing in 1989) and Eldridge Cleaver (who would eventually became a born-again Christian and conservative Republican). The Panthers faded away, along with the revolutionary fervor of the late '60s and early '70s.
But The Black Panthers is still all too timely. The day after our interview, Nelson was scheduled to show and discuss the film at Yale. The event, however, was canceled, as student protests over campus racism roiled through the school, and the nation. Police brutality is still in the news, as are fair housing issues and so many other issues that inspired the creation of the Panthers in the first place.
FOR MORE Q&A sessions at the Angelika Dallas following 7:15 p.m. showings: Nov. 20, with former Panthers Odinga Kambui and James Shockley, moderated by Bart Weiss; Nov. 21, with Kambui, moderated by Weiss.
