American Exported Black Nationalism
Reading by Yohuru R. Williams
© Emory Douglas
For the most part, the image of the American Black nationalism in the 20th century depicts it as the product of foreign influences that extended from Marcus Garvey and Frantz Fanon to Che Guevera and Mao Tse Tung. Such images create the impression that African Americans were greatly influenced by foreign contacts with little impact or contribution of their own. This essay answers two basic questions. First, in what ways did American Black nationalist organizations, specifically the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party (BPP), contribute to the concept of a worldwide freedom struggle in the late 1960s? Second, how were the efforts of these groups received abroad?
While nationalism often is defined by loyalty to a native country, with Black nationalism, the nation can consist of Black people who live in a particular country, as in the United States. Black nationalism also can be defined as a desire for a separate geographical nation within a country, or as a feeling of community with other Blacks in the world — an extension of pan-Africanism. Still, Black Americans who exported Black nationalism not only sought community with other Blacks in the world, but also supported and sought kinship with other ethnic groups engaged in similar struggles like the Cubans, Vietnamese, and Koreans. This feeling of community, however, was not limited to expressions of solidarity with the Third World, but was evident in the treatment and influence of American Black nationalists abroad.
In 1967, SNCC formed an alliance with the Black Panther Party that placed the two organizations at the forefront of militant Black protest in the United States. Founded in 1960 by students seeking to coordinate protest activities, SNCC labored for six years in the nonviolent struggle for integration and civil rights in the southern United States. By 1966, however, SNCC abandoned nonviolence as a tactic and integration as an objective and began to espouse a new militancy that called for Black power. Meanwhile, in Oakland, California, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and others who sought a new revolutionary Black organization in 1966 formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP). The BPP projected many different images, ranging from a political gang to a responsible community-based organization. The BPP used strategies of political education and community organization to create a wide range of programs designed to help community members develop new attitudes of self-control and power in their community.
After forging an alliance with SNCC in 1967, the BPP became more international in its outlook, and members appointed Stokely Carmichael to prime minister and James Forman to minister of foreign affairs. The BPP benefited from the national and international celebrity of its new allies — especially Stokely Carmichael — and thus became more recognizable. Indeed, a 1970 poll taken by Market Dynamics found that Black Americans in New York, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Birmingham considered the BPP the third most effective group behind the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during the previous two years. The survey further revealed that 62 percent of the people polled admired what the BPP was doing. They also predicted that the BPP would be the only Black organization that would be effective in the future.
While the BPP borrowed heavily from the revolutionary literature of the Third World, it also contributed to the growing concept of a worldwide freedom struggle in the late 1960s. Members of SNCC and the BPP attempted to link their ideological struggle with struggles in the Third World. For example, Stokely Carmichael redefined his call for “Black Power” into an appeal for pan-Africanism. Huey Newton contributed the idea of “intercommunalism” and asserted that imperialism had reached such a degree that sovereign borders were no longer relevant and that oppressed nations no longer existed; only oppressed communities within and outside artificial political borders existed. Members of the BPP used this concept as a rallying cry for an international coalition of oppressed peoples to fight against American and Western imperialism.
At the same time, the BPP attempted to make the Marxist literature of the Third-World revolutionaries relevant to the struggle in the United States. For instance, a BPP work assignment instructed members to read the chapter “Communists” in Mao Tse Tung’s Red Book, but to “substitute the word communist with the word revisionist or revolutionary.” Members were further instructed to record, in “however many words it takes you, to explain what you feel this chapter means to you,” and encouraged to apply relevant Maoist solutions to their own particular problems in the United States.
Between 1967 and 1972, the BPP had a far-reaching impact on foreign shores as well. As members sought solidarity with Third World struggles for independence, they exported a unique brand of American Black nationalism that was evident in the goals and objectives of foreign revolutionary groups. In addition, they inspired fear in unfriendly governments that American Black nationalists would ignite flames in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
The BPP also tied Black liberation to an international struggle for freedom and independence and pledged leadership and unity with oppressed peoples of the world. Representatives of SNCC and BPP abroad pledged revolutionary solidarity with all groups engaged in the struggle against imperialism, racism, capitalism, and fascism. ■
© 1997 Yohuru R. Williams. Excerpted and reprinted with permission from Yohuru R. Williams, “American Exported Black Nationalism: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the Worldwide Freedom Struggle (1967–1972),” Negro History Bulletin, vol. 60, no. 3 (July–Sep. 1997).