Our Time is Now

What political similarities and/or differences arise when we compare our present “Black Lives Matter” movement and the “Black Liberation Movement” of the 1960s and 70s?

By Yezou Aymero

The economic and social disenfranchisement of the Black community has prompted the emergence of multiple social justice groups that have approached the issue of racism from different angles. The American Black Liberation movement that gained prominence in the 1960s and 70s was defined by the earlier civil rights movement spearheaded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and later the emergence of the Black Panther Party. In a reaction to the physical threat posed by law enforcement and the fairly prominent Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton created a Marxist–Leninist group of Black radicals who wore distinctly militant outfits and participated in armed patrols as well as community-led projects named ‘community survival programs’ (Black Panther Party Alumni Legacy Network, no date.) for the betterment of Black lives. The Black Panther Party was dissolved in 1982. The early 80s to the 2000s showed an increase in social mobility for the African American population with Roland Burris becoming the first attorney general of Illinois in 1991. In the same year, however, three police officers were videotaped beating a Black man named Rodney King (Lewis, 2020). While the 1990s were a time of great development, police brutality, unfortunately, remained a prevalent issue. The most recently prominent movement for antiracism is the Black Lives Matter movement (often abbreviated to BLM), which emerged in 2013 following the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager. Founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Ayo Tometi, Black Lives Matter is a social and political movement dedicated to empowerment, justice, and awareness pertaining to Black issues worldwide. They redefined activism by making it accessible to the masses and, on more than one occasion, instigating worldwide protests. This essay will analyse the all-important similarities that speak to the carrying forward of the ideology that informed Seale and Newton, as well as how the period-specific limiting factors that affected each movement shaped the political attitudes and methods employed by each. Political differences are prevalent when we examine how the two movements conceived of themselves—both in terms of the political climates that contextualised the attitudes of each movement, and how those contexts shaped both the common and differing aims. The Black Liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s was characterised by the aforementioned Black Panther Party. Its most obvious difference from other Black liberation movements was its engagement in economic and political issues, with a focus on remedying systemic financial oppression. Indeed, with the introduction of Jim Crowlaws still in living memory for Black people then, alongside the widespread economic suppression of Black people in full force, poverty created immense dissatisfaction. Huey P. Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party, said in his memoir Revolutionary Suicide: “For me, no words on the street were as profane as ‘the bills.’(...) I could see the never-ending struggle and agony my father went through trying to cope with them. It is a situation familiar to most people in the Black community” (Newton and Seale, 1967). Here, the economic disenfranchisement that plagued the Black community in the 1960s and 70s meant that the Black Panther party, who defined this movement, conceived of themselves as a political party as well as a movement. Supporting this statement, Newton’s sentiment directly translated to the aims detailed in the Ten-Point Program: “[Number] 2. We want full employment for our people. [Number 10]. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology” (bracket insertions my own), (Newton and Seale, 1967). The Black Liberation Movement that occurred within the 60s made many polarising statements and operated under the assumption that anyone who could be driven away by radical statements had already refused to be affiliated with the group. For this reason, it was much more condensed in size than other movements. The smaller size and overt Leftist views within the party also allowed for greater ease in creating a document such as the Ten-Point Program. With most members more or less committed to a specific set of rules as party members, it was implied that all members of the Black Panthers subscribed to the Marxist views adopted by the founding members. The incredibly harsh reality of life in 1960 America as a Black person is what prompted such an organised and streamlined response, and such clarity in what the party stood for allowed the Black Panthers to cohesively engage in issues such as economic disparity, which allowed for greater unity within activism. In the 2000s, on the other hand, activists had to contend with more covert forms of racism. The 2008–2016 presidency of Barack Obama made some of his non-Black voters complacent in their views on antiracism: by actively endorsing a Black person and not committing violent hate crimes, many non-Black Americans believed themselves uninvolved in discriminatory acts, and believed Obama’s election to be “the end of racism” (Love and Tosolt, 2010). Although Black people had never stopped being murdered by the police, the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) took off intensely in 2020 following the widespread shock of George Floyd’s murder, which was caught on video. BLM contrasted the previous Black liberation movement where “civil rights marches in the 1960s were considerably smaller in number” (Patel, 2020), mainly due to the sheer number of people backing the cause. The resources of manpower and mass-sharing technology were not necessarily readily available during the time of the Black Panthers, and the subsequent distribution of the video showing Floyd’s murder made the issue of police brutality difficult to ignore. In some ways, that is what made BLM impactful: it highlighted the gaslighting faced by Black and African people worldwide—real proof of injustice, a hate crime caught on camera, made it undeniable, and the Black community could no longer be dismissed as hysterical. The brutality of the incident was so overt that it became almost condemnable to not outwardly vocalise support for the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a perspective that shares some similarities to views discussed in the Combahee River Collective statement by Black feminists in the mid-70s. “Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule, and most importantly, feminism” (Combahee River Collective,1977). With the world taken by storm, however, the movement attracted both those who held similar values to the founders of the Black Panther Party and, for the first time, a massive number of white people. It could be argued that a political difference between the two movements is that the less insular structure of BLM led to a dilution of the views held by the Black Panther Party, and therefore contributed to less productive activism for BLM. Indeed, while the majority of civil disobedience practised by protesters was peaceful and constructive, with an aim to raise awareness, the movement was also conflated with looting that occurred within the chaos of the protests. Regardless of the inconvenience caused, due to resources only available within the 21st century, BLM gained worldwide traction in a way that the Black Liberation Movement in the 60s and 70s only partially managed, where most of the unrest was confined to the United States. It is evident that, regardless of ideologies held by people within the group, BLM as a 21st-century movement made activism accessible and became a starting point for thousands to explore their relationship with race. Another area in which the two movements both differ and converge is in the political methods they each used. The Black Panthers, as previously discussed, were viewed as especially radical due to their methods of activism. The Black Panther Party’s original name was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence, given the very real physical threat to Black lives. They were not afraid to bear arms and would patrol neighbourhoods with guns as a means to protect against the fear of being attacked by policemen or other members of society: "They would observe the police and make sure that no brutality occurred," (Newton and Seale, 1967). Here, it must be clarified that the armed patrols were carried out specifically to create a sense of safety and of being protected in a way that was not done by law enforcers, while also holding them accountable. By exercising their right to bear arms, this act of resistance asserted that African Americans increasingly knew their rights, to the point that the police’s importance was somewhat deflated. Within the Black liberation movement of the 60s and 70s, the phrase “by any means necessary”, originally translated from an address given by Frantz Fanon, was employed by both Fanon and Malcolm X to rationalise armed or violent approaches to activism. Moreover, violence was seen as the most effective way to liberation, for the true worldwide revolution they sought justified the means they used in an attempt to realise it. This sentiment is demonstrated in a quote by Fanon from The Wretched of the Earth: “The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, (...) that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native” (Fanon, 2001). While these methods were seen by some as extreme, they were meant to be intimidating in order to maximise the effects. In the words of Angela Davis: “Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root’,” (Davis, 1990). Armed patrols and threats of violence were not the only methods of activism they employed—marches were organised and walk-ins were popular. The methods they used were conducive to the idea that a revolution was necessary in order to truly liberate Black people, and while they often found themselves at odds with the law, this made them incredibly difficult to dismiss. In the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, marches were similarly used to draw attention to the cause, with reports of marches erupting hours after Floyd’s death. Peaceful protests were the desired means of activism by BLM as an organisation, and using data provided by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, it appears that 93% of BLM protests within the United States were nonviolent (Mansoor, 2020). Marches for BLM over the summer of 2020 were heavily policed, who used tear gas as a response. A form of activism employed by this movement was the use of online engagement. Videos of police brutality circulated the internet, such as the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, sparking the incendiary mass protests but also prompting the re-emergence of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. On May 28th 2020, three days after Floyd’s murder, the hashtag rose to 8.8 million uses (Smith, 2021). The hashtag, which originally emerged in 2013, was used to display solidarity from all groups of people that was never before seen, as well as to share protest dates and information in a way that was hard to dismantle, and foster the unprecedented growth within the online movement. The movement has at times been obstructive: in 2016, UK-based BLM activists blocked off a Heathrow runway to “highlight the UK’s environmental impact on the lives of Black people locally and globally” (BBC, 2016). By being significantly disruptive, they garnered police attention in a similar way to the Black Panthers without having to carry weapons. Furthermore, in 2020, statues of racist figures were taken down in the UK, a notable UK case being the statue of Edward Colston (a slave trader) that was rolled into Bristol Harbour (Siddique and Skopeliti, 2020) as an acknowledgement of Britain’s deeply racist history. Petitions were also prominent as a low-effort and convenient method of activism. A comparison can therefore be drawn between the BPP’s calculated use of weapons to assert “Black Power”, and BLM’s use of civil disobedience to create disruption and draw attention to sustained racist symbols such as statues. Both were immensely influential due to the disruption they caused, but BLM managed to garner as much, if not more, attention with almost entirely peaceful methods. In conclusion, BLM and the Black Panther Party both had similar aims: to raise awareness for, and bring attention to, Black issues, as demonstrated through the works published in both time periods. While the Black Panthers favoured surgical and calculated movements—with the precise goal of liberation and supported by the Marxist ideology that shaped its founders—BLM encompassed a more obviously wide range of views. BLM as a movement contained remnants of the 60s movement as more radical views made a popular comeback, and the consumption of Black-centred political theory saw a resurgence. However, BLM also contained an abundance of virtue-signalling and it became something of a social statement to support the movement. The political attitudes that shaped the aims of both groups were significantly different due to the highly differing political and economic climates of their respective time periods. This also further shaped the methods that were used to assert those views. While both movements favoured group protest, there was a significant difference in the ‘clicktivism’ associated with BLM, while the Black Panthers contrastingly favoured more confrontational and less mass-appealing forms of activism. Both groups had significant political differences formed by their sizes and the views of their founders; however, they share crucial common ground: dedication to worldwide Black liberation.

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