There’s nothing new under the sun.
I was sadly reminded of this twice last week. Once while watching "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution," the new documentary by Stanley Nelson scheduled to debut here Friday at the Midtown Art Cinema. And again while talking to former Panther Kathleen Cleaver in her fifth-floor office at Emory University's School of Law.
From the opening moments of the riveting documentary to the close nearly two hours later, the similarities between the unrest that gave rise to the Panthers in 1966 and events that birthed today's "Black Lives Matter" movement are uncanny.
Issues of poverty, economic isolation and reports of excessive force by police are still recurring themes in our daily lives.
As I watched the film, listened to Cleaver's remembrances of time past, Oleta Adams played in my head: "Will we ever learn."
Nelson’s film is the first feature-length documentary to tell the story of the Panthers, a history Cleaver believes is by far the most comprehensive to date.
She and Nelson will be in attendance Friday for a question-and-answer session at this weekend’s opening.
» See a video trailer for the documentary here.
At 21, Cleaver was a secretary in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, working to attract college students to learn about the struggle for liberation and re-energize the struggle in the context of "Black Power."
“We were all stirred up and were modeling ourselves on the Cubans and Algerians, who had fought and won their independence,” Cleaver said.
On Easter weekend in 1967, the SNCC held a conference titled "Liberation will come from a Black Thing." Eldridge Cleaver was among the invited guests and the only one able to make it. A snowstorm had crippled much of the East Coast, making it impossible for the others to make the trip to Nashville, Tenn.
Kathleen was retyping the conference agenda when Eldridge walked in, stopping just inside the door.
“I looked up and back at my typewriter,” she remembered.
After his speech that day, Eldridge offered to help Kathleen with preparations for a fundraising party. When that work was done, he offered to drive her and other members of the student support group back to Atlanta, where he finally got Kathleen’s complete attention.
To the dismay of both her parents and SNCC comrades, and despite the 10-year gap in their ages, she was falling for Eldridge.
“He was an unusual person,” she said. “He was handsome and extremely intelligent. We were on the same wavelength politically.”
By November, Cleaver said, the Black Panther Party had lost its office, was no longer publishing its newspaper, and its chairman and other members were serving jail sentences. Huey Newton, then minister of self defense of the party, had been wounded and charged with murder in the shooting death of John Frey, an Oakland, Calif., policeman.
“It was also a time when all the many police killings of black youth had been judged ‘justifiable homicide’ and many led to riots and rebellions, such as in Newark in 1967 and Detroit,” Cleaver said. “Newton’s case made headlines all over the country.”
In the midst of all this chaos, Eldridge proposed and Kathleen said yes, essentially marrying into the party on Dec. 27, 1967.
That isn’t to say she didn’t believe in the work that the Panthers were doing. She did.
In addition to taking up arms to protect the African-American community against perceived police brutality, the Panthers provided free medical clinics and breakfast programs for children. At its height in 1970, the party had chapters in 68 cities.
But it was all methodically and viciously destroyed, Kathleen Cleaver said.
“The early leaders were killed, jailed, driven out of the country, demonized and subjected to a very intensive campaign led by the FBI,” she said.
Her own actions during a 10-day period in Los Angeles are part of 1979 FBI documents in which the agency provides a blow-by-blow account of where she went, whom she visited and what was said.
“They followed me everywhere I went, recorded everything I said,” she said. “I’m glad they did now, but that’s not the point. If you are a citizen of the United States, you have the right to protest, question the policies and try to make life better for your community. The way the FBI and the government treated the Panthers, it was like a crime.”
In 1966, the Panthers wrote a 10-point program demanding decent housing, quality education and an end to police brutality.
Nearly three generations later, not much has changed. The issues that spawned the Panthers are the same ones that gave birth to “Black Lives Matter.”
That’s why Nelson’s documentary is so powerful. You realize this isn’t history repeating itself, or some sort of instant replay. Unless we act now to learn from our past, this will always be our present and future.
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