New Black Panther Party

Mention on the radio this morning of the new Black Panther Party, about which I know little. So I snooped around. Ends up it's a controversial organization. You can find out what they say about themselves at their official website.

But veterans of the original Black Panther Party don't seem to like them much.

There Is No New Black Panther Party: An Open Letter From the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation
In response from numerous requests from individuals seeking information on the "New Black Panthers," the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation issues this public statement to correct the distorted record being made in the media by a small band of African Americans calling themselves the New Black Panthers. As guardian of the true history of the Black Panther Party, the Foundation, which includes former leading members of the Party, denounces this group's exploitation of the Party's name and history. Failing to find its own legitimacy in the black community, this band would graft the Party's name upon itself, which we condemn.

Firstly, the people in the New Black Panthers were never members of the Black Panther Party and have no legitimate claim on the Party's name. On the contrary, they would steal the names and pretend to walk in the footsteps of the Party's true heroes, such as Black Panther founder Huey P. Newton, George Jackson and Jonathan Jackson, Bunchy Carter, John Huggins, Fred Hampton, Mark Cark, and so many others who gave their very lives to the black liberation struggle under the Party's banner.

Secondly, they denigrate the Party's name by promoting concepts absolutely counter to the revolutionary principles on which the Party was founded. Their alleged media assault on the Ku Klux Klan serves to incite hatred rather than resolve it. The Party's fundamental principle, as best articulated by the great revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, was: "A true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." The Black Panthers were never a group of angry young militants full of fury toward the "white establishment." The Party operated on love for black people, not hatred of white people.

More.

I had an unusual encounter with the original Black Panthers. In the late 60s, when I was teaching Composition as a grad student, I discovered my 8 a.m. class one term was filled with students who were members of the Black Panthers. About a dozen of them. They marched to class in military formation in their black leather jackets and berets. They didn't like my syllabus and refused to follow it. They swore a lot a class, "mutherfucking" being their favorite adjective. I quickly realized I might have a teaching challenge on my hands. If nothing else, they disrupted what the rest of the class was there to learn. The rest of the class included a good number of sweet looking sorority girl types who didn't look comfortable with their unusual colleagues.

I finally cut a deal with the Panthers in class. I gave them a special writing project: to write, and try to publish, an article for their Black Panther newspaper, which a lot of them peddled around campus. In other words, I'd teach them to write better propaganda. This improved their English skills greatly and even moved a few of them in the direction of clearer thinking. But I never could get them to stop swearing in class.

This latter fact had interesting repercussions.

On day, a couple terms later, I found myself in the elevator with my department head. Just as I was getting out, he said, "Oh, Mr. Deemer, I need you in my office first thing in the morning. There are charges of moral turpitude pending against you." And with that, the elevator door closed.

Goddamn, what was this about? The first thing that came to mind was that a former student was pregnant and claiming I was the father. Some damn thing. I was not sleeping with students, and I didn't have a clue what this might be about. Just to be safe, I contacted an attorney.

The meeting, in retrospect, was hilarious. Myself, the chair, and my immediate boss, the head of Comp. The chair wrote something on a sheet of paper and handed it to me. I read the word, "Motherfucker." "Did you say this in class?" the chair asked. I couldn't remember until they got more specific about the term in question: my term with the Black Panthers!

I recalled dealing, finally, with their swearing by having a class discussion on obscene language, and the magical properties of language, and later having the class vote on whether or not cussing should be permitted in our classroom. Swearing won handily -- and the victory was like some kind of weird liberation because now white students were getting in the act, even sorority girls were getting in the act. Class discussion improved greatly because now everybody seemed to want to say Fuck or some such in a public classroom.

And, yes, I joined in now and again. I made my defense. I pointed out that the MF-word must be magical indeed if the chair can't even say it but has to write it on a slip of paper to communicate the pending charge!

Well, this was the situation. One of those sweet sorority girls was the daughter of a big eastern Oregon farmer who was a big donor to the university. She had used the world "mutherfucker" in front of her mother and when asked where on earth she'd picked up such gutter language, she said people talked like this all the time in Mr. Deemer's Composition class at the university. The farmer wanted to know what he was giving money to the university for, anyway -- this?

Well, swell.

My strategy for dealing with the Panthers was backed by my Comp boss, and no charges were filed against me -- but I had to promise not to swear in class any more. For some reason, when the chair learned I was a Navy brat, my conduct made more sense to him than it did with my argument for free speech, magical language, and unique educational strategies for unique situations. There's profiling for you.

And this was my experience with the Black Panthers.