To mark this year’s Black History Month, I invite you for a journey inside this book:
While at it, let us bear in mind that this is essentially what can rightly be called a 'time capsule': there is no before or after, just that moment in History that came to define the Black Panthers Party (BPP), founded two years earlier, in 1966, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale – what was it all about, what made it thick.
Except for brief references in the biographical notes at the end of the book, there is no account, for instance, of Eldridge Cleaver’s prior imprisonment for rape, in 1957 –- even when his acclaimed book written in prison Soul on Ice is mentioned, nothing is said about his own account on it of his experience as a rapist: “starting with black girls for ‘practice’ and then going on the serial rape of white women, as he put it, as an ‘insurrectionary act’” (before settling for an 'almost white' lady, I should add..).
Nor is there any account of his later time in Argelia – having got there with his wife Kathleen via Cuba –, where he was reported to, at some point, have organised a stolen car ring from Europe to Africa, allegedly to garner financial support for his followers from America who had hijacked planes there to join him in Argelia, before moving on to Paris.
Or of how, back in America a few years later, he renounced his radical views, became a born-again Christian and then, among other things religious, a Mormon, before eventually running for office as a member of the Republican Party.
Actually, for some reason, looking at Eldridge’s life trajectory brings to mind this poem by that other Black Knight of the time, Gil Scott-Heron, and associated with it, interestingly enough, the fact that both ultimately had their lives shortened by drug addiction…
There are no images of a more aged Kathleen Cleaver when, except for the dreadlocks, she looks 'whiter than white' and, without her ‘60s almost ever-wearing black sunglasses, 'clearer-eyed' than any average white woman, or of her later divorce from Eldridge amid stories of him discovering that she had a lover who he made sure was killed, or of her subsequent notable academic career either…
... just the absolutely striking images of a stunning 23 year-old beauty sporting a mighty afro and a demeanour fit for a princess, except that instead of a bunch of flowers in her hands she held, if not a cigarette, a gun, even if not showing...
... by the way, these, the guns, the very raison d’être of all the BPP self-defense posture (its original full name was Black Panthers Party for Self-Defense), although referred to in great detail in one paragraph, never appear in the pictures in this book, except in the hands of the “pigs”, i.e. the police.
And that’s just to mention that most charismatic couple around whom, at least for Bingham's cameras, everything seemed to gravitate during those months in 1968, with the “Free Huey” campaign serving as a galvanizing, yet somewhat backgroundish, motif.
But, perhaps it is all these abstractions that make this book so remarkable: it enables us to live that defining moment as if we were there and then; it shows us the very essence of the BPP and the Movement around it during the year when it captured the imaginations of men and women, old and young, black and white and grabbed all attentions in American society and beyond.
And all that while managing not to be obfuscated by other momentous social movements of the time, such as the May 1968 in Paris or the anti-Vietnam war protests, or even the Civil Rights Movement in America.
In fact, it brings us something that was perhaps unique to the BPP at that particular moment in time: alongside the engagement of the 'hippies', 'xicanos' and anti-war protestors, the ideological allegiance (albeit tactical and circumstantial) by such America's foes as Mao’s China and Guevara’s Cuba, as well as anti-colonialist, anti-Apartheid and pan-Africanist movements and governments in Africa.
It is thus a moment in History encapsulated in its time, but so powerfully so that it still resonates in our minds and consciousness (almost) 45 years later...
{to be continued}
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