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The New Black Panther Party,

Black Nationalism, and the

Tangled Legacy of COINTELPRO

D. J. Mulloy

On Election Day 2008, two members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (NBPP), Minister King Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson, stood outside a polling station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, attired in their usual paramilitary-style uniforms of black jackets, combat boots, and black berets. According to a civil suit filed by the U.S. Justice Department on Jan- uary 7, 2009, the two men were also armed with “a dangerous weapon”—a night stick—and engaged in “coercion, threats and intimidation . . . racial threats and insults . . . menacing and intimidating gestures . . . and move- ments directed at individuals who were present to vote” in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.1 That same day the NBPP released an official statement suspending the Philadelphia chapter of the NBPP and placing blame for the incident firmly on the shoulders of Samir Shabazz who, it was said, “acted purely on his own will and in complete contradiction to the code and conduct of a member of our organization.”2

Four months later, on May 29, 2009, the Washington Times broke the news that the Justice Department had decided not to pursue its case against the Panthers.3 The decision provoked a storm of protest in certain sections of the right-wing media in the United States—protest directed as much against the administration of Barack Obama as it was toward the NBPP. As

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an editorial in the Washington Times saw it, for example, the “case involv- ing the New Black Panthers screams out for justice. Instead, the Obama administration looks the other way. This all but invites racial violence at future elections.”4

In many ways this was all very much business as usual for the NBPP. Controversy has followed the party ever since its inception. Yet despite the huge amount of media and political attention it has garnered, there has been very little detailed academic analysis of the NBPP or its activities.5 This chapter examines the origin and history of the NBPP and explores the complex legacy of the counterintelligence program—known as COIN- TELPRO—directed against black nationalist groups during the 1960s and 1970s by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. In doing so it reveals the remarkable sense of suspicion and mutual recrimination these operations still engender in sections of the black community in the United States forty years on. Indeed, it is a key part of the ongoing dispute between the New Black Panthers and surviving members of the original Black Panther Party (BPP), estab- lished by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966, over the right to claim the name and history of the Panthers—another is- sue addressed in the chapter. Examining these two issues in detail reveals much about the NBPP, including the extent to which its political identity is grounded in conspiracy and a beleaguered sense of black nationalism’s place in the contemporary United States. We begin, though, with the for- mation and early development of the NBPP.

Origins and Early Years

The precise origins of the NBPP are difficult to determine. There is general agreement that Aaron Michaels, a radio talk show producer, organized a New Black Panther Party in Dallas, Texas, in either 1989 or 1990.6 However, both the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) argue that Michaels’ group was preceded and directly in- fluenced by a Black Panther militia organized by Michael McGee, a former member of the original BPP and a city alderman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1990. (McGee was a guest that year on Dallas county commissioner John Wiley’s radio show Talkback, which Aaron Michaels produced; it is this encounter that seems to have inspired Michaels to create his party.) The ADL and the SPLC differ, though, in that the ADL regards Michaels as hav- ing established the “founding chapter of the NBPP” while the SPLC con- tends that it was McGee who did so, changing the name of his group to the

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NBPP before organizing new chapters in Dallas and Indianapolis and be- coming the organization’s “national commander” (although the SPLC does not know exactly when this occurred).7 The Official National NBPP Black Power Manual, first published in December 2001, recognizes Michaels’ part in the formation of the NBPP—albeit briefly8—but contains no reference whatsoever to McGee. (A possible explanation for this “omission” is that unlike the NBPP that developed under the leadership of Khallid Abdul Muhammad and Malik Zulu Shabazz—the one in existence at the time the manual was produced—which was very clearly influenced by the activi- ties and ideology of the original BPP and desperately wanted to be seen as its rightful successor, McGee seems to have wanted to distance himself as much as possible from his former comrades, telling a crowd of three hun- dred gathered at a Milwaukee public school in 1995, for example, that he was “not advocating what the Black Panthers were advocating.” Instead, he said, his “militia” would be “about violence . . . actual fighting, bloodshed and urban guerilla warfare.”9)

In any event, and irrespective of who was actually leading it, the NBPP spent the immediate years after its formation endeavoring to build itself up into a national organization. At the National Black Power Summit and Youth Rally organized by Michaels and at which McGee was a speaker, held in Dallas in May 1993, for example, the party claimed to have twenty chapters in twenty American cities.10 According to the SPLC, the rally, which among other things called for the “separation of the races and the overthrow of the U.S. government,” was “attended by 200 blacks” and one particularly notable and “specially invited white guest—Tom Metzger,” the leader of the white supremacist group White Aryan Resistance. Al- though certainly noteworthy, the invitation of Metzger—who according to the ADL told the audience, in a presumably deliberate echo of the black nationalist rhetoric of Malcolm X, that he believed in achieving goals “by whatever means necessary”—was not really that remarkable. In fact, it was a continuation of a long-established practice of black nationalists and white nationalists meeting together to seek common cause, a practice previously undertaken by such black nationalist icons as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan, for example.11 Indeed, one might suggest that more interesting is the fact that such contacts do not appear to have been pursued after this one meeting.

In 1996 the still nascent NBPP was involved in a bitter dispute with the Dallas School Board over what the NBPP considered to be the inadequate number of black members on the board. The dispute reached its climax at a

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meeting on May 23 when three NBPP members, including Aaron Michaels, were forcibly removed by security personnel after they had refused to sit down while the meeting was taking place. One of the Panthers was re- moved from the room in a choke hold. In a news conference following the confrontation, Michaels said that in order to protect itself the NBPP would come to the next meeting armed, a threat that resulted in the cancellation of that meeting, citywide concern, and, eventually, an apology from the school board president, Bill Keever, for the NBPP’s treatment at the meet- ing of May 23.12

More significant, however, is the fact that during this battle with the Dal- las School Board Michaels enlisted the help of Khallid Abdul Muhammad, the controversial former national spokesman for Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam—Khallid appeared alongside Michaels at the news confer- ence announcing the NBPP’s intention to attend the next board meeting armed—since within a short time thereafter Khallid took over the effective running of the party, becoming its national chairman sometime in either 1997 or 1998.13 And if Michaels (or McGee) had created the organization, it was Khallid—and later Malik Shabazz (following Khallid’s death in 2001)— who really raised the NBPP’s political profile, extended the range of its po- litical activities, and established its controversial reputation as “the most anti-Semitic and racist black militant group in the U.S.”14 Because of this and because much of the criticism that has been directed to the organiza- tion is attributable, at least in part, to the actions and rhetorical ferocity of Khallid and Shabazz, it is worth providing a brief overview of each of their backgrounds before they became involved with the party.

Khallid Abdul Muhammad

Khallid Abdul Muhammad was born Harold Moore Jr. in Houston, Texas, on January 12, 1948.15 He was raised by an aunt, became a child preacher, and was president of the Houston Methodist Youth Fellowship. After grad- uating from high school in 1966 he pursued a degree in theological studies at Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. At Dillard, following a speech by Louis Farrakhan, who was then a top aide to the Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Elijah Muhammad, he joined the Nation. He was first known as Brother Harold X and then Dr. Malik Rushaddin before being given the name Khallid Abdul Muhammad by Farrakhan in 1983—at which point he was one of Farrakhan’s most effective organizers.16 (This was after Farra- khan had reconstituted the NOI in 1978, following his split with Wallace D.

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Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad’s son, over the direction the NOI should take following Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975.)17

The NBPP places great store in Khallid’s educational achievements, ar- guing, in the biographical section of its Black Power Manual, for example, that it was the “skills of higher education as well as his fighting spirit [that] made Minister Khallid a valuable weapon to the Nation of Islam and the Black Nation in general.” (In addition to graduating from Dillard, the NB- PP’s biography has him graduating from Pepperdine University in Cali- fornia before receiving an academic fellowship and going on to “‘Intensive Studies’ at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia Universities.”18) So it is perhaps worth noting that there is no evidence that Khallid completed his degree at Dillard, let alone a doctorate. Nor, as is also claimed, is there any evidence that he taught in the African American studies department at the Univer- sity of California at Long Beach.19

What are not in dispute, however, are Khallid’s organizational and fund- raising effectiveness, and his fierce and confrontational rhetorical style— skills that made him especially popular to the more militant and grassroots members of the Nation. Indeed, as former NOI member Vibert White Jr. makes clear in his insider account of the Nation, Khallid made a concen- trated and extremely successful effort to fashion himself as “a warrior for the street brother and sister”:

As the Minister of mosques in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York City, Khallid created a cult-like following that embraced gang-mem- bers like the Crips and Bloods of south central Los Angeles, the Gangsta Disciples of Chicago, and the Zulu Nation of Miami and the Bronx. . . . The young militant members of the FOI [the Fruit of Islam, the NOI’s paramilitary and security wing] also respected Khallid tre- mendously . . . [as] the person who fought with them in the trenches and on the streets of America’s ghettoes. The skilful orator and bril- liant teacher labored diligently to create a special relationship with the young militants in and outside the Nation. His method was based on one-to-one relationships, blunt and nonspiritual language, aggres- sive and sometimes racist dogma, and the personal style of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Huey Newton, and a Mafia hit man all rolled up in one person.20

It was exactly this approach and appeal that Khallid brought with him to the NBPP when he took it over in the late nineties, providing a major influ- ence on the direction the party would take.

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Khallid became Farrakhan’s national spokesman in 1986—an appoint- ment that saw him following in the footsteps of Malcolm X as well as Farra- khan himself—but his swift rise through the upper echelons of the Nation’s leadership was halted by an infamous speech he gave at Kean College, a small liberal arts college in New Jersey, on November 29, 1993. The speech, titled “The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews,” was extraordi- nary in its anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, antiwhite, and antigay vitriol (al- though black “race traitors” were also roundly condemned). In the most notorious part of the speech Khallid argued that Jews themselves were to blame for the Holocaust:

Everybody always talk[s] about Hitler exterminating six million Jews. . . . But don’t anybody ever ask what did they do to Hitler? They went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped, they turned around, and a German, in his own country, would almost have to go to a Jew to get money. They undermined the very fabric of society. Now, he was an arrogant, no-good devil bastard, Hitler, no question about it. . . . He used his greatness for evil and wickedness. But they [the Jews] are wickedly great, too, brother. Everywhere they go and they always do it and they hide their head.21

On January 16, 1994, the ADL took out a full-page ad in the New York Times featuring extracts from the speech; the ad asked people to decide for themselves whether the NOI was moving, as Farrakhan was then claiming, “toward moderation and increased toleration.”22

The response seemed pretty categorical. As Mattias Gardell notes, within just a few days of the ADL’s ad “more than 400 editorials and articles” were written in condemnation of Khallid and the NOI. Significantly, the torrent of criticism directed toward the Nation included not just white and Jew- ish groups but also numerous black political leaders, including Benjamin Chavis of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, William H. Gray of the United Negro College Fund, and Kweisi Mfume, then head of the Congressional Black Caucus, as well as the more populist Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.23 On February 2, for the first time in its history, the United States Senate voted to condemn a speech (97–0), cen- suring Khallid’s views as “false, anti-Semitic, racist, divisive, repugnant and a disservice to all Americans.”24 The following day Farrakhan announced that Khallid had been suspended from the NOI, both as a minister and as its national spokesperson. Khallid’s statements had been “vile, repugnant,

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malicious and mean-spirited,” Farrakhan said, but, in an attempt to have it both ways—to respond to the external criticism while expressing sup- port for Khallid’s views, which as Vibert White notes, were still extremely popular within the Nation—he also contended that “Khallid spoke truths about the Jews, Whites and the Catholics.”25 In other words, Khallid had been punished not for what he said, but for how he had said it. (For its part, the NBPP lauds the Kean College speech as “historic,” as something that “shook the racist, Zionist, imperialist, white supremacist foundation of the world.”26)

Just a few months after the Kean College speech controversy, on May 29, 1994, Khallid was the subject of an assassination attempt when he, four bodyguards, and a bystander were shot by James X. Bess after Khallid had given a speech at the University of California, Riverside. According to some accounts, Bess was pursuing a personal vendetta against Khallid after he or one of his close aides had expelled Bess from the Seattle Mosque in 1991. This was the “official” position of the NOI, for example.27 Other accounts argue that Bess was a Farrakhan “loyalist,” and that the attempted assassi- nation could be attributed to Farrakhan and other ministers’ jealousy over Khallid’s continuing popularity within the Nation, that there was—echoing the assassination of Malcolm X almost forty-years earlier—a conspiracy within the NOI to kill Khallid before he became too powerful.28 Finally, the possibility that the murder attempt might be a COINTELPRO-like opera- tion intended to disrupt the activities of the Nation has also been raised, not least by the NBPP.29 (The NBPP’s embrace of this conspiracy theory is examined in more detail later in this chapter.) Bess was found guilty— alone—of the attempted murder of Khallid and five other counts of assault in March 1996, and was sentenced to life in prison.30

It was during this period—with the controversy of his Kean College speech still swirling, and the NOI leadership at the very least trying to distance itself from him31—that, according to Robert Williams, who had replaced Aaron Michaels as the leader of the NBPP’s Dallas chapter, Khal- lid first became involved with the NBPP. The SPLC suggests that it might actually have been a year earlier in 1993, but it is nonetheless clear that his “difficulties” with the NOI were a major factor in Khallid becoming more active in the party.32 As Indianapolis NBPP leader Mmoja Ajabu told the SPLC: “Khalid took it on [leadership of the NBPP] because he was disen- chanted with the Nation of Islam. He did not leave because he was mad. He left because he thought the Black Panther Party was better adapted to our

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struggle. . . . There was a meeting of all the chapters in Texas and he was voted in.”33

Khallid led the NBPP from 1997–98 until his death, aged fifty-three, from a brain aneurysm, on February 21, 2001. (The NBPP’s “investigation” into his death is addressed in a separate section later in this chapter.) He was succeeded as leader of the party by Malik Shabazz.

Malik Zulu Shabazz

Shabazz was, as the ADL notes, Khallid’s “obvious successor,” having joined the NBPP in 1998 and served it in various capacities including as its na- tional spokesman and minister of justice prior to Khallid’s death.34 Indeed, according to an article in The New Black Panther in 2004, when the NBPP’s national committee met on February 15, 2001, shortly after Khallid fell ill, to discuss what to do, it was “informed by family members that Dr. Muham- mad’s consistent words and wishes to them” were that Shabazz should “take his place if anything happened to him.”35

Shabazz was born Paris Lewis in Los Angeles, California, in 1966 and was raised by his mother after his black activist father died “under myste- rious circumstances that have not been explained to this day,” as Shabazz put it to the New York Daily News in 1998.36 He was introduced to the NOI by his grandfather, who, Shabazz says, joined the Nation in 1955. Shabazz received both his undergraduate degree and his juris doctor from Howard University in Washington D.C., where he also founded the black nationalist group Unity Nation.37 Three months after the Kean College controversy, in a show of support for Khallid, Shabazz invited him to Washington to speak to the group (other invited speakers included Louis Farrakhan and Leonard Jeffries, the controversial professor of black studies at the City College of New York), and while according to the NBPP Black Power Manual Shabazz had first met Khallid in 1988, their association seems only really to have developed after this event.38

Protests, Publicity, and Controversy

The NBPP has been involved in a wide range of activities under the lead- ership of both Khallid and Shabazz as it seeks to achieve its goal of reviv- ing the black power movement in the United States, and to implement its “Black Agenda” of political and economic self-determination and defense of

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“Black rights,” whether by reclaiming and developing black neighborhoods, developing “Black Power through education,” or enforcing “accountability in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.”39 Denouncing “in- tegrationist” civil rights organizations and mainstream black politicians for “licking the boots of the slavemasters’ children with their all-American agenda,” the NBPP portrays itself as being “unafraid to tackle Black issues the world over from an uncompromising Black perspective.”40

Yet although calling for the establishment of “a broad mass movement like the Honorable Marcus Garvey’s, coupled with [the] structure and dis- cipline of the Nation of Islam, and infused with the Revolutionary Nation- alism, public service and militancy of the early Panthers,”41 in actuality, the NBPP has tended to gravitate toward high-profile, confrontational, and media-friendly events, often on behalf of the poor or disadvantaged and in- volving the ready display of firearms and incendiary rhetoric. While these events have certainly contributed to the notoriety of the NBPP, they have arguably done very little in terms of building a mass-based black nationalist movement in the United States.

All the hallmarks of the NBPP’s political activism were on display in the event that first brought the party to widespread attention, the murder of James Byrd Jr., a forty-nine-year-old African American, in Jasper, Texas, in 1998.42 Byrd was killed by three white men, John William “Bill” King, Lawrence Russell Brewer Jr., and Shawn Berry, who had offered to give him a ride as he was walking home on the evening of June 7. The brutal nature of Byrd’s death—after being savagely beaten and kicked, he was chained to the back of Berry’s pickup and dragged by his ankles for three miles—caused a national outcry. His funeral on June 13, 1998, paid for by Dennis Rodman of the Chicago Bulls, received not just national but international media cover- age and was attended by numerous public figures including Kweisi Mfume of the NAACP, California representative Maxine Waters, Mayor Lee Brown of Houston, and Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, who read a let- ter on behalf of President Bill Clinton, as well as Khallid Muhammad and other members of the NBPP.

The NBPP was needed, Khallid said, to “protect the black community” from any copycat crimes, and in a telling homage to the original Black Panthers’ famous “Sacramento event” of 1967, the fifteen or so NBPP mem- bers who came to the funeral did so openly carrying loaded shotguns (as Texas law allowed).43 In a further allusion to the black power activism of the 1960s, Khallid also echoed the sentiments of H. Rap Brown when he declared that the NBPP was “here to say that violence and racism by the

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white man in America is just as American as apple and cherry pie.”44 Simi- lar tactics were employed fourteen days later when the NBPP returned to Jasper to protest against a Ku Klux Klan rally being held in the town. As Malik Shabazz told the once-again-assembled media, “These men are here to freely exercise their divine and, yes, constitutional rights after building this country for 400 years to defend ourselves and carry armed and loaded weapons to defend the black community against this murderous and hypo- critical outfit known as the Ku Klux Klan.”45 However, despite some tense moments, the confrontation between the Klan and the NBPP did not result in any violence. The NBPP returned to Jasper again during the trials of King, Brewer, and Berry in 1999. All three men were found guilty: King and Brewer were sentenced to death, and Berry was given life imprisonment.

Also in 1998 the first in a series of contentious marches organized by the NBPP took place in New York City. Following in the footsteps of the NOI’s 1995 Million Man March in Washington, D.C. (which drew anywhere be- tween four hundred thousand and one and a half million participants, according to various estimates) and the 1997 Million Women March in Philadelphia organized by local community activists Phile Chionesu and Asia Coney (where estimates of the number of attendees again ranged from several hundred thousand to more than a million), Khallid Muhammad called for a Million Youth March to take place on Harlem’s Malcolm X Boulevard.46 The aim of the march, Khallid said, was “to support and guide black youth,” to protest against police brutality and gang violence, to call for reparations to be paid to the descendents of slaves, to bring the “next generation of black leadership to center stage,” and, significantly, to “put black power back on the agenda.”47

Opposition to the march swiftly followed its announcement, including from several Jewish groups that were especially concerned about Khallid’s involvement.48 Citing policing costs, potential traffic problems, and dis- ruption to local businesses, city officials refused to grant a permit for the march, suggesting that instead of Harlem the organizers move it to either Randall’s Island in the East River area of Manhattan or to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, locations better suited, it was argued, to the proposed large numbers of people who would be attending the event. Khallid’s re- sponse to the proposed venue change was predictable. New York, he said, was a “Jewish-controlled city.” “We have a God-given right to march in Harlem and we intend to fight. We want to be in our own neighborhood with our own people.” It was a response that was too much for the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, who held a press conference of his own

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to denounce both the “hate march” and Khallid’s “race baiting and anti- Semitic” rhetoric. “The attributions of the city’s position [on the march] to Jews in the administration doing this is mind-boggling in this day and age,” Giuliani declared, and he urged ordinary New Yorkers to stand up against it.49

The mayor was quick to acknowledge that Khallid and his supporters had a right to demonstrate. “Even when you are filled with hate rhetoric, you do have a right to demonstrate and protest to a certain extent,” he noted. “But you don’t have a right to do it any place you want, anywhere you want, anytime you want.”50 For the march’s organizers, though, all of the city’s purported worries about traffic congestion or policing costs were seen as little more than racially motivated political subterfuge intended to hide the administration’s real, underlying hostility to the NBPP’s message of militant black nationalism, and as a less-than-subtle attempt to limit that message’s appeal in its presumed natural constituency by forcing the march to take place away from Harlem.

The issue was resolved in Khallid Muhammad and the NBPP’s favor in the court system. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan decided that the march did not “pose a significant threat” to any governmental interests such as public safety, which would have been one of the few grounds on which the march could have been banned, and he rejected the city’s argument that it should be moved to either Randall’s Is- land or Van Cortlandt Park because both locations were remote and this re- moteness would “adversely affect” the march organizers’ ability “to get their message out.” The judge did criticize Khallid’s “outrageous, inflammatory and prejudiced” statements, but he also made it clear that such statements did not justify denying him a permit. The city appealed Kaplan’s decision, but it was upheld by the Federal Appeals Court, although with the stipula- tion that the march could only last for four hours on a specific six-block section of Malcolm X Boulevard. (The NBPP had wanted the march to run from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and to be more extensive.)51

On September 5, 1998, the first Million Youth March finally took place. And although it was really a political rally rather than a march, the event proceeded relatively smoothly—with all the expected speeches, black power salutes, and sloganeering—until its close. During the court proceed- ings, in an attempt to allay any possible public safety fears that might arise, Khallid’s lawyers had argued that they were only really expecting 175,000 people to attend rather than the advertised “millions,” but as it turned out, even this figure was wildly optimistic, with police estimates putting the

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actual number of attendees at 6,000.52 Nonetheless, there was still a heavy police presence, with 1,600 officers actively policing the event and another 1,600 held back in reserve. The No. 2 subway line was shut down and police helicopters were also deployed. At 4:05 p.m.—after the court-determined closing time had passed but while Khallid Muhammad was still speaking— hundreds of police officers in riot gear and on horseback tried to make their way to the stage in order to bring the rally to an end. Khallid urged his supporters to defend themselves, and a violent mêlée ensued in which thirty people were injured, including sixteen police officers.53

As much as Khallid and the NBPP were criticized for the incident,54 so too were Giuliani and the police, both for the heavy-handed tactics that were employed and for their punctilious determination to end the rally at 4 p.m. As Harlem councilman Bill Perkins saw it, “The real anger was at the police. The helicopters, the corralling of people, disrupting transporta- tion, preventing people from having access to their businesses and homes, the horses and riot gear, as if they were getting ready for war.”55 Giuliani, though, was unrepentant. In his view, “They [Khallid Muhammad and the NBPP] had their free-speech right. When it got to 4:01 p.m., it was over and I’m proud of the police making sure it was over.”56

Hostilities between the Giuliani administration and the NBPP resumed the following year. Indeed, events surrounding the second Million Youth March provided an almost comic repetition of those of the first. Again the NBPP were initially denied a permit to march, although this time the reason given was its failure to submit “a proper application” and its failure to com- ply with the Federal Appeals Court ruling of the previous year that it could only demonstrate for four hours. Again Khallid Muhammad and the NBPP said they would march with or without a permit. Again the city’s refusal to issue a permit provided an opportunity for the NBPP to see conspiratorial forces and government repression ranged against them. (In Khallid’s view, Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir were “trying to rewrite the white Constitution of America,” and wanted “to minimize this new black power movement.” Shabazz accused Giuliani of trying to curry favor with Jewish voters in anticipation of his expected run against Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate.57) Again the issue went to court, where—once again—the city lost. An appeal was launched. Lost. And then the march took place.58

A number of things were different about the second Million Youth March, however. First, the numbers of protestors were even smaller than in 1998, with estimates ranging from eight hundred to three thousand. Sec- ond, both the police presence and the police’s tactics changed, with only

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eight hundred officers in attendance and no attempt being made to storm the stage as the rally reached its conclusion. Perhaps as a result, a third dif- ference was that there was no repeat of the violence that had accompanied the end of the 1998 event. In fact, the rally ended five minutes early, with Khallid Muhammad urging the crowd to be “courteous, polite, and respect- ful” and to disperse in an “orderly fashion.”59 A fourth difference was that because of the contentious, high-profile, and violent events of the previous year, there was very little support from civic, political, and cultural leaders within the black community for the second march. For example, the rapper and hip-hop mogul Master P, who had financed the 1998 event, withdrew his backing, leaving NBPP members to carry buckets and plastic bags into the crowd to ask for donations to cover the cost of renting the stage and the sound system at the end of the rally.60 Stanley Gleaton, the president of Community Board 10 in Harlem, refused to support the rally, as did Rep. Charles B. Rangel, one of Harlem’s most powerful political figures, New York State Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright, and the state comptroller, H. Carl McCall. The lack of support was dismissed by the spokeswoman for the march, Shaunette Daniels, in typical NBPP fashion: “Unfortunately, the black elected officials are so far removed from their own constituents that they are afraid to stand up for the people,” she told the New York Times.61

During the buildup to the second march Rudolph Giuliani had castigated the media for paying too much attention to Khallid Muhammad and the NBPP. “You are creating them,” he told reporters during a press conference at New York’s City Hall. “They don’t have support. They don’t have political support, they don’t have social support, they don’t have support in the com- munity. And by constantly focusing on them, you are creating them, and I want to say as little as possible to give them attention.”62 But Giuliani’s strat- egy of giving the NBPP as little attention as possible only really came into effect the following year, when the city granted its application for a permit for a third Million Youth March (called “B2K: Black Power 2000”) with no fuss. When only 250 people attended the rally on September 2, again held on Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, Khallid took the view that he was not going to “judge today by the numbers” because the NBPP was “rebuilding the Black Power movement, the black nationalist movement . . . one black block at a time.” But no doubt cognizant of Giuliani’s comments the year before, he laid the blame for the poor attendance squarely at the door of Giuliani and the media. “These were really strategies and tactics,” Khallid told reporters before the rally. “This year they gave us the permit right away,

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The New Black Panther Party, Black Nationalism, and the Legacy of COINTELPRO · 83

and as a result the media did not know and consequently did not cover the news conferences about the event.”63

After an absence of three years—and the death of Khallid—the Million Youth March briefly returned to New York in 2003, although this time in Brooklyn. As with previous marches, the focus was on issues of police bru- tality, street violence, and education, but Shabazz also wanted to address the lack of political involvement of the “the hip-hop generation” of eighteen to twenty-four year olds, with the NBPP aiming to offer them advice on “who to vote for, who not to vote for and how to vote in their interest.”64

Organized by the NBPP together with the United Africa Movement and New York Councilman Charles Barron (a former member of the Harlem branch of the original BPP), the event drew about one thousand people.65 It has not been held since, although Shabazz did work with Louis Farrakhan on the NOI’s Millions More March held in Washington, D.C., on October 15, 2005.

The NBPP’s strategy of maximizing its public and media exposure is also evident in the numerous other protests, rallies, marches, boycotts, town hall meetings, and press conferences that it has been involved in on a range of issues—from police shootings and the gentrification of black neighbor- hoods, to church vandalism and the events of 9/11—since first coming to notice in 1998. In terms of fatal shootings involving the police and African Americans, for example, the NBPP has protested the shooting of Richard Watson in Harlem (killed when a police officer’s pistol discharged as he was dragging Watson from his car in September 1999); the February 2000 acquittal of four police officers charged in the shooting of Amadou Diallo (Diallo had been shot at forty-one times after the police mistook a wallet he was holding for a gun); the shooting of Timothy Thomas in Cincinnati in 2001, which resulted in riots and a citywide curfew, and at whose funeral members of the NOI and the NBPP provided security; a string of fatal po- lice shootings in Boston in 2001 and 2002; the 2003 shootings of Jose Luis Ives Jr. and Michael Newkirk in Newark, New Jersey; the 2006 shooting of eighty-eight-year-old Kathryn Johnston in her home in Atlanta, Georgia (Johnston shot three narcotics officers executing a search warrant before being killed); and, most recently, the acquittal in April 2008 of three detec- tives who had been charged in the November 2006 shooting of Sean Bell in Queens, New York (shot at fifty-one times, the twenty-three-year-old Bell was killed outside the nightclub where he had been attending his bachelor party).66

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In addition, the NBPP has offered protection to graduating black stu- dents at Pennsylvania State University following death threats against a stu- dent there in 2001; created the “Security and Protection Committee of the Jena 6” to provide security for the families of six black teenagers accused of beating a white student at Jena High School in Louisiana in 2006 (the beat- ing followed months of racial tension at the school, including the hanging of nooses from a tree in the school yard); escorted children to school and pumped gas for frightened motorists in the D.C. area during the Washing- ton sniper attacks of 2002; picketed the opening of former President Bill Clinton’s new office in Harlem in July 2001 (Clinton was the “white mis- sionary of gentrification,” Shabazz said, and the opening of his office would increases property prices and force blacks and the poor to move out of the area); protested outside the Santa Barbara courthouse where Michael Jack- son was being arraigned on child abuse charges in 2004 on the basis that Jackson was the victim of a racial double standard (Jackson was found not guilty in 2005); objected to Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ for continuing “the lie that Jesus Christ was Caucasian”; attended a March 2002 meeting of the Washington, D.C., Boxing and Wrestling Commis- sion in support of Mike Tyson’s application to be allowed to fight Lennox Lewis in the city; marched armed outside the Republican Party National Convention in Houston, Texas, in 2000, in opposition to the impending execution of Gary Graham (Graham had been convicted of the murder of Bobby Lambert in 1981 during the robbery of a Houston supermarket but maintained his innocence right up until his execution); held rallies for imprisoned “political activists” such as Mumia Abu-Jamal (convicted, con- troversially, of the 1981 murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner); protested in front of the Danish Embassy in Washington, D.C., during the Danish cartoons controversy in 2006; and offered support and legal advice to al- Qaeda member and “twentieth 9/11 hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui during a hearing in 2002 (Moussaoui was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006 for his part in the 9/11 attacks).67

While many of the issues tackled by the NBPP are serious and substan- tive, raising important questions about race, power and politics in the United States, others appear to have been chosen for their potential public- ity value alone. And while some of these actions have enabled NBPP mem- bers to forge alliances and work with other interested parties, especially at the local level—the NBPP was part of a twenty-group coalition includ- ing D.C. Action for Children, the Council of Latino Agencies, the D.C. Black Church Initiative, and the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless,

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The New Black Panther Party, Black Nationalism, and the Legacy of COINTELPRO · 85

which unsuccessfully opposed the construction of the Washington Nation- als’ baseball stadium in the Ward 6 area of Southeast Washington in 2004, for example68—just as often they have found themselves marginalized by more mainstream political actors even when there seems to be agreement between them on the issue at hand. A good illustration of this is the sepa- rate marches that were organized by the NBBP and the NAACP to protest the shooting of Sean Bell in 2006.69 Moreover, as the small number of at- tendees at the Million Youth Marches demonstrates, overall the party has failed to make much headway in becoming a broad, mass-based move- ment. Indeed, although there are no exact figures on the current size and strength of the NBBP, the SPLC lists only fourteen active chapters in its “Year in Hate” report for 2010—six fewer than the party claimed to have in May 1993.70

Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the range—and manner—of their ac- tivities, criticism of NBPP has been widespread, encompassing local, state, and national politicians; mainstream civil rights organizations; newspaper editorialists and columnists (such as Michelle Malkin and Bill Maxwell) as well as civil rights monitoring groups such as the SPLC and ADL; and, indeed, ordinary citizens.71 Interestingly, though, some of the most ardent opposition to the NBPP has come from former members of the BPP, and it is this that I examine in detail in the following section.

“There Is No New Black Panther Party”: The Black Panther Party and the Anxiety of Influence

The NBPP has not just appropriated the name of the Black Panther Party. Its attempt to connect with and lay claim to the legacy and historical impri- matur of the party established by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale is much more extensive than that. The NBPP’s Ten Point Program of aims and ob- jectives is clearly modeled on the original Panthers’ Ten Point Party Plat- form and Program, for example.72 Photographs of the original Panthers adorn its Web site and newspaper, as does the imagery and artwork of Em- ory Douglas, the BPP’s minister of culture, including that of the black pan- ther itself.73 Quotations from original Panthers and articles about them are published in The New Black Panther, and NBPP members and its leaders are told that they need to be “well versed in original Panther history.”74 The NBPP’s Black Power Manual is dedicated both to Khallid Muhammad— “our beloved Black Power General”—“and all original Black Panther Party members who gave their lives for our people.” And all new members of the

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party, who are required to purchase the manual, are informed that they “are the beneficiary of the struggle of the Original Black Panther Party which originated October 15, 1966 in Oakland, California. We give thanks for them over and over again.”75

Despite such expressions of gratitude, however, many of the most prom- inent members of the original Panthers, including Bobby Seale, David Hill- iard, and Elaine Brown have rejected both the NBPP and the attempt it has made to associate itself with their former organization. This was made abundantly clear in a public statement issued by the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation—founded in 1993 by Hilliard, the former BPP chief of staff, and Huey Newton’s widow, Fredrika Newton, to “honor the legacy and original vision of the Black Panther Party”—in September 2002. Posted on the foundation’s Web site and sent to journalists around the country, the statement could hardly have been more emphatic. “There Is No New Black Panther Party,” it read. The NBPP had “no legitimate claim on the Party’s name” because they “were never members of the Black Panther Party,” and they were denigrating that name by “promoting concepts absolutely counter to the revolutionary principles on which the [original] Party was founded.” The Black Panther Party “never presumed itself to be above the people,” nor did it operate on the basis of “hatred of white people,” the state- ment continued, and the NBPP’s claims about teaching “the black commu- nity about armed defense” were both reactionary and arrogant.76

Hilliard and other former Panthers have repeatedly voiced their objec- tions to the NBPP since it came into existence. Indeed, interviewed by the author in 2009, Hilliard was still extremely angry about what he saw as the “hijacking” of the Panther name by the NBPP. He had sympathy, he said, for “the young black people who have joined the NBPP,” but none at all for its leadership.77 Yet despite the issuing of statements and their many speeches, interviews, and media appearances, Hilliard and his former colleagues have been unable to stop the NBPP from using the Panther name. Nor have two legal actions been able to “close them down.”78

The first attempt to do so was initiated by Fahim Minkah and Marvin Crenshaw, two former original Black Panthers from Dallas in 1997. Indeed, Minkah and Crenshaw won a temporary injunction against the then Dal- las NBPP leader Aaron Michaels that prevented him from using either the original Panther name or its panther logo—both having been trademarked. The lawsuit stated: “The Black Panther Party Inc. does not wish to be con- fused with the ‘New Black Panthers’ a group preaching racial division and the inappropriate use of arms to produce social change.”79 The injunction

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The New Black Panther Party, Black Nationalism, and the Legacy of COINTELPRO · 87

was never enforced, however, and five years later, prompted by the in- creasing visibility of the NBPP in the mainstream media under Shabazz’s leadership, Seale, Hilliard, Brown, and Fredrika Newton, among others, hired a trademark lawyer and launched a fund-raising campaign to bring a second case to enforce it. “Your efforts to appropriate the images, names and writings of the Black Panther Party and to suggest some connection between the Black Panther Party and the New Black Panther Party are an insult to those who committed themselves to the ideals and principles of the Black Panther Party,” the former Panthers’ lawyer, Andrew Gold, wrote to Shabazz on August 20, 2002, as part of his request that the NBPP respect the rights of his clients.80

A particular source of contention in this regard was a doctored version of a well-known photograph from 1967 of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale standing outside the Black Panther Party offices in Oakland. The original photo shows Newton with a shotgun and Seale shouldering a pistol, but in the NBPP’s version Seale had been unceremoniously replaced by Khallid Muhammad.81 Financial constraints led the former Panthers to abandon their case, but the doctored photo strikingly encapsulates what seems to lie at the heart of the dispute between the BPP and the NBPP.82 On the one hand, there is the NBPP’s attempt to lay claim to the legacy of the Black Panther Party—to the extent that in the alteration of the photo Khallid be- comes not just another leader in a “great revolutionary line” that includes Huey Newton (which is how he is described in the NBPP Black Power Man- ual83) but someone who was actually in the original party and physically stood alongside him on the streets of Oakland. While from the perspective of the original Panthers, the photo is a perfect representation of what they see as the NBPP’s distortion of their history. “They are ripping off our his- tory and they have no legal authority to do it,” was how Hilliard put it to me. “The Black Panther Party no longer exists,” he said, and the “real question is why they don’t call themselves the New Muslims or the New NAACP, or the New SNCC?” And the reason for this, he said, was that it was because they were trading on the Black Panther Party’s “global reach” and its “glorious history,” which they knew would get them attention.84

The dispute with the NBPP came at the very time that Seale, Hilliard, and others were trying to transform—and to some extent had succeeded in transforming—the popular conception of the original Black Panther Party within the United States from that of gun-toting “street thugs,” sui- cidally intent on battling it out with police and other law enforcement agencies,85 to serious-minded community activists, whose most important

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legacies—those providing, in the words of the Newton Foundation, the “true historical example” that groups like the NBPP “ought” to be to follow- ing86—came from their free breakfast for children programs, their sickle- cell anemia programs, their educational activities, and their medical clin- ics. That the Black Panther Party was a “community services group” was something Hilliard emphasized throughout his interview with me in 2009, and it is certainly an important aspect of the party’s activities, one that has received significant attention in much of the recent scholarship on the Panthers. Yet the extent to which these activities might be said to “rehabili- tate” the reputation of the Panthers remains open to debate.87 Thomas J. Sugrue, in Sweet Land of Liberty, for example, argues that there was noth- ing especially “new” or “revolutionary” about this aspect of the Panthers’ programs.88

In this respect, perhaps one of the most revealing things Hilliard has said with regard to the NBPP is what he told the Christian Science Monitor in 2002: “They [the NBPP] are the personification of everything negative that’s been said of us.”89 This suggests that, in the battle between the BPP and the NBPP about how the Black Panther Party is remembered and re- garded in American society, the existence and activities of the NBPP pro- vide an unwelcome reminder of “bad” memories of the Panthers rather than “good” ones, and that this is one of the principal reasons why Hilliard and his colleagues have opposed the NBPP so strenuously. In other words, the NBPP is seen in many respects as a major hindrance to the original Panthers’ own ongoing and politicized project of historical explication and reclamation.90

The NBPP has sought to counter the original Panther members’ criti- cisms in a number of ways. First, it has denied that it is a hate group or that its members are antiwhite or anti-Semitic.91 Second, it has rejected the claims of Hilliard and his colleagues to be the “true” or “official” guardians of the Black Panther Party’s legacy. “Our position is the Panther exclusively belongs to no one,” Shabazz has said. “It belongs to the people.” (He has also noted, correctly, if somewhat inconveniently for the original Panthers, that the BPP “borrowed” its name and the panther symbol from the Alabama- based Lowndes County Freedom Organization.) What is more—in a move that interestingly reflects the direction scholarship on the BPP has recently taken—Shabazz argues that the BPP was much more widespread and ex- tensive than the Oakland chapter, and that the former members of this particular part of the party cannot presume to speak for all of it. Shabazz points to the presence of some of these “other” original Panthers within the

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NBPP or offers examples of their willingness to work with the NBPP as a means of reinforcing this argument.92

Third, Shabazz and the NBPP have directly challenged Hilliard and his colleagues’ attempt to control how the Black Panther Party is being re- membered in the present. As Shabazz objected to the New York Times, “No one could be more extreme than the Black Panther Party from Oakland, which openly advocated, with arms, the overthrow of the United States government, and which fought gun battles with the police. For them to call us extreme is extremely outrageous.”93 In accordance with this view, the complaining Panthers have been dismissed as “failed revolutionaries” who were either envious of or shamed by the ongoing militancy of the current generation of black nationalist activists in the NBPP. For example, an article in the September–October 2006 issue of The New Black Panther by Sadiki “Shep” Ojore Olugbala referred dismissively to the “sell out ‘knee grows’ in the Huey P. Newton Foundation.”94 This echoed the views of Aaron Mi- chaels at the time of the first court case against the NBPP in 1997. “I don’t give a damn what judge issued an order,” he told the London Sunday Times. “Nobody can tell us who we can call ourselves.” And he dismissed the com- plainants as “has-been wannabe Panthers” who were simply jealous of the attention the New Black Panthers were getting.95

The fourth, and in some ways most interesting, counterargument Shabazz has relied upon during this conflict with the Black Panthers is a more conspiratorial one. It was not so much his suggestion that Hilliard, Seale and others were “really working with the Zionists,” as was—inevi- tably—their lawyer Andrew Gold, which is what Shabazz told the New York Times in October 2002 (although, this does seem to undermine his already unconvincing claims not be anti-Semitic). Rather, his additional contention was that Hilliard, Seale, and the other members of the “Oakland group” were “being used by outside forces to keep alive the counterintel- ligence program of the FBI and the U.S. government, creating divisions and factions among black organizations.”96 This was exactly the suspicion the Newton Foundation had attempted to cast on to the NBPP in the public statement it had issued the month before. “Who are these people laying claim to the [Black Panther] Party’s history and name?” the statement had asked. “Are they reactionary provocateurs, who would instigate activities counterproductive to the people’s interests, causing mayhem and death?”97

As is now well known, COINTELPRO began with operations against the American Communist Party in 1956. The program was extended to the Puerto Rican independence movement and the civil rights movement in

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the early 1960s before further encompassing the New Left, antiwar groups, the American Indian movement, the Ku Klux Klan and “white hate groups,” and black nationalist organizations. As its initiating document, “COIN- TELPRO: Black Nationalist-Hate Groups,” makes clear, the purpose of this particular program was to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leaders, spokesmen, membership, and supporters.”98 The Black Panther Party was specifically targeted because, as J. Edgar Hoover put it in 1968, the Panthers were “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”99

A range of operations were directed against the Panthers as a result of this assessment. So-called bad-jacketing or snitch-jacketing campaigns— in which the FBI would suggest that someone was a spy or informer for the bureau or the police in the hope of provoking suspicion or reprisals from within the group the person belonged to—were employed against Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Geronimo Pratt. Fake cartoons and flyers were produced and distributed to escalate tensions between the Panthers and the United Slaves organization in Los Angeles (two Pan- thers, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and Jon Huggins, were shot and killed by members of the U.S. organization on January 17, 1969). And infiltrators and agent provocateurs were deployed against the party, a practice that culminated in what Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall describe as the “assassination” of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the FBI in conjunction with the Chicago police in 1969.100 Not surprisingly, then, the FBI’s “war” against the Panthers is generally seen as one of the main reasons behind the party’s eventual demise.

A COINTELPRO-based web of mutual suspicion between the BPP and the NBPP is also evident in separate interviews Kam Williams had with Bobby Seale and Malik Shabazz in 2008 and 2009. In the first, Williams asked Seale what he thought of the New Black Panthers. Part of Seale’s response was to say that, for him and the original Panthers:

It’s gotten to the point where we believe that their leadership is noth- ing but government operatives. . . . It’s like a COINTELPRO opera- tion. I think the leadership is working for the government to spout a bunch of black racist remarks and attitudes, saying they support Al-Qaeda and that sort of crap [presumably a reference to the NBPP’s appearance in support of Zacarias Moussaoui]. I’m very skeptical. I feel for the young brothers who don’t know this is what’s happening.

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They should get out of that group. They act so silly and stupid. . . . So, I told them [NBPP members he had met at a Black Panther reunion], “Don’t talk to me. And don’t try to act bad, just because you’ve got some little pistols under your coats there, because if you jump up in people’s faces here, they will defend themselves.” In fact, I said, “Your damn leadership ain’t nothing but a bunch of CIA a-holes.” That’s what I believe.101

When asked about Seale’s views in 2009, Shabazz replied:

Bobby Seale’s problem is that he is uneducated about me and the New Black Panther Party. He is so caught up in discrediting a new gen- eration of Panthers that he refuses to dialogue or become informed and therefore comes off very ignorant and emotional when discussing us. What Bobby Seale also knows from his own history, that call- ing someone a government operative without any facts whatsoever is a COINTELPRO move on his own behalf. So who is doing what here?102

Whether or not the BPP and the NBPP really believe that the other con- tains government agents working to undermine them is difficult to know, but even if they do not, that they should each raise the specter of Hoover’s counterintelligence program in this way is still extremely revealing because it suggests just how effective COINTELPRO was in sowing seeds of distrust in the black community. It was in fact so effective and had such a profound impact on black nationalist groups in the United States that it was invoked and deployed—even if only as hyperbolic political insult—forty years later.

COINTELPRO Redux: The Assassination of Khallid Muhammad?

The NBPP’s sense that it is surrounded by enemies, that it is subject to repression—both hidden and explicit, and that it has to face a range of con- spiratorial forces arrayed against it is further illustrated by its “investiga- tion” into the death of Khallid Muhammad. The investigation also provides another telling illustration of the tangled legacy of COINTELPRO and pro- vides an interesting example of the extent to which the existence of the program can be politically and ideologically useful to groups like the NBPP.

When Khallid Muhammad died of a brain aneurysm at the WellStar Kennestone Hospital in Marietta, Georgia, on February 17, 2001, Malik Shabazz and the NBPP accepted his death as being the result of natural

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causes. Three years later, however, following the extensive efforts of an NBPP “investigation team,” a seven-page article appeared in the April–May 2004 issue of The New Black Panther under a startling headline: “Was Dr. Khallid Muhammad Assassinated?!?!: What Happened to Our Black Power General?!?!” The NBPP’s acceptance of Khallid’s death had been based, the (unnamed) investigation team noted, on his “medical history, medical re- ports and information at hand [in 2001] concerning the cause of death,” and as it was well known that he suffered from hypertension, or high-blood pressure, nothing untoward was initially suspected. What had not been considered until now, however, was “whether or not his hypertension con- dition was exacerbated, and whether his death was induced by conspiracy via foreign substances, or otherwise.”103

The conspiratorial door having been nudged ajar, three basic questions swiftly and inevitably followed: Who might have done such a thing? Why? And why at that particular time?

As has already been discussed, the NBPP considers itself to have plenty of enemies, and this was also true of Khallid Muhammad, who, the article pointed out, was “feared and hated” not only by “the so-called Jews . . . the Anti Defamation League, [the] Jewish Defense League, the Government, and . . . white America,” but also “by more than a few Black People,” par- ticularly “Black Civil Rights leaders.” As a result the “who” question was dif- ficult to answer conclusively. The list of potential instigators was simply too long. Fortunately, the “why” questions were much more straightforward, as the report endeavored to make clear:

Despite growing pains, the New Black Panther Party under Muham- mad’s leadership was probably his most threatening position due to his ability to organize nationwide and implement his militant agenda in a tangible form that had not been seen since he was a leader in the Nation of Islam. Now that Muhammad was on his own, and his fol- lowers were organizing and carrying guns, it is fair to say that by Feb- ruary 2001, Muhammad was in his most powerful position yet, and the enemy was well at work trying to undermine the fierce leader.104

That Khallid could be seen as “a threat” in this way seemed to be confirmed by the fact that he had already been the subject of an assassination attempt in 1994. Indeed the previous assassination attempt by James X. Bess played a crucial role in the NBPP’s conspiratorial assessment of Khallid’s death in 2001. Not only did it show that he could be seen—had been seen—as someone so dangerous and potentially powerful that he had to be gotten

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rid of but also, perhaps more importantly, because Bess’s assassination at- tempt had failed, it left open the possibility—in fact the likelihood—that the assassin or assassins would try again. (“If Muhammad remained a force and a threat, are we to believe his enemies would give up on their attempts?” as the NBPP put it in the article.)105 The only problem with this, of course, was that Bess had been caught, tried, and convicted for the attempted murder of Khallid, and that his motivation for trying to kill Khallid was gener- ally agreed to have been related to the then ongoing dispute (discussed earlier) within the NOI between supporters of Khallid and those of Louis Farrakhan.

This, though, was quickly dealt with. The NBPP could not deny Bess’s association with the NOI; it was too well-documented. But they could, in an almost textbook example of conspiratorial rationale, suggest that other forces were at work behind the scenes. To achieve this, the NBPP relied on the unimpeachable source—at least for NBPP members—of Khallid him- self. (And of course since he was dead, not only was he unimpeachable, he was also irrefutable.) “Dr. Muhammad concluded that James Bess did not act alone, and at minimum he had contacts with, and was ideologically inspired by some active Nation of Islam members” who were worried that Khallid might be usurping Farrakhan’s position, the article read. However, despite the tensions between Khallid and Farrakhan, it was also the case, the report continued, that the “overwhelming rank and file of the NOI loved Khallid Muhammad and favored his teachings.” Hence, the wider question of who Bess was really “working for” was still open, although the tentative—if suggestive and politically useful—view of the investigation team was that “James Bess may also have been financed and supported by major forces of white supremacy.” The only “evidence” that the NBPP could produce to support its already somewhat cautious allegation—“may also have been financed and supported”—were some unidentified witnesses who, it was claimed, had seen Bess “talking to Irv Rubin,” the—also conve- niently—“deceased leader of the Jewish Defense League of the University of California at Riverside.” (The JDL was also said to have bailed Bess out of jail.)106

Returning to the events of 2001, the NBPP’s suspicions about Khallid’s possible “assassination” were fueled by activities of three people in particu- lar: Khallid Muhammad’s wife, Nefatari Muhammad (also known as Ke- anne Ambush); “Sister Atlanta Chapter,” the NBPP’s Atlanta chapter leader; and, most significantly, a mysterious figure known as “Akhee.”

Nefatari Muhammad’s faults were extensively documented in The New

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Black Panther article. She was criticized for her failure to cooperate with the NBPP’s investigation team and was also found to have been “grossly negligent,” at the very least, when it came to her care of Muhammad—al- legedly leaving him in the bathroom for seven hours rather than taking him straight to the hospital after he first fell ill on the evening of the February 12, 2001, for example. As a consequence of her behavior, the NBPP was unable to rule out the possibility that she may have had a more direct hand in her husband’s death. “Some in the Minister’s family have viewed her . . . pos- sibly as ‘acting on the instructions of influential Jews,’” the article’s authors vaguely reported, while other “family members” had told the investigation team that “Ms. Ambush stopped wearing her wedding ring the night of the funeral, and has supposedly remarried, or is dating a Christian Preacher in Atlanta,” thus further casting her in a negative light.107

“Sister Atlanta Chapter” was accused of having been asked by Malik Shabazz to deliver some of Khallid Muhammad’s blood to “an independent Black toxicologist” in order to determine whether he had been poisoned or “whether something was put in his blood to induce a stroke or kill him,” but she failed to do so, thus sabotaging the NBBP’s attempt to get at the truth. (The original toxicology reports by the Georgia Bureau of Investiga- tion and FBI were said to be unreliable because both organizations “are our enemies” and “if they had a hand in Dr Muhammad’s death . . . they could not be relied upon [as] a final fact finder.”) In the view of the NBPP, there- fore, Sister Atlanta Chapter was “working with the enemy to sabotage the investigation and probably was in the NBPP chapter as an infiltrator.”108

Akhee’s supposed involvement in the assassination plot was rather more complicated. He is identified only as a “rank and file security man” who mysteriously appeared at the WellStar Kennestone Hospital on February 16 claiming to be “a Khallid Muhammad zealot.” In the view of the NBBP’s in- vestigation team, though, both his mysterious appearance and subsequent behavior were evidence of “classic infiltrator-operative actions designed to disrupt black organizations that were notorious under the Counterintel- ligence program under Jay Edgar Hoover [sic] that still continues in other forms today.” Of particular importance in this respect were Akhee’s activities in the week of February 19–23, 2001, a week, the NBPP reported, “marked by strange events and occurrences, particularly in the area of security.” For example, having left his “home” in Atlanta, Akhee “suddenly popped up in New York . . . claiming to be in charge of security,” and having located the Unity Funeral Home, which was handling the arrangements for Khal- lid’s funeral, he “befriended the [New York] leadership and began moving

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around New York with the savvy of a life long resident.” Also, although he was “not even a local official in Atlanta,” during this time Akhee “wore five stars on his shoulder and cap to perpetrate falsely, himself as a five star general—the highest rank.”109

According to the NBPP, while in New York Akhee next met up with Eric Muhammad, a former writer for the NOI’s The Final Call who had taken “Farrakhan’s side” during the dispute with Khallid in the mid-nineties, and “Brother Barry,” who “used to drive for Dr. Muhammad in 1996,” and together they started “wreaking havoc” around the city. In particular, the three men managed to gain access to Khallid’s casket in the cargo area of La Guardia airport where it had arrived from Atlanta, and which, “in com- plete desecration” of Khallid’s body, Eric Muhammad opened. According to the investigators he also opened Khallid’s shirt and began feeling his chest before taking photographs of the body (a further desecration that was to be repeated later at the funeral home). Furious at the lapses of security that had taken place, when Shabazz arrived in New York he immediately ordered the “apprehension” of the three men. Under what the article refers to as “physical pressure,” Eric claimed that everything the men had been doing had been “on the orders of Farrakhan.” Telephone calls to the NOI “quickly proved” this to be a lie, however, and several NBPP members then confiscated Eric’s and Brother Barry’s cameras, although both men some- how managed to escape. This was not the case for Akhee, who, the NBPP state, with intentional, if oblique menace, “was not nearly so lucky.”110

As a result of all this, the NBPP’s investigation team identified Akhee as “an agent placed in the New Black Panther Party to stir up mischief and confusion.” More broadly, it also found “compelling evidence” of a “possible conspiracy”—the tension went unexamined—involving Akhee, Eric, and Barry, the purposes of which it said, again with careful circumspection,

May Have Been To: a) Destroy the New Black Panther Party from within and without

by instigating or allowing massive confusion and disruption. The de- struction of the NBPP perhaps was an intention of the enemy BE- FORE Muhammad passed and these strange activities are fruits of such wicked plan.

b) Show that Malik Zulu Shabazz was trying to cover up or lie about the autopsy being done on Khallid Muhammad therefore put- ting Shabazz’s life and credibility at risk, and destroying the continu- ity of the NBPP leadership. If a successful plot could be launched

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against Shabazz, the enemy knew that the NBPP as a national force was history.

c) Start a war between the Nation of Islam and The New Black Pan- ther Party.111

In other words, a conspiracy with all the hallmarks of a classic COIN- TELPRO operation.112 Finally, from the “possibility” of a conspiracy to kill Khallid Muhammad—one that would have the political advantage to the NBPP of elevating Khallid to the roster of fallen martyrs that includes Mal- colm X, Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton, and even Martin Luther King Jr.— the NBPP’s account of its investigation ended with a much wider and much more concrete conclusion (one emphasized all the more emphatically in its eye-catching deployment of capital letters) “WE FIND A CONSPIRACY WAS AND IS CURRENTLY AFOOT TO DESTROY THE NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY AND THE BLACK NATIONALIST / BLACK POWER / BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT.”113

Devoted readers of The New Black Panther would no doubt be hard pressed to think otherwise, and this despite the implausible nature of the NBPP’s assassination theory as well as the gaps and inconsistencies in its narrative reconstruction. For example: Why did it take so long to realize that Sister Atlanta Chapter had not ordered a second blood test? Why was the NBPP leadership so ready to believe the NOI when they were called about Eric’s allegation? (If the NOI had been involved, would it not have been in its best interest to deny it?) And, why did it take three years for the “possible conspiracy” to be revealed when all the relevant information seems to have been at hand in 2001 (especially since Akhee was appre- hended at the time)? The very nature of COINTELPRO-type operations means that the possibility that there was (or still is) a secret campaign to disrupt the operations of the party cannot be completely disregarded. After all, it took many years for the full extent of Hoover’s COINTELPRO opera- tions to become widely known and accepted, despite the claims of those who were the targets of the program at the time they were taking place. And the possibility of this being the case is all that the NBPP (and other conspiratorially minded groups) need. That there were operations of this kind against black nationalist groups in the past means that there could be operations against them in the present. In other words, it is the reality of COINTELPRO’s existence that provides the crucial factual starting point for the larger fantastical leap that is such a central and persistent feature of conspiratorial thinking.114

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Moreover, the plausibility of such actions taking place against the NBPP does not have to rely on the facticity of COINTELPRO alone. On the con- trary, as Kathryn Olmsted has demonstrated in Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, the U.S. govern- ment has engaged in more than enough nefarious activities, both before and after COINTELPRO—from criminalizing dissent and hounding anti- war radicals during World War I to deceiving the country into a war with Iraq in 2003—to sustain and feed the NBPP’s conspiratorial inclinations.115 Indeed, at the very time that the NBPP’s investigative team was hard at work, the Bush administration was engaged in a widespread illegal spying operation against U.S. citizens under the auspices of the National Security Agency’s “terrorist surveillance program” as part of the “war on terror.”116

Perhaps, though, one might be tempted to argue that, be this as it may, in other respects things have changed considerably since the 1970s, and that the U.S. government is no longer likely to see black nationalist groups as a threat to the nation’s internal security in the way that J. Edger Hoover did. Such an argument would have to contend with the eleven-page Domestic Extremism Lexicon sent to various federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies on March 26, 2009, by the U.S. Department of Homeland Secu- rity’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. Made public by the Washington Times, the lexicon provides a list of definitions and key terms to help eluci- date “the nature and scope of the threat that domestic, non-Islamic extrem- ism poses to the United States.” Included in the lexicon—alongside neo- Nazis, ecoterrorists, animal rights activists, antiabortion extremists, the militia movement, and Christian Identity groups—were black nationalist, black separatist, and black power groups. The Washington Times reported: “Black separatism was defined as a movement that they said advocates the establishment of a separate nation within the U.S., and its members ‘advo- cate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence directed toward local law enforcement’ to advance their goals. Black power is a ‘term used by black separatists to describe their pride in, and the perceived superiority of the black race.’” Although quickly withdrawn—according to Homeland Security spokeswoman Amy Kudwa, the lexicon was “not, nor was it ever, in operational use” and “was recalled as soon as management discovered it had been released without authorization,” the very existence of the lexi- con—together with its widespread and easy availability on the Web (even after the DHS’s “recall”)—suggests that the government still does see black nationalist groups as a serious and potential threat to the United States. And it certainly gives succor to the NBPP, providing yet more “evidence”

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that there is a conspiracy afoot to destroy “THE BLACK NATIONALIST / BLACK POWER / BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT.”117

It is also important to recognize the multiple roles this kind of conspira- torial thinking can play within the ideological system of a group that uses it: to see the useful rhetorical, intellectual, and political functions it can have.118 For the NBPP, understanding and portraying itself as an organi- zation that is being targeted for surveillance or destruction by the gov- ernment or “major forces of white supremacy” means that it must be an organization worth targeting. It demonstrates to the NBPP that it is im- portant, that it is a “real” threat to the government or to the forces of white supremacy. At the same time—and in accordance with one of the party’s principal rhetorical strategies—it allows the NBPP to fit itself into a wider and grander narrative about all the other black nationalist groups that have suffered from repression and surveillance during recent American history. In this process of drawing the past and the present together, by collapsing the distance between them, the NBPP is able to see itself—and to project itself—as important as, as significant as, and to be the political, moral and historical equivalent of Marcus Garvey, the NOI, Malcolm X, SNCC, or the original Black Panther Party, for example.

The embracement and articulation of a narrative of impending conspira- torial threat is also a strategy that can be employed as a useful recruitment tool: as a means to persuade potential recruits that the NBPP is worth join- ing precisely because the U.S. government regards it as a threat, and as a group capable of bringing about significant and radical change for black Americans—unlike, say, the mainstream civil rights groups. (And, as has already been noted, distinguishing itself from such “integrationist” civil rights groups is another key part of the NBPP’s self-conception and po- litical rationale.) Indeed, invoking the specter of governmental (or white power or Jewish) repression is so useful—so protean and multifaceted— that while it can be used as a potential recruitment tool, it can also be used to help explain why, in actuality, so few people have been attracted to the party, why its membership is so low, and why it has not been able achieve its stated aim (at least not yet) of turning itself into a mass-based movement. It is not because of the limited appeal of its particular brand of militant black nationalism within the United States but rather because it has been the object of a secret campaign of sabotage and destruction, just as the original Panthers were.119 (If only we hadn’t been subject to this campaign, so many more would have joined us!) On a psychological level, there is further comfort to be found in the NBPP’s conspiracism in the sense that those

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who have joined can see themselves as part of the “enlightened few”—clear- sighted enough and strong enough to belong to a party so dangerous and potentially powerful to warrant such disruption in the first place. (We may be few, but we are right, and we are still here!) The conspiracy may not exist, but it is certainly a potent and potentially useful message to deploy.

Conclusion: The NBPP, Barack Obama, and Postracial America?

The NBPP did not officially endorse any candidate in the presidential elec- tion of 2008, but its preference for Barack Obama was clear nonetheless. The front cover of the Winter 2008 issue of The New Black Panther con- tained an image of a checked-marked box alongside the legend “Sen. Barack Obama is the Only Choice,” for example, while the back cover was given over to eight photographs of the senator, a potted biography, and a sup- portive quote from Louis Farrakhan.120 And after two white supremacists, Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman, were charged in an assassination plot against Obama just before the election, the NBPP issued a statement indicating that they were going to Tennessee—where the men were be- ing held—in order “to help counter White Supremacist death Plots against Barack Obama and Black Schoolchildren.” “We love Barack Obama,” the statement said. “He gives our people great hope and light for advancement!”

Every President America has had has been a white man, now the Black Man must be given his time to rule. . . . ON ELECTION DAY, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4th, We will be at the polls in the cities and counties in many states to ensure that the enemy does not sabotage the black vote, which was won through the blood of the martyrs of our people.121

Given the NBPP’s openly expressed hostility toward mainstream politi- cians, it might seem odd that the NBPP would support Obama in this way. But Shabazz, like many others, took the view that Obama’s success was evidence that “blacks can do what they will, regardless of systematic rac- ism,” and that he provided a much-needed role model for black youth, who, having seen the obstacles Obama had overcome to reach the presidency, would “understand that we as a people can overcome and master anything in our path in this world.” Shabazz did not see Obama’s election as evidence that the United States was becoming a “postracial society.” Nor did he think it lessened the need for organizations like the NBPP. As he informed Kam Williams, “As far as the movement is concerned, Obama’s election does not

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change the need to fight against racism, police brutality, bad education, lack of health care and housing, oppression abroad, or the litany of concerns our people face. Those problems are real and no one is lulled to sleep to think that because Obama has been elected those problems will disappear.” All that had happened, Shabazz said, was that the NBPP had been “inspired to do better in our organizational efforts to serve the people better,” and to work even harder to achieve its continuing goal of “building the Black Power Movement.”122

Given this, it is worth concluding with some of Obama’s own thoughts about the place of black nationalism in American life. In Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama notes that ever since read- ing Malcolm X’s autobiography he had “tried to untangle the two strands of black nationalism, arguing that nationalism’s affirmative message—of soli- darity and self-reliance, discipline and communal responsibility—need not depend on hatred of whites any more than it depended on white munifi- cence.” Black nationalism provided “an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped,” in which a “steady attack on the white race” and the “constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country, served as the ballast that could prevent the idea of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair,” he wrote. But while it could “thrive as an emotion,” Obama saw it floundering as a program because of its inability to come to terms with the “unyield- ing reality” of American life—“decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power”—with the result that too often “nation- alism dissipated into an attitude . . . a collection of grievances . . . images and sounds that crowded the airwaves and conversation . . . without any corporeal existence.”

Understanding the appeal of black nationalism, especially for “those at the bottom rungs of American life,” and recognizing its legitimate place in black intellectual life, Obama nonetheless worried—in words that seem particularly applicable to the NBPP—that some black politicians had “dis- covered what white politicians had known for a long time: that race baiting could make up for a host of limitations.” “Young leaders, eager to make a name for themselves” peddled conspiracy theories as a “shortcut to fame,” he said—that “Koreans were funding the Klan [or] Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with the AIDS virus,” for example—because “like sex or violence on TV, black rage always found a ready market.”123

It will certainly be interesting to see if the NBPP continues to find a market for its particular brand of black nationalism in the years ahead. As

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this chapter has shown, the experience of the last ten years suggests that its appeal is actually rather limited, and that this is the reason, at least in part, why the party has so often taken refuge in conspiracism as a means of bolstering its political identity while also helping to explain its apparently marginalized status in American life.

Notes

A shorter version of this chapter first appeared in Patterns of Prejudice. Reprinted here with permission of Taylor and Francis.

1. Quoted in Jerry Seper, “Career Lawyers Overruled on Voting Case,” Washington Times, May 29, 2009, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/29/career- lawyers-overruled-on-voting-case/?feat=home_cube_position1. In addition to Jackson and Samir Shabazz, the NBBP’s chairmen Malik Zulu Shabazz was also named in the suit.

2. NBPP, official statement, “Public Notice Regarding Philadelphia Chapter Suspen- sion,” January 7, 2009. This material was previously found at http://www.newblackpan- ther.com/statement-voterintimidation_phillychapter.html. For this and other citations to New Black Panther Party material, the NBPP is constructing a new Web site at www. newblackpanther.org, but it is not available as this book goes to press.

3. Seper, “Career Lawyers Overruled.” 4. Editorial, “Protecting Black Panthers,” Washington Times, May 29, 2009, http://

www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/29/protecting-black-panthers/. See also Michelle Malkin, “Why Is the Obama Justice Department Protecting the New Black Panthers?” May 28, 2009, http://michellemalkin.com/2009/05/28/why-is-the-obama- justice-department-protecting-new-black-panthers/; Tommy De Seno, “Does the Obama Administration Approve of Racial Intimidation, Nightsticks at Polls,” Fox Forum, May 29, 2009, http://www.foxnews.com/opinion (article no longer appears on the Fox News Web site); and Rick Moran, “Who Pressured Justice to Drop Case against Voter Intimidation in Philly?” American Thinker May 30, 2009, http://www.americanthinker .com/blog/2009/05/who_pressured_justice_to_drop.html.

5. Brief references to the NBPP can be found, for example, in Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: New Press, 2007), 1–2 and 335–36; Talmadge Anderson and James Stewart, Introduction to African American Studies: Transdisciplinary Approaches and Implications (Baltimore: Inprint Editions, 2007), 157; Curtis J. Austin, Up against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 421; and Charles E. Jones, “Reconsidering Panther History: The Untold Story,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, edited by Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 5–6. Mu- mia Abu-Jamal also makes note of the formation of the NBPP in “A Life in the Party: An Historical and Retrospective Examination of the Projections and Legacies of the Black Panther Party” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and their Legacy, edited by Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), 50.

6. The SPLC and ADL say 1990, but the Official National NBPP Black Power Man- ual gives the date as 1989. See NBPP, Official National NBPP Black Power Manual (n.p.:

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privately printed 2001), 68 (hereafter, NBPP, Black Power Manual); “Snarling at the White- man,” Southern Poverty Law Center, September 8, 2006, http://www.splcenter.org/intel/ intelreport/article.jsp?aid=214; and “New Black Panther for Self-Defense,” Anti-Defama- tion League, June 1, 2011, http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/Black_Panther.asp?LEARN_ Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=3&item=Black_ Panther. Telephone calls and e-mails by the author to the NBPP in the hope of clarifying this matter went unanswered.

7. The “Snarling at the White Man”; and “New Black Panther Party.” The Indianapolis chapter was led by Mmoja Ajabu.

8. There are two references to Michaels in the Black Power Manual. Section A, “How to Use the New Black Panther Party Black Power Manual” tells NBPP members, among others, that they are the “beneficiary of the work of brother Aron Michaels [sic], who with a few other soldiers founded the NBPP in Dallas, Texas, in 1989.” The statement is repeated on page 68 as part of the biographical information provided for National Min- ister of Defense David Foreman, who is said to have been one of the founding members of the NBPP in Dallas.

9. Quoted in “New Black Panther Party.” This may also help explain the discrepancy in dates as to when the NBPP was founded. If Michaels founded the party in 1989, as the NBPP claims in its Black Power Manual, that was the year before McGee appeared on Wiley’s radio show, which then could not have provided the initial impetus for Michaels.

10. “Snarling at the White Man.” 11. On the relationship between white and black nationalists in the United States,

see, for example, Martin Durham, White Rage: The Extreme Right and American Politics (London: Routledge, 2007), 7, 30 and 132–33; Mattias Gardell, “Black and White Unite in Fight?” in The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization, edited by Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw, 152–92 (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002); and Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Is- lam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 271–84. The rationale for this association was expressed by Marcus Garvey in 1925 as follows: “I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs and White American Societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together. I like honesty and fair play. . . . Potentially, every whiteman is a Klansman, as far as the Negro in competition with whites, socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying about it.” Quoted in Gardell, In the Name, 272.

12. See Peter Applebome, “Race Issue Boils over in Dallas,” New York Times, June 27, 1996, A14; and Sue Anne Pressley, “In Diverse Dallas, Power Struggle over Schools,” Wash- ington Post, September 24, 1996, A01.

13. Again there is some discrepancy about the dates. The ADL says 1998, with Michaels becoming minister of defense, but the SPLC says that it was in either 1997 or 1998 that Khallid took over leadership. According to the SPLC, Michaels may still be involved with the party in some capacity, but McGee’s involvement ended in the mid-1990s.

14. “New Black Panther Party.” 15. This biographical overview is largely based on material drawn from the NBPP’s

Black Power Manual, the ADL’s report, “The New Black Panther Party,” and Jayson Blair’s

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obituary, “K. A. Muhammad, 53, Dies: Ex-Official of Nation of Islam,” New York Times, February, 18, 2001, 1, 40.

16. He was named after the Arab general Khalid ibn al-Walid, known as the Sword of Allah, who united Islam after the death of its founder, Muhammad.

17. Wallace had renamed the NOI the World Community of al-Islam in the West in 1976, having renounced many of his father’s theological positions and embraced a more mainstream and political orientation. The first national convention of Farrakhan’s new NOI took place 1981. See Martha Lee, The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Move- ment (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1988), 77–102; and Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad, 119–43.

18. NBBP, Black Power Manual, 64. 19. Arthur J. Magida, Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His Nation (New

York: Basic Books, 1996), 248–49; and Vibert L. White Jr., Inside the Nation of Islam: A His- torical and Personal Testimony by a Black Muslim (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 119.

20. White, Inside the Nation of Islam, 144. White is now professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield.

21. Quoted in Magida, Prophet of Rage, 175. For discussion of the speech, see also White, Inside the Nation of Islam, 119–22; and Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad, 263–66. The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews is also the title of a book published by the Historical Research Department of the NOI in 1991. For a detailed critique of the book, which argues, among other things, that Jews bear much of the moral culpability for the slave trade, see David Walter Leinweber, “An Historian Critiques the Book The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews,” H-anti-Semitism Occasional Papers, No. 1, http:// www.h-net.org/~antis/papers/occasional.papers.html. See also Robert Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 150–88.

22. Magida, Prophet of Rage, 174. For a discussion of the long-standing and complex relationship between blacks and Jews in the United States, see, for example, Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America, rev. ed. (New York: Touchstone, 1995); Jack Salzman and Cornell West, Struggles in the Prom- ised Land: Toward a History of Black–Jewish Relations in the United States (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 1997); V. P. Franklin, Nancy L. Grant, Harold M. Ketnick, and Genna Rae McNeil, African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Convergence and Conflict (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998); and Cheryl Lynn Green- berg, Troubling the Waters: Black–Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

23. As Gardell notes these were the very same black mainstream organizations and leaders that Farrakhan had been trying to reach during this period. Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad, 265.

24. Quoted in Magida, Prophet of Rage, 179. 25. Quoted in White, Inside the Nation of Islam, 122. Indeed, according to White, “Most

Muslims had for years viewed Khallid as the straight shooter of the Nation. Thus his state- ments [during the Kean speech] were consistent with the rhetoric of the organization.” He

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also argues that although it was not known at the time—not by NOI members, the public, or indeed Khallid himself—internally, Farrakhan had actually “dismissed Khallid from the Nation,” a fact that would not emerge until 1995.

26. NBPP, Black Power Manual, 65. Khallid’s own response, according to NBPP, was to state: “I believe it is one of the greatest honors that a freedom fighter could be paid, to be condemned by his enemy in such a way.” Quoted in “Was Dr. Khallid Muhammad As- sassinated?!?!: What Happened to Our Black Power General?!?!,” The New Black Panther (April/May 2004), 5.

27. Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad, 266. 28. On this see White, Inside the Nation of Islam, 156–57. White notes that Khallid’s

popularity, style, and “lavish lifestyle” had been a source of contention for some in the Nation’s leadership long before the Kean controversy (146).

29. On this, see also Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad, 267. 30. Tom Gorman, “Man Convicted of Shooting Ex-Farrakhan Spokesman,” Los Angeles

Times, March 9, 1996, http://articles.latimes.com/1996-03-08/news/mn-44645_1. 31. According to Vibert White, Khallid was especially hurt that Farrakhan did not come

to visit him in hospital after he was shot, and by the NOI’s “lethargic attitude toward the murder attempt.” White, Inside the Nation of Islam, 157.

32. “Snarling at the White Man.” The 1994 date is echoed in the NBPP’s Black Power Manual, where it is explained that it was the NBPP’s chief of staff, Minister Hashim Nz- inga, who had been shot alongside Khallid at the University of California, who “was re- sponsible for [Khallid] uniting with the New Black Panther Party in Dallas when the New Black Panther Party secured the Minister after the assassination attempt in 1994” (68).

33. Quoted in “Snarling at the White Man.” 34. “The New Black Panther Party.” 35. “Was Dr. Khallid Muhammad Assassinated?,” 27. The article also recounts that after

“a supplemental vote of the National Central Committee, a reluctant Shabazz assumed Muhammad’s authority over the leadership of the New Black Panther Party,” perhaps to make it clear that Shabazz assumed his position not just because of Khallid’s personal endorsement but also as the result of a legitimate vote.

36. Austin Fenner, “Afrocentric Lawyer Force behind the Youth March,” Daily News (New York), September 5, 1998, 19. This, of course, carries interesting echoes of Malcolm X’s story, so it is worth noting that the claim was not repeated in an interview between Shabazz and Kam Williams in 2009, with Shabazz stating simply, “My father was a law student and activist before he passed.” See Kam Williams, “Dr Malik Zulu Shabazz ‘The New Black Panthers’ Interview with Kam Williams,” NewsBlaze, January 6, 2009, http:// newsblaze.com/story/20090106063107kamw.nb/topstory.html.

37. The ADL describes it as “Howard group of NOI supporters.” “Malik Zulu Shabazz,” Anti-Defamation League Web site, http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/malik_ zulu_shabazz/default.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_ America&xpicked=2&item=Shabazz.

38. NBPP, Black Power Manual, 67. In his interview with Kam Williams, Shabazz says that he became a student organizer for Khallid in 1993, the same year that he was “trained in the Nation of Islam.” Williams, “Dr Malik Zulu Shabazz.” In 1996 Shabazz also estab- lished a legal advocacy group called Black Lawyers for Justice.

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39. NBPP, Black Power Manual, 14–16. The NBPP does not really make much of an original contribution to black nationalist thought in the United States; most of its thinking on the subject is derivative. From the rich and voluminous literature on the subject, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 1978); Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York: New York Review of Books, 1967, 2005); Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage, 1967, 1992); William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Baby- lon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); William L. Van Deburg, ed., Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contempo- rary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), especially 85–134.

40. Editorial, “Unity and the Black Agenda 2004,” New Black Panther (April–May 2004): 14. This view was echoed by Jamarhl Crawford, leader of the Boston chapter of the NBPP, who told the Boston Globe in 2002 that, “I want violence in my community to end. I want my brothers to stop killing brothers, and I want police to stop killing brothers. I believe in what the Black Panthers stand for. I could’ve joined the NAACP or the Urban League, but those organizations have proven themselves ineffective.” Quoted in Megan Tench, “New Black Panthers Seek to Unite Neighborhood,” Boston Globe, September 18, 2002, B1.

41. Malik Zulu Shabazz, quoted in “The Year 2004,” New Black Panther (April–May 2004): 16.

42. See Joyce King, Hate Crime: The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002); and Dina Temple-Raston, A Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder, and a Small Town’s Struggle for Redemption (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), especially, 126–34 and 147–51.

43. Temple-Raston, Death in Texas, 147. A rumor that the NBBP’s guns were not actu- ally loaded led it to issue a corrective press statement (quoted in ibid., 148): “The New Black Panther Party did not march with unloaded guns in JASPER Texas on June 13th. Their shotguns were and will be fully loaded in compliance with Texas State law.” Exploit- ing California’s gun laws and in anticipation of generating massive media interest, on May 2, 1967, thirty or so Panthers had marched on—and in—the California state capitol in Sacramento, some carrying loaded guns, in protest against a pending gun-control bill. It was the event that catapulted the Panthers into the national spotlight, and, as Jane Rhodes notes in Framing the Panthers (70–82), also began to fix the public image of them as a gun-toting extremists. See also Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party (London: Arrow Books, 1968), 183–96; and Huey P. Newton with J. Herman Blake, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973), 145–51.

44. Quoted in Temple-Raston, Death in Texas, 134. 45. Quoted in Hugh Aynesworth, “Klan, Armed Blacks Rally Over Man’s Dragging

Death,” Washington Times, June 28, 1998, A3. 46. On the figures for the Million Man March, see Gardell, In the Name of Elijah

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Muhammad, 343; on figures for the Million Woman March, see Michael Janofsky, “At Million Woman March, Focus Is on Family,” New York Times, October 26, 1997, 1.

47. See Chrisena Coleman, “Call for March of Million Youths in Harlem,” Daily News (New York) July 7, 1998, 18; and Jayson Blair, “Organizers of Youth March Vow to Defy City,” New York Times July 23, 1998, B4.

48. They included the ADL, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, an umbrella organization of about sixty Jewish groups in New York, and the Simon Wiesen- thal Center. See Jayson Blair, “A March for Black Youth Leads to Rising Tensions,” New York Times, August 4, 1998, B5; and Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, “A Tale of Two Marches,” Jerusalem Post, August 31, 1998, 8.

49. Quoted in Frank Lombardi and Austin Fenner, “Rudy Hits Leaders of Harlem March,” Daily News (New York) August 6, 1998, 4. See also Jayson Blair, “Mayor Intensi- fies Criticism of Planned Youth March,” New York Times, August 8, 1998, B3.

50. Quoted in Amy Waldman, “Giuliani Assails Organizers of Youth March,” New York Times, August 6, 1998, B4.

51. See Million Youth March, Inc. v. Howard Safir, Commissioner of the New York City Police Department, the City of New York, and Rudolph Giuliani 155 F.3d 124 (1998) U.S. App. Lexis 21567.

52. Dan Barry, “Confrontation in Harlem: The Overview,” New York Times, September 6, 1998, 1, 5.

53. Ibid.; Jayson Blair, “Second Harlem Rally Planned, Despite Last Year’s Melee,” New York Times, August 15, 1999, 1, 31; and Lynne Duke, “No Violence This Time at Black Youth March,” Washington Post, September 5, 1999, A02.

54. Despite the police’s wishes, a grand jury declined to charge Khallid with incitement, but six other people were charged with a range of offenses from reckless endangerment to assault for their part in the melee.

55. Quoted in Juan Gonzalez, “The Past Could Offer Hizzoner Some Lessons,” Daily News (New York): September 3, 1999, 22. See also Peter Noel’s Why Blacks Fear “America’s Mayor”: Reporting Police Brutality and Black Activist Politics Under Rudy Giuliani (Bloom- ington, IN: iUniverse, 2007), especially 147–69.56. Quoted in David Lefer, “Muhammad and that March,” Daily News (New York), August 29, 1999, 6.

57. Quoted in David Barstow, “Harlem Rally Permit Denied, but Organizers Are Defi- ant,” New York Times, August 27, 1999, A1; and David Barstow, “Black Politicians Turn against Planned Harlem Rally for Youth,” New York Times, August 26, 1999, A1.

58. Million Youth March, Inc. v. Howard Safir, Commissioner of the New York City Police Department, the City of New York, and Rudolph Giuliani, Mayor of the City of New York, US Dist 63 F. Supp. 2d 381 (1999), Lexis 13308. U.S. District Judge Denny Chin’s verdict was a classic articulation of free speech rationale. While noting the offensive nature of Khallid Abdul Muhammad’s speech, he argued, “At least as frightening as the rhetoric of Mr. Mu- hammad is the possibility of a society where the right to speak publicly can be denied on the basis of administrative whim, personal dislike, or disapproval of anticipated content. . . . Even hateful, racist and offensive speech is entitled to First Amendment protection.” I discuss these free speech issues in the context of the militia movement and the origi- nal Black Panther Party more fully in D. J. Mulloy, “‘Liberty or Death’: Violence and the

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Rhetoric of Revolution in the American Militia Movement,” Canadian Review of American Studies 38, no. 1 (2008), 119–45.

59. David Barstow, “Harlem Rally Is Smaller and Nonviolent, in Contrast to ’98,” New York Times, September 5, 1999, 1, 27.

60. See David Barstow, “Leaders of Harlem Rally Find Support Precarious in Rap World,” New York Times, September 4, 1999, B1. By way of contrast, during his 1998 speech Khallid had urged the crowd to “go buy every record of Master P you can find” to thank him for financing the event.

61. Barstow, “Black Politicians Turn.” See also the editorial “Stand Up against Hate,” in the Daily News (New York), August 25, 1999, 34.

62. Barstow, “Black Politicians Turn.” 63. Quoted in Michael O. Allen, “March Short of a Million,” Daily News (New York),

September 3, 2000, 5; and “City Grants Permit for Harlem Youth Rally,” New York Times, August 19, 2000, B3. “They asked for a permit like any other group, and they were given a permit,” said City Corporation Counsel Michael Hess. “There is no plot.”

64. Daisy Hernandez, “Million Youth Event Returns, Not to Harlem, but to Brooklyn,” New York Times, August 30, 2003, B5. The hip-hop generation, or the “post–black power generation,” as it is also sometimes called, has been a particular target for the NBPP. The masthead of The New Black Panther declares the Party to be “The Voice of Black Power, Revolution and the Hip-Hop Generation,” for example, the paper has a regular record review section—with the music being given a black fist rating as opposed to stars or num- bers—and the party also spearheads a rap music advocacy group called “Hip Hop 4 Black Unity,” which has its own Web site (http://www.hip-hop4blackunity.org/). In part, this is a continuation of the legacy of Khallid Muhammad, who had a strong following in the hip-hop community and even appeared on songs by such hip-hop heavyweights as Public Enemy (“Night of the Living Baseheads” from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back [1988]); Ice Cube (“Death” and “The Birth” from Death Certificate [1991]); and Tupac Shakur (“White Man’z World,” from The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory [1996]). The post-Khallid NBPP’s strongest connection appears to be with Dead Prez. See, for example, “Dead Prez Speak on the Revolution,” an interview with the group in New Black Panther (September/October 2006): 12. For a discussion of the politics and political involvement of the hip-hop generation, see Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005); and Marcus Reeves, Somebody Scream! Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power (New York: Faber and Faber, 2008).

65. Corey Kilgannon, “Angry Calls to Action, but No Violence, at Million Youth March in Brooklyn,” New York Times, September 7, 2003, 1, 39.

66. See Jayson Blair, “Independent Inquiry Is Sought into Killing of Man by Police,” New York Times, September 3, 1999, B6; Willaims K. Rashbaum, “The Diallo Case: The Protests,” New York Times, February 27, 2000, 1, 1; Tom Jackman, “Cincinnati Mourners Urged Not to Resort to Violence,” Washington Post, April 15, 2001, A03; Michael S. Rosen- wald, “US Probe into Police Shootings Urged,” Boston Globe, September 25, 2002, B2; Rob- ert D. McFadden, “At Two Rallies, Protestors Accuse Police in Killings,” New York Times, August 3, 2003, 1, 32; Shaila Dewan and Brenda Goodman, “Anger Undimmed in Atlanta at Killing of Aged Woman,” New York Times, November 29, 2006, A22; John Elgin and Corey

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Kilgannon, “Stunned Silence Is Followed by Sobs in Court and Vows of Protest,” New York Times, April 26, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/nyregion/26victims.html.

67. Marc Schogol and Ovetta Wiggins, “Metal Detectors Set for Penn State Gradua- tion,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 9, 2001, A01; Abbey Brown, “White, Black Groups Clash at Jena, La., Protests,’ USA Today, January 22, 2008, 4A; Avis Thomas-Lester, “Fears Seep- ing Deeper into Residents’ Lives,” Washington Post, October 17, 2002, T03; Dewayne Wick- ham, “Clinton Protests in Harlem Silly,” USA Today, April 23, 2001, 13A: Bill Keveney and Cear G. Soriano, “He’ll Never Moonwalk Alone,” USA Today, January 21, 2004, 1D; Sharon Tubbs, “New ‘Passion’ Criticism: No Black Jesus?” St. Petersburg Times (Florida), February 28, 2004, 2B; Marc Fisher, “Might vs. Right, Fight vs. Flight, Tyson vs. Lewis,” Washington Post, March 14, 2002, B01; Hugh Aynesworth, “Texas Death-Row Inmate in Campaign Limelight,” Washington Times, June 19, 2000, A1; Joseph A. Slobdzian, Kristin Holmes, and Stuart Ditzen, “Abu-Jamal Rally Leads to Melee,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 9, 2001, B01; Mary Beth Sheridan, “At D.C. Embassy, Protestors Rally against Danish Cartoons,” Washington Post, February 19, 2006, A18; Guy Taylor, “Judge Asks Moussaoui to Rethink Guilty Plea,” Washington Times, July 19, 2002, A01.

68. S. A. Miller and Eric Fisher, “Protestors Decry Ballpark Plan,” Washington Times, October 6, 2004, B01.

69. See Nicholas Confessore, “In Queens, Two Marches and Two Philosophies on Po- lice Shooting,” New York Times, December 10, 2006, 1, 47.

70. These were listed as Washington, D.C.; California; Jacksonville, Florida; Atlanta, Georgia; Louisville, Kentucky; Louisiana; Boston, Massachusetts; Michigan; St Louis, Mis- souri; Mississippi; Raleigh, North Carolina; Newark, New Jersey; Trenton, New Jersey; and New York. SPLC, “The Year in Hate,” Intelligence Report, Spring 2010, 49–50.

71. See, for example, Michelle Malkin, “More Enemies from Within?” Washington Times, November 5, 2001, A19, in which she castigates what she calls the anti-Semitic and anti-American “hatefest” held by the NBPP at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on October 31, 2001, and broadcast live on C-SPAN-2. The event was billed by the NBPP as an Emergency Town Hall Meeting titled “The War against the Muslims—Amer- ica Under Attack” in the context of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Malkin condemned the lack of “mainstream media criticism of the event,” writing, “September 11 taught us that our greatest enemies lurk from within. Before the war, the Malik Shabazzes of the world were treated by the press as curious nuisances in funny costumes. It’s long past time to call and condemn them for what they truly are: Treacherous threats.” Malkin’s nationally syn- dicated article elicited this response from T. R. Peterman, from New Port Richey, Florida, in a letter to the St. Petersburg Times (Florida) on November 13, 2001, 13A:

She is not alone in her wonderment as to the lack of critique by the government, me- dia or the true American populace in general. These hate groups, spewing their rad- ical extremism and fanatical, religious philosophies, are free to spread their poison in our institutions and on our campuses with very little recrimination. . . . Shabazz’s threats and racial comments are as presumptuous as they are despicable, and as a proud American I’m furious that this kind of behavior can go on (especially when our country is at war) without fierce reprisal, at least in the mainstream media. It is

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essential for our citizens to be made aware and duly informed about these traitors and terrorists right here in our midst. God bless America!

Bill Maxwell’s views on the NBPP can be found in “Rediscovering the Beauty of Amer- ica,” St. Petersburg Times (Florida) May 9, 2001, 17A. It is also worth noting that because of his views, Shabazz was refused entry into Canada in May 2007; he had been scheduled to speak at a political rally in Toronto and then at a post-rally event at Ryerson University. See Omar El Akkad, “Black Panther Leader Stopped at Border,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 16, 2007, A13.

72. Although usually referred to as the Black Panther Party “Ten Point Program,” this is how it was described in the early issues of The Black Panther. See “October 1966, Black Panther Party Platform and Program, What We Want, What We Believe,” in The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip S. Foner (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press, 1995), 2–4. To compare the two programs see, http://www.blackpanther.org/TenPoint.htm, and http:// www.newblackpanther.com/platform.html.

73. For example, an editorial in the August 2006 issue of The New Black Panther titled “World at War” is illustrated with an Emory Douglas drawing about “U.S. Imperialism,” which appeared in the January 3, 1970 edition of The Black Panther. The panther symbol was first used by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama of course, but there is some dispute about who originated the design. In his memoir Ready for Revolu- tion: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (New York: Scriber, 2003), Carmichael says it was Jennifer Lawson, but his collaborator, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, suggests it was Ruth Howard (463). In any event, in an essay on black power that he wrote for New York Review of Books in September 22, 1966, Carmichael explained the symbolism of the panther. It was, he said, “a bold beautiful animal representing the strength and dignity of black demands today. A man needs a black panther on his side when he and his family must endure—as hundreds of Alabamians have endured—loss of job, eviction, starvation, and sometimes death for political activity. He may also need a gun and SNCC reaffirms the right of black men everywhere to defend themselves when threatened or attacked.” Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006), 164. Joseph also points out that it was not just Huey Newton and Bobby Seale who were attracted to the panther symbol and idea, but that it was adopted by thousands of “young activists around the country” (124).

74. NBPP, Black Power Manual, 21. 75. “The Black Panther Party Is Back, Never to Fall Again!!” declares the legend on page

9 of the April/May 2004 edition of The New Black Panther Party. 76. Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, “There Is No New Black Panther Party,” http://

www.blackpanther.org/newsalert.htm; and “Former Panthers Denounce New Party,” Bos- ton Globe, September 19, 2002, B2.

77. Interview with author, March 17, 2009. 78. The phrase was used by Hilliard in Dean E. Murphy, “Black Panthers, Gone Gray,

Fight Rival Group,” New York Times, October 8, 2002, A1. 79. Quoted in Christopher Goodwin, “Old Panthers Pounce on New Black Radicals,”

Sunday Times (London) March 16, 1997, 16. See also “Snarling at the White Man.”

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80. Quoted in Steve Miller, “Old Panthers Face New Fight to Keep Their Legacy Intact,” Washington Times, October 27, 2002, A02.

81. Murphy, “ Black Panthers, Gone Gray.” See also Seale’s interview with Kam Wil- liams, “Bobby Seale: The Black Panther Founder,” August 4, 2008, available at http://www. rushprnews.com/2008/08/04/bsn-interviews-bobby-seale-the-black-panther-founder/.

82. Hilliard told me that his attorneys had informed him that pursing the case against the NBPP would cost “tens of thousands of dollars and we just don’t have that kind of money.” Interview with author, March 17, 2009.

83. This is how Khallid Abdul Muhammad is described on page 63 of the Black Power Manual: “He stands in the great revolutionary line of divine with courageous African Ancestors like Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Denmark Vessel, Kwame Nkrumah, Queen Nzingha, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Kwame Toure [sic], Louis Farrakhan and many others who organized to free our people from a wicked and cruel enemy.”

84. NBPP, Black Power Manual. 85. “We were not street thugs. We were avid readers and researchers,” Bobby Seale

told three hundred students at Georgia State University in 1996. Quoted in Michael A. Fletcher, “Though Party’s Long Gone, Black Panthers Still Inspire: Militant Legacy Attracts Academics, Activists,” Washington Post, December 17, 1996, A01.

86. Newton Foundation, “There Is No New Black Panther Party.” 87. Interview with Hilliard March 17, 2009. On the Panthers’ community service pro-

grams, see also Hilliard’s recently edited collection, The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). The academic literature on the Black Panther Party has exploded in recent years. On attempts to recu- perate the legacy and reputation of the Party, see, for example, Charles E. Jones, ed., Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998); Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (New York: Routledge, 2001); Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams, eds., In Search of the Black Pan- ther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Durham, NC: Duke Univer- sity Press, 2006); and Austin, Up against the Wall (2006). Insider accounts include Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Anchor Books, 1992); David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993); David Hilliard with Keith and Kent Zimmerman, Huey Newton: Spirit of the Panther (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006); and Flores A. Forbes, Will You Die With Me? My Life and the Black Panther Party (New York: Atria Books, 2006).

88. Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 409. To suggest otherwise is to reveal “a willful ignorance of the extraordinary array of black-led and interracial social service agencies, meal programs, and health clinics, most of which operated off camera” at the time the Panthers were running their own programs, he writes.

89. Alexandra Marks, “Activists Revive the Black Panthers, at Least in Name,” Christian Science Monitor, March 8, 2002, 05.

90. In addition to its many publications and its sense of itself as the “guardian of the true history of the Black Panther Party,” it is also worth noting in this respect that the Huey

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Newton Foundation is currently working with HBO on a series about the Black Panther Party. The “bad” memories of the Panthers are perhaps best encapsulated in Hugh Pear- son’s bestselling The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 1996).

91. See, for example, Miller, “Old Panthers”; and Williams “Interview with Malik Shabazz,” 2009.

92. It is not clear how many original Panthers are involved in the NBPP, but see, for example, Aza Nedhari, “Original Panthers, New Panthers and Gang Members Unite,” New Black Panther, September/October 2006, 14. On the geographical and organizational di- versity of the original Black Panther Party, see the essays in Judson L. Jeffries, ed., Com- rades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

93. Quoted in Murphy, “Black Panthers, Gone Gray.” 94. Sadiki “Shep” Ojore Olugbala, “The Panther Belongs to the People,” New Black

Panther, September–October 2006, 27. 95. Quoted in Goodwin, “Old Panthers Pounce,” 16. 96. Quoted in Murphy, “Black Panthers, Gone Gray.” On this attitude, see also Olug-

bala, “Panther Belongs to the People,” 27. 97. The Huey Newton Foundation, “There Is no New Black Panther Party.” Two further

questions were asked about the NBPP: “Are they entertainers, who would posture them- selves before the media, and, according to numerous sources, with empty guns, to spin gold for themselves? Are they, given the history of their late-leader Khalid Muhammad, a group of anti-Semites like the very Ku Klux Klan they allegedly oppose?”

98. Quoted in Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Se- cret War against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1988, 2002), 58. See also David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

99. Quoted in Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of Amer- ica’s Political Intelligence System (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 221.

100. On the COINTELPRO campaign against the Black Panther Party, see Kenneth O’Reilly, “Racial Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989), 292–324; Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern Amer- ica From 1870 to 1976 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978, 2001), 523–30; and Huey P. Newton, The War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996).

101. Williams “Interview with Bobby Seale,” 2008. 102. Williams “Interview with Malik Shabazz,” 2009. 103. “Was Dr. Khallid Muhammad Assassinated?” 4–5. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 4–5. Founded in 1968 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish Defense League is

a militant organization that stresses the importance of Jewish “collective self-defense” and advocates taking on “the adversaries of Jews and Judaism on every front.” It has been the subject of much criticism from watchdog groups such as the ADL and the SPLC.

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107. Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers; and Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad. 108. Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid.; and White, Inside the Nation of Islam. The exact details of what happened

to Akhee are left unreported, but examples of some of the photographs confiscated from Eric’s camera are used to illustrate the article.

111. Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad. 112. Just in case the point might be missed, a “note” to the article was included (page

29) to explain why the NBPP was “not at all paranoid or exaggerating” about agent provo- cateurs within its midst. First it explained how a “Cleveland Free Times News Magazine Story” from the fall of 2002 had revealed how an “admitted FBI agent named Billy X had infiltrated the Cleveland Chapter” of the NBPP before traveling all over the United States “claiming to be NBPP,” and “set[ing] up members of the Black Stone Rangers in attempts to rob drug dealers.” (The Cleveland Free Times did indeed run a story on the New Black Panthers on April 25, 2002, but it contains no allegations about a FBI agent named Billy X; it is simply an overview of the NBPP’s activities in the city.) Second, the note pointed to the real repression of the 1960s and 1970s to support the NBBP’s claims: “Add to this [the Cleveland story] the factual history of agent infiltration in the Black Panther party in the 60’s and 70’s and you can glean how reasonably we arrive at our conclusions,” the article’s authors write. See Kevin Hoffman, “Endangered Species: The New Black Panthers want a Revolution, But They’ll Settle for an Audience,” Free Times (Cleveland) April 25, 2002, http://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/endangered-species/Content?oid=1479329. The Free Times is now known as the Cleveland Scene following the merger of two papers in 2008, and its editor was unable to confirm for certain that no other article on the NBPP had appeared in 2002, as none of the staff from that time were still working there. Cor- respondence with author, June 10, 2009.

113. “Was Dr. Khallid Muhammad Assassinated?,” 30, emphasis added. 114. The classic expression of this idea can be found in Richard Hofstadter’s “The Para-

noid Style in American Politics,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), 3–40.

115. Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). One of Olmsted’s most interesting points is how real government repression feeds conspiratorial assessments of government activity in an almost endless feedback loop. On conspiratorial thinking by African Americans in particular, see Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Anita M. Waters, “Conspiracy Theories as Ethnosociologies: Explanation and Intention in African American Political Culture,” Journal of Black Studies 28, no. 1 (1997): 112–25.

116. On this see James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006); and Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How America’s War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

117. Audrey Hudson, “Homeland Agency Pulled Back Extremism Dictionary,” Wash- ington Times, May 5, 2009, A01. See also “Maverick’ DHS Office Issues Glossary of Do- mestic Extremist Groups,” Fox News, May 5, 2009, http://www.foxnews.com/politics

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/2009/05/05/maverick-dhs-office-issues-glossary-domestic-extremist-groups/. A link to the lexicon can be found on the Web site of Washington Times as well as many other places on the Internet.

118. On this, see, for example, Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From the Kennedy Assassination to the X-Files (London: Routledge, 2000), 14; and D. J. Mulloy, American Extremism: History, Politics and the Militia Movement (London: Routledge, 2004), 165–74.

119. On the current appeal of black nationalism in general in the United States, see Melanye T. Price, Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

120. New Black Panther, Winter 2008, 1, 36. 121. NBBP, “NBPP in Crockett County, Tennessee,” http://www.newblackpanther.com/

crocketttn.html. The statement seems to cast some doubt on the reliability of the one the NBPP issued in the wake of the Philadelphia polling station controversy discussed in the introduction—which had claimed that Samir Shabazz had been acting entirely on his own initiative in “intimidating” voters—but it was also entirely consistent with the NBPP’s overall political strategy and activities. On the plot against Obama, see Carrie Johnson, “ATF Says Racists Plotted to Kill Obama,” Washington Post, October 28, 2008, A02.

122. Williams, “Dr Malik Zulu Shabazz,” 2009. 123. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New

York: Three Rivers Press, 1995), 197–204. See also Obama’s “Speech on Race,” in Philadel- phia on March 18, 2008, available at the New York Times Web site, http://www.nytimes. com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html.

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