Frantz Fanon and His Influence on the Black Panther Party and the Black Revolution

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Chapter 1 Frantz Fanon and His Influence on the Black Panther Party and the Black Revolution

Mumia Abu-Jamal

For the mostly teenaged members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (bpp), the name Fanon was a familiar one. For every Panther was told it was his/her duty to read The Wretched of the Earth. It mattered little that it was difficult, given its translation from the original French to English. Fanon, a revolutionary psychiatrist, influenced by his professional knowledge and its concomitant jargon, had a deep penchant to view the world through his psy- chiatric and psychological lenses. Luckily, bpp co-founder, Bobby Seale, early elected to share his copy of The Wretched of the Earth with his fellow co-founder, Huey P. Newton. Huey, who almost finished high school while being an active illiterate, was so moved by the work that he read and reread Wretched six times.1 If one has spent his formative years as an illiterate, and does so clandestinely, he must utilize his memory to determine what has transpired in his life and relationships. When one subsequently acquires literacy, this does not extinguish that extraordinary recall, but rather understandably, it is strengthened thereby. As such, Fanon’s text was mulled over as a valued resource, which found its way into the canons of the Party, and the fundament of bpp ideology and political thought. Fanon was, to say the least, a deep thinker, who contemplated the future of neocolonial African and global societies, and sought to inject his insights into revolutionary and post-colonial states the ability to defend and protect itself from imperial penetration and economic exploitation. From Fanon’s work (including his subsequently published Toward the Af- rican Revolution [ca. 1964]), bpp cadre acquired tremendous insights into the notion of viewing Black communities as colonies of an external, repressive White state power. Newton built on these concepts, as well as the justifica- tion to utilize paramilitary force to resist the empire. This essential insight, that

1 Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 25.

8 Abu-Jamal the African American community was an oppressed colony of the empire, was surely something Newton learned from Fanon, but it was not Newton’s alone. The late theologian, activist/scholar, Dr. James H. Cone, quotes none other than Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as observing: The Black ghetto is “a system of internal colonialism… The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregat- ed and humiliated at every turn.”2 Few observers saw points of convergence between King, the avatar of peace, and Newton, the advocate of revolution, but on the question of the actual sta- tus of Black America and its most populous communities, the two are almost indistinguishable. For who could deny that the vast majority of Black Ameri- cans lived in a profoundly separate living space, which reflects Fanon’s insights about the Manichaean differences between the spaces dwelt in by the colo- nizer and the colonized? These recognitions suggest that Fanon was read by far more than the typical Black militants of the imperial, urban core. bpp Central Committee member and Communications officer, Kathleen Neal Clever has written widely about the “profound” influence of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. In her article, “Back to Africa,” an exposition on her times as a leader of the International Section of the bpp in Algiers, she writes:

The crucible of civil war forged the writings of Frantz Fanon, the Black psychiatrist from Martinique who fought alongside Algerian revolutionaries for independence from France. His books became available in English just as waves of civil violence engulfed the ghettoes of America, reaching the level of insurrection in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. Fanon died in 1961, a year before Alge- ria obtained the independence he had given his life to win, but his bril- liant, posthumously published work The Wretched of the Earth became essential reading for Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their thinking. Fanon’s analysis seemed to explain and to jus- tify the spontaneous violence ravaging Black ghettoes across the coun- try, and linked the incipient insurrections to the rise of a revolutionary movement.3

2 James H. Come, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. (New York: Orbis Books, 1991), 223. 3 Kathleen N. Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969–1970),” in Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Balti- more, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998), 214.