Malav Kanuga
Dhoruba Bin Wahad, left, with Kalonji Jama Changa (editor of Revolution in These Times) at an April 2024 birthday celebration for political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal.
Dhoruba Bin Wahad, then a leading member of the New York Black Panther Party, was arrested in June 1971 and charged with the attempted murders of two New York City police officers. He served nineteen years in prison before being released in 1990 when it came to light that his arrest was part of the FBI’s illegal counter-intelligence program known as COINTELPRO, which particularly targeted Black leaders. Since his release, he has traveled and written extensively. His newest book is Revolution in These Times: Black Panther Party Veteran Dhoruba Bin Wahad on Antifascism, Black Liberation, and a Culture of Resistance, edited by Kalonji Jama Changa. Bin Wahad lives part of the year in Ghana, in West Africa. We spoke via the Internet in early March. He is currently working on his next book, which will be published later this year and is based around his 1998 essay “Beggars on Horseback” about Pan-Africanism. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Tell us about the origins of the Black Panther Party and how it was able to connect with some of the radical Black activist history in the United States.
Dhoruba Bin Wahad: One of the things I like to point out to young people is that the Black Panther Party occurred in a certain historical context, in a certain historical moment. The Black Panther Party was a continuation of the Black radical legacy that went from Marcus Garvey all the way up to Malcolm X and to the heirs of Malcolm X. It was a cadre organization, not an old-school organization of people coming together just organizing and creating some type of hierarchy with Robert’s Rules of Order, using semi-academic organizational structures.
When we started the breakfast program, it wasn’t because we wanted to become a social service organization. We wanted to use the principles of socialism, relying on ourselves in order to bring a certain idea of struggle to our people. It really was an organization that was trying to be a revolutionary structured cadre organization.
Q: This was a party that was organizing at a time when there was no Facebook or Twitter. Organizing had to be done with posters, with flyers, with a newspaper, and the great artwork of Emory Douglas. Talk about the importance of culture in building a movement, and what we’ve lost today with everybody being on social media.
Bin Wahad: Culture is essential to building a movement. That’s why our slogan was “There’s no culture unless it’s a revolutionary culture.” Culture is how we socialize and process our relationships with each other, what we hold up as esteemed. Revolutionary culture is what created the victory for the Vietnamese people. It’s a revolutionary, anti-colonialist culture that has allowed people in Gaza to survive genocide right before our very eyes.
Today, we see that the enemy uses reactionary culture in order to keep poor and oppressed people divided. Culture is key, and the enemy knows that. But culture is also a refuge. People go into their traditions and into their culture when times are hard, when they have to feel a sense of belonging, a sense of being. This is why nationalism and culture have always gone hand in hand. It comes full circle with MAGA and the weaponization of immigration, and then the turning of Black people into enemies of migrants: “They’re going to take jobs from us.”
Q: It was initially known as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Talk about that beginning and self-defense, both in terms of the police and also the breakfast programs and health clinics—the self-defense of a community.
Bin Wahad: The idea that the African people in the United States would pick up a gun to defend themselves is a notion that’s antithetical to the model of the American/European nation-state, the settler state. The settler state, for the primitive accumulation of capital on chattel slavery, relied on kidnapping Africans from Africa and bringing them here to work in two major areas: agriculture and mercantile industries, but mainly agriculture. That’s what began the United States on this road to becoming a superpower: cotton and sugar.
Having said that, when the Black Panther Party came along after World War II, we have to look at where it emerged. It didn’t emerge in Detroit, Michigan. It didn’t emerge in Harlem [in New York City], where the so-called Harlem Renaissance and the Black Renaissance occurred, a cultural capital. It didn’t arise in Florida, or even in Atlanta, Georgia. It arose in Oakland, California, in the Bay Area. So we go and look at the history of the Bay Area, and we see that the majority of the Black people that came to that area came from the rural South. They came from Arkansas, they came from the Southwest, and they came from Texas. And that’s where the majority of the police came from, too.
The Africans came to that area during World War II to work the docks, to load the cargo ships of the Pacific fleet. Now you’ve got the GI Bill, and it bypassed Black labor, bypassed Black people, you see? So they’re in these areas, and these areas become basically ghettos: policed by the cops, the descendants of soldiers and white folks from New Mexico and Arkansas. This mix, this milieu in California, was unique. The idea that Africans, former slaves, are armed is a scary notion to white settlers. They are not comfortable with that under any circumstance.
Q: In the case of the Panthers, it resulted in the National Rifle Association (NRA) supporting the restriction of gun rights in the state of California because they didn’t want Black people with guns to be at the same level as white people with guns.
Bin Wahad: That’s true. But before the Black Panther Party, there were African Americans who fought against the Ku Klux Klan with guns in the South. The difference was, one is post-Korea, because the majority of those young men and women that decided to defend themselves in the South against the Ku Klux Klan, and to defend voting rights, were Korean War veterans.
When the Black Panther Party came along, it was a street crossing where young Black kids were killed because there was no stoplight. So the Panther Party got out there with uniforms and started directing traffic. Then, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, because they were law students, understood that carrying weapons in public was legal. So the police used the fact that they are the armed agents of the state—and this is something that’s very important, which the Black Panther Party understood from the beginning, that police are not workers. The police are not independent entities. They are armed agents of the state, just like the military. They evolved out of a slave system in which they used to be the armed agents that kept Black people and slaves in check, that made sure they didn’t run away.
This is why it’s a mistake to assume that when the police in America kill a Black man, it’s police brutality. It’s some type of aberration. It’s not. They’re doing their job. Their job is to terrorize Black people. Their job is to hold Black people in check by the use of force, because they have a legal right to violence. They have a legal monopoly on violence. Nobody else has a right to violence but the state.
Q: How does this pertain to what is happening in the United States now, with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement?
Bin Wahad: As Charles Dickens said, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” That’s where we’re at now. These are the worst of times because the state has coalesced into a straight-up, up-front oligarchy, and both political parties are corporate parties. The working class, if it’s not challenging the owners of the means of production, if it’s not exerting its rights and its role in capitalist society, then it’s a reactionary class and it’s no longer revolutionary. That’s what the white working class has become in America, trying to seek comfort. And as you know, that was the wrong move at the wrong time. Because as a consequence, the oligarchies have consolidated their power. The corporate elite knew that this type of police force couldn’t protect their interests, and indeed wouldn’t protect their interests. You had to have political police. But this is also the best of times for organizers, for activists to move to the people and bring their message to the people in terms that they can understand.
Q: You talk in the book about the Reverend William J. Barber II and the Poor People’s Campaign as being a descendant of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr’s building of a Poor People’s Campaign. Where do you see that going, and what will that movement be able to achieve?
Bin Wahad: In the last days of King’s life, when he was killed in Memphis, he was going to support sanitation workers. You can’t get lower in terms of hierarchy and working class than garbage men. So that’s almost like a statement on King’s character, to enjoin and support the lowest in society, the ones whose labor is taken for granted and looked at as meaningless.
This was important because it showed that King had a class consciousness that belied his earlier, middle-class approach to the Civil Rights Movement. Through his talks and his speeches, you could see that he was evolving into an anti-imperialist. He was anti-war. He understood that the United States was an imperialist power. He understood that the United States started out as a white supremacist settler state. That’s why he talked about all of us being equal, judged by our character not by the color of our skin. He knew America was built not on the character of people, but on the color of their skin and the quality of their pocketbooks, and whether they owned property.
I look at Barber’s struggle as continuing King’s legacy, because it’s a broad-based struggle. But the reason I emphasize that is because it’s necessary to build a united front. It’s necessary to build an anti-fascist, anti-white-supremacist, united front. And this united front has to put [aside] internecine conflicts, interdisciplinary conflicts, whether it’s misogyny, patriarchy, or homophobia.
All these are subtexts of a larger context of oppression and supremacy. It has to do with distribution or redistribution of the wealth in this world at a crucial time in human history, where we could literally destroy ourselves if we don’t do this. I believe that we cannot have a united front, we cannot create a united front against fascism unless we understand what it is and why it’s necessary.