Whitewashing the Black Panthers

[Valin]

The Daily Beast:

A new PBS documentary tries to excuse a murderous and totalitarian cult.

Michael Moynihan

7.25.15

 

When his captors uncinched the noose around his neck and shoved him into a wooden chair, Alex Rackley might have assumed his ordeal was over. He had already endured a flurry of kicks and punches, the repeated crack of a wooden truncheon, ritual humiliation, and a mock lynching. But it wasn’t over. It was about to get much, much worse.

 

Rackley, a slight, 19-year-old black kid from Florida, was tough (he had a black belt in karate), but hardly in a position to resist his psychopathic interrogators. During a previous beating he had gamely tried, kicking and flailing and swinging his arms. But this time he was tied to the chair, with a towel stuffed in his mouth to mute the screams. The women upstairs were tending to the children while assiduously preparing pots of boiling water—because traditional gender roles applied in the torture business, too.

 

When the bubbling cauldrons were brought to the basement—four or five of them—they were thrown over Rackley’s naked body. Then they worked him over some more. With him burned, battered, and bloodied, the towel was removed from his mouth. As a warning to those who would sell out the party to the Feds (“jackanapes,” “pigs,” and “faggots,” in the party’s nomenclature), the Lubyanka-style proceedings would be recorded on half-inch tape.

 

(Snip)

 

Like many former members of the party elite, these days Ericka Huggins interrogates students about race, class, and gender in her job as a college professor, having long-since lost interest in brutally interrogating suspected FBI informants.

 

From Huggins, we are shunted along to the second witness—another Panther turned college professor. “Now [in the late 1960s] we had the emergence of voices within the community who said ‘We’re not going to continue to turn the other cheek,’” says Jamal Joseph, who teaches film at Columbia University. Joseph features heavily in the Vanguard of the Revolution, fulfilling the role of the handsome, clever, naive teenage Panther railroaded by the pigs for his membership in a renegade political party.

 

But as with Ericka Huggins, there is much about Joseph that viewers aren’t told. The most important piece of neglected information is this: When the Panthers were a spent political force, Joseph joined up with the spinoff Black Guerrilla Army and was sentenced to 12½ years in prison for his part in the infamous 1981 Brinks armored car robbery, which resulted in the death of three innocents, including Waverly Brown, the first African-American to serve on the Nyack, New York, police force.

 

(Snip)

 

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Language Warning

 

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