This page was created by Anonymous.
Black Panther Newspaper, Black Community News Service, 1969
My artifact is a newspaper printed by the Black Panther Party in august 1969 entitled the “The Black Panther” and organized as part of the Black Community News Service. The newspaper is around 24 pages long and printed in black and white ink, with pages containing a variety of content from interview transcripts and editorials to bulletin messages and a comic strip. The paper covers a range of topics of importance to the Party, but specifically addresses the arrest and detainment of the Party’s chairman, Bobby Seale. The front page, a large-format picture of Seale with the headline “KIDNAPPED,” illustrates the urgency of the matter within the Party, and it is explained extensively in a published interview with Seale and several articles discussing his case. Beyond this coverage of the major issue within the party at the time, the paper’s breadth of coverage is notable because it mirrors the wide-ranging functions of an established mainstream newspaper, like the Los Angeles Times, and in doing so seeks to replace it as the source of cultural news and commentary for members of the Black Panther Party. The issue does not simply tell members about urgent domestic matters, major changes to platforms, or issues of future consideration: it contains sections on U.S. cities and international subjects, such as the developing anticolonial movements in Angola and South Africa. Of particular interest, further, is the page announcing the marriage of two Party members entitled “Revolutionary Love, Revolutionary Wedding.”
As in any community paper, the Black Panther contains nuptial announcements, and their composition speaks to the way the party wants to reorient traditional social customs to promote equality and solidarity. The article explains, “the ceremony was the traditional marriage vows with most of the metaphysics removed. When the minister asked who ‘giveth this man and woman in marriage,’ Chairman Bobby Seale said, ‘The Black Panther party.’” The article identifies the location of the wedding as the Free Church of Berkeley, California, which was one of the first regions where the Black Panthers operated after their founding in Oakland in 1966. The Berkeley Free Church was itself famous as a gathering place for radical thinkers in the area and around the University of California campus in Berkeley, and in 1970 a priest at the Free Church spearheaded a campaign to reform the Berkeley Police Department in response to instances of police brutality. That campaign advocated for community-based policing with three separate departments: one in a predominantly black district, one in a predominantly white district, and one covering the UC campus. This model of decentralized community policing is advocated for in this same 1969 newspaper, in an article entitled “What does Decentralization of Police Mean?”
The article about the wedding also illustrates the Party’s close ties to other revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements shines through in this article about the marriage, as it recounts how “the pair of million dollar wedding rings [were] made from U.S. planes shot down over Vietnam… supplied free by the People’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam.” In this way they fulfill the principles of anti-colonial solidarity laid out by Franz Fanon in Wretched of the Earth and advocated by George Jackson in his prison letters collected in Soledad Brother. Both texts emphasized the importance of people from different regions and subgroups supporting one another in the struggle for class and racial equality, and the wedding scene shows how the Panthers had embraced this approach to demonstrate solidarity even during events not designed as an action.
Extra source citations:
"Coast Priest Is Fighting Police Tactics." New York Times, August 23, 1970, Nytimes.com. Web. 10 Dec. 2019.
"Mapping The Black Panther Party." University of Washington, Depts.washington.edu. Web. 10 Dec. 2019.
