---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2002 11:40:37 -0700
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Graying Black Panthers Fight Would-Be Heirs
Graying Black Panthers Fight Would-Be Heirs
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/08/national/08PANT.html>
By DEAN E. MURPHY
October 8, 2002
OAKLAND, Calif., Oct. 7 - His hair has gone gray and he suffered a heart
attack last year. He worries about ordinary things like his daughter's
college tuition. At 65, he takes to the stairs with a slight hesitation.
But Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panther Party and an icon of the
1960's, has a voice that still thunders with the might of a gun-wielding
revolutionary.
Mostly these days, though, Mr. Seale's rolling speeches are not about the
Black Panther Party's famous themes of inner-city poverty, the oppression
of black people or the brutal methods of law enforcement. Instead, he is
furious about a small band of radical blacks who call themselves the New
Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and who have been denounced by a
variety of groups as extremist, racist and anti-Semitic.
Mr. Seale is among a small group of former Black Panthers including David
Hilliard, Elaine Brown and Huey P. Newton's widow, Fredrika, who fear their
contentious yet storied legacy in African-American history is being sullied
by a new and harsher brand of Pantherism.
Together, they have hired a trademark lawyer and have begun a fund-raising
campaign to put the New Black Panther Party out of business and to preserve
the Oakland-born Black Panthers, who formally disbanded in the 1970's, as
the only real thing.
"They have hijacked our name and are hijacking our history," said Mr.
Seale, who described the old Panthers' problems with the new group as both
legal and moral. "We have to claim it back."
The New Black Panthers are not a new rival. The group, in one form or
another, has been around since 1989. For many years, Mr. Seale and the
others considered the new Panthers more nuisance than threat, even meeting
with some members during Black Panther Party reunions.
But since last year, under its new leader, Malik Z. Shabazz, the New Black
Panther Party has taken its message of militant black nationalism into the
mainstream media as never before.
According to one count, Mr. Shabazz was interviewed on the Fox News Channel
10 times in 12 months on subjects from reparations for slavery to the Sept.
11 terrorism attacks. Perhaps most startling to his detractors,
Mr. Shabazz appeared last fall on a three-hour C-SPAN broadcast of a
National Press Club news conference, during which he characterized both the
United States and Israel as terrorist states.
"We have to make it plain that the Zionists control America, lock, stock
and barrel," he told reporters. "The European Jews have America under control."
Mr. Hilliard said the old Black Panther leadership decided that enough was
enough.
"We said, 'We have to close them down,' " said Mr. Hilliard, who was the
party's chief of staff in the 1960's. "They have almost done irreparable
damage to our credibility with their racist and anti-Semitic behavior."
But the New Black Panther Party has refused to submit quietly.
Mr. Shabazz and others dismiss the old guard as jealous and failed
revolutionaries unwilling to acknowledge an emerging generation of younger
black radicals. They count former Panthers among their membership and
insist the Oakland group is not representative of the larger Black Panther
following. They say no one has the right to dictate how the Panther
identity is claimed, particularly since the panther image was originally
used by a black political party in Lowndes County, Ala.
"Our position is the Panther exclusively belongs to no one," Mr. Shabazz said.
"It belongs to the people."
The standoff has each sides making accusations and insinuations about the
other. Mr. Shabazz said Mr. Seale and the other party elders had only
themselves to blame, suggesting they had turned their backs on their
militant traditions.
"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," he said. "For
them to call us extreme is extremely outrageous."
Mr. Seale acknowledged his group's violent past, spitting out the
statistics in rapid fire: 28 members dead; 68 wounded; 14 police officers
dead; 8 members still in prison. But another set of statistics comes to his
lips just as freely: 200,000 hot breakfasts daily for schoolchildren; 1
million tests for sickle-cell anemia; 200,000 weekly newspapers; 5,000
followers in 48 chapters.
"This guy is a distorter and he doesn't understand our history," he said of
Mr. Shabazz. "A lot of positive, progressive things are attached to that
history. These so-called New Black Panthers have been around for 12 years
and they have done nothing to improve the community."
In August, the Black Panther Party's lawyer, Andrew M. Gold, wrote to Mr.
Shabazz demanding that his group drop all references to the Black Panthers,
including use of the name, images of the black panther in its logo and
photographs of Mr. Seale and Mr. Newton on its Web site.
Mr. Seale and Mr. Hilliard have taken particular offense to a doctored
version of one of the most recognized images of the protest era. The image,
a photograph taken in February 1967, featured Mr. Newton toting a shotgun
and Mr. Seale carrying a .45-caliber pistol over his shoulder. In the
version altered by the New Black Panthers, Mr. Seale was replaced by
Khallid Abdul Muhammad, for several years the vitriolic leader of the New
Black Panthers. He died last year.
"This hits them at a very emotional level because they are the founders,"
said Fredrika Newton, president of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, which
is run out of Mr. Hilliard's house near downtown Oakland. Mr. Gold said the
foundation had trademarked the Black Panther Party name and the logo.
Mr. Hilliard said the altered photograph cuts to the heart of their complaint.
"This new generation that sees this stuff doesn't know that we are opposed
to these guys," he said. "I get letters all the time threatening me and
Mrs. Newton because they confuse us with them. We weren't racists. We were
in coalition with people of all colors. People died and went to prison and
are in exile for this history."
Mr. Shabazz, a 35-year-old Washington lawyer who has led the New Black
Panther Party since Mr. Muhammad's death, said in an interview that his
organization was not racist or anti-Semitic. He also suggested that Mr.
Seale, Mr. Hilliard and the others were being manipulated by people opposed
to the black power movement.
"It seems they want war and we will have to go to war," Mr. Shabazz said of
the Oakland group. "But I think they are really working with the Zionists.
I think their lawyer is one. I think they are being used by outside forces
to keep alive the counterintelligence program of the F.B.I. and the U.S.
government, creating divisions and factions among black organizations."
The New Black Panther Party traces its roots to a small organization in
Dallas founded in 1989 by Aaron Michaels, a radio talk show producer. There
are now 30 chapters in the United States and Europe, Mr. Shabazz said. He
declined to release membership statistics, saying only that active
supporters numbered "in the low thousands."
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the organization as an active hate
group along with the Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi movements. A report
on the New Black Panther Party by the center includes statements by its
leaders using phrases like "white devils" and "bloodsucking Jews." Several
years ago, the Anti-Defamation League also identified the party as a hate
group; a spokeswoman described its members as armed and dangerous.
But it is only in recent years that the group has received widespread
attention by taking on high-profile, racially charged causes. In one of the
first instances, Mr. Muhammad, once a top lieutenant to Louis Farrakhan,
the leader of the Nation of Islam, led a group of armed members to Jasper,
Tex., in 1998. The members said they intended to protect blacks from whites
after the truck-dragging murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr., by three
white men.
When Bill Clinton opened his office in Harlem last year, Mr. Shabazz and
other members showed up wearing paramilitary uniforms and demanded that the
former president leave Harlem to blacks. The group also had repeated
run-ins with former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani over its Million Youth March.
Most recently, after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, at the National Press
Club event, he characterized the United States and Israel as the world's
"No. 1 and No. 2 terrorists."
"Zionism is racism," he was quoted as saying. "Zionism is terrorism.
Zionism is colonialism. Zionism is imperialism, and support for Zionism is
the root of why so many were killed on Sept. 11."
Mr. Shabazz said his new Panthers were unfazed by criticism over his
remarks or threats of a lawsuit.
"I am a former National Bar Association Young Lawyer of the Year," he said.
"We have a battery of lawyers. We firmly believe the legal facts are on our
side."
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