by BRUCE A. DIXON
For all of 1969 and most of 1970 I was a rank and file member of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. For many young people like me, the BPP, or as we still call it, “the party” was a personally and politically formative experience, a challenging graduate level introduction to the practical politics of black, and of human liberation, full of many more lessons than our heads could absorb at the time. These lessons came at a great cost to many of our families and comrades, including decades of imprisonment for some of us, exile and early deaths for others.
It’s the job of peoples’ historians to and interpret and share those lessons, to nail them up where everyone can debate and discuss them, so that ordinary people can better understand the forces that shape our lives. Unfortunately, the peoples history of the Black Panther Party and the movement in Chicago hasn’t been written yet.
“From the Bullet to the Ballot:” Dr. Jakobi Williams 2013 book for which the author says he interviewed a number of my own comrades and accessed Chicago Police Red Squad files at some personal risk to himself, falls well short of helping us understand the party in Chicago, the context from which it emerged, why it flourished and eventually folded, or what its lasting impacts were. Though Dr. Williams denies that his book draws a direct and causal link between the efforts of the party in Chicago and the current crop of black faces in high corporate, military and government places, with President Barack Obama at the top of that heap, there can be no doubt that his title alone does precisely that.
Establishment historians have a different sort of gig than peoples historians. The establishment historian has to justify, to legitimize the forces currently in power, to depict their rule as the inevitable outcome of just and meritorious struggle. The black misleadership class needs its historians to tie it firmly to the Freedom Movement, the Black Power movement, and even to the Black Panther Party because even when power flows from the top down, legitimacy flows from the people, from the bottom up, from the streets to the suites.
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