Aubrey MaloneThe Black Panthers (PG)
This fascinating documentary charts the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 70s against the backdrop of some galling actions perpetrated by American police forces. Also some manipulative ploys engineered by FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover as he sought to neutralise a movement that began as a self-defence manoeuvre in a culture geared towards the perpetuation of white power.
In its later stages it documents the internecine conflicts that divided the party. Its hot-headed poster boy Huey Newton –imprisoned for manslaughter and threatened with the death penalty – split from the more PR-friendly Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver. In his early days Cleaver famously said he would “beat Ronald Reagan to death with a marshmallow” but in later life (as a born-again Christian) he became an advocate of that politician.
The film puts one in mind of the similarities between the Panthers and the IRA. A lot of their manifestos concerned basic necessities like housing and education but the more radical elements (like the Provisional IRA) took to the gun. Much of this was understandable because they were facing firearms from racist policemen almost on a daily basis. They were hauled out of cars and into prisons on flimsy pretexts and then confronted with ‘kangaroo’ courts.
The film goes into another dimension when Martin Luther King, a man renowned for his pacifism, is gunned down in cold blood in 1968. This caused erstwhile moderate Panthers to lose whatever limited faith they might have had in the status quo. Shortly afterwards, a young black man called Bobby Hutton was also killed in cold blood because of his Panther affiliations.
The gloves were now off. At this stage many high-profile Hollywood celebrities like Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda lent their voices (and money) to the black cause. They lambasted the ‘culture of paranoia’ that had given Hoover the green light for stratagems like ‘COINTELPRO’, a counter-intelligence programme that recruited informers into his ranks to flush out Panthers and get the lowdown on arms caches.
In one seminal scene we witness the slaughter of a man called Fred Hampton in 1969 as bullets rain down on him and his colleagues. As with all the other incidents in the film, this is vividly recreated with archival footage and eyewitness accounts of survivors of the atrocity.
The split between Eldridge and Cleaver played right into Hoover’s hands. The Panthers could now self-destruct without any of his dirty tricks. Newton went off the rails to become even more of a loose cannon than he’d been up to this.
He also became involved in drugs and was gunned down by a trafficker in 1989.
Though the film is a documentary, it bears all the hallmarks of an engrossing thriller.
We might think the wars it shows have been long won but the recent killings of an unsettling number of African Americans at the hands of white policemen should surely rouse us from such complacency.
*** Very Good