Coöperism 13/13

Flores A. Forbes | Survival Programs Pending Revolution

by |Published -Updated
Black Panther Party Central Committee, 1973. Flores Forbes is standing in front of portrait of Huey P. Newton (Credit: Stanford University Libraries, Special Collections)

By Flores A. Forbes, author of Will You Die with Me? My Life and the Black Panther Party (Washington Square Press, 2006) and Invisible Men: A Contemporary Slave Narrative in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016)

 

The foundation for a conversation about the Black Panther Party’s social programs should begin with the Ten Point Platform and Program.

The first program to be implemented was developed around point 7 which called for an immediate end to the brutality and murder of Black people by the police. This demand was implemented through a call for armed self defense, and the Black Panther Party (“BPP”) provided the example with the armed patrols. Huey Newton was in law school at the time and discovered the open-carry gun laws (his professor was Edwin Meese!)  Huey Newton believed that the self-defense program would recruit members as it set the stage for the Survival Programs such as Sickle Cell Anemia Research and the Free Breakfast for School Children.

Almost all of the programs began in this way, namely with an innovative example that then became part of sustainable community programs, like churches, hospitals and other non profits. Some of the programs like the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program were actually community organizing tools because local residents were hosting kids in their homes, pastors in their churches etc.

These were programs that we imagined being scaled up with public sector involvement, especially school boards. Almost every school district in America eventually adopted the free breakfast program.

Other programs followed the same model and were born of the same problem. The free health clinics substituted for hospitals that avoided Black care. The free Ambulance program (in Winston-Salem, NC) was developed because trauma emergency care redlined Black folk in the South.

It is important to emphasize that the overall strategy was to provide these programs as survival pending revolution.

The programs evolved as a result of the FBI program of COINTELPRO which resulted in 40 Panthers loosing their lives. These were programs to help the community but as things developed, they also became programs to make the Black Panthers look more relevant as they were targeted by the establishment, the FBI, and local police forces.

You may also like

Published

Benjamin P. Davis | A Scarf and A Song: Reflections on Simone Weil, Jean Genet, and Edward Said

In an essay on Genet published in Grand Street, Edward Said tells the story of leaving Hamilton Hall to see Genet speak (on the steps of the Low Library) at a rally for the Black Panthers in the spring of 1970, with the university having yet to recover from the student protests of 1968. Said noted about Columbia that at that time “its administration was feeling uncertain, its faculty were badly divided, its students were perpetually exercised both in and out of the classroom.” At the Panther rally, Said observed a great difference between “the declarative simplicity of Genet’s French remarks” and “the immensely baroque embellishment of them by my erstwhile student.” [Continue reading…]

Published

Bernard E. Harcourt | Factory Work: Simone Weil & Immersive Philosophical Praxis

The philosophical method that Simone Weil pioneered—constantly confronting critique and praxis—can serve as a model, an exemplar, what we might call her “immersive philosophical praxis.” Troubled by the living conditions of factory workers, Weil requested a leave of absence from teaching and went to work as a factory worker at three different factories in Paris, including a Renault plant, for almost six months in 1934-1935. From that experience, Weil observed first hand how cooperation could infuse the modern factory. Reading Simone Weil’s “Factory Journal” brought back to mind my own experience in the factory. I have never written about or spoken about these memories publicly; but reading Weil’s journal from her time working in the Alsthom and Renault factories in 1934-35 reminded me of the time that I spent working in a graphite factory in Chedde, France during the summer of 1981. I had gone there expecting to have a political experience, but I came away from it as a human experience [continue reading here…].

Photo of 549 Riverside Drive in New York City
Published

549 Riverside Drive, New York, NY

As Benjamin Davis discusses in his book, Simone Weil escaped to New York City in July 1942 from Marseilles, France, and lived in an apartment at 549 Riverside Drive in Morningside Heights. She traveled with her parents on the Portuguese ship Serpa Pinto, passing through Morocco and Bermuda, before docking in New York on July 7, 1942 (the boat manifest is here). The Serpa Pinto transported many refugees fleeing the Holocaust during the early 1940s. Simone Weil would live at 549 Riverside Drive until November 10, 1942, when she set sail to London to join General de Gaulle’s Free French army. During her time in Morningside Heights, Weil took part in a first-aid course in Harlem, hoping to return to Europe as a frontline nurse, and spent time in New York’s public libraries […]

Published

Benjamin P. Davis | Critique at Sea Level: Paul Gilroy’s Renewed Critical Theory

In a 2015 lecture, the British cultural theorist Paul Gilroy argued that risking one’s life to save that of another is “not something to pass over casually.” Gilroy went on to suggest that an individual’s “bravery could have something to teach the rest of the EU about primal, humanitarian responsibility to and for others less fortunate than oneself.” Gilroy’s invocation of an ethical obligation to others as a natural or “primal” part of human life cuts against the grain of much critical theory today. In “progressive” or “radical” circles, claims to essence and nature are avoided at all costs. Gilroy’s willingness to make such a foundationalist claim was part of why he earned the title, in a 2021 profile in The Guardian, “The last humanist.” [Continue reading here…]