Children and Childhood in Black Panther Party Thought and Discourse: 1966–1974

The BPP’s Plenary Session took place from September 4–7, 1970. “The rights of children” ranked just subsequent to “self determination” for “nation[al] minorities,” “women,” and “street people.” Other panel themes included community regulation of the police and military, distributions of political power, and internationalism.

In defining “childhood” and “youth,” this article draws heavily from De Schweinitz’s (2009 pp. 5–6) use of the terms. Like De Schweinitz, I contend that the category of age, like gender, has been a historically shifting social construct. In the context of the BPP, age functions in complex ways, as many Panthers were themselves in their mid teen years—and thus, not yet legal adults—when they joined the Party. While acknowledging the fluidity of these categories this article focuses on elementary- and middle-school-aged individuals, as it was members of these age groups to which the Party regularly referred as the “next generation” of social changers. On age as a category of analysis, see Mintz (2008).

For the BPP’s survival programs, see Hilliard (2008).

Huey Newton’s and Bobby Seale’s application of Marx’s discussions of the lumpenproletariat to the black freedom struggle was acutely shaped by their engagement with the writings of Frantz Fanon (Hayes and Kiene 1998 pp. 159–161).

This article stems from a larger dissertation project examining BPP discursive and material engagements with young people throughout the Party’s lifespan from 1966 to 1982. Due to spatial constraints, however, this article explores children and youth in Party literature during the first half of the organization’s existence.

For historical context on The Black Panther, see Billy X Jennings (2015).

These figures represent unemployment among black and white men living in U.S. cities, between the ages of 18 and 24.

The report measured what it deemed as familial dysfunctionality in urban areas by looking at the number of infants born to couples out of wedlock and the proportion of households run by women (Estes 2005 p. 111).

While scholars of the BPP have offered varying categorizations of the Party’s political development, most have identified its early years, up to roughly 1968, as reflective of Black Nationalism (Bloom and Martin 2013; Spencer 2016; Tyner 2006).

On the organization’s name change, see (Bloom and Martin 2013:114).

Capshaw (2014 pp. xix, 157) notes that the Moynihan Report’s pathologizing impulses incensed many participants of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), in part spurring an aesthetic focus on black children. She contends that for many BAM artists, black childhood simultaneously symbolized a nationalist ideal and its unfulfilled status. Visual representations of young people were central to Panther art, particularly through the work of BPP Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas. Given spatial constraints, however, I have omitted a discussion of artistic expressions of children in Panther literature. For scholarship on children as subjects of Douglas’s artwork see (Douglas and Gaiter 2012 p. 242; Durant 2007; Potorti 2017 pp. 96,105–106). For 1970s academic critiques of Moynihan’s “tangle of pathology” thesis, see (Davis 1971 pp. 2–15; Gutman 1976; Stack 1974).

Garvey’s ideas about family and childrearing were shaped by a politics of respectability characteristic of contemporary Black club culture and middle-class notions of black racial progress. While the BPP may have mirrored some of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s ideologies about family and parenthood, the Party’s working-class and socialist politics necessarily influenced its divergence from heteronormative family models, as I demonstrate further in the article.

Nadasen (2005 p. 216) situates the Welfare Rights Movement’s stance on birth control within a broader history of black opposition to forced sterilization. She contends that in the wake of a racialized slave economy premised on the destruction of African and African American families, and Progressive era social reform campaigns that sought to “limit the fertility of so-called “lower-races”…many African American men and women had historically identified birth control with the eugenics movement.” See also (Gordon 1974; Roberts 1997).

For a discussion of women in the Black Power Movement who did not wholly oppose birth control, such as writer and activist, Toni Cade Bambara, see (Capshaw 2014:158-159; Crawford 2009).

Importantly, unlike other Black Nationalist groups, the BPP never adhered to a politics of racial separatism. Even before its more blatant practice of socialism by the mid-1970s, the Panthers’ earlier nationalist politics were guided by class analysis rather than a “blanket condemnation of the white community” (Spencer 2016:78).

Adult education often manifested as informal reading groups where new recruits would discuss the works of Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and other radical intellectuals. At one point in 1970 Newton suggested the creation of a more formal “Ideological Institute,” but with little success, as many saw the assigned literature as too abstract for material movements (Kelley and Esch 1999:23).

The BPP was one of many Black Nationalist groups to organize educational programs for children and youth. By the 1930s, the Nation of Islam (NOI) established schools for its members’ children (Lee 1996:22), while black cultural nationalist groups in the 1960s including the US organization formed their own children’s programs (Brown 2003:40-42).

Interestingly, in a 1976 (reprinted) article in Jet Magazine, Elaine Brown reflected on the purpose of the school, asserting, “…this is not a Black Panther Party School per se…and it’s not a ‘freedom school’ or a ‘liberation school’ in the sense that we teach the children rhetoric. The idea is to produce a model along the lines that Black, poor children are educable.” Huggins corroborated Brown’s sentiment in the same article, noting, “We’re unique in that we serve all children, but still are concerned with the individual child” (Lucas 1976).

Specifically, Newton refers to the “bourgeois family.”

For a general history of communist theories of family and childrearing, see (Mishler 1999).

Spencer (2008:107) demonstrates that women played a central role in the establishment and development of Party institutions such as the CDC. She avers that such programs exemplify, to some extent, how women in the Party spearheaded an internal dialogue about issues such as sexuality, parenthood, and alternative family models. She posits that these programs can be understood as “an innovative response to the realities that Panther women faced.” Spencer draws on Perkins’s (2000 pp. 104–105) assertion that the BPP’s socialist understandings of marriage and family, as evidenced by the Party’s collective parenting model, often played out differently for women and men and in some cases reinscribed patriarchal patterns.