The Battle of Algiers and Colonial Analogy in the Panther 21

In Said 2000b, p. 24.

To emphasize the public hype surrounding parts of the trial, I will note that around 200 members of the public attended its bail hearing, while hundreds more waited in or outside the Criminal Court Building. The mix of spectators and demonstrators included folks from leftist and anti-war organizations, members and supporters of the Panthers, and many others (Chaberski 1975, 109).

The validity of this statement is not of concern to this article; notwithstanding, multiple accounts suggest the Black Panther Party embraced Battle. For more see Jeffries (2010) and Jones (1998). Gillo Pontecorvo, the Italian director of the film, noted that “revolutionary people—like the Black Panthers and the Cuban people—they like these films [including Battle] and are glad they are being shown. The people who are really fighting consider these films not a great help but a help and even beyond aesthetic judgment” (Pontecorvo et al. 1974, 6).

Saadi Yacef, a former commander of the Algerian resistance fighters, proposed the kernel for what became The Battle of Algiers (directed by Pontecorvo and written by Pontecorvo and Franco Solinas); Yacef of the Casbah Film Company of Algiers and Antonio Musu of Igor Films of Rome produced the film (Srivastava 2005b, 109; Mellen 1973, 1). For interviews with Yacef, see Dingeman (2008) and Harrison (2007).

Pontecorvo gained acclaim for The Battle of Algiers, which received a Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival. The film earned him a nomination for best director at the Academy Awards and received two other Academy Award nominations. Perhaps appropriate to the topics at hand, he had “himself fought as a partisan in Milan during the anti-fascist resistance of the Second World War as commander of the Third Brigade. After the war, he joined the Italian Communist Party, serving as Youth Secretary,” which he left in 1956; as Joan Mellen wrote in 1973, “Today he considers himself an ‘Independent of the Left'” (1973, 12). After Battle he directed Burn! (1969), another anticolonial film set on the fictional Caribbean island of Queimada.

Nine of the defendants remained jailed until May 13, 1971 (Chaberski 1975, 71). Moreover, a superseding indictment dated November 17, 1969, added 18 new counts and a 22nd defendant, Fred Richardson, Deputy of Information for the BPP (Chaberski 1975, 83). Among the defendants were six other important Party officers, including the head of the Harlem Chapter: Lumumba Shakur (Chaberski 1975, 17). The initial indictment reads, Shakur was “a member of the Central Staff of the Black Panther Party. William King was a Lieutenant for Security in the organization. Richard Moore was a Field Marshall for the New York area and a member of the Central Staff. Michael Tabor was a Captain in the New York area and a member of the Central Staff. Curtis Powell was a Captain for Security for New York State, Robert Collier was Minister of Education and Larry Mack was the Section Leader of the Queens branch of the Black Panther Party” (Supreme Court of the State of New York 1969a).

The BPP did engage these movements; however, as indicated by the Judge’s continual denial of the trial’s political bent, and his denial that the BPP was on trial, this information is irrelevant to the case. Certainly, this is not to say the case was not political. In “Political Trials in the Legal Order: A Political Scientist’s Perspective” Nathan Hakman numbers the “hundreds of Black Panther Party cases,” among them the Panther 21, as exemplary “political or ideological trials,” a “type of trial whose theoretical relevance is only beginning to be recognized” (1972, 73–74). Ron Christenson includes the trial in Political Trials in History: From Antiquity to the Present (1991). The BPP, not surprisingly, considered the trial political: The cover story of the June 7, 1969 issue of the BPP’s newspaper, The Black Panther, read “Free the NY 21 and All Political Prisoners.” This issue also included an article titled “The Bust of the 21 was to Stop the Free Breakfast Program Also,” which intersects with the defense counsel's narrative (outlined in the following paragraph).

The aforementioned monographs on the Panther 21 engage the prevalence of race and racial bias in and around the trial, for instance in the bail trial and grand jury. For more see Ginger (1971), and Lefcourt (1969).

The nine defendants who were indicted but not tried are: Eddie Joseph and Lonnie Epps (treated as “Youthful Offenders”); Lee Berry (treated separately because of illness); Donald Weems (Kuwasi Balagoon) and Richard Harris (who were in a New Jersey jail for other charges). Mshina (Thomas Berry), Sekou Odinga (Nathaniel Burns), Fred Richardson, and Larry Mack escaped. Richardson surrendered during the trial (Zimroth 1974, 13).

Edwin Kennebeck listed the jury members in his book as follows: "Ingram Fox. Composer, lecturer; black. William Beiser. History teacher; white. Stephen Chaberski. Graduate student (political science); white. Edwin Kennebeck. Editor; white. Frederick Hills. Editor; white. Nils Rasmussen. Television film editor; white. Hiram Irizarry. Maintenance man; Puerto Rican. Eleter Yanes. Clerk, New York State Insurance Company; black. Benjamin Giles. Retired longshoreman; black. Charles Bowser. Welfare Department supervisor; black. James Butters. High-school teacher; white. Joseph Gary. Post Office clerk; black. Alternate Jurors: Claudette Sullivan. Finance officer; black. Joseph Rainato. Mechanical engineer; white. Obie Tunstall. Post Office clerk; black. Murray Schneider. New York State Employment Service interviewer; white" (Kennebeck 1973, 13).

This reaction is plausible, and similar ones are verifiable within the military and defense community. Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Price, current Director of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy (also known as West Point), for instance, teaches the film in his classes. In a conversation with Madeline Dobie, he noted that during discussions about the film he “encourages students to interrogate the concept of terrorism and the definition of terrorist. He also said that while most cadets identify with the French, some end up taking the side of the Algerian insurgents.” For this citation and more on the film’s embrace by the U.S. military and Department of Defense see Dobie (2016).

According to Pontecorvo, the producers insisted that he and Solinas remove the “close-up of a child—clearly a future victim—eating ice-cream” before the first explosion in the sequence. Pontecorvo refused to cut the scene despite their pleas and notes: “since reviews from all over the world said it was an objective film, I say that thanks are also due to the ice-cream scene” (Srivastava 2005b, 111).

More recently, film scholar Carl Plantinga wrote: “Individual viewers’ emotional responses to a movie are in part idiosyncratic. Yet a well-made movie, presumably, has the capacity to guide viewers’ affective responses, at least up to a point.” However, viewers’ reactions to a film “may not align with what the filmmakers seemingly intended” (Plantinga 2013, 107). For a broad view of intersections of film and affect theory, see Fisher (2017).

As Dobie notes, if The Battle of Algiers “undoubtedly inspired both real and armchair revolutionaries in the 1960s and ‘70s, tolerance of revolutionary violence has waned, not least in response to the proliferation of jihadist movements” (2016). Pontecorvo’s desire to “endorse terrorism” was couched within a particular frame and era (Srivastava 2005a, 112), though he states that Ben M’Hidi makes a vital point in the film: “Wars aren’t won with terrorism, neither wars nor revolutions. Terrorism is a beginning but afterward all the people must act” (Said 2000b, 24). Moreover, I would be remiss not to mention that discourse concerning the definitions and uses of the term terrorism and its racialized applications today are on the rise, as explored in Aaronson (2019); Erlenbusch-Anderson (2018); and Corbin (2017). Relatedly, the term “racial terrorism” has gained increasing attention; see, for instance, Tolnay and Beck (2018) and Editorial Board (2015).

This is not to say that the BPP was uninterested in challenging the "power structure," and the organization did not reject violence. For one, Zimroth, who attended the trial nearly every day, wrote: “By the end of the trial, I was convinced that the prosecution had not framed a case against the defendants…My impressions were strengthened when, after the acquittal, one of the defense lawyers told me that several defendants had, in fact, tried to blow up police stations and shoot at policemen, as charged” (1974, 6). Furthermore, Eldridge Cleaver stated clearly in a documentary made while he was in Algiers: “The Black Panther Party is for overthrowing the United States government” (Klein 1970, 00:14:42-00:14:45). In a 1969 public panel in Algiers, after referencing the police offensive on members of the BPP in New York, he noted: “We recognize that since the United States of America is the backbone of oppression in the world that the blows that we strike against the empire there will also aid the liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as we aid ourselves in Babylon”—a statement met with huge applause (in Klein 1970, 00:26:09-00:27:02). Of course, this is rhetoric, not action. My great thanks to daniel reuter for introducing me to William Klein’s documentary.

On New York City’s color line see Fortner (2015) and Flores and Lobo (2013).

The Organization of African Unity selected Algeria “as the host country for Africa’s liberation movements,” and its invitation to African American artists to participate in the First Pan African Cultural Festival signified for Kathleen Cleaver that the country acknowledged “the link between the struggles of Africans and Afro-Americans.” Elaine Klein, from the U.S. and with ties to the Algerian government, ensured invitations to the Festival for several high-ranking members of the Party (Cleaver, 1998 212–213, 219–220).