From Latin America to Africa: Defining the “World Revolution” in The Black Panther

Abstract

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party offered an alternative discourse to the Civil Rights Movement, primarily using Black power rhetoric, Black nationalism and internationalism, and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary politics. This article provides a historical analysis of the Party's international news coverage, published between 1967 and 1970, in its newspaper The Black Panther Black Community News Service. Although previous literature has largely analyzed the Party's use of print media, less work has analyzed how the Party's newspaper became a tool for internationalizing the U.S. Black Power Movement (BPM), immediately following the launching of The Black Panther. An analysis of the newspapers’ first 3 years of publication locates the 1960s BPM within a global movement focusing on both race and class struggle. Although there is little evidence that suggests the newspaper had a significant effect on fostering an international BPM, its existence is important. This article shows how the newspaper helped shape the discourse of race and class by highlighting how The Black Panther informed their members and other readers about the organization and its messages, but also educated readers about international affairs (particularly about socialist and liberation movements abroad). Such a project underscores the importance of the relationship between media history and social movements.

KEYTERMS:

• African American studies
• Black Power Movement
• internationalism
• media
• social movements

Notes

1. The history of the Black press dates back to 1827, with the emergence of Freedom's Journal.

2. On the second page of the November 2, 1968 issue, the paper published a drawing by Emory Douglas that called for U.S. imperialism to be “removed from the ghetto, from Africa, Asia, Latin America, by way of the Grave.” Thus, imperialism and racism were concepts that could not be separated from each other and were part of the Black experience in America and around the world.