Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panther Party in North Korea

THE BLACK PANTHER’S SECRET NORTH KOREAN FETISH

DID YOU KNOW THAT THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY HAD A DEEP AND LONG-RUNNING AFFECTION FOR KIM IL SUNG AND NORTH KOREA'S 'JUCHE' IDEOLOGY? NO, NEITHER DID WE...

by Benjamin R. Young , December 20, 2012

BROKEN WINE BOTTLES AND HYPODERMIC NEEDLES ARE VERY EFFECTIVE. PORK CHOP AND CHICKEN BONES CAN EVEN BE UTILIZED AS WEAPONS. THIS IS ‘JUCHE’ RELYING ON WHAT YOU HAVE, TO SUSTAIN YOUR RESISTANCE.

Or so reads a Black Panther newspaper article from February 1970. A year earlier, the Panthers discovered the Juche Idea after Eldridge Cleaver and Black Panther Party’s (BPP) deputy minister of defense, Byron Booth, visited North Korea as delegates to the eight-day World Conference of Anti-Imperialist Journalists.

But why did North Korea attract the attention of the Panthers? Three points help explain some of the attractive qualities of Kim Il Sung’s leadership to the extremist group during the late 60s and early 1970s:

First, North Korea’s small size and its geographic location in the middle of four powerful nations (China, the USSR, Japan, and the United States which still has troops stationed in South Korea), was similar to the situation in which the Panthers saw themselves. Both were relatively small powers in the midst of formidable foes.

Secondly, North Korea’s ideology of Juche (roughly meaning independence, autonomy and self-reliance) appealed to the Panthers as they too stressed self-reliance and independence.

Finally, the Panthers represented North Korea as a “socialist paradise” in its official newspaper, The Black Panther. And, in doing so, provided a model for democratic values to which the United States ascribed but did not live up to.

Scary, huh, but North Korea was once a model of democracy to a group of radical Americans!

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From the autumn of 1969 to the winter of 1971  the Panthers identified Kim Il Sung’s Juche Idea, rather than the teachings of Mao Zedong, as the most effective application of Marxism-Leninism. The Panthers utilized the slipperiness of Juche as a way to evade the Chinese and Soviet lines of Marxism- Leninism – much in the same way, some argue, the North Koreans used Juche. In the their official newspaper, Black Panther, it was stated:

After careful investigation on the international scene, it is our considered opinion that it is none other than Comrade Kim Il Sung who is brilliantly providing the most profound Marxist-Leninist analysis, strategy, and tactical method for the total destruction of imperialism and the liberation of the oppressed peoples in our time.

BPP’s minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, also explained in a 1970 interview that,

To just take the dry Marxist analysis as it exists is not functional for us… We are in a situation where we have to apply there [sic] universal principles [referring to Marxism-Leninism] to our specific situation in a way that has never been done before…It was a major breakthrough to relate to the whole concept of Juche.

The Panthers were so enamored with North Korea’s “socialist paradise” and its healthcare system that in early 1970 Eldridge sent his wife Kathleen Cleaver and their son to North Korea so that she could “receive the proper rest and medical care necessary at this time.” In Pyongyang, Kathleen gave birth to a baby girl on July 31, 1970. The Cleavers, in a clear attempt to “Koreanize” their daughter’s name, named her Joju Younghi.  Never missing an opportunity to speak of the triumphs of the socialist system, Kathleen Cleaver spoke of the tremendous medical and childcare that she received while in the DPRK. She noted:

I have received while here the most excellent and thorough medical attention in my life, and been afforded the most pleasant and comfortable living conditions for myself and my family.

In 1970, Eldridge Cleaver once again participated in the World Conference of Anti-Imperialist Journalists. This time, Cleaver traveled with Elaine Brown, and nine other Americans of various radical left organizations, to the conference held in North Korea, North Vietnam, and China. Following the trip, Brown acknowledged that the “the entire [North Korean] countryside has electricity in all houses” and that “most of the people even in the countryside have television.”

Brown contrasted the oppressed situation of the working class in America with that of North Koreans thriving under socialism. She contended that,

The people who live on cooperative farms actually live at a much higher living standard than the average person in the United States who would be involved in farming work, or even a worker…Each person, for example, is provided already with heath care and medical facilities, with child care, with housing, with some clothing allotment, with a free educational system up through what we would call high school and even college education.

Brown concluded by noting that,

Every working woman receives 77 days of maternity leave. These human things, automatic for every single person in this society, are the very things that people in our society struggle for.

Brown represented North Korea as a land free of the strains plaguing the common person in the racist, capitalist West.

In stark contrast to the BPP’s overwhelmingly positive representation of North Korea, the Panthers portrayed South Korea as an oppressive American puppet regime bound to fall under the uprising of revolutionary South Korean groups. The Panthers labeled South Korean military dictator Park Chung-hee as a “filthy pro-American and pro-Japanese double henchman” who is “the most faithful running dog of U.S. imperialism in all its nakedness.”

Similar to North Korea’s own propaganda efforts, the Panthers insisted that that the South Korean people suffered from poverty and starvation.  Indeed, Brown evoked the famous North Korean “Nothing to Envy” slogan when she said,

In North Korea, the people say they have nothing to envy anybody in the world. They are getting everything they need, while just a few miles away, in the South, people who speak the same language are starving.

The Black Panthers from the fall of 1969 to the winter of 1971 illustrated the message that Kim Il Sung and North Korea were the most exemplary and loyal revolutionary brethren to the BPP. But why was this love affair so short lived?

Well, the love affair never completely ended. Articles devoted to North Korea, Kim Il Sung, and the Juche Idea merely became less frequent. After January 1971, The Black Panther still devoted occasional sections to events happening on the Korean peninsula, the works of Kim Il Sung, and even North Korea’s support of women’s rights. However, internal turmoil and CIA infiltration of the Panthers didn’t take long to significantly weaken the organization. So much so, that the Panthers had to focus on the cohesiveness of their group rather than diplomatic relations with socialist Asian nations.

In an unlikely relationship, the BPP found a great ally in the North Koreans. Both sides benefited from the interaction. The Panthers used North Korea as a model of true socialism that after revolution, America could one day aspire to. In addition, North Korea’s ideology of Juche fit the needs of the Panthers. It allowed the Panthers to avoid the Soviet and Chinese lines of Marxism-Leninism and advocate self-reliance, a principle that the Panthers espoused. The North Koreans used the The Black Panther as an outlet to disseminate propaganda to Americans. In addition, the North Koreans:

Had the capability to reach, develop, penetrate, and influence dissident groups in the United States.  The North Koreans probably had a capability to place agents, using South Korean or Japanese identities, in the United States and Canada.

As Frank J. Rafalko in his book, MH/Chaos makes clear, the primary target of the North Koreans would have been the Korean-American community. However, there does not appear to have been any placement of North Korean agents in America under the auspices of the BPP.

Eldridge Cleaver in North Vietnam

U.S. People's Anti-Imperialist Delegation

"I led the forbidden explorationTo mysterious Asia MajorBy the U.S. PeoplesAnti-Imperialist Delegation,A flock of peaceful geeseSowing seeds against the war,And resurrecting broken bridgesOver broken faith betweenWicked West and Inscrutable East."-Eldridge Cleaver (1935-1998), “Gangster Cigarettes”

In 1970, Black Panther Party Leader Eldridge Cleaver led a delegation of American journalists and activists on a two and a half month tour of North Korea, North Viet Nam, and the People’s Republic of China.

At the time, the U.S. government prohibited travel to these socialist countries. However, the individuals of the U.S. People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation were critics of U.S. military and political policies and skeptical of the mainstream media’s representation of America’s Cold War enemies.

Espousing a concept of “people’s diplomacy,” they challenged the ability of the U.S. government to represent their interests. Instead, they sought direct, people-to-people, contact with socialist Asian societies.

Who participated on the U.S. People’s Anti-Imperialist Delegation?

The 11-person delegation included a cross-section of American radicalism. They represented the:

• Black Liberation movement
• Antiwar movement
• Women’s Liberation movement
• Alternative Media
• Asian-American movement

Why Did Eldridge Cleaver Initiate This Journey?

Cleaver had been living in exile since a police shootout following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. While abroad in Cuba and Algeria, socialist Third World forces, like the North Vietnamese, the Southern National Liberation Front, and the North Koreans, courted Cleaver to develop political partnerships. They subsequently invited Cleaver and representatives from the American Left to visit their countries.

To the left is a page from the Black Panther Party's newspaper showing the leaders of some socialist countries.

How Did the Cleaver Delegation See Socialist Asia Through “Anti-Imperialist” Eyes?

The concept of “radical orientalism” highlights the ways in which the Anti-Imperialist delegation sought out opportunities to more fully understand and critique what they regarded as the imperialist policies of the United States.

Radical orientalism was proposed by Professor Tzu-Chun Wu to "describe the phenomenon of American activists of the post-Second World War generation who subverted and reinscribed Orientalist traditions of understanding Asia. They continued the practice of cultivating ideas and fantasies about the “Orient” as the polar opposite of the Occident and using these projections to more clearly define themselves. Though they personally sought an identification and connection with socialist Asian countries, they nevertheless reconstructed and highlighted differences between “revolutionary” Asia and mainstream America.” ¹

In addition, they wanted to cultivate their identification with anti-colonial and socialist movements in Asia.

1) Witnessing the Impact of U.S. Warfare

One of the goals of the Delegation was to more fully understand the nature of U.S. military and political policies, particularly in Korea and Viet Nam. Rather than presuming western innocence and heroism, they observed the evidence of U.S. imperialist guilt.

As one of the delegation members, Alex Hing said: “Our country had committed so may despicable crimes in that country [Viet Nam] and yet these people were the warmenst, the most loving people that you’d ever meet… They made it very clear that even though they took us to these museums and things [about U.S. bombing in Viet Nam], and they showed us these sites where we couls see the devastation of what the U.S. did, they thay harbored n o ill feelings for the American people… You go back after that and you dedicate your life to ending the war.”²

2) Observing the Development of Socialist Modernity

Traveling to socialist Asian nations like North Korea and the People’s Republic of China allowed delegation members to catch a glimpse of how these nations developed their economies, political systems, cultural values, and social structures. In essence, the delegation had the opportunity to examine a modern alternative to capitalism.

A member of the delegation, Elaine Brown, emphasized the development of the socialist countries they visited. In an interview, she said that in contrast to the U.S. “there were no homeless beggars on the streets of Pyongyang, no prostitutes, no hustlers. There were no gambling houses or cheap bars, no rundown houses or apartment buildings. Connected to every workplace were a free clinic and a free child-care facility or school.”³

Brown also explained that in rural regions of North Korea “the entire countryside has electricity… And in comparison to the United States… the people who live on cooperative farms actually live on a much higher living standard… because each person, for example, is provided already with health care and medical facilities, with childcare, with housing, with some clothing allotment, with a free educational system up through what we would call high school and even college education. So that the so-called peasant is not living at a low standard at all.”⁴

When they travelled to Viet Nam, the delegation saw that the women were fighters as much as mothers. They viewed this position on women as another benefit of a modern socialist state. To the right is an image of a Viet Namese woman operating an anti-aircraft gun.

3) Revolutionary Women

The Delegation, which had 7 female members out of a total of 11, was also interested in the lives of Asian women. Instead of the passive, exotic image of Asian women, the U.S. delegation came to meet strong revolutionary women who were engaged in building socialist societies and fighting wars of liberation. With the Women’s Liberation movement growing in the United States, the Anti-Imperialist delegation sought out role models of female leadership and activism.

In China, Pat Sumi (shown wearing a Mao suit to the left)credited the Cultural Revolution for challenging social hierarchy and thereby transforming gender hierarchy. She said in China "[e]very human being is a creative and beautiful and complete human being able to make collective contributions to well-being of all the other human beings on the planet earth. Women in China have gone through this whole thing. They dress almost like men do, jackets and slacks, because it's more convenient. They have no fears in meetings about speaking up. It doesn't mean that all the difference between sexes have been erased or that romantic love has been erased. Politically and ideologically people are equal and united as a class." ⁵

The delegation encountered many women warriors in Viet Nam and Pat Sumi explained that "[w]omen in Vietnam have a tradition of being liberation fighters.. We met this 17 year old woman. In her village there was an all-woman guerilla unit that had shot down 2 American airplanes, while taking responsibility for the rice fields around the battery where the anti-aircraft guns are. They produced more on that rice field than any other comparable plot in the village. And the whole group sang poetry and songs for us."⁶

Impact on Delegation Members

To the right is an image of a mother holding a gun and her baby. She is one of the women warriors of Viet Nam.

These women were thus fighters, farmers, and folk artists.

Visiting Asia and viewing the contrasts between the U.S. and socialist countries gave the delegates a better understanding of themselves.

As Pat Sumi, one of the delegation members, explained: “One of the things about being raised in an imperialist country is… somehow you are almost completely unconscious of your beliefs and values… You think they are so normal that you are unconscious of them. What happens when you go in a delegation like that to a foreign country is you finally become acutely aware of what it means to be American and what it means to be a non-American.”

Navigating the Perilous Mental Landscape in the Crazy House Called America

Like the earthquake in Japan, man too is in mental motion, a mind quake of the most devastating degree that is rocking his mental equilibrium to the core!
We must be aware of the times and what must be done. A blind man named Ray Charles told us "the world is in an uproar, the danger zone is everywhere...." And so it is, ancestor Ray, there is turbulence in the land and in man, woman and children. As the earth enters another 25,000 year cycle of history with the coming New Age of high spiritual consciousness, there are many who remain deaf, dumb and blind to present and future events, even though the news is full of rapidly changing events in the global village. One would need to be in worse shape than Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder not to see the earth is in transformation, even Nature itself. The ice is melting, the sea rising, the forests burning, earthquakes and tsunamis , drought, famine, pestilence, in diverse places, just as Jesus predicted.

Apparently, many do not believe what Jesus said even when they see events he predicted before their very eyes, on the news, Twitter, Facebook, Cable TV and elsewhere. He said mother would be against child and child against mother and father. Did he not say brother would be against brother and sister against sister? And do we not see this in our social relations today.

It is crystal clear to me we are in times in which a friend is no longer a friend, a wife and husband no longer wife and husband. There is no love between them. Husbands and wives say the horrible things to each other. Daughters and sons say the most wretched things to their parents, often when the parents are helping them.

But when the danger zone is everywhere, no one, no relationships are exempt from the turmoil sweeping the old order out and ushering in the New Era. But there is an almost organic relationship between the earth quaking and the minds of men, women and children becoming totally unbalanced. In this time of radical change of Nature and man, those with no understanding shall become unglued, losing their fragile mental equilibrium or simply tripping out. Ultimately, they become a danger to themselves and others and must be committed, for they are not the person we knew only yesterday. Today they are a total stranger who does not know us, cannot even recognize us, yet we have known them since childhood. They could be a sibling yet they do not act like there is any blood relationship between us. We behave like total strangers.

It could be parent/child relationships that come to such a low point children will sue parents or visa versa. In short the love is gone. Amiri Baraka tells us in his play A Black Mass, "Where the souls print should be there is only a cellulose pouch of disgusting habits...."

As we walk the streets be very careful what you say to people, for they are on edge, on the precipice, ready to strike out at the slightest perceived negative incident, or wrong word uttered.
Yes, they are ready to kill, so be aware as you make your daily round.

The political/economic atmosphere is charged with venom, but it is misplaced aggression, for no one is going after the bankers, the loan sharks, the Wall Street financiers who were casino gamblers with the wealth of the people, stealing 13 trillion dollars in the sub prime housing scam.
And yet hardly a banker is in jail, meanwhile 2.4 million mostly poor are incarcerated for petty crimes, additionally they suffer drug abuse and mental illness, not to mention lack of proper legal representation at the time of their trials. The only white man doing time is the one who stole from the rich, not the poor. Those who robbed the poor are yet receiving multimillion dollar bonuses while 30 million workers are unemployed and millions are now homeless.

It is this atmosphere that is so unsettling to the mental state of those who were already suffering stress from the general hostile environment, from bad food, the media dispensing
information from the world of make believe and promoting the addiction to white supremacy conspicuous consumption

How do we move from problem to solution, from addiction to recovery, from sickness to healing?
The Buddhists says knowledge plus the right action. We must first understand the time and what must be done. These are perilous times, very dangerous, thus one must tip through the tulips, through the mind fields that lay before us, behind us, to the right and to the left.

We must practice eternal vigilance and stay on guard against being deceived. There are those who wish to deceive us so that we remain victims of the slave system. They will not tell us all the institutions are exhausted, political, economic, educational, religious, marital. None of these shall continue with business as usual. They must and shall undergo radical structural change, if not simply thrown into the dustbin of history where they belonged long ago.

Those not prepared for radical change shall be blown by the wayside where they shall inhabit the lower realms of an animal existence until they die or recover from savagery and come into the era of civility and spirituality beyond religiosity.

Those who are a danger to themselves and others will need to be confined to a program of long term recovery, a rehabilitation of their disgusting habits, namely greed, ego, pride, lust, arrogance, and other deadly sins, and most importantly the inability to practice freedom, justice and equality, constitutionally unable to share the wealth and practice democracy or the consent of the governed.

The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end, or rather what goes around comes around. What we are witnessing and experiencing is not linear time but circular, for we shall continue, but only those who are able to jump out of the box of the old structures into the new.

The fearless ones, they shall be successful. Those not motivated by the illusions of the monkey mind shall be successful. We pray for the others who persist in their inordinancy, blindly wandering on, as the Qur'an says.
--Marvin X
4/7/11

OPINION

Breeding mental illness in the US

Rampant over-prescribing of drugs contributes to a system that is better at producing disorders than rectifying them. Last Modified: 10 Apr 2013 09:49

Belen Fernandez Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.

"Standard psychiatric diagnoses… do not correspond to meaningful clusters of symptoms in the real world" and can counter-productively result in "further stigma, discrimination and social exclusion" for their recipients [Reuters]

In a recent article on the BBC News website, Professor Peter Kinderman - head of the Institute of Psychology, Health and Society at the University of Liverpool - warns that the forthcoming edition of theAmerican Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual "will lower many diagnostic thresholds and increase the number of people in the general population seen as having a mental illness". According to Kinderman, the manual - scheduled for publication in May 2013 - constitutes a dangerous effort to pathologise emotions and other symptoms of human existence and will exacerbate the rampant over-prescribing of drugs that already occurs "despite significant side-effects and poor evidence of their effectiveness". The practice of attributing emotional distress and other phenomena to alleged cerebral/biological abnormalities rather than to social and psychological causes, writes Kinderman, is particularly problematic: "Standard psychiatric diagnoses… do not correspond to meaningful clusters of symptoms in the real world" and can counter-productively result in "further stigma, discrimination and social exclusion" for their recipients. Regarding the impending updates to the psychiatric manual, Kinderman notes that "[t]he new diagnosis of 'disruptive mood dysregulation disorder' will turn childhood temper tantrums into symptoms of a mental illness", while relaxed criteria for "generalised anxiety disorder" will turn "the worries of everyday life into targets for medical treatment". Normal grief will undergo conversion into "major depressive disorder". Additional cutting-edge maladies will include "internet addiction" and "sex addiction". No guidelines are apparently provided as to how to go about diagnosing societies that obsessively pathologise routine aspects of individual life. Societal diagnostics  Incidentally, the tendency toward over-diagnosis and over-prescription that dominates the mental health care scene in the US contributes to a system that is better at producing disorders than rectifying them. For example, it is not difficult to see how anxiety that otherwise would not be present can be generated by inculcating persons with the fear that something is always wrong with them and that it requires purchase of a substance, service, or gadget to fix - a process aided by ubiquitous advertising for antidepressants. The profitable endurance of the depression industry in particular is presumably ensured by the very nature of contemporary society - not least by the isolation of the individual who has been conditioned to believe that self-made success and material gains trump inter-human bonds in importance. To be sure, neoliberal policies dependent on the obstruction of communal solidarity facilitate a mass alienation from human reality and deprive individuals of psychological support networks enjoyed in certain other cultures. It could be argued that alienation in the US begins at birth, an event too often characterised by scheduled Caesarean sections, the immediate removal of newborns from the vicinity of their mothers in defiance of natural bonding needs, and hospital distribution of infant formula encouraging mothers to simplify their lives by administering expensive and potentially toxic material to their offspring rather than the free nutrition that is generally located in their own breasts. And it is pretty much downhill from there.  Sequestration will damage US social safety net The "socialisation" process of children increasingly involves fundamentally anti-socialising activities such as video games and other technological distractions, the all-pervasiveness of which renders the proliferation of attention deficit disorder somewhat less than surprising. Of course, this does not stop ADD from being treated by and large as an individual mental defect rather than a societally induced condition. Energetic children are reformed into automatons via the fanatical prescription of pharmaceuticals with side effects ranging from depression to sudden death, while a cultural insistence on individual triumph and competition over collaboration likely contributes to such manifestations of emotional insecurity as the institutionalised practice of bullying at US schools. Luckily for drug companies and other entities that profit from mental disturbance, the New York Timesreported in February with regard to victims of bullying and bullies themselves that "researchers have found that [an] elevated risk of psychiatric trouble extends into adulthood, sometimes even a decade after the intimidation has ended". Disconnecting from the human condition  My own personal experience with mental health issues in the US includes a prolonged panic attack I suffered in high school in the late 90s. Convinced for a period of six months that I was on the verge of spontaneous death, I would hyperventilate, unceasingly check my pulse, and hide in bathroom stalls. After later living abroad for many years in locations less estranged from reality, I concluded that the attacks had been hypochondriac fallout of extreme anxiety over the possibility of stigmatisation by society for exhibiting any indication of physical or psychological weakness - such as anxiety itself. Of course, the structure and habits of other societies and cultures can also have adverse effects on the human nervous system; however, the position of the US as global superpower means that its acute unhinging from humanity contains worldwide ramifications. For example, the mass production of isolated persons lacking empathy naturally facilitates the frequent military devastation of populations abroad - a hobby that has been deemed more lucrative than, say,providing health care to US children. The agricultural imperialism of US-based corporations like Monsanto, patron saint of the genetic modification of food, has also proved an effective means of global population control, facilitating thesuicide of hundreds of thousands of farmers in India. Obviously, a nutritional reliance on modified and artificial ingredients and other materials that do not technically qualify as food does not bode well for biological - and therefore also psychological - processes. The quest for profit at the expense of the functioning of the body is further evidence of the US disconnect from the human condition, which is reinforced by schizophrenic electronic multi-tasking and the general reduction of interpersonal relations to a barrage of mobile phone beeps and Facebook notifications. In my interview last year with renowned Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra, he commented on the contemporary deterioration of the human essence: "Our capacity for uncritical love has been expended recklessly in recent years on the free market… This was the false god we were instructed to worship during the era of globalisation and most of us duly obliged, even the least resourceful and economically underprivileged peoples, dazzled by our new goods and gadgets, the routinely updated models of mobile phones… [Now] we can see more clearly how a tiny minority has enriched itself, leaving many others feeling cheated, and exposed to deprivation and suffering."  Professor Kinderman notes in his BBC News article on mental illness that therapy constitutes a "humane and effective alternative… to traditional psychiatric diagnoses". Any truly effective therapeutic approach, however, would require a thorough examination of the inhumane context in which minds function - and, presumably, a comprehensive systemic rewiring. Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, released by Verso in 2011. She is a member of the Jacobin Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, The Baffler, Al Akhbar English and many other publications.  Follow her on Twitter: @MariaBelen_Fdez The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Last Poets and the Black Panthers

After the Party: Music and the Black Panthers

Musicians don't often end up on FBI watch lists, but the Last Poets did, thanks to their links with the Black Panthers. Dorian Lynskey looks back at a time when pop and politics collided as never before

• • 
    Dorian Lynskey
  • The Guardian, 
  • 
    
  • Thursday 2 September 2010 17.45 EDT

The Last Poets in 1970, left to right, Umar Bin Hassan, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin and Abiodun Oyewole. Photograph: GAB Archive/Redferns

One day last December, Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets attended a gathering in Chicago to commemorate local Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, who was shot dead by the police 40 years earlier. There were about 30 people, including the widows of Hampton and fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and former members of radical groups such as Weatherman. "We laughed and drank wine and talked about what we all had been through," Hassan says. "I'm glad I made it. It was good to see a lot of those people still living, you know?"

They were survivors of a turbulent period. In 1968, just two years after Oakland residents Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panthers, FBI director J Edgar Hoover called the party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and set about spending millions of dollars to infiltrate, sabotage and divide it. By the mid 70s, it was in terminal decline, and Hampton was far from the only fatality.

The Panthers' legacy has been fiercely debated ever since. Some people claim the leadership, especially Newton, were their own worst enemies: paranoid hotheads prone to violence and cronyism. Others regard them as heroes who gave young African-Americans power and pride in the face of endemic racism, only to be brought down by Hoover's machinations. A new project, Tongues on Fire, aims to accentuate the positive, bringing together the party's official artist and minister of culture, Emory Douglas, with musicians such as the Last Poets, the Roots and jazz saxophonist David Murray.

Valerie Malot, a Frenchwoman who is Murray's wife and producer, conceived Tongues on Fire after attending an activist convention in Oakland and seeing Bobby Seale selling a Panther-themed hot sauce named after the famous 60s war cry Burn Baby Burn. "I was really shocked when you've tried all your life to change people's conditions and you end up selling hot sauce at a convention," she says. Malot's focus on Douglas makes sense. He came to work on the Black Panther newspaper when the party had barely a dozen members, and the vivid, revolutionary designs he produced during the subsequent decade are part of the era's visual vocabulary. But the Panthers' relationship with music was much more complex.

When Newton and Seale were preparing the first edition of the newspaper in 1966, they listened obsessively to "brother Bobby" Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, especially Ballad of a Thin Man, which Newton read, rather fancifully, as a parable of racist oppression. At this point, black artists were still using code words such as "respect" and "pushing" when dealing with the subject of race. Even after blackness entered pop's lexicon via James Brown's Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud, Newton and Seale's rhetoric, and Douglas's artwork, only found their musical analogue with the arrival of the Last Poets.

Formed in Harlem in 1968, the Last Poets lost most of their founding members before they even recorded their debut album. The classic lineup on the Poets' eponymous 1970 release consisted of Abiodun Oyewole, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin and Umar Bin Hassan. In his hometown of Akron, Ohio, Hassan had been an angry young man looking for direction when he saw the Panthers' first televised action: their armed entrance into the California legislature in May 1967.

"Woah," he remembers. "I was so excited to see some young black men do that. The Panthers were my first introduction to black militancy. About two months later I saw Huey Newton on the news, standing on the fenders of two cars and throwing down his fists at these white cops. I thought the revolution was going to begin and end in California. I ain't never been in a gang, but if I was going to be in a gang I wanted to be in a gang that stood up and defended the black community from racist cops."

Nobody had ever heard anything like the Last Poets. They combined the militant spirit of avant-garde jazz musicians such as Archie Shepp with the furious poetry of Amiri Baraka, who called for "poems that kill: assassin poems". Their rage was aimed at both white America ("the Statue of Liberty is a prostitute") and apathetic, unrevolutionary black people. Controversially, they called these people "niggers".

"The Last Poets out-niggered everybody," Hassan says with a throaty chuckle. "We had Wake Up Niggers, Niggers Are Scared of Revolution … Our thing was not to use that word as casually as the kids today. You got young kids who think it's OK to be a nigger. Nah, it ain't OK. We were trying to get rid of the nigger in our community and in ourselves. The difference between us and hip-hop is we had direction, we had a movement, we had people who kept our eyes on the prize. We weren't just bullshitting and jiving."

Despite zero airplay, the response to the album from those who heard it was "overwhelming" and the Panthers saw a fantastic recruitment opportunity in the Poets. "Everybody knew how much the people liked us and everybody wanted us to become a part of their thing," says Hassan. "But we kept ourselves independent." They did not need to be card-carrying members in order to be useful. "Music to [the Panthers] was something to get people's attention so they could speak," says David Murray, who was a teenager at the time. "Like a trumpet sounds and then there's a speech."

Very soon the party had a soundtrack, with such radical poets as the Watts Prophets, Nikki Giovanni and Gil Scott-Heron emerging almost simultaneously (although Scott-Heron was sceptical about "would-be revolutionaries" with "afros, handshakes and dashikis" in his song Brother). Sympathetic rock stars such as Santana and the Grateful Dead played fundraisers. The party even attempted to launch its own musical stars. Elaine Brown, a new recruit who later became the party's minister of information and, eventually, chairman, recorded a vocal jazz album called Seize the Time and a follow-up for Motown, Until We're Free. At Emory Douglas's suggestion, four San Francisco Panthers formed a Temptations-style soul group with the Marx-inspired name of the Lumpen, though songs such as Revolution Is the Only Solution and Old Pig Nixon were a long way from the Temptations in terms of chart appeal.

Unlike the Last Poets' output, this was pure propaganda music. As the Lumpen's Michael Torrance explains on the Black Panther history site It's About Time: "The music was simply another facet of service to the Party and the Revolution. Furthermore, since we were an educational cadre, rigorous study was necessary to be able to translate the ideology of the BPP into song." The musicians employed the same strategy as Douglas did with his artwork. "Huey and Bobby always said that the African-American community wasn't a reading community but they learned through observation and participation," Douglas says. "[African revolutionary] Samora Machel said you have to be able to speak in a way that a child could understand." Indeed, the Panthers' most famous song, written after Newton's arrest for murdering a police officer in 1967, was a two-line chant that even children could sing: "Black is beautiful/ Free Huey!"

In 1970, the year the Last Poets began their album with the ominous phrase "time is running out", it seemed to many US radicals, black and white alike, that revolution was imminent. But within a couple of years, the Black Panther Party was in disarray, largely thanks to the dirty tricks of the FBI. "Those who have the power always have the time and resources to get together," Hassan says. "They took their blows for a minute but then they realised, 'We gotta come back at this.'"

The agency fomented civil war between Newton and Cleaver, with bloody consequences. Douglas, who was regularly tailed by FBI agents, remembers seeing his artwork imitated on a forged pamphlet attacking another black organisation. "They tried to destroy and discredit the Black Panther Party by any means necessary," he says. "We knew what was going on but you couldn't put your finger on it." The Watts Writers Workshop, the base of the Watts Prophets, was burned to the ground by a trusted employee who, it transpired, was an FBI plant. The Last Poets were constantly monitored, as Hassan discovered years later when he saw his FBI files. "We were on President Nixon's list, the defence department list, the national security list. It kind of blew my mind."

Not all the blame, however, can be laid at the government's door. The Huey Newton who emerged from jail to retake the party leadership in late 1970 was a troubled, paranoid character who acquired a taste for cocaine and groupies and soon fell out with Cleaver. "Bobby Seale was the brains," says David Murray. "Huey Newton was an action person. He would just go and do it. That might also be why he's not alive [Newton was shot by a crack dealer in 1989]."

Despite positive achievements such as a free breakfast programme for poor children, the mood of mistrust caused Panther members to desert en masse. Elaine Brown resigned the chairmanship in 1977 after Newton approved the beating of a female party administrator. Eight years earlier she had recorded Seize the Time. Now the time was definitely past.

"We all thought we were moving towards bringing about something new, something good, for America – not just for black people, but for all people," Hassan says. "But when you started seeing one brother go one way and another brother snitching, a lot of us went back on to the streets doing what we were doing before, selling drugs or hustling, because we were disappointed." Hassan himself left the Last Poets in 1974 and became a cocaine addict, giving poetry readings in crackhouses. "Yeah man, there was a lot of disappointment."

Asked about the Panthers' balance sheet, Emory Douglas draws a long sigh. "I would say we did the best we could under the circumstances. You have to understand that never in the history of the country had any organisation stood up to the challenges in the way we did and at such a young age." David Murray thinks the party has to be seen in context. "This was a time when California was changing the world. I was a hippie, I was a Black Panther, I was in the Nation of Islam. That was how you grew up during that time – you had to dabble in each one."

Tongues on Fire demonstrates that the era's revolutionary art, visual and musical, outlasted the party that inspired it. Chaka Khan and Chic's Nile Rodgers drew from their experience as members. Bands such as Public Enemy (whose Chuck D remembers singing "Free Huey!" as a child) pitched themselves as the Panthers' heirs: "This party started right in '66/ With a pro-black radical mix." Naturally, they were fans of the Last Poets.

A few years ago, Hassan met former Panther chairman David Hilliard in Oakland. "He said, 'Do you know how important you guys were? People listened to y'all. Y'all made people want to be Panthers and join the Nation of Islam. Y'all were as important as anyone because you made people think.' It took me a long time to understand how much influence we had on that time."

Tongues on Fire: A Tribute to the Black Panthers, featuring David Murray, the Last Poets and the Roots, is at the Barbican, London, on 11 September.