Civil Rights: Pharaoh's Lesson

"Black men," cried the speaker, must unite to overthrow their white "oppressors," becoming "like panthers—smiling, cunning, scientific, striking by night and sparing no one!" Max Stanford, a youthful member of New York's new, still minuscule Black Panther Party, an offshoot of the Student Nonviolent Co ordinating Committee, was outlining his own wild strategy for black power before a Harlem audience last week, but his words carried an unintended irony. As the existence of the Black Panthers and the extremes of Stanford's language illustrate, unity—the kind of unity that inspired the successful...