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Occupying Army. A November staff report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence quotes one Panther spokesman on the key to Panther ideology. "We start with the basic definition," he said, "that black people in America are a colonized people in every sense of the term and that white America is an organized imperialist force holding black people in colonial bondage." From that quasi-Marxist assumption, absurd to most whites but increasingly appealing to some blacks, the Panthers conclude that the police are an occupying army. As the staff study puts it, for the Panthers "violence against the police and other agents of symbols of authority is not crime but heroism, not merely an unlawful act but a revolutionary gesture against an illegitimate government." When Huey Newton and Bobby Scale started the Black Panther Party in Oakland in October 1966, their founding statement ended with the opening section of the Declaration of Independence.
Much of Panther rhetoric is couched in Marxist-Maoist terms. One of the few national Panther leaders not in jail or in exile is Raymond Masai Hewitt, the 28-year-old ex-Marine who is Panther Minister of Education. He told TIME San Francisco Bureau Chief Jesse Birnbaum: "We know we can learn from the struggles of China, Korea and Russia. We use it as a guide to action. An ideology has to be a living thing. But the Black Panther Party is not really Maoist." Still, while they may not take all of their own inflammatory rhetoric seriously, other Americans cannot help taking them at their word.
The Panthers have tangled increasingly with police in a dozen cities, and in most cases there is the characteristic dispute over who started it. Panthers contend that cops have regularly harassed and provoked them since the early days of the movement in Oakland. Law-enforcement officials in Washington point to Panther attacks on police in Jersey City, and to the New York indictment of 22 Panthers last April for plotting to kill policemen and dynamite police stations, stores and a railroad right-of-way. Blacks note angrily that 15 of the New York suspects are being held in lieu of $100,000 bail, while four young whites arrested for actually setting dynamite charges in Manhattan office buildings last month had bail put at from $20,000 to $50,000.
Incipient Tragedy. Society has a duty to defend itself against private armies; there can be no argument that Panther arms caches should be broken up just like those of the Mafia or the Ku Klux Klan or the Minutemen. But because of the special history of injustice to blacks, there is incipient tragedy in the use of conventional police tactics against them. Besides, says Lou Smith, a black who heads Operation Bootstrap in Los Angeles, "the police don't use that kind of stuff on the Klan or the Minutemen. You don't find police shooting them down." It is, says Daniel Walker, head of the commission that studied police brutality at the 1968 Chicago convention, "one of those unfortunate situations in which one story is almost totally believed by the white community and another story is almost totally believed by the black community."