Black Panther
15 minutes. Archival series, 1968. Thurs., Oct. 9. 7 p.m. Calhoun Hall 100.
This documentary, used by the Black Panthers themselves to promote their cause, is a classic archival source document of the 1960s filmed in Oakland,
Sacramento, and San Francisco. It is narrated by three of the most famous Black
Panthers themselves: Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense, speaking from the
Alameda County Jail where he is confined; Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of
Information; and Bobby Seale, Chairman. Part of the documentary is filmed from the inside of shops with broken windows, looking out. We see a Cleaver for
President sign (on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket) and a book of the speeches and writings of Ché Guevara in the background; we hear drums and chants alternating with interviews filmed in 1968.
The speakers suggest that one of their objectives is to show how police back up a system that keeps the black community oppressed. They say that they follow police to make sure that they do not hurt people, and if people go to jail, they bail them out. They want to show people that there are other ways of obtaining power besides becoming policemen for a Euro-American-dominated society.
The Black Panthers are willing to build a coalition with the Euro-American students’ Peace and Freedom Party, but they want those students to see that not only the Vietnam War, but also the injustices at home in the United States need to be addressed.
The Panthers say that their program is what the people have wanted for 400 years:
1. Self-determination
2. Full employment.
3. Decent housing.
4. Fair business practices in dealing with African Americans.
5. Good education.
6. Exemption from military service for African Americans.
7. End to police brutality and murder.
8. Release of African Americans from jail because they have not been given fair trials.

9. Trial by a jury of his peers of Huey Newton and other African Americans in the future.
Summary of program demands: Land, bread, housing, clothing, education, justice, peace, and finally, that the United Nations should address through a plebiscite the racist crimes committed in the United States.
Two books that should be read by people interested in this film are
Cleaver’s prison diary and letters, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968); and an anthology of
Cleaver’s other writings edited by his ex-wife, law professor Kathleen Cleaver, with a foreword by literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Target Zero, A Life in
Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Gates writes that for his generation of high school and college students, the three classic works of the
Black Power era were Soul on Ice ; The Autobiography of Malcolm X ; and Claude
Brown’s
Manchild in the Promised Land. The book includes interviews with Gates and with Playboy Magazine as well as essays, speeches, letters, poems, and excerpts from autobiographical material from different times in Cleaver’s life.
This film will be shown in
Celluloid for Social Justice: The Legacy of 1968 in Documentaries
Mini-Film-Series Honoring the 40 th Anniversary of California
Newsreel; http://www.newsreel.org
consisting of documentaries provided by California Newsreel
The film series precedes 1968: A Global Perspective --
An Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of Texas at Austin
October 10-12, 2008; http://www.1968conf.org