Replies

SNCC always had a Communist element traveling with it, and it became more radical over the course of the 60s. Here's a highlight of some key points from some commentary I wrote on the FBI's VVAW file, filling in some background on the Black Panthers and SNCC:

---

Black Panther Party (BPP): Black political party which rejected the civil rights movement’s nonviolent tactics in favor of revolutionary tactics. Founded in Oakland in 1966 by Marxist-Leninists Huey Newton and Bobby Seale on the model of Stokely Carmichael’s Alabama-based Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). In the late 1950s Carmichael had attended the Bronx High School of Science with a group of young Communists that included the son of high-ranking CP member Eugene Dennis, and had joined a Marxist study group and participated in CP-organized demonstrations against the House Un-American Activities Committee. His subsequent college career at Howard University brought him into contact with the civil rights group the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and while working for SNCC he was invited to a conference at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a Marxist think tank linked to Soviet and Cuban agents, in 1964. The next year, while organizing a SNCC black voter registration drive in Alabama, Carmichael founded the first all-black political party, the LCFO, which chose for its party symbol a black panther logo. A civil rights worker returning from Alabama to Oakland brought news of the LCFO to Newton and Seale, who requested permission to adopt the black panther as the name for a new, Oakland-based black political party, originally founded in October 1966 as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, later shortened to simply the Black Panther Party. By this time Carmichael had become head of SNCC, and in May 1967 Newton recruited him to the BPP. That summer Carmichael and his SNCC associates Julius Lester and George Ware travelled to Cuba as delegates to the July 31 through August 10 Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) conference, a gathering of guerrilla movements from throughout Latin America, where Carmichael saluted Che Guevara and expressed solidarity with the Cuban revolution and the Vietcong. From Cuba, Carmichael travelled to China, North Vietnam, and Guinea, where Communist fellow traveller Shirley Du Bois had arranged for him to meet leaders of the Soviet-supported Pan African Movement. Following Carmichael’s return to the US, SNCC merged with the BPP in February 1968, the BPP appointed Carmichael its Honorary Prime Minister, and the SNCC-BPP coalition joined a coalition of white radicals from Bob Avakian’s Peace and Freedom Party, which represented a Maoist faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This coalition soon splintered, with SNCC expelling Carmichael and the BPP and SDS splitting into factions over partisan and tactical disputes. Meanwhile some chapters of the BPP had developed organized criminal associations with prostitution and drug rings, which together with the BPP’s violence and Communist ties led the FBI to publicly identify the BPP as the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country” in September 1968. The next year, the BPP began to develop ties to the VVAW through charismatic black VVAW recruit Al Hubbard, who advocated turning the VVAW into a “weather vets” group, modeled on the terrorist Weathermen faction of SDS. Hubbard took VVAW members to BPP meetings with him, built a BPP chapter of the VVAW in Harlem, and coordinated the BPP’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention (RPCC) with a VVAW demonstration at Valley Forge in September 1970. During 1970 white BPP associate Mark Lane also became involved in the VVAW’s Winter Soldier Investigation and brought his fellow BPP supporter Jane Fonda into contact with the VVAW. In 1971 Hubbard’s VVAW associate Ed Damato began using the pretext of donating clothes and medical supplies to smuggle guns collected from VVAW regional chapters to the United Front, a black militant group in Cairo, Illinois linked to a St. Louis gang called the Black Liberators.