[lbo-talk] Black Panther Coloring Book

[Carrol Cox]

It occurred to me that those of us trying to explain the Panthers made on
error from the beginning. Some jerk had called them an "armed
insurrectionary" group or something like that, and we focused on the
"insurrection." But the Pantheers were NOT an armed group. They were a
civil-rights and community organizing groups just as were SNCC, SCLC, etc.
On certain special occasions they used guns as dramatic props, that was all.
In other words the partial analogy I drew between our Black Santa Clause in
Bloomington and the Panthers' guns should have been a simple identity. In
both cases, the guand the Santa suit were simply props used in specific
contexts to make a simple point: Blacks wre citizens of the U.S.They were no
more an armed group than the US group in Bloomington was a gift-distributing
group!

In California, it was a legal right of citizens to bear arms in public. That
right had to be ceased just as the right to a seat in the front of the bus
was a civil-right in Montgomery. It was a brillian tactic, and had the
Panthers not used it, they would never have become, as they are, the high
point of one of the great mass movements in U.S. history. Idiots who kvetch
about them are not worth arguing against. The point of discussing the
Panthers is not to "defend" them. There's nothing that needs defense. The
point is to understand them in order to understand more deeply the meaning
of the '60s and how we can learn from that meaning as we uncover it.

The guns are a mere    distraction from serious political discussion.

Carrol