Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning 2025 film One Battle After Another sparked a spirited debate on the left over its portrayal of a fictional group of revolutionaries known as the French 75. Some read the movie as a call to arms against Trump’s fascistic policies while others interpreted it as a satirical depiction of ultra-left adventurism gone awry.
However, whatever one’s explication of the film, it is clear that the primary inspiration for the French 75 was the Weather Underground—the notorious militant group that emerged in the late 1960s which took its name from a Bob Dylan song lyric—something leading man Leonardo DiCaprio confirmed in an interview with Radio Times. DiCaprio stated that, “[Anderson] based this on a lot of the activities of the Weathermen, late 1960s revolutionaries that were fighting imperialism, the Vietnam War, [and for] civil rights.”
Indeed, in an era of rampant U.S. imperialist aggression and increasingly corporatized “resistance,” the Weathermen’s militant anti-imperialism holds a certain appeal. Yet a re-examination of Weather’s “armed struggle” tactics and organizational structure shows they should serve as a cautionary tale rather than an inspiration for activists today. Instead, of all the groups that came out of the New Left, the militant Black Panther Party (BPP) represents a model to the issues of strategy and party structure faced by the contemporary left.
Although the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers are frequently lumped together, the militants were often at odds and the stark differences in the U.S. government’s response to the two groups demonstrates who was most threatening to the existing order.
One could argue that One Battle After Another contributes to the conflation of the two groups, as some critics have argued that the character of Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by actress Teyana Taylor, who received an Academy Award nomination for her performance) seemingly made a mockery of the late fugitive revolutionary Assata Shakur.
However, it appears that Taylor, who cites Shakur’s autobiography as one of her favorite books, drew inspiration from the committed activist in crafting the redeeming elements of Perfidia’s flawed, complex and contradictory composite character.
Both the Weathermen and the BPP emerged after the U.S. national security apparatus had quelled the influence of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).
Coupled with the overt suppression of McCarthyism, a heavy blow was dealt to CPUSA by the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), the Bureau’s notorious covert campaign to sabotage the left. Begun in 1956, the same year the international communist movement split over Stalin’s legacy due to Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous “Secret Speech,” COINTELPRO was first deployed against CPUSA and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
The goal of the campaign of surveillance and infiltration was to provoke conflicts within the Marxist left, the Bureau’s primary tactic being the use of informants. It was later revealed in the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s, and it has been estimated that, at the peak of the FBI’s operations, 17% of CPUSA members and 10% of SWP members were Bureau informants. [NOTE: 17%? That’s a rather precise percentage]
In the 1960s, COINTELPRO was expanded to include “Black Nationalist Hate Groups” and the New Left, for which the program is most widely known. In fact, the Weathermen’s rise to prominence can be indirectly traced back to the FBI’s campaign against a faction within the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the campus-based New Left group from which Weather emerged.
The faction within the SDS targeted by the Bureau was an arm of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which was originally started in 1962 by expelled CPUSA members to counter the “revisionism” of the Communist Party. The PLP, a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist party which focused on building a mass movement, received its broadest support between 1965 and 1967, coinciding with its organization of the student-led May 2nd Movement against U.S. imperialist aggression in Vietnam.
Within SDS, the PLP backed a faction known as the Worker Student Alliance which aimed for militant students to leave academic circles and unite with industrial workers.
The FBI took advantage of the differences between the competing left-wing organizations as a divide-and-conquer strategy, as indicated in a Bureau memorandum which suggests “the exploiting of hostility between New Left groups and such organizations as the Progressive Labor Party.” However, conflicts were emerging not only between the PLP’s faction and the SDS, but also with the BPP over the Black Power group’s position on nationalism, with Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver accusing the PLP of advocating the “dogmatic” views of the “Old Left.”
In reality, both contingents bore the contradictions of the New Left, with the feds working to fracture the two camps over their differences on nationalism. While the PLP may have been viewed by their counterparts as a strict “Stalinist” party focused on building a worker-student alliance, it had arguably deviated from the traditional Marxist-Leninist position on the right of peoples to self-determination by opposing revolutionary Black nationalism.
Nevertheless, at SDS’s March 1969 National Council meeting, the PLP criticized the Panthers over their “bourgeois nationalist” stance, escalating the ideological battle for control of the New Left.
A few months later, a group of Panthers attended SDS’s National Convention in Chicago at which they denounced the PLP as “armchair Marxists” and “counterrevolutionary traitors.” At this same convention, all PLP members were expelled from SDS, even though they made up the voting majority. The mass expulsion was a joint effort of the two other factions within SDS, the Revolutionary Youth Movement II (RYMII) and the National Office (NO).
This SDS convention, at which Weather’s founding statement was distributed, is where the connection between the FBI’s offensive against the PLP and the emergence of the Weathermen lies. Estimated to have at least one informant in every chapter of the nationwide SDS, the FBI directed its plants within the radical student group to vote with the National Office for the expulsion of the PLP.
The National Office was spearheaded by Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd, the nascent leaders of the Weather Underground. The FBI preferred the NO over the victory of the PLP because the Bureau was concerned that the Maoist-oriented Party posed a greater long-term threat and would turn the SDS into a disciplined mass movement.
Two months after the June 1969 SDS convention, the FBI’s Detroit headquarters sent an anonymous letter to BPP and SDS leaders. Signed “An Angry Black Brother,” the letter stated how Black people should not work with the “lillywhite [sic] SDS” and was intended to cause friction between the two radical groups. Although the SDS worked alongside Black-led student groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), it predominately consisted of white students from prestigious universities.
According to the August 1969 memo, the Detroit field office “further propose[d] that informants be instructed to make statements aimed at causing disruption in SDS/BPP, in an effort to further widen the gap between these two organizations.” Simultaneously, Mike Klonsky, the leader of RYMII, quit the National Organizing Committee due to his disagreement with Weather’s view of the working class as reactionary enemies of the revolution, allowing the faction to take control of the student movement.
The Weathermen’s view of the white working class as inherently racist and incapable of recognizing its own oppression was reflected in much of the group’s subsequent actions. This position may have been influenced by the writings of Frankfurt School critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, who had an indirect connection to the militant group through rank-and-file Weather member Naomi Jaffe, a student of the “Godfather of the New Left” at Brandeis University.
Although the Weathermen (and Marcuse’s) abandonment of the working class as the motor of revolution is now widely accepted on what the American academic Gabriel Rockhill calls the “compatible left,” this stance garnered Weather criticism at the time.
Journalist Paul Glusman, writing in the legendary Ramparts magazine, criticized the Weathermen for not mentioning white youth as a revolutionary force in their own right, outside of providing support for the Black liberation struggle. Pointedly, he wrote: “One would think the Panthers would prefer allies who are in it for themselves and not guilt-ridden successors to the civil-rights liberals who left when things got hot.”
David Hilliard, Chief of Staff of the BPP, also criticized Weather for their lack of faith in the white working class. In a speech at San Francisco State College in 1969, Hilliard stated: “You have to keep a very watchful eye on the people that stand up and use super revolutionary slogans; but you can always catch them in various devious places. Watch these people. Judge these people by their actions and not by their words. Because the whole revolution has been infiltrated; it’s been infiltrated culturally and it’s been infiltrated ideologically.”
Contemporaneously, the Chicago branch of the BPP under the leadership of Fred Hampton had formed the “Rainbow Coalition” in alliance with the Young Patriots organization in Chicago, a left-wing group which consisted of mostly poor, white Southerners. Ultimately, the Weathermen did far more harm than good by alienating the working class with their adventurist tactics.
For example, in the fall of 1969, a group of Weathermen invaded an anti-war action organizing meeting at Boston University, assailing attendees as “pigs” for opposing Weather’s program. This view was not shared by Panther leader Huey Newton, who saw the Peace Movement as “one of the most important movements going on at this time.” Newton viewed Weather’s antagonizing of other anti-war activists for being insufficiently radical as counter-productive to building a mass movement.
Another illustration of what Hampton called Weather’s “revolutionary child’s play” was the group’s contemptuous view of all GIs as “pigs,” even though historically rank-and-file soldiers have played an important role in revolutions and are largely drawn from the working class. In fact, prominent Panther Geronimo Pratt (also known as Geronimo Ji-Jaga), who was the Deputy Minister of Defense of the BPP’s Southern California Chapter, had a military background. As a decorated Vietnam veteran, the GI Bill allowed Pratt to study political science at UCLA, where he became involved in activism.
Weather’s most infamous action is its role in the three days of rioting in Chicago in October 1969. Known as the “Days of Rage,” the purported goal of the protests was to incite mass action to stop American involvement in Vietnam and “bring the war home.” Instead, the group’s efforts only resulted in violent clashes with the police, property damage to the city, and negative publicity, alienating the public and damaging the anti-war cause.
Meanwhile, RYMII organized the largest event of the “Days of Rage,” leading an interracial march with thousands of people in attendance. The Maoist-inspired SDS faction also coordinated a gathering with the Chicago Panthers in front of the courthouse where the Chicago 8 trial was taking place that same week. Demonstrating their superior organizing capabilities, on the same day Weather put on another anarchistic march-cum-riot (which attracted only about 300 people), RYMII held a demonstration at a Caterpillar factory in solidarity with striking workers which gathered around 3,000 supporters.
Illinois BPP Chairman Fred Hampton spoke critically of Weather’s “Days of Rage” tactics, accurately diagnosing their strategic errors: “The Weathermen should have spent their time organizing the white working and lumpen class instead of prematurely engaging in conflict with trigger-happy pigs.” Instead of stirring the masses into a revolutionary fervor, the “Days of Rage” only resulted in the FBI opening a file on the Weathermen.
Weather continued to express their antipathy to the working class in their confrontational attitude toward the nationwide General Electric strike which began shortly after the Chicago riots. Weather members attended the demonstrations supporting the strikers, but not to show solidarity with the G.E. auto workers. Rather, the radicals disrupted the demonstrations by brandishing signs and distributing papers calling the G.E. workers “pigs.”
At Weather’s December 1969 “War Council,” Bob Avakian, the leader of the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (BARU), a radical Maoist group which had backed RYMII against the PLP, pointed out to the Weathermen that the Panthers advocated the organization of the white working class into a mass revolutionary movement. The militants believed this strategy to be “national chauvinism,” leading a Weather member retort to Avakian, “Well, we don’t agree with the Panthers on a lot of things.”
BARU later morphed into the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a group heavily infiltrated by the FBI during COINTELPRO, which would evolve into a cult of personality around Avakian and is still active to this day.
The Weathermen’s ultra-left adventurism is still used by the right to portray the left as morally bankrupt. Meanwhile, Weather’s practice of bizarre, hours-long “criticism/self-criticism” sessions—which consisted of verbal castigation of heretical members, the administration of LSD and forced sexual intercourse between members—resembled the CIA’s MK-ULTRA experiments and the contemporaneous cult around Charles Manson. In fact, Manson was the subject of controversial statements made by Weather leader Bernardine Dohrn that garnered the group widespread criticism. At the “War Council,” Dohrn publicly praised the Tate-LaBianca murders committed by Manson’s followers earlier that year. Describing the killings as “far out” and “wild,” Dohrn held up four fingers to represent the fork stabbed into Sharon Tate’s pregnant stomach and proclaimed that “the Weathermen dig Charles Manson,” a remark that is still used today by religious anti-abortion activists to paint leftist women as deranged. (Journalist Tom O’Neill’s book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, also documents how the Sharon Tate murders were likely a product of MK-ULTRA.)
Further demonstrating their aversion to organizing the masses, the Weathermen decided to move underground. The group had withdrawn from public view by February 1970, when three Molotov cocktails exploded in front of the home of Justice John M. Murtaugh, the New York Supreme Court judge presiding over the Panther 21 trial. The latter were a group of New York Panthers charged with conspiracy to bomb various buildings throughout the five boroughs. The Weather Underground’s attack on the judge’s house certainly did not help the Panther 21 who were trying to convince a jury that the bomb conspiracy charges were fabricated. The defendants were acquitted in 1971, the jury deliberating for just 45 minutes.
Two weeks after the group firebombed Judge Murtaugh’s home, an explosion occurred at an apartment in Lower Manhattan, killing three Weathermen. Cathy Wilkerson and a few other Weather members had been living in her parents’ Greenwich Village townhouse, using the location to manufacture explosives, when a bomb accidentally detonated due to improper wiring. The tragedy spurred the Weather Underground to criticize their own adventurist tactics as a “military error” and reconsider their approach. As Dohrn said in an interview in 2021, “Yes, we were labeled as violent after the townhouse bombing incident in the Village, and because our comrades were intending to do violence to civilians. But we had spent our first year underground having endless discussions and meetings across the country with friends and others on how to proceed, and we came to believe that violence against property was different from violence against people. We were not going to go down the road of hurting people. In fact, we would go out of our way to prevent anybody from being harmed.”
Even though no innocent bystanders were injured, the aftermath of the Townhouse explosion led the FBI to put Weather members Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, who had both survived the accident, on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, while subsequently indicting 12 other Weather leaders for their parts in the “Days of Rage” riots. In July 1970, a month after the radicals detonated dynamite at NYPD headquarters, more federal indictments were handed out. The FBI had planted informants in the Weather Underground, the most well-known being a U.S. Army veteran named Larry Grathwohl who infiltrated the group and later wrote a book about his experience. Yet, somehow, the militant radicals were able to move about with minimal interference from the law, even though their above-ground supporters were subjected to harassment.
In 1970, the Weather Underground gained further notoriety when it helped LSD advocate Timothy Leary escape from prison. Leary was a clinical psychologist who worked at Harvard University, founding the Harvard Psilocybin Project and experimenting with LSD during his time at the prestigious Ivy League school. The acid guru’s research dove-tailed with the interests of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program and it has been long suspected that he covertly received agency funding for his work.
Although there is no concrete documentation, the majority of MK-ULTRA files were destroyed and, given how Leary’s research was contemporaneous with the Agency’s project, it is not unlikely the “high priest” was the recipient of government funds. In fact, some FOIA requests do suggest agency money was funneled through organizations linked to his work. Indeed, Leary, the man who coined the slogan of the counter-culture—“turn on, tune in, drop out”—later in life stated his belief that the entire LSD movement was started by the CIA. At the very least, he was a rat, as Leary would go on to inform on the Weathermen to the FBI when he was later captured in Afghanistan in 1973.
In September 1970, Weather accepted $25,000 from The Brotherhood of Eternal Love (a Southern California commune that turned into the largest international psychedelics distributor apart from the CIA) to break Leary out of a San Luis Obispo-based penitentiary where he was held for marijuana possession. The prison break was successful, with the getaway vehicle driven by Clayton Van Lydegraf, a radical who had been expelled from both the CPUSA and PLP for his ultra-leftism. The goal was to transport Leary and his wife to Algeria to join exiled Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Leary did make it to the Panther compound in Algeria, but Cleaver placed him under “revolutionary arrest” over his continued drug advocacy and the LSD guru was eventually expelled from the compound.
Shortly after the prison break, the Weather Underground issued a communique which, while not renouncing militancy, acknowledged the need for organizing a mass movement. Instead of the working class, however, Weather looked to the drug-saturated youth culture of the time as a potential revolutionary force. However, the aforementioned New York Panther 21 voiced criticism of the group’s stance, pointing out that “grass and organic consciousness expanding drugs [were] not weapons of the revolution.” Similarly, in a 1971 interview with Pacifica Radio, Cleaver, speaking from Algeria, expressed how the Panthers did not support Leary or the psychedelic drug culture, which he characterized as counter-revolutionary.
Contrary to their ostensible shift in views, the Weather Underground continued their bombing campaign with the purported aim of bringing attention to American atrocities in Indo-China. In response to the U.S. invasion of Laos in the spring of 1971, the radicals planted two bombs in the U.S. Capitol in Washington. D.C. The first explosive, planted on February 28, failed to ignite properly, leading the radicals to try again with a new munition on the following day, which exploded successfully.
A year later, supposedly in honor of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, Weather placed a bomb inside the Pentagon. Hidden in the fourth-floor women’s restroom, the blast mangled the plumbing and blew away the wall, causing flood damage to a computer for military communications. A tape archive containing highly classified information was also severely compromised and the destruction of evidence of U.S. war crimes proved more helpful to the authorities than the anti-war movement.
Even more controversially, Weather also endorsed the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small militant organization led by an escaped ex-con named Donald DeFreeze, that gained notoriety for the kidnapping and alleged brainwashing of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. In early 1974, three months after Hearst’s abduction, Weather issued a communique calling for people to “give them [the SLA] encouragement, support, shelter, and love. Empty your pockets.” However, many on the American Left viewed the SLA with suspicion, such as the underground newspaper the Ann Arbor Sun, better known as the mouthpiece for the White Panther Party. The radical rag issued an article titled “Who Ran The SLA?” written by legendary journalist Dick Russell originally for Argosy magazine, accompanied by a cartoon of the group’s multi-headed snake logo with the central head depicting a police officer, calling out the SLA as being the creation of several U.S. government agencies. The BPP also conducted their own investigation of the SLA, concluding that Donald DeFreeze was a police informant.
In 1974, Weather began to build an “above-ground” faction called the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC) under the guidance of expelled PLP leader Clayton Van Lydegraf, who had formally joined the underground organization. This was followed by further infighting and fragmentation, seemingly endemic problems of the New Left. Two years after its birth, the PFOC split over whether to continue armed struggle and clandestine life or surface and face arrest. The New York “Central Committee,” headed by Ayers and Dohrn, favored coming out of hiding and broke with the “Bay Area Revolutionary Committee,” led by Van Lydegraf who accused the New York branch of abandoning revolutionary principles. By the end of 1976, Van Lydegraf’s Bay Area group had become the Weather Underground Organization, the Weather founders not included.
Slowly, the original Weather members began to surface. The first to emerge was Weather co-founder Mark Rudd, who turned himself into the authorities in 1977. Rudd was released on a $4,000 bail and, after pleading guilty, received a $2,000 fine and two years’ probation. In fact, in a 2021 interview with Jacobin magazine, Rudd was asked: “What was the outcome of your turning yourself in? Did you have to face charges and go to jail?” Rudd replied: “You’d think! No, nothing.” Earlier that year, U.S. President Jimmy Carter had given an unconditional pardon (Proclamation 4483) to hundreds of thousands of men who evaded the draft, as part of a campaign promise to heal national divisions over the Vietnam War. The lenient treatment Weather leaders received was arguably a result of this political climate but, notably, the Black Panthers did not benefit from the amnesty.
In December 1980, Dohrn and Ayers turned themselves in and were inexplicably not prosecuted for the 25 bombings for which Weather claimed responsibility. Dohrn received a mere three years’ probation and a $1,500 fine for her activities, after most of the charges against the Weathermen were thrown out due to “improper FBI surveillance.” The Bureau’s use of illegal tactics against the left had been revealed in the Church Committee hearings, which likely restricted the FBI’s ability to prosecute the group. However, it is also a possibility that the Weathermen were given leniency because they unwittingly served COINTELPRO’s larger purpose of tarnishing the left’s reputation.
However, to her credit, Dohrn was jailed (for less than a year) for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the 1981 Brinks robbery, a heist of an armored car carrying a large load of cash in Nanuet, New York, a suburb 30 miles north of Manhattan. The hold-up had been committed by several Black Liberation Army (BLA) members and four former Weather militants affiliated with the May 19th Communist Organization. Although the goal was to use the spoils to “finance the revolution,” the heist turned into a fatal shootout. The BLA was an offshoot of the New York Panthers but in terms of organizational structure was closer to Weather, being composed of decentralized autonomous cells, in contrast to the BPP’s democratic centralism. (The armored car robbery was masterminded by Mutulu Shakur, BLA leader and the stepfather of the late rapper, Tupac Shakur.)
Although Dohrn faced legal repercussions, she and her husband’s careers were not impeded by their militant past. A former law student, in the late 1980s, Dohrn began working for a law firm. In fact, her position in the National Lawyers Guild was what initially had gotten her involved with SDS, as she had worked to defend students who had been arrested during the ‘68 protests. From 1991 to 2013, Dohrn was a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law, while Bill Ayers enjoyed a similarly successful academic career as a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. It is important to note that these ostensible radicals who bombed the Pentagon had an easier time holding university jobs than other prominent figures on the left.
In later years, both Ayers and Rudd reflected on the damaging impact their organization had on the left as a whole. Ayers admitted that “the movement fractured, deep schisms and fissures ran us through, and all the progressive forces were weakened. I’m sorry for my role in that.” Rudd acknowledged “another big mistake that I was directly responsible for was eliminating organizing we had done so much of and substituting it with militancy.” However, activist organizing and militancy were not mutually exclusive, as the Black Panther Party demonstrated, and why the authorities considered the group such an existential threat.
Founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, the BPP was initially called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense with the aim of protecting Black communities from police brutality. Both Seale and Newton had been members of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a Marxist-Leninist, Black nationalist organization. The founders were inspired by anti-imperialist luminaries such as Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, and even the iconic Panther beret was an homage to another great revolutionary: Ernesto “Che” Guevara. In fact, Seale and Newton raised money to purchase the group’s firearms by selling marked-up copies of Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book to Berkeley students. Newton, who had attended law school, had an intimate knowledge of California gun laws and organized the Panthers’ armed actions, such as monitoring police activity and defending the civil rights of Black Americans, within the bounds of Second Amendment rights.
The BPP functioned as a people’s militia, protecting Black communities from state terror, and the group’s focus on militancy attracted the attention of other African-American activists of the time. Ex-con and Ramparts contributor Eldridge Cleaver was drawn to the group, becoming the party’s Minister of Information shortly after his parole from prison. Cleaver assisted Newton in organizing one of the BPP’s most famous actions in spring 1967 when the Panthers marched into the State Capitol in Sacramento to protest a proposed gun-control bill.
Newton, a clever strategist, made sure the protest was entirely legal. Six months after the Panthers marched on the California State Capitol, Newton was jailed for the alleged shooting of Oakland Police Officer John Frey during a traffic stop. Even though no gun was found and Newton had lost consciousness after being shot first in the stomach during the exchange, the Panther co-founder was originally convicted of voluntary manslaughter; the California Court of Appeals reversed Newton’s conviction, citing prejudicial errors in the trial.
Following his release from prison, Newton shifted the BPP’s focus from police confrontation to community support programs designed to build autonomous, cooperative institutions. The four main programs were a petition campaign for community control of police, free health clinics, free breakfasts for school children, and political education through liberation schools.
This decision caused a split with Cleaver, by that time in exile in Algeria after his own trouble with the police, who argued for immediate violent revolution. Cleaver diverged from the Panther line in his support of the Weather Underground, who he lauded as “angels of destruction.”
In turn, Newton criticized Cleaver’s approach of ultra-left actionism and accused him of trying to turn the BPP into a revolutionary cult, out of touch with the Black community at large. In 1971, Newton wrote: “The correct handling of a revolution is not to offer the people an ‘either-or’ ultimatum. Instead we must gain the support of the people through serving their needs. Then, when the police or any other agency of repression tries to destroy the program, the people will move to a higher level of consciousness and action.”
The Oakland and New York branches of the BPP, under the leadership of Newton and Cleaver respectively, definitively split over the question of the timing of armed struggle. Newton’s West Coast faction believed that armed warfare would only serve to isolate the party and ensure its destruction by the state, not an unfounded view given the repression already faced by the group.
For example, co-founder Bobby Seale was persecuted in a similarly unjust way. The Texas native was originally arrested as one of the “Chicago Eight” defendants, in which the Panther and seven other anti-war activist co-defendants were charged with “conspiracy” and “inciting a riot” in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The evidence against Seale was practically non-existent, as he did not participate in the planning of the protest, only going to Chicago for two days as a last-minute replacement for Cleaver. The civil rights violations and humiliation Seale suffered during the Chicago “conspiracy” trial is even more shocking.
Firstly, U.S. District Judge Julius Hoffman refused to allow Seale to defend himself. Charles Garry, the BPP’s lawyer, was recovering from a major surgery at the time of the trial and was unable to represent him— but the judge refused to postpone the trial so Garry could attend. The whole trial put the institutionalized racism within the American criminal justice system on full display, with Seale chained to a chair and gagged so that he could not “interrupt” the proceedings. Seale was eventually ungagged as a result of public outcry but, nonetheless, the judge declared a mistrial and sentenced him to four years in prison until his conviction was suspended and he was released in 1972.
The most blatant example of the state repression the Panthers faced was the brutal murder of Fred Hampton, the Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP. Hampton, who had worked as an NAACP organizer just out of high school, was only 19 when the FBI opened a file on him. A gifted student who graduated high school with honors and led civil rights actions in his teens, Hampton had the makings of a “Black Messiah,” the FBI’s term for an intelligent and dedicated leader who it feared could unite the Black Power movement. This was of particular concern to the Bureau, especially if the leader connected racial oppression to class exploitation.
Hampton was a budding revolutionary who considered himself a Marxist-Leninist and he expanded the party’s community programs of dual power and mutual aid. This work, as well as his efforts to unite the struggle of other ethnic minorities and poor whites based on the recognition of class solidarity, made him a truly threatening figure to the existing order.
With his clean record, the police could only manage to frame him for the heinous crime of allegedly stealing ice cream bars and distributing them to children.
Via the COINTELPRO initiative, Hampton was shot dead in his sleep on December 4, 1969, during a pre-dawn police raid on his apartment. The raid was a joint effort by the local police, the FBI, and the Department of Justice, with the police and press misrepresenting the brutal murder of Hampton as a “wild gun battle” with deranged radicals. It turned out that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself had authorized Hampton’s slaying, making him one of the few radicals to be executed by the police after extensive FBI planning.
The Bureau could not have carried out the operation without the vital intelligence provided by William O’Neal, the FBI’s informant within the Chicago Panthers, who had been recruited after being busted for auto-theft. O’Neal rose in the Panther ranks, becoming the Chicago branch’s Security Captain, simultaneously acting as an agent provocateur by pushing for more violent confrontations with the police.
The Hampton raid was executed after O’Neal provided misleading information about a stockpile of weapons in Hampton’s apartment and he even supplied the FBI with floor plans and keys to Panther headquarters. It has also been speculated that O’Neal drugged Hampton the evening prior to the raid. (In fact, the chemist who autopsied the slain revolutionary found enough of a barbiturate in his blood to keep him unconscious, but the FBI and the federal grand jury rejected the doctor’s findings.) Years later, O’Neal would admit to his role as an informant for the second installment of the acclaimed PBS documentary tv series Eyes on the Prize. On the night the second season premiered, O’Neal committed suicide.
In fact, the BPP had been subject to heavy infiltration by law enforcement since its inception. A perfect example of the extent of the FBI’s penetration of the group was the life-long Bay Area civil rights activist and “secret” member of the Panthers, Richard Aoki. The latter was one of the few non-Black members of the BPP and the only Asian-American to hold a leadership role in the organization, being named Captain of the Berkeley Branch in 1967.
Decades later, Aoki was posthumously unmasked in 2012 as an FBI informant. It caused quite a stir among the left when journalist Seth Rosenfeld alleged in an article in the Center for Investigative Reporting that Aoki was a Bureau stoolie who infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the BPP. Rosenfeld was met with backlash for tarnishing the reputation of a “committed activist” but, a month later, a second story was published with newly declassified documents from Aoki’s FBI file detailing more than 15 years of cooperation between the activist and the Bureau’s San Francisco field office.
Ironically, Aoki himself had experienced the repressive nature of the U.S. government, having spent time in Japanese internment camps as a child. After joining an Oakland street gang in high school, the young Aoki signed up with the U.S. Army to expunge his juvenile criminal record. Most of his service was in the Army Reserves, where he made his connection with the Bureau and simultaneously became a member of the SWP. He also was elected to the Berkeley Young Socialist Alliance’s executive council and informed on both groups. While attending Merritt College, Aoki met Newton and Seale and subsequently befriended the young radicals. Seale’s book Seize the Time describes Aoki as giving the Panthers their first firearms and the Panther co-founder staunchly defended the latter as a loyal comrade in response to the allegations. If Aoki provided arms to the group in their infancy without the FBI’s knowledge, it is possible that he was conflicted about his role as a mole.
Aoki also took credit for introducing Seale and Newton to the work of Mao Tse-tung and generally painted himself as a principled activist. However, he gave valuable intelligence on the Panthers to local law enforcement agencies and, after his involvement with the BPP dwindled in 1968, he went on to inform on other left-wing groups. At the time, Aoki was enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became involved with the student activist movement. Although some dismiss the revelations about Aoki as a trivial detail, his work as a mole calls into question the authenticity of his entire career and a re-examination of his complicated legacy.
The BPP bore the brunt of the FBI’s efforts against the New Left, as well as against the Black Power movement. Some 80% of the Bureau’s authorized actions against Black Power groups were directed against the Panthers. After Nixon was elected in 1968, directives issuing from FBI headquarters called for “imaginative and hard-hitting counter-intelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP.” J. Edgar Hoover himself placed a high priority on destroying the Panthers, in an official directive from the summer of 1969 the FBI director stated that, “The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” adding that he would eradicate the group by the end of the year. By the end of the decade, Hoover had nearly completed his objective; Newton and Seale were in the can and Fred Hampton was six feet under.
The authorities had a hand in exploiting conflicts within the party as well as within the Black Power movement as a whole. In fact, FBI officials boasted of having created the vendetta between the Cleaver and Newton branches of the Panthers and, at the peak of the split, the feds sent death threats to Newton, making it appear as though the New York Panthers had written them.
The BPP’s treatment is comparable with CPUSA, which was subject to strict repression during the McCarthy era. However, the BPP had to deal with the double burden of institutionalized racism. Newton lawyer Charles Garry, who as a white attorney garnered Newton criticism from Black cultural nationalists for choosing a “honky lawyer,” was a self-professed Communist and had been brought before HUAC in 1948. Garry subsequently worked to represent other accused Communists before HUAC throughout the McCarthy era. In an essay where he examined the persecution of the BPP, Garry wrote that, “In the over thirty years I have been practicing law, I have never experienced the type of persecution faced by the Panthers.”
The party’s discipline and democratic centralist organization posed a greater threat than culturally nationalist Black groups or anarchistic student groups. The BPP’s community service programs were particularly threatening to the authorities as they built mass support for the group. The FBI considered the Free Breakfast for Children a “nefarious activity” and sent counter-intelligence agents to disrupt the survival program.
In contrast to the Panthers, who never did anything as audacious as bombing the Pentagon, the response by the authorities to the Weather Underground was relatively mild. Although the group was subject to FBI surveillance and infiltration, none of the leadership was killed or suffered life-long repercussions. Although the Weather Underground purported to be an anti-imperialist group, in practice, it tarnished the reputation of the left and anti-war movement.
Hampton shared this opinion, denouncing its adventurism as playing into the hands of the authorities. For all of Weather’s attempts to paint itself as aligned with the BPP, Hampton, in an interview, emphatically stated: “No, the BPP is not with the Weathermen,” and accused the group of provoking the U.S. power structure to react with violence. Unlike Weather, the BPP did not stock guns to promote adventurism, but to arm Black communities for self-defense against racist police, all within their constitutional rights.
Today, the Panther legacy is often appropriated by liberal identity politics, with Newton and Hampton’s Marxist-Leninist principles obscured. In answer to the common mystifications around the Panthers, a 1969 article published in the party’s newsletter clearly states the group’s politics. Entitled “On Establishing a United Front with Communists,” which criticized those who resisted an alliance with Communists, the piece averred: “We [the Panthers] are adherents of Soviet democracy, the democracy of the toilers, the most consistent democracy in the world. But in the capitalist countries we defend and shall continue to defend every inch of bourgeois democratic liberties which are being attacked by fascism and bourgeois reaction, because the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat so dictate.”
This was in solidarity with Soviet leadership which urged communists in Western capitalist countries to fight for civil liberties against an increasingly fascistic bourgeoisie who were beginning to remove the pretenses of bourgeois democracy. With this in mind, if One Battle After Another can be read as a comedic romp in the pitfalls of ultra-leftism, the film can also serve as a warning for the left about the ineffective nature of fighting fascism with adventurism.
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About the Author
Shaenah Batterson is a polemicist and poet located in Baltimore, Maryland.
She writes a Substack called The Red Letter and cohosts the podcast Captive Minds.
Shaenah can be reached at shaenahbatterson@icloud.com.
