Consideration, even appreciation, of the place of the BPP and the broader field of 1960s radicalism in American political history should not require exaggeration, distortion, and mythology. All that activity was the product of and constituted nodes within a complex and fluid moment in American politics that remains poorly understood, not least due to an endless, self-reinforcing barrage of mass-mediated, spectaclist representations and the nostalgic yearnings of aging radicals who at this point in their lives have, or perhaps always had, difficulty distinguishing existential gratification and political analysis.16 Especially a half-century after the fact, there are no vital legacies to be preserved or organizational histories to be protected. If any political imperative should inform reflection on that past, it should be to take advantage of the perspective and insight enabled by temporal distance and observation of the continued maturation and evolution of political forces to deepen comprehension of the sources of our current political moment and how we got here from there.
With all that said, there is a broad commonsense understanding among leftists, even internationally, that the Black Panther Party was a major revolutionary organization that would have been a potent force in American politics but for massive state repression. Therefore, I assume that Rustin’s assessment of the BPP, and of the New Left generally, will strike a dissonant note with some readers and may seem heretical. In his “Address to YPSL,” Rustin targeted an emergent tendency within the left to “substitute psychology for politics,” which he judged to be “an extremely dangerous attitude which the movement must fight.” He also inveighed against the tendencies to substitute morality for programs and slogans for politics, both of which he saw as growing dangers especially among young radicals, and he believed that young Socialists would be best equipped to combat those tendencies. In keeping with his criticisms of Black Power, he noted:
Simply telling white people what makes you feel good in a moral stance, that they’re blue-eyed devils or that they are a racist, is dangerous. [I think perhaps the most dangerous thing that ever happened now, as I look back upon it, is the Kerner Report.] It’s a cop-out for blacks who don’t want to develop programs, so they call white people racists. And it’s a cop-out for whites who are titillated and delighted to be called racists. And thus Stokely can come back to the United States and receive $2,500 a lecture for telling white people how they stink.