Musicians don't often end up on FBI watch lists, but the Last Poets did, thanks to their links with the Black Panthers. Dorian Lynskey looks back at a time when pop and politics collided as never before.
After the Party: Music and the Black Panthers
by Dorian Lynskey
One day last December, Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets attended a gathering in Chicago to commemorate local Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, who was shot dead by the police 40 years earlier. There were about 30 people, including the widows of Hampton and fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and former members of radical groups such as Weatherman. "We laughed and drank wine and talked about what we all had been through," Hassan says. "I'm glad I made it. It was good to see a lot of those people still living, you know?"
They were survivors of a turbulent period. In 1968, just two years after Oakland residents Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panthers, FBI director J Edgar Hoover called the party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and set about spending millions of dollars to infiltrate, sabotage and divide it. By the mid 70s, it was in terminal decline, and Hampton was far from the only fatality.
The Panthers' legacy has been fiercely debated ever since. Some people claim the leadership, especially Newton, were their own worst enemies: paranoid hotheads prone to violence and cronyism. Others regard them as heroes who gave young African-Americans power and pride in the face of endemic racism, only to be brought down by Hoover's machinations. A new project, Tongues on Fire, aims to accentuate the positive, bringing together the party's official artist and minister of culture, Emory Douglas, with musicians such as the Last Poets, the Roots and jazz saxophonist David Murray.
Read the Full Essay @ The Guardian
After the Party: Music and the Black Panthers
by Dorian Lynskey
One day last December, Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets attended a gathering in Chicago to commemorate local Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, who was shot dead by the police 40 years earlier. There were about 30 people, including the widows of Hampton and fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and former members of radical groups such as Weatherman. "We laughed and drank wine and talked about what we all had been through," Hassan says. "I'm glad I made it. It was good to see a lot of those people still living, you know?"
They were survivors of a turbulent period. In 1968, just two years after Oakland residents Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panthers, FBI director J Edgar Hoover called the party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and set about spending millions of dollars to infiltrate, sabotage and divide it. By the mid 70s, it was in terminal decline, and Hampton was far from the only fatality.
The Panthers' legacy has been fiercely debated ever since. Some people claim the leadership, especially Newton, were their own worst enemies: paranoid hotheads prone to violence and cronyism. Others regard them as heroes who gave young African-Americans power and pride in the face of endemic racism, only to be brought down by Hoover's machinations. A new project, Tongues on Fire, aims to accentuate the positive, bringing together the party's official artist and minister of culture, Emory Douglas, with musicians such as the Last Poets, the Roots and jazz saxophonist David Murray.
Read the Full Essay @ The Guardian
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