'Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution' And Its Relevance

It’s been nearly 50 years since the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and filmmaker Stanley Nelson’s documentary about the group — The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, airing as part of PBS’s Independent Lens on Tuesday night — reminds us of a time in which young people’s protests against oppression both actual and perceived was more organized, militant, and political. 


Newton was only in his mid-20s when he co-founded the Panthers. One of the group’s initial successes was a breakfast program for lower-income children, a project that both did good work and yielded good p.r. for the Panthers. When Newton looked at the local gun laws and saw that it was legal to carry firearms on public property as long as they were openly displayed, some Panthers took to carrying weapons, ostensibly to protect themselves and others from what they considered police harassment — this was not such great p.r., at least as far as the government and the establishment media was concerned.

But the Panthers’ paradoxes — feeding kids hot meals; exercising Second Amendment rights in a way that even today’s current NRA might deem a tad impolitic — exerted a powerful allure to many young, radicalized citizens, black and white. It helped, as Vanguard of the Revolution’s extensive amount of archival footage makes clear, that the Panthers had a super-cool look: the leather jackets, black berets, nimbus Afros — the Panthers mastered media attention in a way that white-founded political groups such as the SDS had not.