Category: Religion

P. T. Barnum’s elephant

Another story for liberal religious kids. Originally written c. 2000 for First Parish in Lexington, Mass. I dusted off this old story and fixed it up a little because my current congregation’s Sunday school will be learning about P. T. Barnum this year. This story comes from his 1872 autobiography, Struggles and Triumphs.

He was the greatest showman in America! He was a man who was known and loved everywhere, the most famous person in the United States in the nineteenth century! He was the man who created “the greatest show on earth”! His name was Phineas Taylor Barnum.

P. T. Barnum was a showman, the greatest showman of all time, a man who put on shows of strange and wonderful things in his giant Museum in New York City. He exhibited the very first live hippopotamus ever seen in North America. His museum was known for its amazing and incredible animals. He even exhibited the amazing Feejee Mermaid. (Well, actually he later admitted that the Feejee Mermaid was a fake that had been glued together.)

He was a showman, but more than that he was an expert at making money. He had a two-part secret for making money. First, give the public good value. Second, get all the free advertising that you can. Here’s an example of how Barnum gave good value, and got free advertising for his fabulous American Museum….

P. T. Barnum brought thirteen elephants Asia to North America. He exhibited them in New York and all across the North American continent. After four years, he sold all but one. He kept that one for his farm in Connecticut. He figured out a way that the elephant could draw a plow. Then he hired a man to use the elephant to plow a tiny corner of Barnum’s farm, which just happened to be right next to the main line of the New York and New Haven Railroad.

P. T. Barnum gave this man a time-table for the railroad. Every time a passenger train was due to pass by, the man made sure the elephant was busily engaged in drawing the plow, right where all the passengers could see.

Hundreds of people each day rode the train past Barnum’s elephant. Everyone who saw it was amazed and astonished. Barnum was using an elephant to draw a plow! Reporters from all the New York newspapers came to write stories on this amazing spectacle. People wrote letters to Barnum from far and wide, asking his advice on how they, too, might use an elephant to draw a plow on their farms.

When Barnum responded to these letters, he always wrote: “Now this is strictly confidential, but for goodness sake don’t even think of getting an elephant. They eat far too much hay and you would lose money. I’m just doing it to draw attention to my museum in New York.”

Pictures of Barnum’s elephant pulling the plow began to appear in newspapers all across the United States, and even overseas in Europe. People came out to Connecticut on purpose just to see Barnum’s elephant at work. They would say, “Why look at that! That’s a real elephant drawing that plow! If Barnum can use an elephant on his farm, he must have all kinds of animals at his Museum. Guess I’ll go to Barnum’s Museum next time I’m in New York city.”

One day, an old farmer friend of Barnum’s came to visit. This farmer wanted to see the elephant at work. By this time, that six acre plot of land beside the railroad had been plowed over about sixty times. The farmer watched the elephant work for a while, and then he turned to Barnum and said, “My team of oxen could pull harder than that elephant any day.”

“Oh, I think that elephant can draw better than your oxen,” said Barnum.

“I don’t want to doubt your word,” said his farmer friend, “but tell me how that elephant can draw better than my oxen.”

Barnum replied, “That elephant is drawing the attention of twenty million people to Barnum’s Museum.”

P. T. Barnum later became famous for his circus, but not many people know that he was also a Universalist. He’s one of my favorite Unitarian Universalists, precisely because he wasn’t perfect. He didn’t always tell the truth, but at least he later admitted when he tried to fool people. He made too much money, but he made sure to give lots of his money away to help other people. He gave money to poor people, and he gave money to help people stop drinking, and he built parks that everyone could use, and he gave lots of money to his Universalist church. I like P. T. Barnum because I know I’m not perfect. But even though I make mistakes, I can follow Barnum’s example and help make the world a better place.

“Elephantine Agriculture,” engraving from the book Struggles and Triumphs by P.T. Barnum (1872). Public domain image courtesy Project Gutenberg.

What we can learn from Afghanistan

Thomas Reese, a senior analyst with Religion News Service, who earned a doctorate in political science from UC Berkeley, has written a short and helpful essay analyzing the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Early in his essay, Reese points out that the Trump administration made an agreement with the Taliban declaring that the United States would be leaving, and that the Biden administration is finally implementing that agreement. (This was a helpful reminder to me here that both Democrats and Republicans agreed that it was time to leave Afghanistan; it must have seemed a truly hopeless situation if those two deeply polarized parties actually agreed we had to get out.) Moving quickly past blame and recriminations, Reese’s essay gets to what I think is the heart of the issue:

“What we and our allies should learn from Afghanistan, and what we should have learned from Vietnam, is that the United States military cannot save countries from themselves. If their leadership is corrupt, if their government does not have popular support, if the country is divided by warring ethnic or religious factions, if there is civil war, the American military cannot solve their problems. In fact, history tells us that American troops often make matters worse by using tactics that cause disproportionate collateral damage and by making the local military dependent on us.”

This will be hard for many Americans to hear, but it’s obviously true: our military can’t solve every problem. Our leadership, and our electorate, needs to learn this lesson before we get involved in yet another mess like Vietnam or Afghanistan. Reese ends his essay by advocating for morality in diplomacy:

“Political realists argue that morality has no place in foreign policy, but their tactics have consistently failed. It is time to try a moral strategy that uses diplomacy rather than guns, and fights corruption rather than tries to bribe elites to do our bidding.”

I agree with Reese. Back in the 1970s, the Unitarian Universalist church of my childhood was riven by conflict over Vietnam. Some members of the church thought the war in Vietnam was a moral stand against communism. Some church members thought the war in Vietnam propped up an immoral South Vietnamese regime and used immoral methods. When they called Dana Mclean Greeley as their new minister in 1971, they hoped for someone who would offer guidance out of this intra-congregational conflict. Greeley didn’t take sides on Vietnam. Instead he explained that in the nuclear era, war can no longer be considered a reasonable, sensible option. A few months after the United States pulled out of Vietnam, he preached a sermon which was even more pointed:

“War is insanity in this day and age. It is total destructiveness; it is total immorality; it is total waste. The end of war should be our goal today. Negotiation should be our commitment. We ourselves ought to be both wiser and more ethical than our fathers, but we are not.”

Back in 1975, Greeley called upon us to learn how to be ethical. Now in 2021, Reese calls upon us to be moral. I agree with them both. Rather than using the military to try to solve problems, our goal should be — as Greeley said so many years ago — to end all war.

Pluralist theories of religion

Many Unitarian Universalist espouse pluralist theories of religion. What is a pluralist theory of religion? According to S. Mark Heim, such theories “attempt to transform religious diversity from an apparent embarrassment for claims to religious truth into supporting testimony for one truth subsistent in all faiths: (“Pluralistic Theology as Apologetics,” ch. 4 in Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion,Orbis: 1995, p. 123).

This is the familiar argument that while all religions might be different in specifics, they all have the same goal. One analogy used is that all religions are paths up the same mountain — the paths start from different places, and take different routes up the mountain, but they all wind up at the same summit. That’s what a pluralist theory of religion is.

Back to Heim:

“There is a great deal of discussion today about ‘post modernity’ and about the possible changes which may follow the dethroning of North Atlantic views of history, knowledge, and justice from their supposed universal status through a recognition of valid alternatives from other cultures. Insofar as such a transformation were actually to take place, pluralistic theologies would seem to be among the most likely casualities, defensively structured as they are around the presumed universality of the codes of modern rationality. Ironically, pluralistic antidotes to Christian particularism may prove to be much more culture and time bound than the theologies they condemn. The very religious traditions pluralistic theologies wish to affirm may find on the whole they have as much to fear from the pluralists’ embrace as the exclusivists’ denial.”

Ouch. Take that, Unitarian Universalists. Heim is telling us that we can’t have our commitment to rationality, which is a Western invention, and at the same time claim a commitment to pluralism, since by claiming the universalist of rationalism we’re undermining the very pluralism we claim to support. Heim continues:

“The primary challenge to pluralist theologies is to make explicit their case for the global normativity of the Western critical principles that determine their univocal definitions of religion.”

Transgracial

“Transgracial” — that’s not a typographical error. Rebecca Tuvel, professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, explores the implications of a “transgracial,” or combined transgender and transracial identity, in a post to the American Philosophy Association (APA) “Black Issues in Philosophy” blog. In this post, Tuvel argues that transracial identity is analogous to transgender identity, where “analogous to” doesn’t mean “identical to.” When she first published these ideas in 2017, apparently some people were outraged. But I think Tuvel’s proposed analogy is less interesting than an essay she refers to written by Ronnie Gladden, who presents as a black man but who identifies as a white woman.

This essay, published in 2015 in Queer Cats Journal of LGBTQ Studies is titled “TRANSgressive Talk: An Introduction to the Meaning of Transgracial Identity.” The author, at that time a doctoral student in education at Northern Kentucky University, identifies their names as both Ronnie Gladden and Rachael Greenberg, so I’ll refer to them as Gladden/Greenberg. (For reference, it appears in 2021 that they identify simply as Ronnie Gladden.) In 2015, Gladden/Greenberg began their essay by saying:

“My confrontation with my internalized racial unrest, along with a growing awareness of my authentic gender identity, has been prompted, in part, by two socio-political shifts: 1) the escalating tensions belying the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, and 2) the increased visibility of transgender individuals in a myriad of public spaces. Increasingly, I feel an urgency to be forthcoming about my true identity in an era where transparency is not just encouraged; it is demanded. In spite of presenting as outwardly black and male — by and large I view myself as white and female….”

Gladden/Greenberg writes about an intersectional identity that I hadn’t thought about before. They describe tensions in their life that I wouldn’t have thought about. At the same time, claiming a transracial identity in the U.S. today may not seem possible, given the way we understand race in our society. But a 2014 article in Georgetown Law Journal by Camille Gear Rich, Gould School of Law at USC, titled “Elective Race: Recognizing Race Discrimination in the Era of Racial Self-Identification”, referred to in Tuvel’s blog post, may help to think further about the question of transracial identities. In this article, Rich writes:

“[W]e are in a key moment of discursive and ideological transition, an era in which the model of elective race is ascending, poised to become one of the dominant frameworks for understanding race in the United States. Because we are in a period of transition, many Americans still are wedded to fairly traditional attitudes about race. For these Americans, race is still an objective, easily ascertainable fact determined by the process of involuntary racial ascription — how one’s physical traits are racially categorized by third parties. The elective-race framework will challenge these Americans to recognize other ways in which people experience race, including acts of voluntary affiliation as well as selective and conditional affiliations.”

Rich acknowledges that this new elective model of race poses distinct challenges: “The elective-race framework rejects claims about the obdurate, all-encompassing nature of white privilege and the need for racial passing” (p. 1506). Rich isn’t denying that white privilege is real, but at the same time different individuals may navigate white privilege in different ways. Rich also points out that “neither lay understandings nor institutional understandings of elective race are fully developed”; I’m finding Rich’s article to be an excellent resource as I develop my own understanding of elective race.

Given that a significant number of people — let’s say, a growing number of people — accept the evolving concept of elective race, it should be no surprise to find people who identify as living at the intersection of transracial and transgender identities. I imagine that will be a difficult intersection at which to live. I wonder how Unitarian Universalism (and other religions, for that matter) will respond to the persons living at that intersection.

The basis for inter-religious dialogue

Raimundo Panikkar was a scholar who studied inter-religious dialogue. He held doctorate degrees in philosophy, chemistry, and theology. While serving as professor of religious studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Panikkar wrote a short essay about the necessary conditions for inter-religious dialogue:

“The modern kosmology (sic) assuming time is linear, history is paramount, individuality is the essence of Man (sic), democracy is an absolute, technocracy is neutral, social darwinism, and the like, cannot offer a fair platform for the Dialogue [between religions]. The basis for the Dialogue cannot be the modern Western myth.” — “The Ongoing Dialogue,” Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, vol. 2, 1989.

We Unitarian Universalists mostly assume that we have somehow moved beyond myths; yet most of us buy into the modern Western myth. Our “Seven Principles” specifically affirm individuality and democracy as among our highest values. Many of say “We believe in science,” and part of that belief is that science (and there seems to be little difference between our “science” andwhat Panikkar calls “technocracy”) represent a culturally neutral viewpoint. And of course we affirm that time is linear. All these things seem to us to be axiomatically true; how could they be doubted?

Yet I think Panikkar is correct. We think of human individuality, democracy, belief in science, and the linearity of time as axiomatic — but we also know from our own tradition of logic that axioms cannot be proved from within a logically consistent system. These axioms, like all axioms, are in some sense matters of belief. They are part of our foundational myth.

We Unitarian Universalists think we’re supremely rational and we don’t have myths. This attitude can cause problems when we try to engage in inter-religious dialogue. I don’t mind if we think we’re right and other religions are wrong — that’s what human beings do — but I do mind when we we’re not even aware that that’s what we’re doing.

What I see in an old photo

Cleaning out the files on my laptop, I came across an old low-resolution photo from 1999, showing a dozen people posing for the camera. It was a photo of the participants in the first “Essex Conversations” colloquium. Using GIMP, I increased the size of the photo to see if I could recognize those people…

I think I can identify most of them. From left to right are Lena Breen, then head of the religious education department of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA); Ginger Luke, minister of religious education; Jeanellen Ryan, leadership development director in the UUA’s religious education department; Frances Manly, minister of religious education; Tom Yondorf, parish minister; Susan Davison Archer, minister of religious education; Susan Suchocki Brown, parish minister; and Susan Harlow, professor of religious education at Meadville/Lombard.

In the front row at left is John Marsh, parish minister; a woman whom I’m sure I know but whose name I can’t remember; me, then a lay director of religious education; and Tom Owen-Towle, parish minister.

Several things struck me when I looked at this photo. Everyone is white. At 38 years old, I was the youngest person in the photo. And today, I’m the only one still active and working in a Unitarian Universalist congregation or organization (see the notes at the end of this post).

After looking at the photo, I dug out the essay I presented at that colloquium in 1999. It holds up surprisingly well in a number of areas, especially in its critique of the limitations of developmentalism, and in its insistence on talking about real live learners — I thought then, and think now, that too much theorizing about religious education is done without having real live children and teens in mind.

But it’s also fun to re-read that old essay to find all the things I no longer agree with. First, and perhaps most importantly, my essay didn’t adequately address how it is that learning and individual development depend on social interaction (I read Vygotsky a couple of years after I wrote it). Second, the world has changed a great deal since 1999, and Unitarian Universalist religious education faces new challenges, especially the ongoing decline of religious education enrollment in UU congregations, and the rise of religious disaffiliation, two linked trends that have been accelerated by the COVID pandemic. Third, over the past decade I’ve become increasingly aware of just how religiously illiterate most North Americans are, and I’ve seen research showing how religious literacy improves cross-cultural understanding, and how improved cross-cultural understanding can reduce violence and conflict in our communities; I wish now I’d made religious literacy integral to the essay. Finally, I’m less critical of schooling than I used to be, since I now believe some of the favored alternatives to schooling promoted in UU circle are artifacts of upper middle class white culture; yet because most children in North America attend school, schooling is can be more easily accepted across racial, cultural, and ethnic boundaries.

A revised version of my 1999 essay was published in the book Essex Conversations: Visions for Lifespan Religious Education (Skinner House: Boston, 2001); a book which, somewhat to my astonishment, is still in print. I think it’s past time for another generation of UU religious educators to write new essays about the future of religious education. Unfortunately, a colloquium like the one I attended costs a lot of money, and I suspect the declining financial health of the entire denomination means there won’t be another one in the foreseeable future. And religious education is no longer the priority it once was for Unitarian Universalists, partly because religious education enrollment has been declining since 2005 — but also because the current generation of children is majority non-white, and any attempt to encourage a bunch of non-white youngsters to come into our 95% white denomination is going to run smack up against the systemic racism that pervades the UUA.

Nevertheless, I wish we could put together a group of thoughtful people who are dedicated to religious education, who could spend a long weekend together to talk about what’s needed in religious education for the current generation of children. I wish we could have a new book of essays that address today’s religious education challenges — essays that address how we might keep Unitarian Universalist religious education from completely dying out.

Notes about the people in the photo:

John Marsh died in June. According to the UUA directory of professional religious leaders, Lena Breen, Ginger Luke, Jeanellen Ryan, Frances Manly, Susan Davison Archer, Susan Suchocki Brown, and Tom Owen-Towle are all either retired or no longer active. Susan Harlow, who was a United Church of Christ (UCC) minister, is retired from People’s Church in Chicago. Tom Yondorf left the ministry in 2000 to become a school teacher.

Generational divide

Paul Gilroy is a professor at University College London, and director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism there. He’s four years older than I am, and though in many ways we’re quite different it turns out we share a perception of today’s anti-racism work:

“Anti-racism has changed since Gilroy’s youth, its edge blunted. For much of the 20th century, being against racism meant being for a radically different political and economic settlement, such as socialism or communism. Today it can mean little more than doing what Gilroy mockingly calls ‘McKinsey multiculturalism’: keeping unjust societies as they are, except with a few ‘black and brown bodies’ in the corporate boardrooms. (‘I’m not very interested in decolonising the 1%’ he [says].) What is left is a more individualistic anti-racist culture, which is keen on checking privilege and affirming the validity of other people’s experiences, but has trouble creating durable institutions or political programmes.” — “The Last Humanist,” Yohann Koshy, The Guardian, August 5, 2021.

One reason I continue to call myself an “unrepentant Marxist” is that capitalism has proved unable to change racist systems in the U.S. (Indeed, from a historical perspective it’s arguable that capitalism initially thrived due to the way it exploited nonwhite labor, e.g., chattel slavery in the U.S.) I recognize that my view represents a tiny minority in the United States, or indeed in Unitarian Universalist circles, and that I may very well be wrong. However, if capitalism was able to solve the problem of racism in the U.S., I would think it would have done so many years ago. And it’s hard to see how a system built on inequality, as capitalism has always been, could somehow magically create racial equality. While Marxism may be the wrong answer, it’s no less wrong than capitalism.

Where does that leave us? As Paul Gilroy points out, we’re left with an “individualistic anti-racist culture” which does not seriously address unjust societies.

The Ten-minute Wedding

Over the years, I’ve performed a number of ten-minute weddings. What’s the point of a ten-minute wedding? I’ve done these weddings for couples who had a friend officiate at their wedding ceremony then needed a legal wedding, and for other couples whose wedding ceremony was not, for some reason or other, a legal wedding. These weddings are also useful for those who want a courthouse-type wedding, but who prefer not to go to city hall to be married. Mostly I’ve done this type of wedding in my office at church, but memorably I did one for a couple at a restaurant where the waitress was one of the witnesses (the couple gave her a really big tip).

I realized I’ve never put this ten-minute wedding on my Web site. In case it might be useful to someone else, here’s the form I use:

The Ten-Minute Wedding

Intention: A and B, it is now time to begin your passage into marriage, by declaring your intent to marry and then by making your vows to each other. Are you now ready to begin your passage into marriage? [Answer “I am.”]

Vows:

I, A, take you, B, to be my spouse,
to join our visions for a better future,
to join our voices for equality and love,
to have and to hold,
from this day forward,
as long as we both shall live.

I, B, take you, A, to be my spouse,
to join our visions for a better future,
to join our voices for equality and love,
to have and to hold,
from this day forward,
as long as we both shall live.

[Or use these more traditional vows: “I, A, take you, B, to be my spouse, / to have and to hold, / from this day forward, / as long as we both shall live.”]

Declaration: Inasmuch as A and B have agreed in their desire to go forward in life together, seeking an ever richer, deepening relationship, and because they have pledged themselves to meet sorrow and joy as one, we rejoice to recognize them as married.

CC0

As far as I know, all these words are in the public domain, so I slapped a Creative Commons CC0 “No rights reserved” label on the wedding above (the words in blue type). That means it’s in the public domain, so you can use it, modify it, etc.

Here are some thoughts on this wedding from:

(1) Obviously, other vows may be used.

(2) While I’m pretty insistent on making weddings absolutely gender-neutral —I feel vows should be the same for both persons in the couple, and I use the gender-neutral “spouse” — you may have different views on gender neutrality. Feel free to use words like “husband” and “wife,” or to have one spouse to say they’ll “honor and obey” the other spouse (just so long as I don’t have to attend the wedding).

(3) An unspoken assumption in this wedding form is that both persons involved know exactly what they’re getting into, and both freely consent to the marriage. I wouldn’t perform a wedding unless both parties are fluent in English, or unless there’s a certified interpreter — many courthouse officiants have similar requirements. All the usual criteria for consent also apply: e.g., I won’t perform a wedding where one member of the couple appears to be dominating or abusing the other, or where one member of the couple appears to be intoxicated, or where one member of the couple is under the age of consent.

(4) I feel it’s archaic and ridiculous for the officiant to say, “You may now kiss.” (And no way would I ever utter the sexist words, “You may kiss the bride.”) If both members of the couple are above the age of consent, why do they need my permission? But at the end of the brief ceremony, I might remind them that this a a time when couples often kids each other, if they choose to do so.

(5) Although I call this a Ten-minute Wedding, if you’re the officiant you’ll want to schedule at least 15 minutes. You’ll need five minutes to check the marriage license, and get the couple settled down. The actual wedding takes about five minutes. Then another five minutes for you to sign the marriage license, and to have any witnesses sign as well (if your state requires witness signatures).

Finally — yes, I can do a Ten-minute Wedding for you if you need one. Email me to schedule a time to meet in my office. If I don’t know you, I’ll require a minimum $50 donation to LifeMoves, a nonprofit that provides services and housing to homeless people; if you can’t afford $50, let me know and we’ll work out a sliding scale. (Also, if you want anything more than the wedding shown above in blue — that means any customization, including writing your own vows — my fee immediately goes to $500, because customization requires more time from me.)

Many conservative Christians are appalled by anti-vaxxers

Steve Hassen, a conservative Christian, has written a blog post that explains why conservative Christians should get vaccinated. The blog post is based on a podcast interview with Professor Warren Throckmorton, a psychologist. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post:

“I asked Throckmorton for his view on the COVID-19 pandemic and what he thinks about vaccination? He and his family are vaccinated. When I asked him about Christianity and science, he told me Biblical sources provide believers guidance. He pointed out that Timothy, a disciple of St. Paul, had a stomach ailment. He was not advised to pray or just have faith but to take a little wine (that is, treat the ailment). Luke, who wrote one of the Gospels, was himself a physician. God gave us incredible gifts: our minds, intelligence, and curiosity. Certainly, we are meant to use our minds and think and not allow irrational fears to cause harm and death.”

Hassen covers a lot of ground in his blog post. He takes on Trump: “How can anyone [who’s] religious think God is using Donald Trump?” He explains how science and conservative Christian faith are compatible. He critiques Christian nationalism and dominionism, two of the biggest threats to U.S. democracy today. And he touches on the problem of narcissism in the pastors of mega-churches (some of what he says there reminds me of one or two people who used to be ministers of some of our largest UU congregations).

Hassen reminds me of the conservative Christians I used to know back in the day: people whose intelligence, morals, and ethics I held in great respect, even while disagreeing with them on some theological points. Unitarian Universalists who like to demonize white evangelical conservative Christians might want to read this post, and expand their horizons a little bit. If we’re going to stop the threat to democracy represented by QAnon and Trumpism, we need all the allies we can get.

Reforming police, 1969

In July, 1969, Jules Siegel interviewed several Black Panthers for an article he was writing. The Panthers he spoke to talked quite a bit about a topic that has been very much in the news over the past year — reforming the police. Field Marshal “D.C.” [Donald Cox] of the Black Panthers laid out the fundamental problem:

“It has been called police brutality. It’s a matter of educating people to the fact that yes, it’s brutal, but the term for it is fascism. Black people already know, because they’ve lived under fascist terror ever since we’ve been in this country. Fascism is the police running amok in the black community.”

“Poison,” a field lieutenant from the Chicago Black Panthers, outlined the Panthers’ solution — community control of police:

“Lots of people don’t understand what community control means. It means giving the people a voice. Right now they have no voice because it is a centralist form of government. Community control of the police doesn’t mean that the community would take over the present pig [i.e., police] department. It means that people will have people from within that community policing that community. If one of these police would commit a crime against the people, he [sic] would have to come home at night. It’s a hard thing to go home if you’ve committed a crime against your own people. Before you commit that crime, you begin to think.”

It’s also important to note that Field Marshal D.C. asserted that the fascism of the police was not rooted in race and racism per se:

“It’s in the interest of the power structure to propagate the idea that it’s a race struggle rather than a class struggle. As long as they can keep people divided into ethnic groups, the masses are not going to join together to form a united front against the exploiter who is oppressing everyone.”

In short, the Panthers saw that the real problem was not the police, but the power structure that the police represented.

The Black Panthers had many problems, including rampant sexism. But I still find much of their vision for society compelling. They saw that U.S. capitalism was upheld by a form of fascism, and that police brutality was one manifestation of that fascism. They wanted to wrest social control away from “the oppressor,” and put that control back in the hands of the people. And they combined grand theory with practical action: by July, 1969, the Panthers’ “Breakfast for Children” program was feeding 50,000 children a week across the U.S. In spite of their flaws, theirs was a grand vision for a more just and egalitarian society. This vision provides a necessary context for their proposals for police reform.

A screen grab from a National Archives video of the Black Panthers, c. 1966-1969, showing Party leader Kathleen Cleaver (?) speaking at Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland.

Notes: Interview excerpts from “The Black Panthers” by Jules Siegel, from his book Record (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books/Rolling Stone, 1972). More about the Black Panther Party at the National Archives, including vintage video footage, and brief biographies of prominent women Panthers.