The Black Panther Party's effectiveness came from their systems thinking - free breakfast programs, health clinics, legal aid - creating parallel institutions that served real needs while revealing state failures. Their discipline around uniforms, community programs, and internal education wasn't aesthetic; it was infrastructure. What parallel institutions could we build today that would be equally impossible to ignore?
You have to be wary of anyone, regardless of age, resume, or proximity to history, who spends more time policing Black people doing work than confronting the systems killing us. Especially when that critique flows downward, not upward.
What’s being done here isn’t protection of legacy. It’s delegitimization through comparison. And that move has a long history. if you don’t look, sound, or organize exactly like a image from the past, then you’re framed as fake, reckless, or dangerous. That logic doesn’t defend Black life, it narrows who is allowed to resist.
The reality is this there is no single authorized form of Black struggle. The original Panthers themselves evolved, disagreed, fractured, and adapted to conditions. Treating them like a museum exhibit instead of a living political lineage is itself ahistorical.
You don’t erase real community work because it doesn’t fit your preferred model. Mutual aid, protection, food distribution, court support, and local organizing don’t stop being valid because they aren’t branded the way you like or because they didn’t emerge from the same decade, city, or leadership circle.
And let’s be honest about motive.
Who benefits when Black formations are publicly dismissed as unserious, dangerous, or illegitimate by other Black people?
Who benefits when nationalism is framed as inherently suspect, but global solidarity is only acceptable when it’s abstract and non-threatening?
Who benefits when critique focuses on aesthetics and symbolism instead of material outcomes?
Because it’s never the community.
Calling something “spectacle” is easy. Building trust is slow. But you don’t get to ignore lived impact because it doesn’t match your theory. You don’t get to imply people are disposable learning curves while claiming to care about survival.
And let’s be clear uplifting the state’s framing whether intentionally or not by amplifying narratives that paint Black organizers as reckless or fraudulent is not radical. It’s familiar. We’ve seen this before. It’s how movements get isolated while repression stays untouched.
If someone is serious about legacy, the question isn’t “does this look like the Panthers?”
The question is Who is feeding people? Who is showing up? Who is rooted? Who is accountable to the community they serve?
I appreciate you engaging this seriously. These questions matter, and I welcome the exchange.
To be clear, I’m not policing Black people doing work, nor dismissing mutual aid, protection, or local organizing. Those efforts are not cosmetic to me—they are the material basis of survival. My argument was not about aesthetics or nostalgia, and not about who gets to resist.
It was about strategy and consequence. When groups adopt historically charged names or symbols, those choices carry inherited risks as well as power. That isn’t moral judgment—it’s historical fact. The state has never responded to such symbolism neutrally, and pretending otherwise has cost lives.
I agree there is no single authorized form of Black struggle, nor should there be. The original Panthers themselves adapted, fractured, and debated under pressure. Precisely because of that history, my concern is whether new formations are building structures that can survive repression and remain accountable when conditions harden—not just when visibility is high.
We may differ on emphasis, but I think we share the same priority: survival over symbolism, accountability over image, and real community impact over commentary. That’s the ground I’m standing on.
The article and this rebuttal make a lot of really great points. I don't even know if I grasp it enough to fully join the conversation, but it's worth pointing out that the original Black Panthers didn't actually last or survive repression. If they had, we wouldn't be talking about the original Black Panthers in the past tense, it would just continue to be a thing.
the work they did definitely still has an impact today.
But I think, going off of what you say, but also what the other person said, we're putting "Black Panthers" specifically, The organizations, the names, the visuals, the style— on too much of a pedestal.
In fact, that's part of how they were forcefully disbanded. If we want to truly fight back, to truly liberate everyone and raise the condition of black people in the United States, we need to adopt Black Panther tactics on a wider scale and beyond any organization name or formal group.
It doesn't matter what your group is called or how they look or identify if they're doing mutual aid and protection and building community systems that save lives. Whether the group is durable and non-centralized can definitely affect a lot of things, and even that group's lifespan, but the work they do still has a major impact.
Honestly, I have some thoughts about how trying to build a uniform approach or organization or NATION across hundreds of millions of people, across most of a continent, is doomed to fail. Our experiences and our cultures are too different. It would be a mistake to try and make us all the same, or get such a large amount of people on the same exact page, so we have to encourage building these kinds of systems wherever we are, even if one way of doing things is very different from others. We fight together, even as we are in different organizations.
I have spent my entire adult life doing community organizing and grassroots advocacy, and I must say. this post is so freaking spot on, and I think it also speaks to the challenges community organizations are currently having as well. The desire for spectacle and results without an infrastructure, north star, or theory of change. Thank you for writing this post, I'll be subscribing to see what else you cover!
Thank you so much for writing this! I have not wanted to speak on the alleged "New BPP," but you're absolutely right. I wrote curriculum for the Huey Newton Foundation last year, and I spent a lot of time just reading archives on BPP programming--the heart of the Panthers. To reduce the BPP to costume and guns is not only clownish and unserious, but it is potentially dangerous. Thank you for such a clear response.
Wow- this spoke to me on an entirely differently level. Forgive me for pointing to Christianity in this discussion (that is the realm im more familiar with) but there are a lot of parallels in the formation of the original BPP and the ministry of Jesus. Setting up structure, ensuring continuity with ideology/systems, visibility audits, repression preparation. You helped me connect a lot of dots. Thanks for writing this!
Thank you for sharing, this was magnificent and something I am going to be contemplating on much for future organizational work. I do think that people jump the gun a bit and worry more about recruitment or actions rather than building any kind of structure to sustain the group as a whole. Ill be thinking about this one for a bit.
I loved reading this. Continuity is not the hardware, it is the software. It is the boring, durable stuff, the political education, the mutual aid, the legal and security protocols that make repression survivable, and the leadership development that prevents a whole formation from collapsing. If your continuity cannot survive the loss of the face, then it was never continuity, it was visibility. 
I had forgotten about NFAC. And the New Black Panthers of Philadelphia who showed up at the polling stations in 2010 and caught a voter intimidation charge. Or for that matter, the ones who came to a BLM march in Atlanta dressed in what looked like Black Panther Halloween costumes, with fake guns.
The Black Panther Party's effectiveness came from their systems thinking - free breakfast programs, health clinics, legal aid - creating parallel institutions that served real needs while revealing state failures. Their discipline around uniforms, community programs, and internal education wasn't aesthetic; it was infrastructure. What parallel institutions could we build today that would be equally impossible to ignore?
You have to be wary of anyone, regardless of age, resume, or proximity to history, who spends more time policing Black people doing work than confronting the systems killing us. Especially when that critique flows downward, not upward.
What’s being done here isn’t protection of legacy. It’s delegitimization through comparison. And that move has a long history. if you don’t look, sound, or organize exactly like a image from the past, then you’re framed as fake, reckless, or dangerous. That logic doesn’t defend Black life, it narrows who is allowed to resist.
The reality is this there is no single authorized form of Black struggle. The original Panthers themselves evolved, disagreed, fractured, and adapted to conditions. Treating them like a museum exhibit instead of a living political lineage is itself ahistorical.
You don’t erase real community work because it doesn’t fit your preferred model. Mutual aid, protection, food distribution, court support, and local organizing don’t stop being valid because they aren’t branded the way you like or because they didn’t emerge from the same decade, city, or leadership circle.
And let’s be honest about motive.
Who benefits when Black formations are publicly dismissed as unserious, dangerous, or illegitimate by other Black people?
Who benefits when nationalism is framed as inherently suspect, but global solidarity is only acceptable when it’s abstract and non-threatening?
Who benefits when critique focuses on aesthetics and symbolism instead of material outcomes?
Because it’s never the community.
Calling something “spectacle” is easy. Building trust is slow. But you don’t get to ignore lived impact because it doesn’t match your theory. You don’t get to imply people are disposable learning curves while claiming to care about survival.
And let’s be clear uplifting the state’s framing whether intentionally or not by amplifying narratives that paint Black organizers as reckless or fraudulent is not radical. It’s familiar. We’ve seen this before. It’s how movements get isolated while repression stays untouched.
If someone is serious about legacy, the question isn’t “does this look like the Panthers?”
The question is Who is feeding people? Who is showing up? Who is rooted? Who is accountable to the community they serve?
Anything else is just commentary.
Thank you for this.
I appreciate you engaging this seriously. These questions matter, and I welcome the exchange.
To be clear, I’m not policing Black people doing work, nor dismissing mutual aid, protection, or local organizing. Those efforts are not cosmetic to me—they are the material basis of survival. My argument was not about aesthetics or nostalgia, and not about who gets to resist.
It was about strategy and consequence. When groups adopt historically charged names or symbols, those choices carry inherited risks as well as power. That isn’t moral judgment—it’s historical fact. The state has never responded to such symbolism neutrally, and pretending otherwise has cost lives.
I agree there is no single authorized form of Black struggle, nor should there be. The original Panthers themselves adapted, fractured, and debated under pressure. Precisely because of that history, my concern is whether new formations are building structures that can survive repression and remain accountable when conditions harden—not just when visibility is high.
We may differ on emphasis, but I think we share the same priority: survival over symbolism, accountability over image, and real community impact over commentary. That’s the ground I’m standing on.
I wish you well.
The article and this rebuttal make a lot of really great points. I don't even know if I grasp it enough to fully join the conversation, but it's worth pointing out that the original Black Panthers didn't actually last or survive repression. If they had, we wouldn't be talking about the original Black Panthers in the past tense, it would just continue to be a thing.
the work they did definitely still has an impact today.
But I think, going off of what you say, but also what the other person said, we're putting "Black Panthers" specifically, The organizations, the names, the visuals, the style— on too much of a pedestal.
In fact, that's part of how they were forcefully disbanded. If we want to truly fight back, to truly liberate everyone and raise the condition of black people in the United States, we need to adopt Black Panther tactics on a wider scale and beyond any organization name or formal group.
It doesn't matter what your group is called or how they look or identify if they're doing mutual aid and protection and building community systems that save lives. Whether the group is durable and non-centralized can definitely affect a lot of things, and even that group's lifespan, but the work they do still has a major impact.
Honestly, I have some thoughts about how trying to build a uniform approach or organization or NATION across hundreds of millions of people, across most of a continent, is doomed to fail. Our experiences and our cultures are too different. It would be a mistake to try and make us all the same, or get such a large amount of people on the same exact page, so we have to encourage building these kinds of systems wherever we are, even if one way of doing things is very different from others. We fight together, even as we are in different organizations.
This rebuttal has a lot of great points. Very well said.
I have spent my entire adult life doing community organizing and grassroots advocacy, and I must say. this post is so freaking spot on, and I think it also speaks to the challenges community organizations are currently having as well. The desire for spectacle and results without an infrastructure, north star, or theory of change. Thank you for writing this post, I'll be subscribing to see what else you cover!
What I find so refreshing is that this is done from a perspective of improving our work! Your "cadre logic" vs "spectacle logic" speaks to me deeply!
Thank you so much for writing this! I have not wanted to speak on the alleged "New BPP," but you're absolutely right. I wrote curriculum for the Huey Newton Foundation last year, and I spent a lot of time just reading archives on BPP programming--the heart of the Panthers. To reduce the BPP to costume and guns is not only clownish and unserious, but it is potentially dangerous. Thank you for such a clear response.
Wow- this spoke to me on an entirely differently level. Forgive me for pointing to Christianity in this discussion (that is the realm im more familiar with) but there are a lot of parallels in the formation of the original BPP and the ministry of Jesus. Setting up structure, ensuring continuity with ideology/systems, visibility audits, repression preparation. You helped me connect a lot of dots. Thanks for writing this!
I was raised a Mississippi Southern Baptist. We can discuss and recognize from wherever we come as long as we are civil and do no harm.
So, so good. Much thanks.
“The New Black Panther Party adopted the name and iconography of the Panthers without inheriting their organizational logic.” 🔥🔥🔥
Great article and very educational. Would you be ok if I translated it to portuguese so it can be shared with my comrades in Brasil?
Please do. I write to contribute to our global discourse.
Perfectly articulated the feelings I've felt towards the performances of revolution I see today.
Thank you for sharing, this was magnificent and something I am going to be contemplating on much for future organizational work. I do think that people jump the gun a bit and worry more about recruitment or actions rather than building any kind of structure to sustain the group as a whole. Ill be thinking about this one for a bit.
If it looks like a panther and fights like a panther and speaks like a panther and builds collective power like a panther, it’s a panther.
I loved reading this. Continuity is not the hardware, it is the software. It is the boring, durable stuff, the political education, the mutual aid, the legal and security protocols that make repression survivable, and the leadership development that prevents a whole formation from collapsing. If your continuity cannot survive the loss of the face, then it was never continuity, it was visibility. 
I had forgotten about NFAC. And the New Black Panthers of Philadelphia who showed up at the polling stations in 2010 and caught a voter intimidation charge. Or for that matter, the ones who came to a BLM march in Atlanta dressed in what looked like Black Panther Halloween costumes, with fake guns.
It gets tiresome.
This was enlightening and most appreciated! 👏👏👏
Was gon ask if you got books but I guess I will just google, I am impressed with the quality of your strategic analysis
Mr Flowers please get in touch! floydwebb@gmail.com
I have no books. I have been thinking and studying, constantly. But thank you for asking. It is encouraging.