The Black Panther Party is the subject of growing academic interest as historians born after the 1960s take a new look at a movement known to their generation mostly from movies, memoirs and negative government reports.
Scholars from around the country will meet in Boston beginning today to give more than 40 new papers on the Panthers. Organizers are saying the conference breaks new ground as a scholars-only assessment of the group, which emerged in Oakland in 1966, spread nationally and internationally, and faded out in 1980.
The conference, called "The Black Panther Party in Historical Perspective," is part of a trend to look at the Panthers in the web of American social history rather than merely as one of the most sensational groups to emerge in the upheaval of the '60s.
"If historians don't ignore them, they tend to focus on the militant side of black people brandishing guns, or they focus on the negative side of cocaine and brutalization and violence and all the rest," said Jama Lazerow, a professor of history at Wheelock College, where the conference will be held.
"The Panthers are the most radical version of the '60s stories, and the way people tend to interpret the '60s even now is in a negative or positive light, " he said.
In 1968, the FBI branded the Panthers the nation's most violence-prone extremist group and began a campaign to disrupt the party from within and prosecute its leaders and active members. The government's record still clouds the Panthers' image, but young scholars see that as just one version of the story.
"We're not out to celebrate the Panthers," said Yohuru Williams, 31, a Delaware State University history professor and one of the organizers of the conference. "We're out to correct the historical record."
Kathleen Cleaver, who once served as the party's communications secretary and is the former spouse of the late Panther spokesman Eldridge Cleaver, welcomes the effort to put the group's story in historical context.
"The whole premise on which a black person's existence is viewed historically has to be corrected, and if you have a corrected premise, the view of the Black Panther Party will come closer to reality," said Cleaver, a senior lecturer at Emory School of Law in Atlanta.
The group's rise and demise, and especially the life and death of its co- founder and star, Huey Newton, lend themselves to romantic, heroic and true- crime treatments in books and movies.
Newton typically enters the stage in 1966 as a taut, shirtless young black man armed with a gun and law book as he confronts racist police on the streets of Oakland.
And he exits in 1989, again on the streets of Oakland, shot dead by a drug dealer.
But scholars are now looking at Newton as a many-sided character and the Panthers as a group with more dimensions than simply the tragic and the heroic.
"It took all types," Lazerow said. "It's just a more complicated story than any of these histories have made it."
Newton is the topic of two papers at the conference, one dealing with the myth, the other with his "spiritual and educational legacy."
But the conference is giving more time to the unsung rank-and-file Panthers,
especially outside the Bay Area, as scholars look into the workings of party branches in places as diverse as Harlem, New Orleans and Des Moines, Iowa.
Several papers explore the Panthers and other political movements afoot at the time, including the New Left, gay liberation and the international anti- colonial struggle.
The original Panthers soaked up what radicals in Berkeley, New York and around the world were saying about the revolutionary movement in places like Algeria. What they learned clicked with their experiences as young black men growing up in a declining Oakland after World War II.
"They come out of a milieu, but they decide to take an aggressive stance," Self said. "(Newton) comes from a world that's defined by a very real struggle between the white Oakland P.D. and these black kids for public space. What's going on for them daily is this kind of dance with the police."
The Panthers had learned of colonial struggles elsewhere, and Self believes they had something to say about the idea that the black community in the city was a "colonized place," too.
"They're making this critique at the historical moment when the increasingly black central city and white suburbs is the hot topic," said Self,
who is working on a book called "American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland."
"He contends that America is the only true empire that ever existed -- more so than the Roman Empire, because during the Roman Empire there were still places that were unknown," Hilliard said.
Conference participant Williams said the Panthers' racial politics, often criticized as violent, also should be looked at historically.
"They talk about police patrols, but they don't understand there was this long-standing police brutality that was directly connected to the legacy of slavery in the United States," he said.
"If you look at the best of the Black Panther Party, they're still needed," he said. "They can fill a void in today's society, when we're moving away from individual freedom, where the state is encroaching on individual rights . . ."
"Young folks," he said, "can't believe you had a group like that who dared to stand up to the most powerful country in the world."