The Black Panther Party was violent and militant – endorsing their model of revolution guarantees further violence

There is little doubt the Panthers were targeted in ways that were often viciously excessive, including what amounted to extrajudicial killings. But there is even less doubt that among their own senior ranks were pathological killers, ideological madmen and depraved opportunists. But that side of the story is either only referred to in passing or ignored altogether. For example, the film features interviews with a charming and now grey-haired former Black Panther called Ericka Huggins. Although the image of the Panthers was potently male, more than half the members by the late 1960s were female. Their story has been sidelined and it is to the documentary’s credit that it seeks to redress the marginalising of female voices. We hear Huggins speak about what initially galvanised her to join the Panthers, how she committed herself to the cause and how, with a heavy heart, she finally left, having been assaulted by an increasingly deranged Newton. What she doesn’t mention – and nor does the film – is the case of a 19-year-old Panther foot soldier called Alex Rackley. In May 1969, after her Panther husband, John Huggins, was killed in a shoot-out with black nationalists, Huggins moved with her baby daughter to New Haven, Connecticut, where she led the local chapter of the Black Panthers. For no good reason, Rackley, an illiterate young man, was suspected of being an informant. At that time, the FBI had infiltrated the organisation and fear of informants was widespread. And so Rackley was interrogated under torture. He was tied to a chair and had boiling water poured over him and was then left tied to a bed for three days in great pain, in his own mess. Not only did Huggins witness these scenes, , after which he was taken to a nearby swamp and shot dead. Huggins and Seale were charged with murder, kidnap and conspiracy, the allegation being that they commissioned the crime. After a celebrated trial, both walked free. Huggins’s defence was that she was coerced into playing along with the killers – Warren Kimbro and Lonnie McLucas – by the national “field marshal” of the Panthers, George Sams. Of this whole tragic episode, not a word is mentioned. Why? “Ericka Huggins was acquitted,” Stanley Nelson tells me on the phone from the States. “You can’t keep trying people in the media.” Huggins was indeed acquitted – the jury found her not guilty by 10-2. But no one can say she wasn’t there during the torture. Nor that she didn’t remain in the Panthers for almost another decade. Why did she stay with an organisation that harboured such sadistic killers? “Because I was committed to the party, not to orchestrations of the FBI,” she tells me from her home in Oakland. “I was committed to serving people. That’s why I stayed.” As far as she is concerned, the FBI were ruthless puppet masters, able to turn good men into cold-blooded killers through the power of suggestion. It’s a handy theory that absolves the Panthers of responsibility for their own actions and it’s one the film implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, supports. As Nelson says: “We did ask people about that [Alex Rackley] story. But to retry someone who’s been acquitted, I don’t see the relevance of it. What exactly does it prove? It’s a very complicated story. You have a psychopathic infiltrator from the FBI, spurring the Panthers on to commit these acts.” The accusation that Sams was working for the FBI has been repeated many times but with no definitive proof and there is nothing to suggest the torture was conducted under FBI direction. All the same, when I ask Nelson whether there was a critical point at which things started to go wrong, he says: “If you wanted to single out one thing, I think it would be J Edgar Hoover and the FBI. I think the Panthers might have been able to sort out their internal problems themselves.” This is, to say at the least, a large assumption, But it’s one that fits the film’s perspective. As Nelson rightly says: “The way the Black Panthers are remembered is not the way that they were thought of at the time.” And one judgment of the film is that it sets out to recover that earlier understanding of the Panthers, when they were seen by many as an inspiration rather than an embarrassment. “We wanted to give this film the spirit of this revolutionary fervour going on,” says Nelson. In an immediate sense, it’s a question of image and style. The Panthers were striking in the first instance because of how they looked. This was the era of afros and black consciousness and no one did it with more panache than the Panthers. Seldom has a sense of danger, radicalism and street cool been combined to such mesmerising effect. One former henchman in the film recalls a gathering of sympathetic Hollywood A-listers which Black Panthers attended in full black leather-and-guns garb. “Those stars,” he says laughing at the memory, “they just loved that shit. They just ate that shit up.” There was a willingness in progressive circles to give the Panthers the benefit of any doubt, owing to their unimpeachable revolutionary credentials. For they didn’t just shout “kill the pigs”, like a lot of angry students, they really did go out and shoot the police dead. Newton killed Oakland police officer John Frey in a shoot-out after Frey stopped him in his car early on the morning of 28 October 1967. Newton suffered a stomach wound in the exchange and was arrested in hospital. There followed a nationwide campaign to release him.