The Violence of Belonging
Let me just say plainly what the New Black Panther Party believes, because that's where the disgust actually lives, and euphemism is doing a lot of protective work here that it hasn't earned. Their own literature calls a Black person who marries or loves outside their race a collaborator — a modern-day custodian of Uncle Tom. Their former national spokesman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, told crowds outright that there was no such thing as a good white person, and that if you ever found one, the correct response was violence before he had the chance to "change." This wasn't just rhetoric people carried around in their heads. In 2008, two members stood outside a Philadelphia polling place, one of them holding a nightstick, and it turned into a federal voter-intimidation case. It's hard to file that under street theater once an organization has told you, in its own words and through what its members actually did, what it thinks your blood entitles you to and how it expects you to be treated if you're born outside it.
Take away the beret and the borrowed name, and what's underneath is a founding premise: ancestry is destiny, mixing betrayal, and an entire race carries a guilt that no individual member of it can ever finish paying off. That's the same ground the Klan stands on, just facing the other direction.
The Klan started in Pulaski, Tennessee, in the winter of 1865 and 1866 — a handful of defeated Confederate veterans who turned what began as a social club into a terror campaign almost overnight. Its purpose became clear fast: bury Reconstruction, and bury Black political power along with it. It came back a second time in 1915 wearing the same core belief with new targets stapled on, adding Catholics, Jews, and immigrants to the list of things it considered contamination. By the civil rights era, burning a cross on someone's lawn was still just a way of telling a Black family whose blood the neighborhood was supposed to belong to. Every time it resurfaced, it kept coming back to the same idea — that white Protestant supremacy needed defending against racial and social contamination.
The NBPP just flips that logic and lands in the exact same failure. Purity becomes virtue, mixing becomes corruption, and ancestry becomes a legitimate way to decide who's loyal and who belongs. An idea doesn't get less monstrous because the people holding it come from a group that has historically been on the receiving end of racial violence. If it's repellent for a white organization to say someone stops being "one of us" the moment they marry outside their race, swapping which race is on top doesn't fix the idea — it just points it somewhere else. Suffering can explain how someone ends up holding an ugly belief. It doesn't launder the belief once they're holding it.
And here's what makes the whole thing worse — the inheritance this group chose to wear, because the original Black Panther Party was never clean or mythical to begin with. It was a complicated, contradictory organization that had already paid in its own blood for the right to be taken seriously, and some of that blood was spilled by Panthers themselves. In May 1969, members of the New Haven chapter tortured and murdered Alex Rackley, a nineteen-year-old Panther they suspected of being an informant. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins were later tried in connection with the killing. Huey Newton, one of the Party's co-founders, was later accused of murdering seventeen-year-old Kathleen Smith in 1974 and fled to Cuba while facing prosecution. Elaine Brown, who became Party chairwoman that same year, later wrote about the misogyny and violence women faced inside an organization whose public language was liberation.
None of it should be softened. The original Party was capable of real cruelty toward its own people — paranoia, internal power struggles, criminality, government infiltration, and the ordinary human rot that grows inside any movement under siege long enough that it starts eating itself. Its failures matter because being honest about history means holding all of it at once, not choosing the flattering half. The Black Panther Party could be revolutionary and destructive at the same time, politically important and internally brutal at the same time, without ever making racial purity the basis of its politics. You don't have to excuse its worst violence to still see that distinction clearly.
The New Black Panther Party crossed a different line — it made racial separation and collective racial judgment the actual substance of its politics. And it did that while wearing the name of an organization whose history, messy and violent as parts of it were, also included alliances that make the theft particularly ugly.
Bobby Seale — who helped found the original Party and has more standing than almost anyone alive to say what belongs to its legacy — rejected the New Black Panther Party outright and called it a racist hate group. The Huey P. Newton Foundation said the same, publicly rejecting the NBPP's use of the name and insisting the original organization was never founded on hatred of white people. Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed during a Chicago police raid in 1969, and before that happened, he'd helped build the Rainbow Coalition — working alongside the Young Patriots, poor white Southerners in Chicago, and the Young Lords, among other groups. Hampton didn't need poor white people to stop being white before he could recognize that they, too, were being exploited by the same system.
There's something genuinely obscene about borrowing the Black Panther name after that history. The NBPP took an inheritance built by people who proved you could oppose oppression without hating an entire race, and attached it to a politics that treats race itself as the measure of someone's loyalty.
Call it robbery instead of inheritance. It earns the same moral disgust as the Klan, though pretending the two organizations have done equal damage to the world would be historically ridiculous — they plainly haven't. This isn't about equivalent power, equivalent reach, or an equivalent body count. It's about the principle sitting underneath racial supremacy, wherever it shows up. The moment a movement decides that ancestry or skin can determine a person's worth, loyalty, legitimacy, or right to belong, the corruption has already happened. Time tells you how much damage an idea managed to do. It doesn't tell you whether the idea is rotten.
This one is rotten no matter how small the group holding it is.
Marni Fraser
0826|2026
SOURCES
Southern Poverty Law Center. “New Black Panther Party.” Extremist Files. Documents the NBPP’s racial-separatist ideology, The Nationalist Manifesto, its statements concerning mixed-race relationships, and statements attributed to Khalid Abdul Muhammad and other NBPP leaders.
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Race Neutral Enforcement of the Law? The U.S. Department of Justice and the New Black Panther Party Litigation. 2010. Documents the 2008 Philadelphia polling-place incident and statements attributed to New Black Panther Party members and leadership.
U.S. Department of Justice. “Justice Department Files Lawsuit Against New Black Panther Party.” January 7, 2009. Federal account of the Philadelphia polling-place voter-intimidation case.
Anti-Defamation League. “Report: The New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (NBPP).” Documents the organization’s history, racist and antisemitic rhetoric, leadership, and ideological differences from the original Black Panther Party.
Southern Poverty Law Center. “Hate Group Founder’s Post on Homeland Security Board on Hold.” Documents the NBPP’s opposition to mixed-race marriage and statements attributed to Khalid Abdul Muhammad.
The Journal of African American History. “There Is No New Black Panther Party: The New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” University of Chicago Press. Scholarly discussion of the NBPP, its development, ideology, and relationship to the historical Black Panther Party.
Image by Wallace Chuck, edited by me.
