Anti-Colonial Framework
The foundation of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1966 and its adoption of an anti-colonial framework was not an anomaly. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s nascent party and their Black Panther newspaper’s espousal of Third World solidarity were built upon the intellectual work of the previous generation who, inspired by the imperative of Cold War decolonization, reinvisioned the status of African Americans not as citizens denied their civil rights, but as colonized people. This new relationship was formulated by actors not only in the domestic but also the international sphere, such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and George Padmore. In America, figures such as Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and Martin Luther King Jr. all contributed to the anti-colonial and Third World connection. Indeed, in 1959 on a trip to India MLK said that “the strongest bond of fraternity was the common cause of minority and colonial peoples in America, Africa, and Asia struggling to throw off racism and imperialism.” (Singh, 2005, 185.) The narrative of the Cold War played a key role in the struggle for civil rights, a struggle which birthed the updated transnational framework.
As nations in Africa and Asia were throwing off the yoke of imperial domination and fighting for Atlantic Charter-inspired self-determination, the reality of non-white progress caused African Americans to compare their struggle to the victories being achieved in Ghana and Nigeria.
"Even our American brothers, as a result of racial discrimination, find themselves within a great modern nation in an artificial situation that can only be understood in reference to colonialism."- Aimé Césaire, Paris, 1956.
(Singh, 2005, 174.)
In addition to the decolonisation process, the Cold War further blurred the lines between the domestic and international spheres as factors like economic might, sport superiority, and positive propaganda all became weapons for American democracy to prove its righteousness to the world. The power of positive propaganda played a crucial role in the development of Cold War civil rights, since the U.S. government tried to portray a story of progress against the evil, imperialistic Soviet Union. American racial problems were manipulated by the Soviet Union which ensured that race would be a part of the Cold War narrative. (Dudziak, 2002, 250.) After the question of race in America was eclipsed by concerns over Vietnam in the international sphere, the establishment was less inclined to support civil rights movements in an attempt to manipulate the nnarrative of race towards the mid 1960s, which is when the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland.