Part One

The rise of the militant black power movement, of which the Black Panthers were a prominent example of, paradoxically both confused and confirmed many of the Soviet and Eastern bloc assumptions about race and American racism that had developed since the 1920s. Although the Bolsheviks were roughly aware of American racism, it was actually black activists that brought lynching and other problems of Jim Crow to the attention of Moscow. Black radicals from the US and Caribbean brought up the issue of racism in the Americas during the 1st Congress of the Comintern in March 1919. The Fourth Comintern Congress authorized a "Negro Bureau" three years later and under its auspices published a number of tracts attacking the racism and publishing books like Negroes in America and Lynching in America by Claude McKay. These books had a limited print run in both Russian and English. McKay was a Jamaican-American poet and author whose dark skin meant that he was an ideal poster-child for the Soviet's antiracist ideology. Soviet publications in the early 1920s featured McKay with Soviet leaders. The antiracism campaign trailed off in Soviet discourse in the early 1920s, but picked up speed again in the early 1930s. There were multiple reasons behind this. Firstly, as the Five-Year Plan gathered steam it imported American expertise and methodologies and "Americanism" became a byword for modernity for many within the Soviet Union. Moreover, the rise of fascism meant that the USSR ideologically positioned itself as a rival of biologically-based racism. But Soviet antiracism campaigns directed to the US hemmed and hawed during 1930s, with some CPUSA activists calling for more militant action while Moscow favored more conciliatory behavior from the US party to build an American equivalent of a united front.

The Marxist-Leninist position as it evolved on US race relations tended to treat the US's African-American population as a captive national group. From the Soviet perspective, the "Black Belt" of the American South was that it was essentially a separate nation held captive by capitalism and the CPUSA activists would often stress the need of this discrete national group to organize and break free from imperialism. The Communists' general dismissal of indigenous organizations outside the CPUSA like the black church as tools of imperialism coupled with this rather skewed understanding of national identity tended to reduce Communist inroads into the African-American community into a narrow ideological cul-de-sac.

The rise of the BPP and other groups therefore posed a conundrum to the Marxist-Leninists of the Eastern bloc. On one hand, the BPP did espouse that the American black nation possessed a discrete identity and the BPP's rhetoric opposed America's allegedly imperial foreign policies. But the BPP eschewed any type of subordination and coordination with the CPUSA and its appeals to racial separatism was diametrically opposed to the Marxist-Leninist conventions about race and ethnicity, namely that oppressed races would act in solidarity and union with each other under the auspices of trained vanguard party. The BPP's connections to Mao and other radical leaders of the 1960s also set off alarms inside the Eastern bloc as the PRC had emerged as an uncomfortable rival. So the state response in the Eastern bloc to the BPP and black radicalism was a mixture of ambivalence and support. State media would often highlight African-American discontent and involvement in the anti-war movement while simultaneously critiquing the BPP for its ideological indiscipline and incorrect understandings of Marxism.

The state media of the GDR is an excellent lens to gauge this extremely mixed-reading of the BPP. Because of various reasons having to do with the Cold War and their experience as an exiled KPD members during the Third Reich, the SED leadership tended to take a more orthodox and less flexible approach towards ideological matters than their Warsaw Pac counterparts. Moreover, the end of the FRG's Hallstein Doctrine, which sought to diplomatically isolate the GDR, meant that the GDR needed some issue which to differentiate itself from the other Germany in world affairs. In this case, championing the rights of non-Europeans meant it had positioned itself as the true German champion of these groups.

The 16 February 1969 Neues Deutschland article "Zum nationalen Aspekt der Negerfrage" by Klaus Steinger was in many ways very typical of the GDR press reports on the BPP. Steinger framed his analysis of race relations in the US through a report of the 19th Party Conference of the CPUSA which stressed that the Party leadership was preparing itself for a "new phase of the liberation struggle." According to Steinger, the CPUSA recognized that:

The party is guided by the recognition that its social structure of the predominantly proletarian black race (Negrovolk) currently embodies the most closed, most revolutionized, and therefore militant, part of American society.

While Steineger quoted CPUSA activist Claude Lightfoot that the Black Belt hypothesis was a "serious mistake because it 'limited self-determination on the basis of artificial geographic conditions'," neither Steineger nor Lightfoot question the fundamental analysis that the African-Americans were a discrete national group inside the US. In this formulation, the BPP is only an expression and evidence of Black national awakening, not an end onto itself. The future for black America according to Steinger is the CPUSA, which:

which stands on consistent internationalist positions, identifies itself fully with the requirement of black America, to obtain "the highest possible level of control over his own destiny under the present system."

Steinger's dismissal of the BPP's ideology and agency was one of the common media stratagems of the GDR with regards to the Black Power movement. The GDR press eagerly reported upon violent police crackdowns on BPP leaders but tended to give short shrift on what these men were actually saying. For example, the GDR press had several reports on the trial of Huey Newton for the shooting of James Frey in 1968, but the details of these reports gave split their coverage between reports of American police brutality and gestures of GDR solidarity to Newton than his actual ideology. After speaking in vague generalities about the BPP's social activism, one 24 December 1968 Neues Deutschland piece concluded:

Bobby Hutton has been shot, Huey Newton thrown into prison, Bobby Seale put under indictment for "illegally" possessing weapons. (And in a country where guns almost everywhere freely available and "between 50 and 200 million rifles, revolvers and pistols" are in private hands.) Solidarity must be strengthened.

Another Steineger Neues Deutschland piece from 16 November 1968 dramatically connected Newton's legal troubles with earlier racial injustices in which the CPUSA had played a key role in the defense of African-Americans. Under the auspices of the "ultra-reactionary" Governor Ronald Reagan, and that:

As before in the trials of Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, the Martinsville Seven, Willie McGhee and the Rosenbergs, American class justice has tried them under wanton disregard even the most basic criminal procedural norms, of which Huey Newton is an example.

Follow-up question: Famous Black Panther Party member Angela Davis visited East Berlin together with some other members. What were the purpose of trips like these? Who organized the trips?

Thanks!

Another follow-up question- did other countries criticize the treatment of blacks in the US?

Additional followup: how exactly were the Black Panthers influenced by Maoist ideology?