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Meredith L. Roman, "The Black Panthers and the Soviets: A Comparative History of Human Rights Movements" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Meredith Roman about her book titled the Black Panthers and the A Comparative History of Human Rights Movements, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Now, this book is really interesting because it does something that seems intuitively, or maybe it's just me as a historian that, like, there must be so many productive comparisons between the Black Pan and Soviet activists aiming for human rights against the Soviet state, because they're happening at exactly the same time. And even from a surface level comparison, there seem to be some similarities in terms of rhetoric. But even just the fact that they're at the same time, wouldn't we want to know more? Maybe that's just me as a comparative historian, but I find this premise really intriguing. And sure enough, as the book shows, and as I'm sure our discussion will too, there are a lot of reasons why we might want to look at these groups in comparison with each other in terms of rhetoric and in terms of some other things too. So I think we've got rather a lot to discuss. Meredith, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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C
Miranda, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. For the invitation.
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B
I'm very pleased you said yes. But before we get too far into the book, could you please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this?
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C
Sure. So I'm Meredith Roman. I'm an associate professor of history at SUNY Brockport in upstate New York.
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B
Closer.
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C
To Canada than to Toronto, than to New York City. And I've been teaching here for. For 20 years. And this book, I think, really comes out of my origins in the Comparative Black History program at Michigan State University. I was trained by a really renowned scholar in Soviet history, Louis Siegelbaum. But I was also exposed to the comparative Black History program that was, I think, in its prime when I was there in the early 2000s. And so I was interested in exploring the Soviet Union and using that background within a comparative context that centered race and constructions of blackness. So that basic foundation set the stage for me to eventually write a book like this. So my first. My first book, my dissertation was looking at Soviet anti racism. And so this book didn't grow organically out of this. It came quite, I guess, bizarrely from a conference, Phi Alpha Theta History Honors Conference, that I was chairing a panel for. So it's a student honors conference that students from around the area of upstate New York come and present their work. And there was a panel on Soviet dissidents that I was asked to chair and comment on. And it was a great. It was a great panel, and I appreciated the student's perspective. But there was a lot of outrage, righteous outrage at the persecution of activists who were fighting for basic human freedoms without any larger context that similar repression and persecution was taking place in the United States. And so, although I did not mention it at the time, and I complimented the young students on work well done, at the same time, it left me uncomfortable because it was also an all white space, and it seemed like a Cold War legacy of talking about just how awful the Soviet Union was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for good reason, but in a way that reinforced this understanding of the United States as a place where such atrocities and authoritarian tendencies could not exist. And so that was the inspiration for this book. I didn't know what I was going to write after my study of Soviet anti racism and the interwar era. And that was really the locus point for what became 12 years later, this particular study.
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B
I always find it really interesting to hear how projects develop because it's never just one moment. It's sort of things connect to each other and wait, hang on now I'm thinking about this and what happens if I go investigate over here. So thank you for telling us a bit about the backstory in this particular case. And I think that also gives us a good place to sort of jump right in with talking about some of the comparisons here. So thinking about some civil rights issues in the U.S. so, for example, the struggle for desegregation efforts, if we look to the Soviet Union, again roughly around the same time we've got destalinization efforts underway. How much should we understand ways in which we can compare them? How much might these things be linked? They're happening at the same time? Is that kind of as far as it goes?
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C
I think there's more to the Cold War context that helps us explain why they're going on around the same time. I think there's. There's certainly a desire on the part of leaders and segments of the population, both in the United States and the Soviet Union, to more fully realize the promises of equality, freedom and justice. Because these two systems, as we know, were trying to sell their versions of modernity as the most liberating and the most effective in allowing people to realize their human potential. And so Stalinization or Stalinism and Jim Crowism were systems of violence or systems of injustice that were upheld by violence, that were making it harder for leaders to sell these systems on a global stage, especially to an emerging decolonizing world. And so I think that Cold War context, combined with frustrations on the part of members of the population in both countries as well as the leaders, that we need to eliminate some of these aspects of Stalinism and Jim Crowism to return to what were supposed to be the hopeful, liberating promises of Soviet state socialism and American capitalist democracy. And so in both cases there is this domestic purpose, but there's also the global purpose as well for dismantling these systems of injustice and moving away from, or trying to move away from more heavy handed forms of physical violence and repression. So in both cases as well, I think what's striking is that they elicited anti democratic backlash in both cases. So although there's impetus among leaders and members of society for these changes, for destalinization, for desegregation, at the same time there are members, there are certain authorities as well as certain citizens who are not necessarily happy with these changes. And when I teach, especially desalinization, because I teach the Soviet Union class all the time, students are oftentimes surprised that there was pushback against destalinization. Like, wouldn't people want these democratic reforms? Well, the same could be said about the United States. Wouldn't people want desegregation? Wouldn't they want a more complete democracy? And obviously the backlash was expressed in different ways, given the parameters of a democratic system, in much more violent and open ways in the United States. But there was this backlash. And at the same time, there's also those members of society who are upset that because of this backlash, there's either a pause on reforms, if not a reversal of those reforms. And so this is the context in which both members of the Soviet dissident movement as well as the Black Panthers emerge in the mid-1960s amidst this anti democratic backlash that the de Stalinization reforms and the desegregation reforms had elicited both from above and from below. And so it's their efforts to express their outrage and their discomfort that these reforms have not only been ended in some cases, but in some cases are also being reversed.
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B
That's really interesting to understand the similar contexts in which, as you said, these two groups emerge. When they do so, to what extent are they talking about their goals and the impact that they hope to have in similar terms?
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C
Well, I think it starts with their names. What they call themselves is, I think, something that speaks to their larger goals, which is to end state violence. So in terms of a lot of the people that I look at with regard to the Soviet Union who fashion themselves as human rights activists, the Russian term was rights defenders or proposals. And so it was defending themselves, defending the population from state violence and defending their rights. Right. So in using the language of human rights as a form to prevent greater violence on the part of the state. And the Panthers were also about ending state violence. And so the use of the panther was, or the choice of the panther was rather deliberate. It was an animal that they emphasized did not engage in offensive violence, but when backed into a corner, when being the subject or subjected to violence, that it would strike back, that it would defend itself from violence. And they too use the language of human rights as a means to try and end that violence. So protecting themselves as well as the greater population from the state's violence is in many ways their overarching goal and a shared goal. And of course, you know, one of the co founders of the Panthers even talked about, we're not only trying to defend ourselves and the African American population from police violence, from physical violence, but also the violence of having and defending ourselves against poor medical care, unemployment, poor housing. So violence was understood not just in physical terms, but more metaphorical terms as the violence of impoverishment and being deprived of these rights. And so ending violence, ending state violence in however they conceived of it was an overarching goal and naming that violence, because, of course, the authorities didn't see this as violence. And so. And I'm sure we'll talk about this later, but that was one of their major objectives or tactics to try and end this violence was to at least name it as violence, whether it assumed the form of police brutality, whether it assumed the form of locking someone up because they had written a petition opposing the repression of a demonstration in 1965, for example, in the Soviet Union on Pushkin Square to honor the Soviet constitution. So it was also naming that violence as a means of trying to end that violence. And the way in which they talk about human rights was very different. Although they're using the language. They're both using the language of human rights as a weapon, in essence, against the forms of state violence that they seek to end. The Soviet human rights activists, the rights defenders, are emphasizing the rights of the individual, the rights of sort of what we consider political and civil rights, the right to freedom of expression, the right to the freedom of the press, right to freedom of assembly, Things that, in their lives were most pertinent to realizing freedom. And in the case of those outside the rights defense movement in the Soviet Union, there was even some criticism that they prioritized only political and civil rights of the individual, and that they in many ways ignored social and economic rights or the rights, for example, of workers to strike. And so it was a very rich community, and some of them themselves would say it was a mistake on our part that we did not have a more expansive notion of what rights we were organizing for. And that was putting greater distance between us and the larger Soviet population who wasn't. Who weren't really concerned about being able to publish the poems or the literary works that we might have been more concerned with. But at the same time, those rights were the ones that most reflected or most inhibited their existence, as many of them were elites, many of them were intellectuals who were university educated. And so having the. Or not having the ability to speak out was something that. Or write what they wanted to write or have communication with whoever they wanted to communicate with, including foreigners who were in the Soviet Union. That was something that was most detrimental to their daily existence and their desire for freedom. In terms of the Panthers, obviously, the social constituency. Their social constituency was much different, and hence they were more interested in social and economic rights. The civil rights movement had, as your listeners know, had advanced Political and civil rights on a legal level at least. And so they were more interested in pursuing those rights that the civil rights movement had essentially ignored as a result of American anti communism and pressure from US leaders even in the immediate post war period to wage a civil rights movement that was seen as more consistent with American values and to avoid pursuing social and economic rights that were seen as communist, Communist as Soviet inspired. And so when the NAACP in the late 1940s is talking about their strategy for pursuing black equality, they essentially realize that without social and economic rights, the right to employment, the right to decent housing, education, that equality will be incomplete. But at the same time they make that decision that in order to not be perceived as anti American, in order to be perceived as not engaging in a sort of Soviet inspired movement, that they need to focus on those rights, the right to freedom of speech, the right to assembly, that are more seen as more American oriented. And so although they're using different languages to talk about human rights or they're focusing on different types of human rights at the same time, those human rights, they argue, are essential. The realization of those human rights are essential to ending the violence that they see as deforming their, their own selves as well as the broader communities that they're struggling to, to liberate.
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B
And were they aware of any of these similarities? I mean, obviously we can look back now and go, oh, well, here's the ways in which they're doing similar things. But did they realize it at the time wasn't on purpose?
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C
They did not. And I this is something that's. It's tragic on many levels that the, the Cold War use of the black liberation struggle on the part of Soviet authorities, as well as the use on the part of American politicians and journalists to hold up Soviet dissidents as the true freedom fighters, those whom we should sort of pay the most attention to, that those Cold War politics prevent either side from really engaging with or paying much attention to the other. Because there's a resentment that is, I would argue, more acknowledged on the part of Soviet dissidents that U.S. leaders, or excuse me, Soviet leaders since the 1920s have been using U.S. racism to proclaim the moral superiority of Soviet society. And that did not abate by the late night, the mid or late 1960s. And so many of those who were in the Soviet human rights activist movement, they resented. They resented the attention given to black activists, especially in the United States. And in some cases, and not all cases, but in some cases because they were so tired of hearing about the struggles of black activists. They stopped believing that there was any real persecution or violence that they were facing. And if they were facing any persecution or violence, it was minimal in comparison to what they faced. So that resentment of Soviet attention and exploitation of American racial apartheid to claim the superiority of Soviet socialist democracy was got in the way or inhibited any. Any effort to illuminate any connection between them and black liberation activists. And at the same time, you could argue, or I do argue, that there was a similar not necessarily spoken resentment. I mean, it's amazing. The Black Panthers just virtually ignore the fact there's dissidents in the Soviet Union or human rights activists in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe. It's as if the place doesn't even exist. And I argue it's because they are so saturated. They are creating literature and discourse that rejects the establishment press sort of establishment discourse, which they feel is so saturated or has so much attention paid to what's going on in the communist world and the struggle for freedom there and the struggle for human rights that they feel no need to try and forge any connection or see any connection with them. And it's not just these sort of old stereotypes that, well, they're anti white. So of course they do not see any common cause with those in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. And of course, their own politics and alliances that they form with white radical groups in the United States, it completely dispels sort of any notion that it was simply because these were white groups organizing. It was. It was more sophisticated than that. It was that these white groups who were fighting for human rights were given a lot of attention by leaders and journalists in the United States. So that resentment prevented them from. From attempting to forge any alliances. And they, they had no, you know, unlike a lot of the. The radicals who I study, who I study in my. My first book, they had no interest in the Soviet Union. They. They did. When they did mention the Soviet Union, it was to condemn it as an imperialist power. So on that sense, they could have found common ground with Soviet human rights activists, but these sort of the cold war baggage was. Was just too. Too heavy for them to want to. To circumvent all that. And, and because they felt that there was a lack of attention comparatively to the struggles taking place in the global South. That's. Those are the activists that they attempted to forge the greatest connections with, those who were marginalized, like they were marginalized by US Actors and journalists.
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B
Well, and as you've said, right, the focus was so much on the domestic problems that took up just so much of the attention. And of course, one aspect of this was work undertaken to investigate and publicize human rights abuses perpetrated by their own government.
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C
Right.
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B
So that it couldn't be swept under the rug. And this was, of course, also happening with the Soviet dissidents trying to do the same thing with the Soviet government. Were there ways of investigating and publicizing these issues similar at all?
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C
They were. I mean, the, this, the differences are obvious because Soviet human rights activists, of course, could not publish openly. Right. So they were publishing in Samistat and the, the self publishing, impressive self publishing network that emerged and really expanded by the late 1960s and early 1970s. But what was similar about, as you mentioned in the question, what was similar about their approach is that they were most focused on documenting domestic human rights abuses. So even though the Panthers, for example, would publish information about what was going on in Vietnam or Mozambique, it far paled in comparison to what they were documenting about their observations at home. And so both groups are most concerned with documenting the various forms that state violence assumes within their own space because of the fact the Soviet Central Press and the American Free Press were ignoring those abuses. And so what's striking, I think, is that in the Soviet case, the journal, the samizdat journal or bulletin that I spend the most time on is the Chronicle of Current Events. And that actually had a larger audience, even though it was published in samizdat, than the Black Panther newspaper, which is the other publication that I compare the Chronicle to, because of the fact that, that it was often published abroad. It was translated and then published abroad in Tamiznat, but it was also broadcast through the various Western radio stations that were broadcasting into the Soviet Union. So quite ironically, although it was a really underground and self published journal, it actually in the end had a, I would argue, a much broader audience than the people who are reading the Black Panther newspaper, even though that could be published openly, certainly not without harassment on the part of law enforcement authorities. But it could be sold and published sort of openly. And yet the readership was marginal by comparison. Those who were exposed to its contents were far fewer in number. What's interesting is that they're documenting what they see. And so obviously in the Chronicle of Current Events that the Soviet activists were producing, people did not always sign their names to items unless it was a letter of protest or sort of a statement on behalf of the death of a fellow activist. So a lot of the items were anonymous, and of course the editor was anonymous because they wanted to avoid persecution. But the size of the Chronicle of Current Events, which was founded in April 1968, it grows in size and scope because there are people from throughout the Soviet Union who are contributing information. And so it's. It's these quotidian journalists, so to speak. None of them, I think you might find one or two, but none of them are trained journalists who are contributing information. And so. But this is information that is. Is absent from the. Obviously from the Soviet central press. And so they're circumventing censorship, and they are compiling information that they are seeing and then publishing in the Chronicle of Current Events. And in many ways, the Black Panther has a similar format in that initially it's a very localized publication that grows in size and scope because you have people contributing information about what they are seeing in their own cities, their own communities, and sometimes they sign their names to it. I mean, more often you will have authored pieces. But at the same time, these are not trained journalists either. They're sort of everyday people who are observing and documenting what they see. And that impetus to document is also something that is striking. There is no justice for victims of police brutality who are. Whose names and families are mentioned in the Black Panther newspaper. And there's no justice for the defendants in the show trials, the political trials that so be human rights activists are subjected to, and then they are either sent to labor camps, to internal exile in some of the worst cases, obviously, the Soviet psychiatric institutes. So there's no justice, right. Even though this is being published and it's being broadcast, there's no justice for victims on either side. And yet there's that impulse to document. Right. At the very least. So although we don't necessarily expect the court cases to end in acquittal, although we do not expect there to be justice for the families of police brutality in the United States, at the same time, at least we want to bear witness. And that impetus to bear witness, I think, is one of the most salient features. And both publications were founded because of acts of specific acts of injustice. In the Black Panther case, it was a justifiable homicide of someone who was not in the Black Panther Party, but a young black man who was shot in the back by police. And it was declared justifiable homicide. And so the family was left in despair. And in the case of the Chronicle event of Current Events, the impetus was a show trial in Moscow in January 1968 of four individuals who were brought up on criminal charges simply for publishing in samizdat, right. Publishing materials in this uncensored network of publication and so the activists who establish these publications want to find a way to communicate with people about the violence, the injustices that are taking place. And so they emphasize these acts of specific injustice, whether it be the justifiable homicide and the show trial. They're not isolated, they're not aberrations, they're part of the larger system of injustice. And so we need to establish publications to at least bear witness to all these, these crimes, these human rights abuses that are occurring. Occurring that the central press and the American free press are completely ignoring.
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B
This idea of ignoring, I think is really interesting because in a lot of ways it helps make sense of a similarity that maybe otherwise would be hard to understand in terms of press portrayals. Because of course in the Soviet context the press is entirely state controlled, full stop, whereas in the US the press operates in a very different legal context, which could make one think that these couldn't be framed in the same ways by these two groups. Right, that seems like a really big difference. But through this lens of what isn't conveyed, the idea that there isn't justice being shown, that seems like a really powerful similarity to that we can see, despite those differences. Does that make sense in terms of thinking about how the Soviet dissidents and the Black Panthers thought about the mainstream media?
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C
Absolutely. They, they very much believed that their perspectives were not being represented. And, and certainly in the Soviet case, that seems more obvious. I think it's, it's more apparent given that the, it's a state run enterprise, that there is no, there is nothing that will, will be published that does not pass the state censor. And at the same time, Soviet leaders knew that because the population were fully aware that there was nothing that was being published that the state didn't approve of, that Soviet authorities were more careful about using the press because it could backfire on them. And so although Soviet dissidents, rights defenders, human rights activists, whatever we want to call them, although they did criminalize them and never disclosed what they were really being charged with, what their real activity was, at the same time they realized that they could turn by, if they gave them too much attention, they could potentially turn them into folk heroes of sorts, that in essence the population, the Soviet population that was very skeptical of news and was very good at reading against the grain, that they would realize that those who were being demonized and criminalized, that likely they were doing something that was quite contrary to what the press was claiming. And so in memorandum that have been declassified between the head of the KGB and Soviet party leaders, there is a hesitancy about giving them Soviet dissidents too much press just for that very reason that it might backfire on them. So it's very selective when and where and in what context that they are criminalized. And of course, they're criminalized in a way that they claim that they are selfish, they're greedy, they're agents of US Western imperialism, they're backed by the CIA right to completely delegitimize their, their claims. And so that, that trope is, is one that is most often used to describe Soviet rights defenders. And of course, the Soviet press will seize on the fact that they're being called dissidents, because dissidents is a Western term. And so that's why many of the people who I look at in the book, they rejected the term dissidents because it was a Western term and it obscured the fact that they were really calling on Soviet leaders to stop the forms of violence that were in violation of their own laws. And so dissident made them seem as if they were puppets of Western imperialist forces. So the emphasis on then calling themselves rights defenders was a way of rejecting that criminalization through association with foreigners in the capitalist West. And of course, because the Soviet press did not acknowledge that human rights abuses were taking place, that people were being persecuted just for exercising their right to freedom of speech, it did look like these intellectuals, members of the intelligentsia, were speaking out against things that didn't actually have any legitimacy. And so in the, the case of the Black Panthers, there was obviously a much greater level of information given or published in the press about the Panthers. But they too were criminalized as anti white terrorists, anti white thugs who, because the abuses that the Panthers were organizing around issues of police brutality, issues of violation of basic human rights to decent health care, education, housing, employment, because those, those abuses didn't exist, those human rights violations didn't exist. They, they did look like angry, irrational, crazy black men who were just angry and about bringing down the system. And so that, that trope of criminalization vilification obviously also builds on, builds on the longer history of, of criminalizing, vilifying black radical voices in the United States. So the, the Panthers felt that they, not only their own representation, but that of African American communities as a whole, Their perspectives were not being in any way validated or acknowledged even. And I think one of the things that is always very striking is that even one of the government commissions, U.S. government commissions that was set up to investigate why there were all these urban rebellions in the, the mid-1960s found that the American Free Press rarely acknowledged that there were African American perspectives to be considered in, in publication. And yet just the sort of hiring of a few black journalists did not. Which, which did take place did not necessarily upset that sort of larger institutional precedent on the part of the American, quote unquote, free press to really validate African American perspectives and experiences. And instead, as the, as the Panthers argued, the press validated or legitimized the abuses that especially African Americans in inner city or ghetto communities faced by saying, well, it was the result of their own patholog criminal behavior. That was the reason why we need to have such heavy police presence, or that's the reason why they are unemployed and do not have access to good housing is because they are in essence, pathological and criminal. And so that system of completely criminalizing the communities that they sought to defend from violence was again the impetus for establishing a publication that actually humanized the inhabitants of those communities for whom the American press either completely disregarded or portrayed as sort of pathological and criminal. And so at the same time, I would just add that what's striking here in both the Soviet depictions of the dissidents as well as the American journalists depiction of the Panthers is that they both claimed that their societies were free of lawlessness, of brainwashing, of political indoctrination, of lying. And the only sources of violence and lawlessness and brainwashing or political indoctrination or in sort of lie telling, were the members of the quote, unquote, Soviet dissident movement or the Black Panthers themselves, who were supposedly indoctrinating children with a hatred of violence of white people and the police, rather than sort of actually looking at what their programs and their platforms were.
- [38:58]
B
This is very interesting to see where the similarities might be, even if the systems on paper look really different. Now, of course, pushback against these movements has come up a number of times through our conversation, especially the really extreme elements of it. Are there any other things about the similarities of tactics used, for example, by law enforcement to stop these groups from doing what they wanted to that we should discuss further?
- [39:24]
C
Well, I think most pertinent is the desire on the part of law enforcement and the KGB and FBI to sow division and disunity and betrayal within these movements as a way to undermine still further their legitimacy and to make them, their claims that they are criminals or they are anti American or they are anti Soviet seem real. And so they, the KGB and FBI use a number of different tactics. I mean, they are using sort of wiretaps illegal wire types like bugging, and use of informants and provocateurs. Although in the US Case, the use of provocateurs and informants is far more successful on the part of the FBI and local law enforcement officials because the movement is bigger. And there's, as several Panthers sort of reflect on later, they did not necessarily expect the degree of illegal activity on the part of the US Government to try and infiltrate them and bring them down. And that, in essence, their own commitment to legality that was emphasized on the part especially of the two founders, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, made them think that the US Government would in some ways practice some degree of legality in their repression of them. So there are similar tactics. I think what's. And I, I've referenced this before, but I think the KGB and FBI labeling of them as anti Soviet, as anti American, as threats to national security, as, as criminals, as, as terrorists, sort of as, as agents of destruction, that made any type of violence and repression possible, and if not possible, then necessary. And it allowed for no nuanced reading or interpretation of what they were trying, what these two groups were trying to do. And so the way in which state authorities see them, I think is quite striking. And then seeing what would be most effective as trying to disrupt the communities that they had forged and make them destroy each other, if you will, or betray each other, distrust each other. And so the one chapter in the book, I argue that because of backlash, some backlash, that the repression on the part of Soviet authorities and American authorities because of backlash, that impetus, that desire to disrupt and sow division and discord within these two groups becomes even more imperative, becomes even more urgent. And in the Soviet case, it's because of backlash from the political trials that they've organized, which are framed as criminal trials of, of. Of Soviet activists. The backlash in the west just is, is immense. And then they, the KGB under Andropov, you know, sort of sees a shift towards incarcerating more Soviet activists in psychiatric, psychiatric institutes as a way to, to sort of silence them. Because, of course, unlike the Stalin era, one of the things that Soviet activists were able to do were they were not tortured into confessing to the crimes, and they were able to defend themselves or speak their mind within the trial system or within the particular legal proceedings. And so in order to shut them up and basically try them without them being present, they would subject them to the horrific practice of psychiatric oppression so that they could not speak out. But that backfired too, because Soviet activists were very good at exposing the Soviet abuse of psychiatry and worked with Western journalists, US journalists and British journalists to get out information regarding psychiatric oppression. And it's within that context that the KGB then realizes they need to do something if they're going to have another trial. They need to essentially target two major figures within the Soviet human rights movement to have them recant, to have them betray their colleagues and appear both in court as well as a very well orchestrated press conference to claim that yes, they were receiving support from Western imperialist forces and that the movement is not a human rights rights movement, it's an anti Soviet movement. They want to do harm to the Soviet people. And so that is sort of the crowning jewel for the KGB is this. Not only do they, these two leading figures, Pyotr Yakir and Victor Crossan, not only are they able to turn them and have them recant and have them claim that this movement was one that was plotted by US or Western imperialists, but they also betray the names of colleagues who were in part who were taking part in the movement as well. And so this is a blow to the community and does temporarily lead to a quieting even on the part of the Chronicle of Current Events, because there is uncertainty about how to proceed next and who do we trust and how do we proceed. And in the US case, the FBI received some backlash because of the Chicago Police's with the help of the FBI assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago on December 4, 1969. And that runs counter, in the end, it runs counter to what the FBI's desire was, which was to make sure the Panther Panthers don't get increasing community support and even support of non radical black organizations. And so in response to this brutal execution, assassination, which of course they claim is not an assassination, but the police engaging in a lawful raid on Fred Hampton's apartment. But there is questioning about the context and the sort of validity of these claims. And so this steps up the FBI, FBI and J. Edgar Hoover's efforts to basically say, okay, we need to move away from these more heavy handed forms of oppression because it's uniting people and giving some sympathy to the Black Panthers, even among organizations like the naacp, which was seen as an organization of good blacks. So we need to now try to find a way to really sow division within the Black Panther Party. And they succeed quite tragically in using pre existing differences in vision between two of the major leaders of the Panthers in Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, in which both sides will attack each other and turn on each other in A way that the FBI plays a really salient role. But of course, that role is hidden from public view. So it looks like the movement is cannibalizing itself and turning on itself without US or FBI orchestration. So the emphasis on dissension, sowing betrayal, dissension, division is the way that the FBI and the KGB see as the path towards neutralizing both movements.
- [47:51]
B
Yeah. This is really interesting to see similarities between the movements and similarities in the reactions to the movements, as well as, of course, similarities in the context in which the movements emerge, going right back to the beginning of our conversation. So thank you for helping us see sort of where the similarities are and where it's sort of interesting to put them in conversation, but maybe, you know, we shouldn't consider them to be too similar. Right. There's all sorts of interesting nuance here.
- [48:16]
C
Yeah, no, I would never want anyone to walk away with the idea that I'm claiming these movements and the repression that they experience are the same because there's real obvious differences in both cases. But we shouldn't let those differences delude us into thinking that there are also no parallels or similarities in practices on the side of activists as well as authorities.
- [48:44]
B
No, I think that's exactly right and probably a good place to conclude our discussion on the book. Leaving me with just a final question of whether you have an idea of what you might be working on next. I don't know if you have any current or upcoming projects you want to give us a sneak preview of, so.
- [49:00]
C
I'm still looking for that organic inspiration to sort of take me in the next direction. Though I would like to pursue a longer scholarly inquiry into some threads I develop in the epilogue about the relationship between the US Production of knowledge about Soviet dissidents and the reinforcement of the image of the United States as a refuge from state violence, surveillance, and authoritarian practices. In essence, I think it gets to. One of the major underlying issues that I hope the book draws our attention to is that even though groups like the Panthers are exposing police violence and are exposing African Americans lack of access to decent human rights in terms of housing and education and healthcare, that at the same time they were unable to really bring about real change. And so the connection which seems really salient even in 2025, between sort of the anti communist rhetoric and the advancement of anti black racism is a connection that I. That I started to trace out or sketch out in the epilogue. But I would like to turn my attention more fully, in a much more comprehensive manner to that relationship between the history of white supremacy and anti communism and the role that the attention to Soviet dissidents played in further solidifying that connection.
- [50:54]
B
Well, that certainly sounds intriguing. Best of luck with seeing where that investigation takes you.
- [50:59]
C
Thank you so much, Miranda.
- [51:00]
B
Of course, while you are doing that, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Black Panthers and the A Comparative History of Human Rights Movements, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Merida, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [51:13]
C
Thank you so much, Miranda. It's been a pleasure. Sam.