The New Afrikan Black Panther Party (NABPP) was founded by Kevin "Rashid" Johnson and Shaka Sankofa Zulu in October of 2005 under the name New Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter (NBPP-PC), as a faction within the prison-based Black Brigade, which had been initiated a few years earlier by original BPP member and political prisoner Samuel “Angel” Coley, with the help of the prison-based Red Heart Warriors’ Society (RHWS). After the publication of the first issue of Right On!, its newsletter, its name was changed to New Afrikan BPP-PC to avoid confusion with the ultra-nationalist NBPP.
It did consciously pattern itself after and saw itself as a continuation of George Jackson and W. L. Nolen’s original Black Panther Party Prison Chapter. The Black Brigade was an eclectic mix of Black Liberation ideology and politics, which, after Comrade Coley’s passing from Hepatitis C, fell under the domination of a Nathaniel Lees, a prisoner who declared himself the Brigade’s Commander. Lee held a Hobbesian philosophy, based on the writings of Thomas Hobbes, a 17th Century English political philosopher.
Hobbes was a proponent of the “divine right of kings,” and Lee had little interest in inner-organizational democracy. He was, however, content to let the Panthers do the work of actually building the Black Brigade. That is, he was until he began to view the Panthers as a threat to his absolutism, at which point he expelled them, only to find that the whole Brigade went with them and reorganized as the New Afrikan Service Organization (NASO), the forerunner of the United Panther Movement (UPM).
The NABPP-PC self-identified as “revolutionary nationalist” and with the original BPP of the late 1960s. It struggled against narrow bourgeois black nationalism in different forms, but all the while it was struggling to get a handle on Huey Newton’s Theory of Revolutionary Intercommunalism, which it officially adopted as the basis of its ideological political line in 2015. This theory has been further developed and tested in practice by the Party since then.
The history of NABPP is unique, not only in that it was formed from scratch within the prisons but in that it struggled to define the most revolutionary and advanced political theory that exists today. The Party has taken to heart Mao’s words: “I hope that you will practice Marxism and not revisionism; that you will unite and not split; that you will be sincere and open and not resort to plotting and conspiracy. The correctness or otherwise of the ideological and political line decides everything. When the Party’s line is correct, then everything will come its way. If it has no followers, then it can have followers; if it has no guns, then it can have guns; if it has no political power, then it can have political power. If its line is not correct, even what it has it may lose. The line is a net rope. When it is pulled, the whole net opens out.” (Talks With Responsible Comrades At Various Places During Provincial Tour From the middle of August to 12 September 1971.)
Since the release of the Party’s Chairman, Shaka S. Zulu, the NABPP has begun building the United Panther Movement on the outside, starting in Newark, NJ and now in other cities. Applying the basic strategy of transforming the “slave pens of oppression” into “schools of liberation” and the oppressed communities into “base areas of cultural, social and political revolution” in the context of building a worldwide united front against capitalist-imperialism, racism and police state repression, we are demonstrating that “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”
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