Black Scare in California: Blacks, Reds, and Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s

Prehistory

This was an era of explosive contradictions in Los Angeles—a city where Hollywood, still reeling from McCarthyite purges, saw its radical voices silenced as corporate control tightened over culture. Meanwhile, the labor movement and the Communist Party fought tirelessly against rampant exploitation, racist policies, and imperialist wars, even as they were pushed to the margins. Tragically, mainstream civil rights leaders squandered critical momentum, prioritizing the Red Scare over tangible victories for Black liberation.

Yet, as Horne reveals, this period laid the foundation for the Black Panther Party’s revolutionary vision. The Communist Party, often erased from mainstream narratives, played a pivotal role in reshaping the struggle, reframing Black liberation through the lens of class struggle. Horne underscores this transformative shift, noting: “The advent of the Communists marked a new development in the centuries-long Black Liberation Movement, as the Reds sought to shift the discourse to class and class struggle, with Negroes epitomizing the latter given their initial status as unpaid workers.”² This radical reimagining of Black resistance did not just influence Southern California—it reverberated nationwide, setting the stage for the Black Panther Party’s militant defiance.

The Communist-aligned International Labor Defense, led by William L. Patterson, built a formidable legal network from the 1920s until its suppression in 1951. Using skilled legal expertise, the principle of “mass defense,” and international leverage on the U.S. ruling class, it defended labor organizers, political dissidents, and victims of racist persecution—most famously, the Scottsboro Nine. Horne shows how Patterson later bridged the Communist Party and Black Panthers in the 1960s, despite their political and strategic differences. Radical attorneys like Loren Miller (an anti-segregation advocate), Charles Garry (who argued cases revolving around Smith Act and the Black Panther Party), and Leo Branton (also involved in the Smith Act trials and, subsequently, Angela Davis’s trial) continued this legacy of resistance.³

Horne could have also noted the Communist Party’s leadership in the fight against the Eisenhower administration’s 1954 mass deportation policy known as “Operation Wetback.” Utilizing their legal expertise, ability to organize mass protests, and widely circulating newspaper, as historian Natalia Molina shows in her book How Race Is Made in America, the Communists and their allies, through the organization known as the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born—particularly its Southern California chapters—led the battle to force the Immigration and Naturalization Service to shut down the operation just a few months after it was launched, failing to meet its goal of deporting one million people of Mexican descent. That political struggle, quite relevant today, also sustained the left’s legal and organizational capacities in ways pertinent to Horne’s argument.

Meanwhile, other forces in the struggle for Black liberation, such as the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, and eventually the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had conceded to government-induced demands to expel Communists from their organizations and take public stances hostile to that movement. Ironically, such moves never secured the favor they sought from the ruling class. Instead, they were regularly subjugated to the surveillance, infiltration, and sabotage tactics by federal and police informers and agents that had been designed to combat the Communists. Horne argues further that anticommunism, as practiced by the oppressed, only served to weaken their political forces and to delay the strategic aim of liberation. Civil rights victories can be more closely linked, he calculates, to the international face-saving the U.S. government felt compelled to make when it proclaimed itself the world leader in democracy while sustaining a racist capitalist system. Historian Erik S. McDuffie has referred to this argument as the “Horne thesis,” as it is sustained across a large cross-section of Horne’s scholarly output.

Racist Retaliation for Civil Rights

When police stormed Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood with vengeance in their hearts, they did not just bring violence—they exposed a political void. (Horne’s book Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s, has documented and analyzed the causes and consequences of the Watts uprising.) The civil rights movement, weakened by anticommunist purges, left space for new Black radical forces to emerge: Ron Karenga’s cultural nationalism, Malcolm X’s aborted campaign against police killings, Black studies activists, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s fiery Black Power advocates. But Reagan’s 1966 election victory delivered a crushing message: white California had chosen white supremacy, and there would be no justice without a fight.

Reagan’s racist governance did not just terrorize Black communities, it paved the way for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential victory and the so-called war on drugs, a thinly veiled war on Black liberation. Nixon’s own advisor John Ehrlichman later admitted the truth: the policy was never about public health—it was about criminalizing resistance. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reveals in Abolition Geography, this was the blueprint for mass incarceration, a system designed to disappear Black dissent while enabling neoliberal exploitation. Before Reagan, California invested in education; after him, it built cages. Governor Pat Brown’s visionary university expansion was dismantled, and in its place came Gilmore’s “prison boom”: a brutal exchange of classrooms for cells. This was not just policy; it was punishment, retaliation for Black defiance.

Toward Redefining Black Liberation Struggles

In the second part of Armed Struggle?, Horne illustrates how Black Power and Black nationalist elements contributed to forming the Black Panther Party. Following the police violence in Watts in 1965, armed self-defense became a prominent topic. The image of the Black Panther united various regionally diverse Black movements stretching from Alabama to Oakland. By the late 1960s, Black leaders in Southern California’s Communist Party began urging national leadership to adopt a more flexible stance toward the Black Power movement. For example, Cyril Briggs, a former founder of the African Blood Brotherhood and advocate of armed self-defense during the “Red Summer” of 1919, challenged the leadership. He notably opposed the Communist Party’s leadership’s hardline stance against Black nationalism.⁴

Horne’s analysis scratches the surface of the Communist Party’s internal evolution, but more could be added, particularly the crucial role of James Jackson. A seasoned organizer in Virginia and Louisiana since the 1930s, Jackson did not just participate in the Communist Party’s debates—he transformed them. His 1960 convention report on the “national question” significantly altered Party policy. Jackson proved that the Great Migration and urbanization of Southern Black communities had fundamentally changed the terrain of struggle. The fight was no longer about establishing a separate country but for class solidarity, civil rights, and economic power—a vision that resonated with Black America’s demands in the 1950s and ’60s. Thus, Jackson called for a complete distance from political groups that talked in nationalist terms.

Yet in Southern California, Communists like Briggs and Roscoe Porter saw an urgent need for bold adaptation to new circumstances. The Watts uprising and rising police terror demanded a united front, one that could bridge the Party’s class analysis with the explosive energy of Black Power. Briggs’s untimely death stalled this critical shift. Still, the Party’s outreach to the Black Panthers—spearheaded by Patterson—proved more flexible than Jackson’s hard line. By 1968, Patterson, alongside younger leaders like Carl Bloice and Porter, was not just debating theory; he was forging alliances, co-organizing antifascist conferences, and publishing editorials in The Black Panther newspaper. While Bloice defended the right to armed self-defense against police terror in Political Affairs magazine, the Communists stopped short of endorsing the Panthers’ call for offensive struggle. As Porter argued, armed resistance was a last resort, when all avenues of democratic struggle had been strangled.⁵

Siege

Horne also explores how these tentative talks were undermined by the anticommunist hostilities of Los Angeles native Eldridge Cleaver after he ascended to control of the Party. Horne compiles an unsparing criticism of Cleaver. Cleaver’s leadership and views are described as “unstable,” politically “eclectic,” and “disastrous,” constantly “toggling between [Karl] Marx and the [Nation of Islam] Muslims” as he rose to power in the vacuum within the Black Panther Party following the imprisonment of Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, as well as the police murder of Fred Hampton.⁶ His rise to leadership proved disastrous for the Panthers, as he denounced the Soviet Union, Cuba, and other international allies of national liberation struggles. Seemingly convinced that the Soviets were colluding with the United States to control the world’s people of color, Horne documents how, even during his flight to Cuba and, later, to Algeria, Cleaver appeared determined to abuse his hosts’ hospitality and create intense international trouble for them.

Horne implies that Cleaver’s substance abuse distorted his political judgment, causing him to overestimate the imminence of U.S. fascism and reject crucial leftist alliances. His insistence on expanding violent police confrontations proved disastrous, getting Panthers killed or imprisoned while undermining the movement. Meanwhile, declining anticommunism and escalating police brutality created unprecedented spaces for renewed left-center coalitions. Cleaver’s leadership collapsed under the weight of his drug use, sexual violence, racial essentialism, and reckless criminal behavior in exile, marking his political demise.

After the Black Panther Party gained national prominence in 1967, Los Angeles police escalated attacks. They brutalized pro-Panther university student protesters demanding the establishment of Black and Chicano studies programs and systematically targeted Black neighborhoods for violence, hoping, according to observers and participants at the time, to provoke another Watts uprising. The December 1969 siege of the Black Panther Party’s Los Angeles offices marked a turning point: hundreds of officers, including SWAT teams with explosives, assaulted the building until community resistance forced their retreat. Though thwarted from mass murder that day, police later conducted mass arrests of activists. Paradoxically, the attack backfired—swelling Black Panther Party membership, donor support, and public anger toward police brutality.

Many in the Black Panther Party viewed incidents like this as evidence that armed struggle was a necessary offensive tactic. Indeed, Horne argues that this error shaped George Jackson’s political analysis. Jackson was influenced by imprisoned Black Power activists and studied Marxist works and writings by Frantz Fanon and other national liberation leaders. Jackson led a movement of incarcerated men who daily confronted violence by armed prison guards who used murder to retaliate against complaints about their abuses. After publishing Soledad Brother, a collection of prison letters and the first of his two books, Jackson was inducted into the Black Panther Party. He became close with Davis, a former Panther who had joined the Communist Party. Davis taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and faced criticism for her open Communist membership, which led to her being fired on orders from Reagan. Jackson’s younger teenage brother, Jonathan, adopted George’s perception of armed struggle. This fueled the latter’s decision to take weapons that Davis had purchased for self-protection and use them to free members of Jackson’s prison movement, who were being tried at the San Marin County Courthouse on August 7, 1970.

The indiscriminate police response left hostages and assailants dead or wounded in a hail of gunfire. Authorities immediately scapegoated Davis. Though prosecutors produced a gun allegedly linking her to the crime, their case disintegrated under scrutiny. Witnesses placed her on a highway to San Francisco at the time of the courthouse violence, her fingerprints were conspicuously absent from the getaway vehicle, and multiple eyewitness accounts of the events at the courthouse collapsed under cross-examination.

Free Angela

Horne’s meticulous investigation of the Davis case—drawing on court records, personal correspondence among the participants, and media archives—exposes the trial as a politically and racially motivated attempt to convict the governor’s arch-nemesis. Davis’s defense team revived the playbook of Patterson’s International Labor Defense, deploying an eventually successful two-pronged strategy. In court, elite attorneys dismantled the prosecution’s flimsy evidence. On the global stage and in the U.S. streets, a “mass defense” movement mobilized international pressure—particularly from Soviet-aligned nations—while domestic protests and letter campaigns flooded the system. A seismic victory secured Davis’s acquittal and reinvigorated the Communist Party, triggering its largest membership surge since Joe McCarthy’s alcoholic demise.

The closing section of the book outlines the decline of the Black Panther Party by the late 1970s, Cleaver’s opportunistic conversion to a weird form of Christianity, and divisions and conflicts—even with the Communist Party—that Horne hints may have led ultimately to its factional dispute in the early 1990s in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Assessment

Horne’s history of mid-twentieth-century Southern California underscores two critical points. First, he elevates those who affirmed Black people’s right to self-defense against racist state and vigilante violence. Yet, the Davis case, student movements, and the Communist Party’s survival amid repression proved that fascism had not taken root. This condition revealed the flaws in the Black Panther Party’s estimate of the balance of forces, leading to its grave tactical errors.

This misstep stemmed from a flawed political analysis: an overestimation of the lumpenproletariat as the revolutionary vanguard, a failure to build alliances with Cuba and the USSR, and Cleaver’s sabotage of existing leftist ties or domestic solidarity with other antifascist forces. Worse, the Black Panther Party’s racialist lens led them to align with China—which, ironically, was a U.S. foreign policy ally at the time. Even further, China, which had cultivated a positive relationship with Washington, was not positioned to make demands for redress of the U.S. domestic scene.

Horne’s key insight, however, is that the Panthers’ strongest appeal lay in their stark diagnosis of a deeper problem: the white U.S. working class’s divided loyalties. He adds that the Black Communist and California native Porter made a critical observation requiring careful analysis. The Panthers were driven by a palpable “lack of confidence in the mettle of broad sectors of the Euro-American working class”; a factor that also attracted many Black community members to the movement. By contrast, a generalized adherence to white supremacy among most white people—and their refusal critically to consider their relation to settler colonialism—enabled and fostered “the nettle of class collaboration” among white citizens.⁷

Class collaboration indexes the role of racism in dividing the working class and enabling Euro-American workers to side with the ruling class to sustain white supremacy in exchange for their continued subordination to the logic and vices of capitalism, thus overseeing their own exploitation and subservience. This condition is attested to by the Los Angeles Police Department’s close organizational affiliation with the racist and anticommunist John Birch Society, which claimed one hundred thousand members nationally, far outnumbering all the Communists and Black Panthers combined. Further, Reagan’s and Nixon’s election victories in 1966 and ’68 seemed to support the case. Until radical political movements make far more sustainable progress in fighting anti-Black racism and settler colonialism (to which, I think, can be added racist immigration regimes and heteronormative patriarchy), Horne seems to say, the faulty analysis and violent outcomes elevated by the Black Panther Party will attract adherents.

Armed Struggle? provides a comprehensive and meticulously researched account of the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party in Southern California, situating it within broader historical struggles against racism, state repression, and anticommunism. The book underscores the pivotal role of the Communist Party in shaping early civil rights activism, legal defense strategies, and labor organizing while critically examining the Black Panther Party’s ideological and tactical shortcomings. Despite their flaws, the Panthers resonated with many Black Americans disillusioned by the persistence of white supremacy and the failures of liberal reformism. The book also exposes the devastating consequences of state repression, from police violence to political sabotage, which targeted both the Panthers and the Communist Party.

Ultimately, Armed Struggle? serves as a cautionary tale, emphasizing the necessity of multiracial working-class solidarity, strategic international alliances, and a clear-eyed analysis of political conditions. Horne’s work reaffirms that while militant resistance to oppression is justified, lasting liberation requires disciplined organization, principled coalitions, and a steadfast commitment to combating racism and capitalism, which are integrally linked. The lessons of this era remain urgently relevant in today’s struggles for racial and economic justice confronting Donald Trump’s drive for authoritarianism.

Notes

1. ↩ Gerald Horne, Armed Struggle?: Panthers and Communists, Black Nationalists and Liberals in Southern California Through the Sixties and Seventies (New York: International Publishers, 2024), 233.
2. ↩ Horne, Armed Struggle?, 53.
3. ↩ Originally passed in 1941, the Smith Act was used at the peak of the Cold War as one of the state’s tools to target presumed Communist Party members and their allies. It criminalized advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and was twinned with immigration procedures to ease the deportation of non-citizens believed to be members of the Communist Party. Between 1949 and 1956, about 140 Communist Party leaders were rounded up, charged with federal crimes, and imprisoned or deported under its provisions. It enabled many other measures, such as loyalty programs, official investigations, surveillance, mass firings, and blacklisting to target radical critics of U.S. capitalism, racism, and war policies. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1998), 97; Charisse Burden-Stelly, Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 199–201; Carl Risen, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2025), 85–86.
4. ↩ Horne, Armed Struggle?, 266.
5. ↩ Horne, Armed Struggle?,  271.
6. ↩ Horne, Armed Struggle?, 243–53.
7. ↩ Horne, Armed Struggle?, 445.