ABSTRACT
Newton's later writings on “Revolutionary Suicide” reveal anxieties that members of the Party had taken the concept too far and had become trapped into a fatalistic struggle where they expected, and even welcomed, death by police. The concept of “Revolutionary Suicide” presents an entrypoint into how the Black Panther Party conceptualizations of police brutality represented both rupture and continuity with past traditions of Black resistance. The Civil Rights Movement as defined by the traditional non-violent movement of 1954–65 drew on Gandhian non-violent philosophy to render visible the brutality and barbarism of Southern police. Popular narratives of the Civil Rights Movement suggest a hard break between the traditional non-violent movement of the South and the later, militant northern movement defined by Black Power. Working-class Black people have long embraced the gun as a means of self-defense from the violence of Jim Crow.
