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Prison, Where Is Thy Victory? A Black Panther Theology of Mass Incarceration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2019

Brian P. Sowers
Brian P. Sowers*
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York
*
bsowers@brooklyn.cuny.edu
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Abstract

On 12 July 1969, Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, wrote “Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?,” a socialist critique of America’s penal system that focused on its inability to rehabilitate prisoners. Beyond its explicit rejection of American capitalism, his essay, with its very title, also invokes two passages from the Bible—Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor 15:55) and the book of the prophet Hosea (Hos 13:14) —although Newton never elaborates on their allusive force. Intertextually bound to Newton’s title, these biblical passages function as a type of guiding lens through which “full-knowing readers” can engage Newton’s treatment of mass incarceration. This essay provides such an intertextual reading of “Prison” vis-à-vis 1 Cor 15 and Hos 13, with particular attention to the ways Newton’s biblical models simultaneously enrich and complicate interpretations of “Prison.”

Keywords

Huey NewtonBlack Panther PartyBlack TheologyLiberation Theology1 Corinthians 15Hosea 13
Type
Articles
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 113 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 24 - 44
Copyright
© Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2020 

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References

1 If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (ed. Angela Y. Davis; New York: Third Press, 1971; repr., London: Verso, 2016) 60–64. Page numbers taken from the reprinted edition. Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1972; repr., San Francisco: City Lights, 2009) 221–24. Donald F. Tibbs, From Black Power to Prison Power: The Making of Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 97–98.

2 Newton, To Die for the People, 223.

3 Ibid.

4 Joseph Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

5 Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt, 1973; repr., New York: Penguin, 2009) 77, 249. Page numbers taken from the reprinted edition. Brian P. Sowers, “The Socratic Black Panther: Reading Huey P. Newton Reading Plato,” Journal of African American Studies 21 (2017) 26–41.

6 Fuller accounts of these events can be found in Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, and Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970; repr., Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1991).

7 See Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Judson L. Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002); On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities across America (ed. Judson L. Jeffries; Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party (ed. Judson L. Jeffries; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); and J. Herman Blake, “The Caged Panther: The Prison Years of Huey P. Newton,” Journal of African American Studies 16 (2012) 236–48.

8 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 122–23; Jeffries, Huey P. Newton.

9 Compare James Bell, “Correcting the System of Unequal Justice,” in The Covenant with Black America: Ten Years Later (ed. Tavis Smiley; Carlsbad, CA: SmileyBooks, 2016) 51–68; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Samuel F. Yette, The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America (New York: Berkley, 1972).

10 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013) 206–43. See also Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) 51.

11 Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Vintage, 1967); Berger, Captive Nation, 49–90.

12 C. Gerald Fraser, “Black Prisoners Embrace New View of Themselves as Political Victims,” New York Times (16 September 1971) 49; Roberta A. Johnson, “The Prison Birth of Black Power,” The Journal of Black Studies 5 (1975) 395–414, at 409; Herman Badillo and Milton Haynes, A Bill of No Rights–Attica and the American Prison System (New York: Outerbridge & Lazard, 1972) 11.

13 Nikhil P. Singh, “The Black Panthers and the ‘Undeveloped Country’ of the Left,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (ed. Charles E. Jones; Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1998) 57–105, at 71–77; Jeffries, Huey P. Newton, 55–56, 66, 75; Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2004), 60–61, 66–67.

14 For a more complete treatment of Newton’s use of Plato, see Sowers, “The Socratic Black Panther.”

15 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 249.

16 Ibid., 77. See also Huey P. Newton, “The Correct Handling of the Revolution,” in The Black Panthers Speak (ed. Philip S. Foner; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970; repr., Chicago: Haymarket, 2014) 41–45, at 42. Page numbers taken from the reprinted edition. Huey P. Newton, “Huey Newton Talks to the Movement about the Black Panther Party, Cultural Nationalism, SNCC, Liberals, and White Revolutionaries,” in The Black Panthers Speak (ed. Foner), 50–67. Fleeta Drumgo, “We Are All Prisoners,” The Black Scholar 2 (1971) 32–33; Steven V. Roberts, “Prisons Feel a Mood of Protest” New York Times (19 September 1971) 5; James B. Jacobs, “Criminology: Stratification and Conflict among Prison Inmates,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 66 (1976) 476–82, at 480–81; Sowers, “The Socratic Black Panther.”

17 Compare Amy A. Ongiri, “Prisoners of Love: Affiliation, Sexuality, and the Black Panther Party,” The Journal of African American History 94 (2009) 69–86, at 70.

18 Johnson, “The Prison Birth of Black Power,” 396.

19 Compare Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom.

20 Newton, To Die for the People, 221.

21 Ibid., 222.

22 Compare Steven Nelson, “Nelson Mandela’s Two Bodies,” Transition 116 (2014) 130–42, at 130–31.

23 Newton, To Die for the People, 223.

24 Johnson, “The Prison Birth of Black Power,” 400; Norman S. Hayner and Ellis Ash, “The Prisoner Community as a Social Group,” American Sociological Review 4 (1939) 362–69.

25 Newton, To Die for the People, 223. Compare Johnson, “The Prison Birth of Black Power,” 396.

26 Sophia Hansen-Day, “ ‘Seize the Time:’ The Role of Political Development in Building a Formerly Imprisoned Black Intellectual’s Subjectivity and Praxis,” Tapestries: Interwoven Voices of Local and Global Identities 4.1 (2015).

27 Newton, To Die for the People, 223. Compare Robert Chrisman, “Black Prisoners, White Law,” Black Scholar 2 (1971) 44–46, and Berger, Captive Nation, 68.

28 Newton, To Die for the People, 223; Chrisman, “Black Prisoners, White Law.” Contrast these views with the justification for mass imprisonment advanced by Mark S. Fleisher, Warehousing Violence (London: Sage, 1989).

29 Newton, To Die for the People, 224; Hansen-Day, “ ‘Seize the Time.’ ”

30 Newton, To Die for the People, 224.

31 Compare Johnson, “The Prison Birth of Black Power,” 397; Badillo and Hayes, A Bill of No Rights; Ralph Ginzburg, “Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison,” New York Times Magazine (3 December 1972) 38; George Mangakis, “A Letter from Prison,” Transition 39 (1971) 14–19, at 15.

32 Newton, To Die for the People, 224.

33 Mangakis, “A Letter from Prison,” 16.

34 It is instructive to compare Newton’s position here with his discussion of Black capitalism in Huey P. Newton, “War against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1980) 21–24.

35 Bruce J. Malina and John J Pilch, Social Science Commentary on the Letters of Paul (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006) 59–60.

36 Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (trans. John Bowden; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1978) 109, and idem, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (trans. John Bowden; London: SCM, 1999) 147–51.

37 Malina and Pilch, Social Science Commentary, 122.

38 Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press 1995) 104–8. Compare Gerhard Sellin, Der Streit um die Auferstehung der Toten: Eine religionsgeschichtliche und exegetische Untersuchung von 1. Korinther 15 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986) 17–37.

39 Compare Martin, The Corinthian Body, 3–37.

40 Chong-hun Kim, The Significance of Clothing Imagery in the Pauline Corpus (JSNTSup 268; London: T&T Clark, 2004).

41 The Greco-Roman philosophical influences on Paul’s theology are more fully articulated in Martin, The Corinthian Body.

42 See also Henrik P. Thyssen, “Philosophical Christology in the New Testament,” Numen 53 (2006) 133–76; Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Contraversions; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 61–62; and Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament: Complete in One Volume (New York: Scribner, 1951) 204.

43 Jeffries, Huey P. Newton; Sowers, “The Socratic Black Panther.”

44 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 249; Sowers, “The Socratic Black Panther,” 36–37.

45 Malina and Pilch, Social Science Commentary, 128.

46 Martin L. King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Penguin, 1964) 77.

47 Ibid., 83–84.

48 Huey P. Newton, “Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970,” in The Huey P. Newton Reader (ed. David Hilliard and Donald Weise; New York: Seven Stories, 2002) 160–75, at 161–62; Sowers, “The Socratic Black Panther,” 40.

49 Newton, To Die for the People.

50 Bruce W. Longenecker, Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) 108–31.

51 Uri Regev, “Justice and Power: A Jewish Perspective,” European Judaism: A Journal for a New Europe 40 (2007) 148–64.

52 Rainer Kessler, The Social History of Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008) 108–17, and Bernhard Lang, “The Social Organization of Peasant Poverty in Biblical Israel,” JSOT 24 (1983) 47–63.

53 Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997) 644–46.

54 Emmanuel O. Nwaoru, “A Fresh Look at Amos 4:1–3 and Its Imagery,” VT 59 (2009) 460–74; Robert B. Coote, Amos among the Prophets: Composition and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981) 24–32; Kessler, The Social History of Ancient Israel, 109–10; and Hemchand Gossai, Social Critique by Israel’s Eighth-Century Prophets: Justice and Righteousness in Context (New York: Lang, 1993; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006) 244–260. Page numbers taken from the reprinted edition.

55 Nwaoru, “A Fresh Look,” 462.

56 Ibid., 471; Klaus Koch, The Prophets: The Assyrian Period (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983); and Gossai, Social Critique.

57 Gossai, Social Critique, 158.

58 Newton, To Die for the People, 223.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Gossai, Social Critique, 230.

62 Jacob S. Dorman, Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Phillip Richards, “The ‘Joseph’ Story as Slave Narrative: On Genesis and Exodus as Prototypes for Early Black Anglophone Writing,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (ed. Vincent L. Wimbush and Rosamond C. Rodman; New York: Continuum, 2000; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012) 221–35 (page numbers taken from the reprinted edition); John Saillant, “Origins of African American Biblical Hermeneutics in Eighteenth-Century Black Opposition to the Slave Trade and Slavery,” in African Americans and the Bible (ed. Wimbush and Rodman), 236–50; and Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

63 Jeffries, Huey P. Newton.