- Former Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown rates six movie scenes for accuracy.
- Brown discusses why she believes "Judas and the Black Messiah" innacurately depicts Fred Hampton.
- She comments on Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's portrayal of Bobby Seale in "The Trial of the Chicago 7."
Following is a transcript of the
Elaine Brown: My name is Elaine Brown. I am a former leader of the Black Panther Party in the years 1974 to 1977. I've been asked to take a look at some Hollywood films where the Black Panther Party is depicted and to give my thoughts and a review of those films.
"Forrest Gump" (1994)
Black Panther: Shut that blind, man. And get your white a-- away from that window. Don't you know we in a war here? Hey, man, he's cool. He's cool. He's one of us. Let me tell you about us.
Elaine: Everybody in America loves "Forrest Gump." And so the shame of it is that this one encounter that Forrest Gump has is with this insane cult group of people that doesn't like white people. Well, of course it was a caricature, and it was certainly demeaning, not to count inaccurate.
Well, nobody walked around wearing that stuff. Every once in a while we'd have those rallies in the early days where people would wear, you know, the black leather. That was our sort of uniform. But nobody would be walking around the office with that clothing on.
The
But then in my particular case, in 1970, I visited Hanoi and other places and did a radio interview with a figure called Hanoi Hannah. And we urged our Black brothers to throw down their weapons and come home. Sorry I had a fight in the middle of your Black Panther Party.
So, to make light of it, to make a joke out of us, then we become a caricature and a joke. There's nothing you can say about it that's good at all, as to what was the Black Panther Party and any depiction of it.
And if you were to rank it, which, you know, is just so typically American, Western thinking, that everything has to be ranked, but if you were to rank it, I don't think it's on the chart. It would be below one.
"The Trial of the Chicago 7" (2020)
Bobby Seale: There's no place to be right now but in it.
Sondra: But fry the pigs?
Bobby Seale: If they attack --
Sondra: Dr. King --
Bobby Seale: Is dead!
Elaine: Bobby was very dynamic. Bobby Seale was the chairman and cofounder of the Black Panther Party. But I can tell you this: There's no one in the Black Panther Party who would have spoken to the chairman of the party that way. Period. So that's No. 1. But I can't imagine anybody, any sister or brother, telling the chairman of the Black Panther Party what to do or not do.
Bobby Seale: I said it would be impossible for me to care any less what you are tired of and I demand to cross-examine the witness.
Elaine: And the fact that he would have spoken out in this style, it would have been absolutely true. There's no way you would have told Bobby not to speak up in the courtroom, because that was almost the style of the Black Panther Party. And not for arbitrary reasons. Don't be afraid to speak. Don't be afraid to not follow their rules and so forth.
[chains rustling as Bobby Seale returns to the courtroom gagged and bound]
Elaine: We were pretty pissed off about it when Bobby was gagged and bound. He was treated so incredibly differently than the others. I thought it wasn't a bad film, as a film, because it was more in tune with the times.
"The Butler" (2013)
Ehrlichman: We just need to make sure that Nixon Black power doesn't equate Nixon with the Black Panthers.
Richard Nixon: Have you lost your mind, man? Did you read Hoover's last memo on that?
Ehrlichman: That's my point.
Nixon: Goddamn terrifying. No, no, no. I gave him the green light to gut those sons of bitches.
Ehrlichman: Good, good.
Elaine: I had forgotten about "The Butler." I had written that out of my memory, because that was another one of those films I refuse to see. Why don't we just put Aunt Jemima back on the pancake box? Or Uncle Ben back on the rice box, you know?
Eldridge Huggins: This time, we take a stand against these injustices that have plagued our community. They take one of ours, we taking two of theirs. "If they kill one of us, we kill two of them."
Elaine: I mean, this kind of simple-minded rhetoric, this is not something anybody would have ever said. Why would we never have said it? Because it didn't make any sense. That didn't mean we wouldn't defend ourselves, but nobody's going out and saying, "Well, we gonna kill two of them for every one they kill," all this kind of stuff. And we're not gonna allow the police to come to our communities and shoot people. We will move on them, and we will do that, but that wasn't the essential thing.
Gloria Gaines:We ain't seen this boy --
Cecil Gaines: I'm gonna snatch the life out of you, boy!
Gloria: Now everybody just sit down.
Louis Gaines: I'm sorry, Mr. Butler, I didn't mean to make fun of your hero.
[Gloria slaps Louis]
Gloria: Everything you are and everything you have is because of that butler.
Elaine: Now, this wouldn't have happened in anybody's universe, period. Period. You hear me?
The idea that this woman, Oprah, can play a role where she slaps a member of the Black Panther Party gives Hollywood and white people such comfort, knowing, "This isn't the way Black people are. We don't like them either. Even now we don't like them. We don't even like what they stood for. They were wrong. They were terrorists. They were killers. This man was a good solid brother who took care of his family and didn't bother anybody, and he should have been respected by his disrespectful son who joins the Black Panther Party."
It's just so shameful to try to show and to embrace the idea of the good Black versus the bad Black. And in this case, the bad Black, what's the worst? Oh, Black Panthers.
So, the point is, there are so many inaccuracies in this concept, not to count that the boy of that man was never in the Black Panther Party. But the main purpose of that stupid film was to elevate the role of the good servile Negro. Overall, pretty bad.
"Judas and the Black Messiah" (2021)
Fred Hampton: I pledge to develop...
Crowd: I pledge to develop...
Hampton: My mind and body to the greatest extent possible.
Crowd: My mind and body to the greatest extent possible.
Hampton: I will learn all that I can.
Elaine: The Black Panther Party Breakfast for Children Program was not the centerpiece of the Black Panther Party, first of all. It was a tool -- the ideological underpinning was to bring people together and to recognize that they had a right to eat. You have a right to food. And we still see that today. We talked about the right to medical care. We talked the right to food, clothing, all these things that, right now, are still a problem.
So, as a Black person, when you look at the situation then as now, you find that we have the highest rate of prostate and breast cancer deaths in America. And then we said, well, people are dying because they have no access to even the most minimal medical care. And so we said, we have to put clinics up, we have to show people that you have a human right to access to healthcare. And the reason we said "free" is because we wanted people to conceptualize the idea that in a humane society, we're not going to make people pay for those things that keep you alive.
So I think that Fred Hampton recognized that, because he was ideologically very strong, as I knew him. Unlike the director of this film and his friend, Ryan Coogler, I knew Fred Hampton. And I knew that he was very much ideologically aligned and understood the purpose of all of these programs.
This is why the Chicago police would come in and assault our clinics. You know, there in Chicago, they took some very heavy hits on breakfast programs and so forth. Because the fear of J. Edgar Hoover, which he stated openly, it wasn't that we had guns. Nobody was afraid of our guns. What do we have compared to the Chicago PD? Or the Illinois State Police that murdered Fred? Or the United States Army, or the United States Navy, or the United States Marine Corps, or the United States Air Force, or the CIA, or the FBI, or the ATF, and all the other agencies of this government that are armed to the teeth? Now, you know the Black Panther Party did not represent a threat on the issue of guns.
What was the threat that we represented? We had an agenda to understand that the reason we remained oppressed in America was because there was this fundamental 400-year-old existing system that had oppressed us as a group in the beginning, and so, therefore, the only way that we could be free was that this whole system had to be dismantled. Now that's what we understood and I absolutely know that Fred Hampton understood.
So, the limitation, the narrow, pathetic, two-dimensional characterization of Fred, oh, that was nothing compared to who Fred Hampton was. To put Fred into any context with this piece of garbage, William O'Neal -- and this guy was on screen as much as Fred Hampton. So what you've done is make him like the other side of Fred Hampton. Like there's Fred Hampton, and then there's William O'Neal.
William O'Neal had no such significance in the history of either the party or Black people. And this is so insulting to the history of Fred Hampton, much less the Black Panther Party, to equate these men as though they were two sides of the coin. You know, "Well, one turned out this way, one..." No! This was a fight for Black people and our liberation.
If you had been respectful of that history, then you might've shown more respect to not only Fred Hampton, but to the Black Panther Party.
"Panther" (1995)
Alma: We want full-fledged membership in the Black Panther Party. And none of that, "OK, sugar. As long as you play the background, getting my beer and rubbing my feet" bulls--- either. You dig?
Elaine: Those sisters standing there looking tough, "We're gonna be in the party," who the hell did that? It's just downright silly. Nobody did that. And to make the point that women were equal, I mean, it just wasn't something that even came up. There were women in the Black Panther Party from day one. Ericka Huggins was one of the first members in LA. And when I joined, she was my captain. So we had women in leadership almost from the beginning, that I can recall. I don't know where that's coming from. And it's kind of insulting to both the men in the party and to the party's fundamental belief system and ideology.
Bobby Seale: We're here to send a message. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense calls upon the American people in general and Black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California legislature now considering the Mulford Act.
Elaine: So, this was the first and only time the National Rifle Association supported a gun-control bill. [laughs] Which is very funny. As soon as some Black people started talking about carrying guns. And all this was, was what is now called open carry.
Because at that time in California, you could carry a shotgun. That was part of our organizing. To say, "We have the right to bear arms." You want to say white people have the right to bear arms? So as soon as we assume that second amendment right, as all of these organizations like to claim, "Oh, also, we got to have gun control." So it was an impressive moment, and a lot of people were shocked by it, that Black people, not only that we had guns, but we were not there as thugs.
We were there with an ideological drive. As Huey Newton used to say, the gun is not necessarily revolutionary, because the police have guns. So we know it's not a revolutionary act. But in this case, it's the ideology behind the gun, and that ideology is a championing of the right of self-defense, under the larger agenda of seeking liberation for Black people.
"Seberg" (2019)
[cameras flashing]
Elaine: I love Jean Seberg. And I knew her very well. Very well. I saw pieces of this stupid movie, but the scenes I saw were just so inaccurate and so disrespectful of Jean and who she was.
Hollywood was a big supporter of the Black Panther Party. In our chapter in Southern California, we knew every Hollywood star, because at that moment we were the flavor of the year. You know? And one of our biggest supporters was a guy named Bert Schneider, who made a film called "Easy Rider." And, of course, Jane Fonda. So, the LA chapter, we were sort of assigned to go and see her, because this was money that could come into the Black Panther Party. So that's why I know so much about Jean Seberg.
I remember when ultimately my baby was born, she sent me a card and some baby clothes, stuff like this. She was a really genuinely decent and good person.
Jean Seberg: If bringing them here raises their profile and it draws attention to the cause, then I've done my job.
Elaine: She said she wanted to support us. But she didn't want to be open about it, because she felt that if she were, that she would never get work in Hollywood and that she would not be able to support us, therefore. And so she would give donations of $10,000 to $15,000, you know? Which would go to the Northern California, up to Northern California and be spent on, you know, food, production of our newspaper, what have you.
Jean Seberg: They've tapped our phones in Los Angeles. They're listening. I can hear these little clicks on the line.
Elaine: I mean, we were all aware -- we assumed phones were being tapped. Nobody was unconscious. But I don't think we understood the magnitude of what we were up against, which was the entire United States government. And there was a paranoia that, if you want to call it that, but, you know, paranoias were being raised that we were afraid of imaginary things. This was nothing to -- nothing imaginary in it. But she definitely lost everything.
And their point was to discredit the Black Panther Party. Jean was certainly, you know, collateral damage, a casualty. I don't think this film, in any way, gives credibility to Jean's commitment to the ideals that the party espoused.
That's why I have problems with these films. It's because that, even though they get Black people to sort of take over the film, the Black Panther Party remains demonized, mischaracterized in the public imagery that Hollywood produces.