July 20, 1969: 54 years ago, July 20 1969, the Black Panther Party's three-day United [...]

54 years ago, July 20 1969, the Black Panther Party’s three-day United Front Against Fascism Conference concluded in Oakland. The UFAF was an attempt to unite the disparate strands of the American left in order to combat what the Panthers saw as creeping American fascism

The Panthers announced the UFAF in May after the killing of James Rector and the occupation of Berkeley by the National Guard. These incidents, combined with increasingly violent state repression of the BPP, were seen as signaling a turn towards fascism
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While the conference was eventually held in the Oakland Auditorium, early plans were to hold it at People’s Pad, a controversial and short-lived crash pad/commune started by People’s Park activists on the site of a former majority-Black naval housing project in South Berkeley

In a strategy influenced by the Communist Party’s Popular Front period, the BPP sought to unite all “non-fascist” elements in American political life, from the burgeoning revolutionary movements to organized labor and “liberal or semi-liberal” organizations

The UFAF brought together an impressive array of groups, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Third World Liberation Front, Young Lords, Young Patriot Organization, Red Guard, NAACP, Asian American Political Alliance, National Welfare Rights Organization, and more

The UFAF also demonstrated the striking degree to which the BPP had begun to embrace the analysis and rhetoric of the Communist Party, longtime local leaders of which (including Herbert Aptheker, Roscoe Proctor, and Archie Brown) spoke at great length during the conference

With the UFAF, the BPP’s politics more explicitly centered cross-racial and cross-gender class unity. In the run-up to the conference, they amended their Ten-Point Program, changing a reference to “robbery by the white man” to “robbery by the CAPITALIST”
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One of the conference’s most dramatic moments came during the Women Speak Out Against Fascism panel, when Panther Roberta Alexander (herself the daughter of Oakland Communist Party leader Hursel Alexander) called out sexism in the BPP, saying “it has got to go; it is going”

The conference also featured a fair amount of conflict, as various factions and groups walked out of the room or protested at different points. The tensions between the politics of racial, class, and anti-fascist unity demonstrated fault lines that would very soon split the Party

@jp_bse The RCP grew out of the Revolutionary Union, which began as the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, an SDS-connected-but-not-affiliated Maoist group led by the young Bob Avakian. They emerged publicly in April 1969, a few months before the UFAF took place

@jp_bse But the UFAF featured scattered (but bitter) infighting between groups that had been involved in SDS, which split at their national convention mere weeks before the UFAF took place (SDS still formally existed and was one of the organizations in the “United Front Against Fascism”)

@jp_bse And it was out of these post-SDS conflicts that BARU, which eventually became RCP, really grew

@jp_bse Fun(?) fact I just remembered: Roberta Alexander, mentioned in this thread, joined the Panthers only after she attempted to join BARU but was told that Black people weren’t admitted to the group because the BPP (not BARU) was the vanguard organization of Black people