Learning From the Black Panthers

Assembled from footage shot for Swedish television during that period, then found in storage three decades later, the film combines interviews conducted at the time with voiceover segments in which prominent African-Americans reflect on the legacy of Black Power.

The persecution of people who protested the war in Gaza and the demonisation of the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrate that the state no longer feels the need to mute its power, transporting us back to the Watergate Era.

Agents from the Federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil at his campus apartment Saturday and then transported him far from New York to a detention center in Louisiana, inspiring fear and outrage.

The order came from the State Department, complying with President Donald Trump’s demand to deport foreign students who had protested Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Because this move breaks with recent practice, many people are acting as though it were unprecedented.

While Khalil’s detention exemplifies the second Trump Administration’s authoritarianism, however, The Black Power Mixtape provides a forceful reminder that the White House has a long history of persecuting dissidents.

The archival material is immensely valuable because Swedish crews in the United States covered the subject very differently from mainstream American news organisations. In place of propagandistic depictions of the Black Panther Party as an existential threat to the status quo, we are given a more well-rounded view of its activities.

This goes hand in hand with the romanticisation of Black revolutionaries that was common in progressive European circles at that time, particularly in countries that did not have a large minority population.

One segment in the film concerns a cover story in TV Guide singling out Swedish media for presenting a distorted view of American society, showing the bad without contextualising it in relation to the good. Since the magazine’s creator was Walter Annenberg, one of President Richard Nixon’s biggest supporters and his ambassador to the United Kingdom, the story was politically motivated.

Titles appear at various points in The Black Power Mixtape to provide context. A particularly revealing one for 1972 states that the “US breaks diplomatic ties to Sweden after Prime Minister Olaf Palme compares the Hanoi bombings to Nazi massacres.”

That was a different time.

The Sweden that produced the raw material for The Black Power Mixtape has given way to a Sweden transformed by immigration and refugee resettlement, in which multiculturalism is only fitfully acknowledged.

In other words, a Swedish television crew today would be unlikely to view the Black Panthers with the equanimity of their forebears.

The high point of The Black Power Mixtape is a series of segments featuring Angela Davis when she was a prisoner, culminating in a contentious interview that Swedish television was able to film inside her cell.

Asked a leading question about whether the Black Panther Party’s methods are wrong, Davis launches into an impassioned defense of revolution, arguing that the ends it seeks are more important than the means used to achieve them.

She then tells the story of her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, explaining that she and her sister knew the girls killed in the KKK’s attack on a Black church:

“That’s why, when someone asks me about violence, I just. . . I just find it incredible. Because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through, what Black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first Black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”

Those of us who have refused to turn a blind eye to the massive destruction in Gaza and the deplorable conditions in which its inhabitants have been living should have no trouble discerning the parallel between Davis’s argument and the ones made on behalf of Palestinians.

Just as the ideological foundations for the second Trump Administration date from the end of the Cold War, when a new form of authoritarian populism began to emerge, the political foundations for its treatment of activists like Khalil can be traced to the 1960s, when a heavy-handed police state countered a rapid growth in radicalism.

There is a lot more continuity than we are led to believe.

That’s why The Black Power Mixtape is essential as an historical document and a user’s manual for fighting oppression today. The two go hand in hand.

In the film we learn how, despite being American citizens, radical groups that arose in the 1960s were relentlessly attacked by the police, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and a legal system rigged against them. And the Black Panthers suffered most of all.

It wasn’t just the Black Panthers’ promotion of self-defense initiatives that brought the heat down on them, but the free breakfast program for impoverished children that Hoover declared the biggest threat to COINTELPRO’s efforts to undermine the Black Panther Party.

Over and over, the Black Panthers were provoked into conflicts that led to them being jailed or killed. Sometimes, as in the case of the Chicago chapter’s charismatic leader Fred Hampton, they were simply murdered.

Although The Black Power Mixtape obeys linear chronology, the way it splices archival footage together gives the film a labyrinthine structure, with storylines branching off in different directions. If you haven’t already learned some of the history it covers, the story’s twists and turns can be hard to follow.

Part of that concerns the content of the voice-overs, which veer towards the personal. Part of that has to do with the excellent soundtrack, particularly the original score composed by Questlove and Om’Mas Keith, which takes things into an ambient zone where clarity takes a backseat to feeling.

If this quality makes The Black Power Mixtape less effective in communicating simple facts, it also makes the film a superb complement to straighter storytelling.

Some of that may have to do with the period in which the film was being put together.

When it came out in 2011, audiences couldn’t help but notice a sharp contrast between the United States that Swedish television crews had captured during the heyday of the Black Power movement and the present-day United States led by a Black President with an African surname.

For Europeans, the preternaturally cool and cosmopolitan Barack Hussein Obama seemed to embody the advertising catchphrase “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Even Americans with a more granular understanding of the United States were deceived by the president’s performance of post-racism.

As the benefit of hindsight makes clear, the truth was much more complicated.

Although it was undoubtedly the case that a Black man would not previously have been able to win a national election in the United States, the backlash against having one in the White House was strong.

Obama’s victory over John McCain helped expose pockets of hardcore racism in American society, with people posting on social media platforms – which were not censored much back then – that they refused to acknowledge the N-word president’s authority.

In the months following the 2008 election, popular resistance to the Democratic president mounted rapidly, and his name became synonymous with everything conservatives disliked.

After the Tea Party’s stunning success in the 2010 midterm elections, traditional conservatives soon realised that their political future depended on pleasing this vocal minority in the Republican Party, increasing the pace of the polarisation that had begun in the waning days of the Cold War.

Maybe the best thing about watching The Black Power Mixtape in 2025 is the way it promotes the construction of multiple overlapping genealogies, how we got here from there, and over there, and even farther away.

The most sobering lesson can also be a source of hope.

As terrible as things are right now, both in the United States and Europe, the regression keeping us awake at night turns out to be less dramatic than we had been led to believe.

Donald Trump spent his last semester of university in an inner-city Philadelphia wracked by the rioting that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. His political fixations reflect that experience.

In a sense, Trump is trying to bring the 1960s back every bit as much as the ageing Baby Boomers on the left. But whereas they have the counterculture in mind, he wants to restore the counter-counter culture, to deal with political opponents of today as harshly as they were treated back then.

The Black Power Mixtape can help us respond to that threat with a clear head and firm heart.