In 1971, Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton went to see Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
in Oakland, shortly after the film’s release. What he saw that day
would have a profound effect not only on Newton himself, but also on Van
Peebles, the film and the Party. Newton devoted an entire issue of the
Black Panther Party’s newspaper to Van Peebles’s film—the first time the
paper was ever given over to one subject in its entirely—the
centerpiece of which was his long essay that analyzed the film from a
revolutionary perspective. Newton soon made the film required viewing
for every Panther member in every chapter across the country.
Billy “X” Jennings was a young Panther and Huey’s assistant at the
time; today, he runs the Black Panther Party’s official website itsabouttimebpp.com. In an interview filmed for How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It), Jennings recalled the impact of Sweetback
on the Party, and on Huey in particular. What follows is an edited
transcript of that conversation, conducted on May 14, 2004, with the
film’s director, Joe Angio, and producer, Michael Solomon.
Q. What it was like the first time you saw Sweetback?
A. The first time I saw it was during 1971. Huey Newton had seen it
and was enthusiastic. Huey told all the comrades about it and developed a
policy in our organization that everybody would go to see it—150 to 200
Party leaders went to see it over a three-day period. The Fox Theater
in Oakland let Party members in, 30 to 40 at a time, for free. The first
time I saw it, it grabbed me.
Q. But try to
describe—in as much detail as you can remember—what that experience was
like: how you got there, what the reaction was like inside the theater,
and if you discussed it afterward, what did you say when you talked
about it.
A. Well, if I can look back on 1971, it was the 7
o’clock showing at the Fox Theater—Huey told everyone who didn’t have
any definite work to show up at the movie. There was a special side door
where they were letting us in, for free. When we arrived, there were
comrades coming out who had just seen it, and they were slapping each
other five, saying, “It’s going to be a bad movie; they’ve got some good
shit in there.”
In the black community, it’s typical
that people talk to the screen in the theater. When the movie starts out
Sweet Sweetback is a young cat, right? And this was the first time
you’ve ever seen sex on screen, and there were some people saying, “The
young guy getting some!” Actually talking to the movie. And when Sweet
Sweetback had to defend himself and help the revolutionary brother out,
and deal with those two police, you could hear people shout, “Right on!
That’s the way he should deal with it. He’s doing the right thing.” And
Van Peebles’s—Sweet Sweetback’s—boss in the movie was Beetle. And this
guy was, like a very unconscious person, and one time he was selling
selling Sweetback out, and people were booing, stuff like that.
And
there are sad parts in the movie, like at the very end, you don’t know
if Sweet Sweetback is dead or not when they sic the dogs on him, so just
when he’s about to obtain his freedom, there’s silence, because of what
is happening. When you put dogs on black people, black people react in a
very hostile manner because of what’s been happening historically to
black people. So when they put the dogs out to get Sweet Sweetback,
everybody was angry, cussing at the screen, because everybody thought it
was going to be the end for Sweetback. But when we saw the dogs all
laid out—Sweetback had escaped and killed the dogs—you heard a big
release when you see Sweetback running at the end of the movie. It was
fantastic; it was like a warm feeling, like when somebody recognizes you
in a crowd or something. It’s like, Yeah, this one’s finally got it
right.
Q. And what about Huey; what was his reaction when he first saw Sweetback?
A. At the time, Huey was going to court. So I would help him get his
things together for court in the day, then in the evening I worked at
the Lamp Post, a restaurant we [the Party] owned. After court was over,
Huey would come in for dinner. He had just seen the movie, and when he’s
very excited about something he gets a big smile and he talks fast—you
could see from his hand gestures that he was excited and talking about
the movie: “Finally there was a movie out that had some consciousness in
it, and had all the elements for a possible revolutionary movie.” He
was also excited about the fact that there was a brother in the movie, a
guy who made the movie, who directed it, and starred in it too. He
thought that was a beautiful thing.
Huey was going
on about how the police was dealt with in the movie and how the
community rallied around Sweet Sweetback and this brother named Momo,
who was a revolutionary—he was a person in the community who was making
changes; he wanted a different type of system. So we looked at that as
being part of us. Sweetback is uniting with the revolutionary because
the enemy is the same. And that’s what really caught Huey’s idea because
of all this heavy symbolism in the movie. For instance, Sweet Sweetback
only says three or four things in the movie—in the Party we always say
actions speak louder than words. And Van Peebles let Sweet Sweetback do
that. There’s a part where there’s background singing—“Feet don’t fail
me now”—and that’s a part we really relate to because Sweet Sweetback
uses no technology to escape, to harm anybody. When he fights in a pool
hall with the police, he uses a pool cue as a spear, then he uses
handcuffs as a knife. What it also shows is that, throughout the movie,
as Sweet Sweetback moves through community, he had aid; he had support
from people in the community who thought he was discriminated against,
and that what he did was good because those cops were known as being
very brutal. So he started getting community support—even from women who
were prostitutes, church members, stuff like that. It was like a circle
that showed if people perceive you’re doing something positive for the
community, people will rally around you and help you. Even the gangsters
would help him up to a point.
Q. What was the impact on the Party and its members?
A. The impact was good because I really liked the fact that the good
guys win at the end. I mean, here was a guy who was working really hard
and he was a victim. Sweet Sweetback was a victim of society, and
throughout the whole movie he gradually gains consciousness about who he
is and what his position is in the world. When I see him deal with the
police in that manner—because the police in the movie were very
aggressive, very brutal, they had a very nasty relationship with people
in the community, and most of the people in the community in that movie
were black. When he dealt with them in a physical manner I felt
empowerment because it was how we felt at the time we had to progress
the struggle. We were coming from an era of nonviolence. And as the
movie depicts, a brother stands up for justice because what set
Sweetback off was that police was brutalizing a young black brother, and
he couldn’t turn his back on it. So he stood up for him, which to me
was a very good example of what people could do in our community: to
come together to oppose our oppressor.
Q. As far as the kind of movies you were seeing in the theaters at this time, this was a sea change, right?
A. Big time change. In the Party, I was a dedicated member. Going to
the theater was not an everyday thing for us. We worked 16-hour
days—there was no time to go to the movies! So when something special
came along, something we thought would raise people’s consciousness, we
would see it. Before Sweetback, I couldn’t remember seeing any
progressive movies on the commercial market that I told others to see
because it had consciousness-raising values.
Q. What were some of the points that Huey was making about the movie in his analysis?
A. Huey put a revolutionary analysis to this movie because he saw
the potential that this movie had. At this time, in 1971, the Party was
talking about the lumpenproletariat, the lumpenproletariat being the
people who don’t have any jobs, who don’t have any direct investment in
society, the low-level, unemployed people. And this was what Sweet
Sweetback was; he was one of those guys. He didn’t have a regular job.
He worked in a house of ill repute, and he performed for his living. So
he was a victim, like we all are. So his level of consciousness grew and
grew. And people saw him as somebody who was victimized but he made
that step, and became a legend in the community because he got away.
There were messages, like Sweet Sweetback running throughout the movie [Holds up newspaper with photograph of Sweetback running].
When I see this particular photo, it reminds me of someone like Nat
Turner, or someone from the slavery days, running for his freedom. So
when he talks about “Feet don’t fail me now,” that’s all black people
had at the time was their feet and their ability to survive. It has a
lot of symbolism, cause it deals with slavery.
The
movie also deals with two guys who were coming from different ends of
the community. You had a revolutionary and then you had Sweetback, who
represents a very unconscious guy; by the end he’s helping the
revolutionary elude the police. He helps the revolutionary when he was
sick and when he was beat up. Even in the movie, when the motorcycle guy
comes and tells Sweetback, “Get on, I’ll take you out of here,” he
says, “No, take the other guy, he’s our future.” So being around this
revolutionary has changed his ideas about how he views life; who his
enemies and who his friends are. So it was good symbolism in that
manner.
And there were other things, like the
women in the movie. If you didn’t read Huey’s article, you might
interpret that he was exploiting the women, but in the movie the women
saved him time and time again. They gave him knowledge, they gave him
love, they helped him escape, they put money in his pocket. And even the
older sisters in the movie, when the police came around, they said
they’d never seen Sweetback, even though they had just seen him moments
before. So he had cooperation from various levels of the community.
Because he was being victimized and people realized he was being
victimized, but Sweet Sweetback took the ultimate step, he did something
about his oppressors. And he eventually got away at the very end with
the help of the community.
It was the embodiment
of what the Party was about. Finally, we’d seen someone capture our
thoughts, our gestures, our ideologies. You know, here’s an unconscious
guy who becomes conscious. Where people in the community who had no
unity before are rallying around Sweet Sweetback because he did some
stuff that made a difference. And that’s what we thought we were doing;
we were those revolutionaries who were making a difference. So when we
seen that projected on the screen, all it did was help to empower us
even more.
Q. You told me earlier that, for a while, this was all that Huey would talk about, right?
A. Oh, yeah, he would talk about it on a regular basis. I think Huey
himself had gone to see it like three or four times. He was always
taking different people. He thought, This might be the trend that we’re
looking for—that this might be the vehicle to get other people to start
making movies more related to the true conditions of the community,
instead of stuff like the ones that came afterward that dealt with drug
dealers, gangsters, and all the negative aspects of the community.
Q.
You’ve talked about the impact that the movie had on the party, but
what about Huey’s analysis—what impact did that have on the party?
A. In the Party, we believed in taking a phenomenon and trying to
make it act out in a desired manner. This film had the potential to
educate the people about the ills of our community, and how to solve
some of the basic problems in our community. Not only here in the Bay
Area, but throughout the Black Panther Party all across America. At that
time we had about 40 chapters throughout America, and every member of
the Party was supposed to go see this movie. The paper was a big seller
for the Party. When the paper was sold on the streets, we sold a lot of
issues because when people learned that Huey had made an analysis of the
movie, they wanted to find out what he saw in the movie that they
didn’t see, its potential, and stuff like that.
I
don’t think the movie would have been as well received without Huey’s
analysis. They went hand in hand. In the movie, you had people making
backwards statements, like, “You can’t fight the system. You can’t fight
City Hall.” Well, we knew you can fight City Hall, and you can win. So
you can overcome different obstacles and this movie shows you that you
can do that.
So Huey helped the movie out
tremendously cause he gave another face to the movie—I don’t think Van
Peebles knew entirely how powerful the movie was until Huey put his
analysis to it. Some movie-goers might have seen it only as a sexual,
violent movie. If you interpret it as a sexual, male-chauvinistic movie,
Huey was providing an alternative, bringing out other points Van
Peebles was making in the movie: self-defense, unity, coming together to
help each other. Even if you don’t like each other, we have the same
oppressor; we have to unify to do something to help the deplorable
conditions in the community. Those are very strong points. The point
that the women in the movie might be looked at as sexual objects, but
when you look at it from Huey’s revolutionary perspective, they gave
Sweetback knowledge, information, they helped him escape. So it wasn’t
the fact that women were being exploited in this movie, you just had to
look at it with the revolutionary eye as opposed to looking at it
straight up.
Q. How long afterward did the paper come out?
A. I think it was the next week. I think the week after Huey saw the
movie, the next week Huey did the analysis in the newspaper. That
following week after he went to see the movie…we had political-education
classes every Sunday, and it was at that Sunday’s political-education
class that the only thing that we dealt with was this article right here
[Points to newspaper]. We had 250 members of the Black Panther Party
all sitting around reading this together, as a group. So, the paper was
sold, we learned from the paper and we put the ideas out in the
community.
Q. In those meetings did some of the conflicts of the movie come out? You know, “I think Sweetback…”
A. Oh, yeah. We had different people with different terminology—some
sisters didn’t think there was any value to the movie at all. If you
went to see the movie, you might’ve been caught up in the scenes instead
of the overall themes of the movie, you know? Even though Sweetback
didn’t talk all that much in the movie, you might say, “Hey, that guy
didn’t say shit in the movie.” He didn’t have to say anything because
his actions speak louder than words.
Q.
Let’s go back to the movie’s sexual aspects. That was one of the main
criticisms of the movie; you’ve even alluded to the fact that people in
the Party were divided on this issue.
A. Yeah, even in the
Party, some people thought it was a glorified sex movie, about a male
chauvinist who had sex throughout the movie. But Huey had also made an
analysis about Dylan, about freaks—I think it’s called “Ballad of a Thin
Man.” And he talks about how people have to survive, how people who go
to see the freak show, the sideshow, to see these freaks. But they in
turn are the real freaks because they—the freaks—are doing this out of
survival. And the people who are coming to do this are doing it for
their pleasure, out of their own decision. Sweet Sweetback, his whole
thing was having this sexual thing, right? That was his art. He did that
because he was a victim; he didn’t have a job to go to. So he was being
victimized in that way. So the interpretation of Van Peebles came from a
guy who was unconscious going to conscious.
Q.
We all know now how Melvin capitalized on the movie’s X rating by
making the slogan “Rated X by an all-white jury.” Is that something the
Party reacted to as well?
A. “Rated X by an all-white jury”
was a good slogan. The movie was rated X but Melvin Van Peebles put the
twist to it and got a little mileage out of that. But even the slogan
falls in accordance with point eight of our ten-point program: one of
the things we specify that we want and that we believe was that black
people need to be tried by a jury of our peers. And the motion-picture
industry is not a peer group. By them putting an X on it, he had to take
the movie to the people. People could understand that because, this was
1971, and in 1964 President Johnson had signed a voting-rights bill
that made it possible for everyone in America to vote. But that’s not
true because [black] people weren’t even registered to vote. But people
could understand the “all-white jury” thing because that was, you know,
who rules America. So that slogan came across very good in the
community.
Q. What was going on with the state of the Party at the time when the movie came out?
A. Prior to the movie coming out in 1971, our organization went
through a tremendous blow. We’d had a split within our organization;
certain members in certain chapters of the Black Panther Party had left
the organization because they viewed the direction that the Party was
going was not revolutionary enough. So this happened a few months before
the movie was released. But also at the same time, there was a lot of
conscience-raising, as far as society as a whole, but also in the music
industry. In 1971, one of the biggest hits was “What’s Going On?” by
Marvin Gaye. “Mercy Mercy Me.” He talked about the conditions in the
community; he talked about people going to fight in Vietnam, people not
having jobs. So on the heels of that to have a movie talking about the
deplorable conditions in the community, to give symbolism to how this
silent black man who was nobody rose to become a representative member
of the community. So the movie came at a very good time, when the
consciousness was rising. Because you had people like James Brown
talking about “I’m black and I’m proud;” black businesses coming out
with black and brown stamps. Plus, to have a major black movie by a
black director; he acted in it and he wrote it, that was a tremendous
thing cause I don’t think anyone had did that in the modern era before
Van Peebles. So 1971 was a strong year for the Party, even though we had
the split. The organization became more directed toward our
community-service programs, because the people who left the organization
were people who were pro-military, who emphasized revolution over
community work. Our thing was to educate the community so the people
could make the decision whether they want to have revolution or not. Our
thing was to be servants of the people; provide services to help
people, like the breakfast program, the sickle-cell anemia program, the
free-food program, to aid the people in the community. That’s where the
Party was going at the time the movie came out. Plus, it came out in
cluster of other movies, Shaft, etc., these movies came out in the wake
of Sweetback, but none had the revolutionary potential of Sweetback.
Q.
Going back to the music of that era, what a lot of people don’t know
about the Sweetback soundtrack is that it’s the first recorded
appearance of Earth, Wind & Fire. They were the band on that.
A. Hmm. Now that’s a piece of information I didn’t know. Van Peebles
I know did a lot of those lyrics himself, like he says, “You bled my
mother…” And actually, that became a big issue in the Party because we
used that a number of times, on the back [Holds up BPP newspaper] it
says: “You bled my mama, you bled my papa, but you won’t bleed me”
because I’m gonna stand up to you, I’m gonna organize, I’m gonna do
something about the problem. So all that had a direct relation to the
Party, because the Party was pushing the image to the lumpenproletariat.
And that’s who Van Peebles was through the character Sweet Sweetback:
he was an unemployed, broke guy in the community; he was a nobody as far
as the system goes, but he became an icon in the community because
people was trying to help him, you know.
Q. Were there any other movies, books, music, etc., that the Party embraced to the degree they did with Sweetback?
A. Well, like I said, at that particular time, the Party was
developing a community liaison. Before the Party was viewed as a
strictly militant group. So we were re-establishing ourselves in the
community. At various times, the Party would have us go see things, like
Trouble Man, when it was released, we went to see that en masse. But as
far as popular music at the time, there were some groups, like Curtis
Mayfield, the Impressions. They performed for us when Curtis Mayfield
was in the group in 1968 at Huey’s birthday rally while Huey was sill in
jail. Then later on there was a group from back east called The
Persuasions, they were an a cappella group. As well as Aretha
Franklin—when Aretha came to town she had dinner with Huey. There were
different people who came through Oakland, like John Lee Hooker. Now
John Lee Hooker was from Oakland, so on different occasions he did free
concerts for us. So did Santana. Before Santana released his Evil Ways
album, he had done a free show for our breakfast program. Same with
Tower of Power. Lenny Williams has always been close to the Party. Lenny
Williams’ cousin plays drums for The Lumpen, who is a band the Black
Panther Party put together. The connection with progressive musicians in
the Bay Area has been longstanding. We always had people doing benefits
for us: the Jefferson Airplane, you know, before they became the
Starship. The Grateful Dead opened up three or four shows for The
Lumpen, before they did “Truckin’.” So the Party’s been connected with
different groups from pop culture. Like James Baldwin, different writers
like that. Richard Wright. In fact, Richard Wright, the author of
Native Son, his daughter ran our parish chapter of the Black Panther
Party.
Q. Let’s go back to Melvin and Huey.
You mentioned that there was a three-, four-month period when they hung
around quite a bit. Did Huey ever talk about those times?
A.
Not really. I never heard anything much—they were in New York, they
were over here, doing this or that. At one point Van Peebles and Huey
were going to do a movie together, something revolutionary or some such,
but nothing ever materialized from it. Huey was a drawing card for
many, and actually, he was a very celebrity-oriented revolutionary. The
impact of Huey and the Black Panther Party could be felt throughout the
world. We had Black Panther Party members being requested to travel to
Japan, to Paris and France, different locations like that, to speak. One
Party member went to speak in Germany and was surprised to see “Free
Huey” written on the Berlin Wall! Now that’s a great impact for a guy
who’s never been out of Oakland, to go to a foreign country, and to see
that what they’re doing has an impact on other places. So the impact of
the Party was felt throughout…even Mandela talks about the Party being a
strong, positive image, something that kept him going all those years
when he was in prison in South Africa. Stephen Biko started a Black
Panther Party. There were Black Panther Parties being started all over.
The Grey Panther Party, who were senior citizens; the Polynesian Panther
Party, they have a Panther Party in India, you know, the lower-class
people there, they call them the untouchables. They have a caste system
in India, so they have a Panther Party in India that represents the
lower-class people because the word Panther stands for freedom fighter,
someone who stands up for their rights. So, in that way, by Van Peebles
being connected to the Party it only made his understanding of the
people, his legacy, even bigger.