“On May Day, Thursday May 1st, a revolutionary wedding took place. The wedding was the first of its kind here in decadent, racist America,” a notice in the May 11, 1969 edition of the Black Panther announced. Beneath a gently out-of-focus snapshot of the smiling couple looking “radiantly revolutionary in their Panther uniforms of black and Panther blue,” the paper printed an account of the event. Party chairman Bobby Seale officiated the ceremony at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, reading from Mao’s Little Red Book “in place of the Holy Bible.” After the ceremony, a crowd of children serenaded the newlyweds with “the revolutionary song of ‘We want a pork chop, off the pig.’”
The couple were Black Panther Party (BPP) members Shelly Sanders and Charles Bursey. Captain of the Berkeley section, Bursey is perhaps best known today as the subject of a photo taken during one of the party’s earliest Free Breakfast for Children programs: The 22-year-old Bursey delicately reaching over a young girl to serve her a plate, wearing an apron in place of a black leather jacket, has become one of the more widely circulated visual counterpoints to the hypermasculine, paramilitary image of the party that’s long dominated the popular imagination. The marriage took place under the auspices of St. Augustine’s Rev. Earl Neil, a longtime civil rights leader and close ally of the Panthers. It was at that same church where, just months prior, the first Free Breakfast for Children program was formed.
The May Day wedding of Shelly Sanders and Charles Bursey was the first of at least four “revolutionary weddings” performed and promoted by the BPP in 1969. The next was carried out two weeks later by the Kansas City chapter, which announced in the party’s newspaper that it was “very proud to be second in the tradition of having a revolutionary marriage” along with a striking photograph of Panthers Phyllis Story and Phillip Ortega locked in an embrace, framed by a pair of crossed shotguns held by two of their comrades. The ceremony was nearly a direct repeat of the Burseys’. The couple wore uniforms of black leather, were serenaded with “off the pig,” and were read quotations from Mao: “The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you.”
Two more weddings followed in August, as Minister of Culture Emory Douglas married Judy Graham at St. Augustine’s, and Minister of Education Raymond “Masai” Hewitt married Shirley Neeley at the Berkeley Free Church. In both cases, the ceremony was substantially the same, with minor adjustments. The Douglases substituted a passage from Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice for the Red Book: “I greet you, my Queen, not in the obsequious whine of a cringing Slave to which you have become accustomed, neither do I greet you in the new voice, the unctuous supplications of the sleek Black Bourgeoisie, nor the bullying bellow of the Free Slave — but in my own voice do I greet you, the voice of the Black Man…put on your crown, my Queen, and we will build a new city on these ruins.”
The Hewitts took their vows with “million dollar wedding rings” forged out of metal procured from the smoldering ruins of downed U.S. bombers, a gift from the Viet Cong. Theirs was the only “revolutionary wedding” to be officiated by a white person, the Free Church’s Rev. Dick York — a wild-haired hippie priest and a fixture in the Bay Area’s leftist scene. Like Neil, York was an ordained Episcopal minister who received tacit permission from church officials to engage the radical community with unorthodox liturgical experiments. York never seems to have been disciplined for promoting “armed love [and] love-making” among his countercultural flock, nor Neil for substituting the words of Mao and Cleaver for the word of God.
The church may not have minded but the Feds took note: In a June 1969 memorandum, the FBI castigated the weddings’ “mockery…of sympathetic ministers and priests who furnish churches for these people under the cloak of humanitarianism.” The FBI memorandum was repeated almost word-for-word in a nationally syndicated article by influential conservative columnist Robert S. Allen. After the wedding of the Hewitts, the party appears never to have held another marriage ceremony, at least not one that they promoted publicly.
At first blush, it isn’t obvious why the BPP would seek to create a new matrimonial rite for the party faithful. While the Panthers’ pragmatism led them to embrace all kinds of apparently contradictory strategies and positions in different moments, they were consistent opponents of the kinds of cultural nationalism (“pork chop nationalism” in Panther vernacular) that emphasized the creation of new modes of dress, speech, and ceremony as the key to Black liberation. As an organization, they were also highly suspicious of patriarchal family structures and the sexual repression that made them possible. In fact, for “Supreme Servant of the People” Huey P. Newton, questions of sex, gender, and family structure were not afterthoughts; they were foundational to his ideological development.
One of the earliest political influences on the young Newton was an eccentric man four years his senior whom he befriended at Oakland City College in 1959. William Brumfield, or “Richard Thorne” as he chose to be called, introduced Newton to the world of organized Black radicalism as well as to his friend — and eventual BPP co-founder — Bobby Seale. Thorne inducted Newton into Donald Warden’s lively Afro-American Association, the fulcrum of Black militant study and debate in Oakland. He was one of the first people Newton encountered who wore his hair in an afro, and Thorne looked so much like Bill Cosby that one of his friends thought for a while he was the actor. A committed anti-imperialist, Thorne participated in a trip to Cuba during which he reportedly met exiled Black revolutionary Robert F. Williams and played ping-pong with Fidel Castro. Castro won, but Thorne gave him a run for his money.
The couple wore uniforms of black leather, were serenaded with “off the pig,” and were read quotations from Mao.
Richard Thorne’s abiding political interest was free love. In Newton’s autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide (1973), he recalls Thorne’s ideas about relationships: “He saw nonpossessive love as pure love, the only love, and possessive love as a mockery of pure love. Nonpossessive love did not enslave or constrain the love object…No man should own his wife, nor should a wife own a husband, because ownership is predicated upon control, fences, barriers, constraints, and psychological tyranny.” Thorne’s thinking had a profound influence on the teenage Newton. The two moved in together and attempted to put their ideas into practice, engaging in a series of polyamorous “experiments” with women that Newton later described as both “free” and “exploitative.”
In 1966, the same year Newton and Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Thorne — with whom Newton had by then had a falling out — took over the Sexual Freedom League, a Berkeley organization that held orgies as political statements and made headlines with public exhibitions of group nudity. By 1967, Thorne would split from the League to form the Om Lovers, a tiny, abusive sex cult with himself — now known as “Om” — as unquestioned godhead; for years, the sect lived directly across the street from the Panthers’ national headquarters in Berkeley.
The BPP’s rank-and-file culture reflected Newton’s radical approach to romantic and sexual relationships. Many Panthers lived collectively in houses known as “Panther Pads,” in which multiple-partner relationships were common and non-monogamous sex was encouraged. Children were often born out of wedlock, which the party actively worked to de-stigmatize. In 1970, the Panthers made waves when they openly aligned themselves with the gay liberation movement, as Newton declared that homophobia was a result of the “long conditioning process which builds insecurity in the American male.” Much more than is often appreciated, the Black Panthers were active participants in the same kinds of countercultural experiments that proliferated in the Haight-Ashbury scene and other bohemian milieus across the Bay Area.
Unsurprisingly, given the backdrop of pervasive sexism and misogyny in the culture at large, purportedly “free” sex in the BPP was frequently coercive in practice. Panther women were routinely pressured to perform the “revolutionary duty” of sex on-command with their male comrades. Some party men who eagerly pursued multiple sexual partners became violently jealous when “their” women did the same. (Bobby Seale has been accused of having one of his wife’s partners killed; the claim has never been substantiated.) It should be noted that this dynamic was by no means specific to the Black Panthers, but generally predominated in culturally radical left-wing spaces in the era of the sexual revolution. The party was also never as centralized as its propaganda implied, and certain chapters leaned heavily into the Panthers’ macho-warrior image, ignoring the gender politics of the Oakland leadership outright. During a visit to New York, Oakland Panther Bill Brent was dismayed to discover that women in one chapter “were dubbed Pantherettes and had to serve the brothers without question.”
And then there was the case of Eldridge Cleaver, the party’s minister of information and chief spokesman, who famously converted to left-wing politics at Folsom Prison while serving a sentence for a rape conviction. Among other things, his 1968 Soul on Ice, a landmark text in the development of Black Power and the source of one “revolutionary wedding” liturgy, is a redemption narrative about the power of non-possessive love, especially interracial love, to heal the psychic wounds inflicted by racial capitalism. Despite the complexity of Cleaver’s writing on the entanglements of race and gender (read Soul on Ice’s stunning “The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs”), his headline-grabbing public pronouncements tended strongly toward blunt, pigheaded chauvinism.
In an October 1968 speech at Stanford University, Cleaver instructed the women in the audience to embrace their “pussy power” by only having sex with men who acted “like Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, and Jerry Rubin.” For women, “political power, revolutionary power grows out of the lips of a pussy,” he insisted. When Illinois chapter co-founder (and, until last year, longtime representative for Chicago’s South Side) Bobby Rush attempted to spread the “pussy power” doctrine at the 1969 National Convention of Students for a Democratic Society, uproar over his comments that “sisters have a strategic position for the revolution…prone” helped hasten the imminent collapse of that organization.
Faced with the glaring contradiction between the party line on “the woman question” and the widespread sexism in its ranks, Panther women organized increasingly fierce resistance to intraparty chauvinism. The party’s feminist current broke out into the open at the 1969 United Front Against Fascism conference in Oakland. During the conference’s “women’s panel,” party member Roberta Alexander addressed the issue:
For the past several months in our Party there have been struggles over this question. These struggles have gone through the whole gamut of possible real problems; have gone through women leadership; women being able to be armed, to defend themselves as well as the brothers; on whether or not the women do all the typing or whether or not they also take part in the armed self-defense and the running of the offices…and it even goes down to the sexual levels, whether or not the women are supposed to do so and so for the cause of the revolution, etc.
In combating the organization’s internal sexism, Panther women — who made up a majority of party membership in 1969 — were able to appeal to their leadership’s own stated positions. Rather than bury this internal critique, the Black Panther printed the text of Alexander’s speech in full.
Two years before the Panthers’ “revolutionary weddings,” Ron Karenga’s cultural nationalist US Organization held what it called “the first Afro-American wedding in the United States.” In the words of attendee Amiri Baraka, these so-called arusi “drew on certain generalized African customs, ‘updated’ and supposedly made relevant for black people in the United States.” A photograph of the Los Angeles event reveals an intensely gendered ceremony: A line of men in identical outfits stand face-to-face with a line of women in flowing dresses, dangling earrings, and matching rings. Karenga’s ideology was deeply concerned with gender roles which, in a classically nationalist formulation, it saw as the basic structure of the “nation.” It stressed the secondary status of the Black woman, whose role was to support and inspire her man, educate her children, and create new social norms for her Black community. The US Organization and the BPP were violent, sometimes deadly enemies (a mutual hostility effectively stoked by federal intelligence agencies), and issues of sex and gender marked one of their core areas of disagreement. “Cultural nationalists, like Ron Karenga, are male chauvinists as well,” Bobby Seale argued in a 1970 interview. “What they do is oppress the black woman. Their black racism leads them to theories of male domination as well. Thus black racists come to the same conclusions that white racists do with respect to their women. The party says no to this.”
Panther ideology, in contrast, explicitly rejected any differential roles for members based on gender. “The fight against male chauvinism is a class struggle,” Seale continued. “To understand male chauvinism one has to understand that it is interlocked with racism.” This official commitment to gender equality is reflected in the form of the Panther wedding, in which brides and grooms generally wore identical (or near-identical) outfits and no explicit reference was made to gender roles. Importantly, where Karenga’s arusi appealed to abstract, idealized African traditions, the Panther weddings were self-consciously new, experimental, and strikingly informal. Within the established framework, all Panther weddings differed in their details. In the case of the Hewitts’ wedding at the Free Church, Masai even chose to wear an elegant white coat, leaving the more symbolically masculine black leather jacket to his bride, Shirley.
Unlike Karenga’s arusi, the “revolutionary wedding” neither projected its ceremony backward toward an imaginary national past, nor forward to a glorious future. The ritual was not intended to supplant traditional weddings, nor was it meant to endure through the ages, pretensions the Panthers eschewed on principle. Huey P. Newton argued that when it had done “the job that has to be done,” the “Black Panther Party will no longer be the Black Panther Party.” In other words, the party’s success in combating racism would be measured by the increasing irrelevance and incoherence of racial categories themselves. The forms of thought and activity the party developed were intended as temporary, expedient tools to overthrow the American capitalist state and its racist power structure — a complex the Panthers called “Babylon.” When that aim had been achieved, the tools would be abandoned. New tasks, new needs, and new desires would require the development of new tools. The party’s conception of the revolutionary lies in this distinction.
“Revolutionary love,” therefore, did not primarily mean the modeling of the open, caring, egalitarian love the party hoped would predominate after the revolution so much as it meant a set of practices that enabled lovers to give themselves fully to revolutionary struggle. The intention of the revolutionary wedding was to place love in service of the revolution, to transform mere sexual and familial bonds into bonds of comradeship. In the name of revolutionary love, party members were actively discouraged from pursuing sexual relationships with non-members (this policy, unwritten but very real, was applied much more stringently to women than to men), as outside relationships risked members developing obligations unrelated to, greater than, or even contradictory to the revolution. At the movement’s height in 1969, this practice contributed to the spirit of energetic cohesion and total commitment the party is remembered for. But as the BPP declined over the following decade (due to a combination of horrific state repression, ideological splits, personality conflicts, and other factors) the taboo on non-Panther relationships helped foster a stilted atmosphere of isolation, alienation, and cultishness. It was not seriously challenged until the late 1970s, when the party was already on the verge of collapse.
Interviewed in the 1990s, one former East Coast Panther recalled with pride that “we were involved in the process of resocializing and re-educating ourselves as Black men to the contradictions of sexism in the Black community.” It is this focus on process that best characterizes the BPP’s approach to the politics of sex, marriage, and love. Rather than a utopian attempt to fully define the terms of liberated love and sexuality, the Black Panthers were concerned with bringing about a world in which such love might become possible. This was the task of “revolutionary love.” Not a new tradition, but a new beginning. Like the sun at eight or nine in the morning.
Mat Wranovics and Matt Ray are the founders of Left in the Bay, a project that uncovers and retells stories of social struggle in the San Francisco Bay Area. Follow them on social media @leftinthebay.
All images courtesy of The Black Panther newspaper.
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