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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
In 1969, the Black Panther Party (BPP) established a relationship with the North Korean leadership that was based upon the principle of self-reliance (under the rubric of the Juche ideology), the transnational goal of Third World revolution, and a mutual antagonism toward American intervention around the world. Although the U.S. government forbade its citizens from travelling to North Korea, BPP leader Eldridge Cleaver along with other Panthers bypassed travel restrictions and visited North Korea to join anti-imperialist journalist conferences in 1969 and 1970. In North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the Panthers found a new ideology and a government that was critical of the U.S. government. The Panthers established an alliance with North Korean leaders who they recognized as an independent force within the world communist movement. They believed that the “Black colony” inside the United States could learn from the DPRK's self-reliant stance in political, economic, and cultural matters. This study adds to recent scholarship on the global influence of the BPP and opens a new field of inquiry, as the BPP-North Korean relationship has not been analyzed in-depth.
1 The concept of the “Third World” developed in the early 1950s and gained prominence after the Afro-Asian Conference (better known as the Bandung Conference) that took place in 1955. The two Koreas were left out of the Bandung Conference. These talks gave rise to what became known as the Third World movement. See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008), 41.
2 Prashad, The Darker Nations, xv-xvii.
3 Kathleen Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969-1972) in The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 216.
4 BPP leader Eldridge Cleaver considered African Americans “colonial subjects in a decentralized country, dispersed throughout the white mother country in enclaves called black communities, black ghettos.” See Eldridge Cleaver, Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches (New York: Random House, 1969), 140.
5 See Mary Hershberger, Traveling to Vietnam: American Peace Activists and the War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998).
6 For works on the Chinese and Cuban allure to U.S. radicals during the 1960s, see Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao” in Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans, eds. Fred Ho and Bill Mullen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); and Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (London: Verso, 2002).
7 Although the Panthers were not the only American radical leftists who forged ties with the DPRK, they established the strongest connection. Other American radical leftist organizations whose members traveled to North Korea during the 1960s and 1970s include the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), the Youth International Party (Yippies), the Movement for a Democratic Military, the Peace & Freedom Party, the women's liberation movement, the San Francisco-based Red Guards, the radical magazine Ramparts, and the film collective, New York NEWSREEL. Prominent radical leftist organizations such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Weather Underground neither sent members to North Korea nor showed any interest in establishing relations with the North Korean government. For a fascinating look at a short-lived Pyongyang-funded leftist organization in New York City, see Brandon Gauthier, “The American-Korean Friendship and Information Center and North Korean Public Diplomacy, 1971-1976,” Yonsei Journal of International Studies vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2014), 151-162.
8 Eldridge Cleaver's Typed Notes on Korea,“ September 28 1969, Texas A&M University, Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, The Eldridge Cleaver Collection, 1959-1981.
9 The Korean War entered a period of armistice in 1953, but no peace treaty was signed. For recent scholarship on North Korean ideology, see Charles Armstrong, “The Role and Influence of Ideology,” in North Korea in Transition: Politics, Economy, and Society, eds. Kyung-Ae Park and Scott Snyder (Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2013); Rudiger Frank, “Socialist Neoconservatism and North Korean Foreign Policy” in New Challenges of North Korean Foreign Policy, ed. Kyung-Ae Park (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); B.R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2010); and Jae-Jung Suh, ed., Origins of North Korea's Juche: Colonialism, War, and Development (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2013).
10 Peniel Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2006), 178.
11 Cleaver gained fame as a writer due to his controversial book, Soul on Ice. The book, published in 1968, was comprised of writings from his time at Folsom State Prison. In the book, Cleaver admits to raping black women as a “practice run” before moving on to raping white women. He also launches homophobic remarks at James Baldwin, a prominent African-American novelist and poet. However, Soul on Ice also tells of Cleaver's transformation from petty marijuana dealer in his youth to a devoted Marxist-Leninist who believed that communism was the only way to eradicate racism around the world. See Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Random House, Inc., 1968).
12 In the 1960s and 1970s, North Korea supported many Third World revolutionaries fighting for independence. For a complete analysis, see Joseph Bermudez, Terrorism: The North Korean Connection (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1990).
13 Kathleen Cleaver, “Memories of Love and War” (Unpublished Memoir, 2011), 559. I am grateful to the author for sharing her memoir with me.
14 By 1971, the Panthers were effectively split into two different camps. The Huey Newton-led camp emphasized local changes and social welfare programs, such as the free breakfast for children program, in American inner cities. Cleaver's faction focused on ties with socialistoriented Third World nations and advocated guerilla warfare on the streets of white America, or as Cleaver called it “Babylon,” in order to defeat the white bourgeois power structure. See Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 218-239; and Sean Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon: Eldridge Cleaver's Cold War,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 3 (2013): 538-571.
15 I adopt Martin Seliger's arguments that politics and ideology are inseparable and that ideology is “a set of ideas by which men posit, explain, and justify the ends and means of organized social action, irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, uproot, or rebuild a given social order.” See Martin Seliger, Ideology and Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), 14.
16 Nihil Pal Singh, “The Black Panthers and the ‘Undeveloped Country’ of the Left,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 57-108. In the BPP's ten-point platform, it refers to Black America as a “black colony” and to African Americans as “black colonial subjects” who will determine “the will of black people as to their national destiny.” See Huey Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973), 122-123. BPP co-founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale also claimed “that the black community in America constituted an internal colony that suffered from cultural destruction, white economic exploitation and racial oppression by an occupying white police force.” See Michael L. Clemons and Charles E. Jones, “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena,” New Political Science 21, no. 2 (1999), 189.
17 Singh, “The Black Panthers and the ‘Undeveloped Country’ of the Left,” 88.
18 For scholarly works that have briefly noted the BPP's connection to North Korea in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Charles K. Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 177; Curtis Austin, “The Black Panthers and the Vietnam War,” in America and the Vietnam War: Re-Examining the Culture and History of a Generation, ed. Andrew Wiest, Mary Kathryn Barbier, and Glenn Robins (New York: Routledge, 2010); Floyd W. Hayes, III, and Francis A. Kiene, III, “‘All Power to the People’: The Political Thought of Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, 157-176; G. Louis Heath, Off The Pigs: The History and Literature of the Black Panther Party, (Matuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, 1976); Sean Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon: Eldridge Cleaver's Cold War,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 3 (2013): 538-571; Frank J. Rafalko, MH/CHAOS: The CIA's Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011); and Jennifer B. Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,1999).
19 For important, recent scholarship on the global approach of the BPP, see Yohuru Williams, “‘They've lynched our savior, Lumumba in the old fashion Southern style’: The Conscious Internationalism of American Black Nationalism,” in Black Beyond Borders, ed. Nico Slate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 147-167; Yohuru Williams, “American Exported Black Nationalism: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the Worldwide Freedom Struggle, 1967-1972,” Negro History Bulletin 60, no. 3 (July-September 1997), 13-20; Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour; Singh, “The Black Panthers and the ‘Undeveloped Country’ of the Left,” 57-108; Sean Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon: Eldridge Cleaver's Cold War,” Diplomatic History 37, no. 3 (2013): 538-571; Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013).
20 Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon,” 552.
21 Yohuru Williams, “‘They've lynched our savior, Lumumba in the old fashion Southern style’: The Conscious Internationalism of American Black Nationalism,” in Black Beyond Borders, 165.
22 Oz Frankel, “The Black Panthers of Israel and the Politics of the Radical Analogy,” in Black Beyond Borders, 81-106; Robbie Shilliam, “The Polynesian Panthers and the Black Power Gang: Surviving Racism and Colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand,” in Black Beyond Borders, 107-126; Nico Slate, “The Dalit Panthers: Race, Caste, and Black Power in India,” in Black Beyond Borders, 127- 143.
23 Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour, 176.
24 Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour, 211.
25 Williams, “American Exported Black Nationalism,” Negro History Bulletin, 19.
26 The Black Panther was first published in April 1967. Early on, “the newspaper's circulation was still quite limited” but by 1970, “the paper's circulation grew to an estimated 139,000 copies per week.” See Ward Churchill, “‘To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy’: The FBI's Secret War against the Black Panther Party,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy, ed. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), 85-86.
27 An online digital archive of Eldridge Cleaver's personal papers regarding his travels to the DPRK and an e-dossier, written by the author of this piece, introducing these documents can be found at the Woodrow Wilson Center's North Korean International Documentation Project (NKIDP) website. See Benjamin R. Young, “‘Our Common Struggle against Our Common Enemy’: North Korea and the American Radical Left,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars-North Korea International Documentation Project (NKIDP) e-Dossier no. 14, February 11, 2013.
28 Bruce Cumings, “The American Century and the Third World,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (Spring 1999), 357.
29 Charles K. Armstrong, “Socialism, Sovereignty, and the North Korean Exception,” in North Korea: Toward a Better Understanding, ed. Sonia Ryang (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2009), 45.
30 Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country (New York: The New Press, 2004), viii-ix, 134-135.
31 Joan Robinson, “Korean Miracle,” Monthly Review 16, no. 8 (January 1965), 541-549.
32 Victor Cha, An Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (New York: Harpers Collins Publishers, 2012), 24-25.
33 “1969 Statement from the U.S. People's Anti-Imperialist Delegation to Korea,” University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library, BANC MSS 91/213c, The Eldridge Cleaver Papers, 1963-1988, Carton 5, Folder 4.
34 Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Random House, 2011), 159-160.
35 “Militant Solidarity with Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America,” The Pyongyang Times (January 6, 1969), 14.
36 Quote from Kim Il Sung cited in Pak In-kun, “U.S. Imperialism is the Outrageous Strangler of National Independence and Sovereign Rights,” Kulloja (December 1976), 60.
37 The training in these camps lasted from six to eighteen months, and during that time, the North Korean military taught foreign revolutionaries Korean martial arts. The foreign revolutionaries were also put through “vigorous training” such as running through the North Korean mountains at night while carrying one hundred pound sandbags. “Running, running, running” became the training slogan of these camps. See “The Trade in Troublemaking,” Time 97, no. 19 (May 10, 1971), 38.
38 On March 31, 1970, nine members of the Japanese Red Army (JRA) hijacked a Japan Air Lines plane and landed it in Pyongyang. These nine members eventually settled in a housing complex on the outskirts of Pyongyang and the North Korean government used the JRA connection to send money and arms to various Third World-oriented organizations, such as the PLO, the Baader-Meinhof group, and the Italian Red Brigades. For information on the training of PLO and JRA members, see Bermudez, Terrorism: The North Korean Connection, 102-104. For information on the training of Official Irish Republican Army members in the DPRK in the 1980s, see John Sweeney, North Korea Undercover: Inside the World's Most Secret State (London: Transworld Publishers, 2013), 201-226.
39 Rafalko, MH/CHAOS, 175-177.
40 Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), 414.
41 Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun, 414.
42 “DPRK Meeting Welcomes African Delegations,” Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) (September 14, 1978).
43 Liu Ming, “Changes and Continuities in Pyongyang's China Policy,” in North Korea in Transition: Politics, Economy, and Society, eds. Kyung-Ae Park and Scott Snyder (Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2013), 216.
44 “Document 14: Memo of the Soviet Embassy in the DPRK,” (August 5, 1967) in Limits of the ‘Teeth and Lips’ Alliance: New Evidence on Sino-DPRK Relations, 1955-1984, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars-NKIDP digital archive (accessed March 18, 2013).
45 “Let Us Defend the Socialist Camp,” Rodong Sinmun (October 28, 1963), 1-2.
46 Cha, An Impossible State, 112-113.
47 For more on this topic, see Balazs Szalontai, Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953-1964 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004).
48 “Report, Embassy of Hungary in North Korea in North Korea to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry,” NKIDP digital archive, December 8, 1960. (accessed April 6, 2013).
49 “Report, Embassy of Hungary in North Korea in North Korea to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry,” NKIDP Digital Archive.(accessed April 6, 2013).
50 Szalontai, Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era, 131.
51 Kim Il Sung, “For the Development of the Non-Aligned Movement,” Kim Il Sung Selected Works, vol. 40 (Pyongyang, DPRK: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1995), 117-144.
52 Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004), 137.
53 [53] Charles K. Armstrong, “Juche and North Korea's Global Aspirations,” North Korea International Documentation Project Working Paper No. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, April 2009), 33.
54 Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 467.
55 Anderson, Che Guevara, 473.
56 I.F. Stone, “The Legacy of Che Guevara,” Ramparts (December 1967), 21.
57 “From a June 2, 1967 Memo of the Soviet Embassy in the DPRK (1st Secretary V. Nemchinov) About Some New Factors in Korean-Cuban Relations,” (June 2, 1967) NKIDP digital archive (accessed March 9, 2015).
58 See Benjamin R. Young, “The Struggle for Legitimacy: North Korea's Relations with Africa, 1965-1992,” British Association for Korean Studies Papers no. 16 (forthcoming, 2015).
59 Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak, 144.
60 The Sub-Saharan African nations to which I refer are Angola, Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Togo, Uganda, Upper Volta, and Zaire. See Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak, 179.
61 “Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK, Report: Visit of an Ethiopian Government Delegation in the DPRK,” (April 28, 1976) NKIDP digital archive (accessed May 10, 2013).
62 “Telegram 066.712 From the Romanian Embassy in Pyongyang to the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” (June 3, 1978), NKIDP digital archive (accessed March 9, 2015).
63 “Hungarian Embassy in the DPRK, Telegram, June 2 1976: Subject: Visit of the President of Mali in the DPRK,” (June 2, 1976), NKIDP digital archive (accessed March 9, 2015).
64 Cleaver would subsequently criticize Cuba's adherence to the Soviet line of peaceful coexistence and denounce Cuban racism. Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon,” 558; Ray F. Herndon, “Ex-Black Panther Scores Racism in Cuba,” Chicago Defender (December 1, 1969), 2.
65 Kathleen Cleaver, Unpublished Memoir, 540.
66 Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon,” 559.
67 Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon,” 559-560.
68 Kathleen Cleaver, “Back to Africa,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, 226.
69 In April 1970, the Panthers began selling a book composed of Kim Il Sung's revolutionary thoughts. The book was titled, Let Us Embody More Thoroughly the Revolutionary Spirit of Independence, Self-Sustenance, and Self-Defense in All Fields of State Activity. In July 1970, the Panthers began selling two other books composed of Kim Il Sung's revolutionary thoughts. One of the books was titled, Each of You Should Be Prepared to be a Match for One Hundred. The other book was a September 7, 1968 report from the anniversary celebration of the founding of the DPRK, titled, The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is the banner of freedom and independence for our people and the powerful weapon of building socialism and communism. The BPP sold these three books until January 1971. Each of these books were published by The New World Liberation Front, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist group based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
70 Eldridge Cleaver, “Manifesto from The Land of Blood & Fire,” The Black Panther 4, no. 15 (March 15, 1970).
71 Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Fire (Waco, TX: Word Books Publisher, 1978), 147.
72 On the eve of the conference, “several North Korean organizations had sent a cablegram to the Panthers' imprisoned chairman [Bobby Seale], condemning the ‘illegal’ imprisonment of Panther officers.” See Committee on Internal Security, House of Representatives, Gun-Barrel Politics: The Black Panther Party, 1966-1971 (Washington, D.C.: Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 105.
73 Cleaver also gave a poignant speech where he insisted that revolutionaries inside America “need words [from journalists] that will make the soldiers, sailors, marines, and special forces of the U.S. imperialists turn their guns against their commanding officers; words that will persuade them to evacuate South Korea, Vietnam, and all the bases of U.S. imperialist aggression around the world.” G. Louis Heath, Off the Pigs: The History and Literature of the Black Panther Party, (Matuchen, New Jersey: The Scarecrow Press, 1976), 163.
74 In 1971, Huey Newton traveled from Oakland to China and engaged in his own solidarity campaign with socialist Asian nations. During his tour of China, he met with North Korean officials. The North Korean ambassador to China gave Newton “a sumptuous dinner and showed films of his country.” On Chinese National Day (October 1st), Newton attended a large reception in the Great Hall of the People and shared a table “with the head of Peking University, the head of the North Korean army and Comrade Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's wife.” See Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 325.
75 Eldridge Cleaver, “On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party,” vol. 1 A Black Panther Party Pamphlet (1969) (accessed August 15, 2013).
76 “Eldridge Cleaver's Typed Notes on Korea,” September 28 1969, Texas A&M University, Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, The Eldridge Cleaver Collection, 1959-1981.
77 Eldridge Cleaver foreword to JUCHE!: The Speeches and Writings of Kim Il Sung, Li Yuk-Sa ed. (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972), XII.
78 Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun, 414.
79 Myers, The Cleanest Race, 46.
80 Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, 363.
81 Alzo David-West, “Between Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism: Juche and the Case of Chong Tasan,” Korean Studies 35 (2011), 107.
82 Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak, 53.
83 North Korea's Juche ideology was a model that the Panthers could appropriate into the Party's discourse as the organization emphasized self-defense of the black community. In 1968, the Panthers changed their name from the BPP for Self-Defense to the BPP due to the organization's philosophical shift from focusing primarily on gun violence to other forms of violence (unemployment, poor housing, improper education, lack of public facilities, and the inequity of the draft) that affected impoverished communities in the United States. Despite the name change, the organization maintained an emphasis on the self-defense and self-reliance of the black community. See Bridgette Baldwin, “In the Shadow of the Gun,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, eds. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 83.
84 “We Must Rely on Ourselves,” The Black Panther 4, no. 13 (February 28, 1970).
85 Committee on Internal Security, Gun-Barrel Politics, 105.
86 For more on key black leaders within the CPUSA, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
87 “Interview with Eldridge Cleaver,” The Black Panther 4, no. 18 (April 4, 1970).
88 In a 1970 interview with a journalist from the United Arab Republic, Kim Il Sung expressed solidarity with the African American struggle for equal rights and said, “Imperialism is attacked not only from outside but also from within and is confronted with an acute crisis. The struggle of the Negroes against racial discrimination and for freedom and democratic rights and an anti-war movement of the masses of the peoples are going on extensively in the United States.” As his remarks reveal, Kim Il Sung regarded African Americans and the antiwar movement in the United States as allies in the global fight against American imperialism. See Kim Il Sung, Answers to the Questions Raised by Foreign Journalists (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1970) 196.
89 The “charge,” to which the North Korean press referred, was the May 21, 1969 murder of Alex Rackley, a member of the BPP's New York Chapter, who had been suspected of being a police informant. After months of trials and deliberation, the jury was unable to reach a verdict on Seale's involvement in Rackley's murder and he was released from prison in 1972. For the North Korean article, see “Suppression of USA Black Panther Party Must Be Stopped at Once,” The Pyongyang Times (January 26, 1970). For more on the Seale trial, see Paul Bass, “Black Panther Torture ‘Trial’ Tape Surfaces,” New Haven Independent (February 21, 2013) (accessed September 4, 2013); and Neil MacFarquhar, “Harold M. Mulvey, 86, Judge at Tense Black Panther Trials,” New York Times (March 1, 2000), C30
90 “Savage Repression against the Black Panther Party of USA Must Be Stopped Immediately,” The Pyongyang Times (July 6, 1970), 8.
91 Committee on Internal Security, Gun-Barrel Politics, 105.
92 Committee on Internal Security, Gun-Barrel Politics, 105.
93 Judy Tzu-Chun Wu has thoroughly documented the travels and experiences of the Anti-Imperialist delegation throughout socialist Asia in her recent book. See Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Feminism, and Orientalism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
94 Kathleen Cleaver, Unpublished Memoir, 570-572.
95 Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon,” 559.
96 As explained in Brown's memoir, Cleaver was disgruntled with the BPP's “bullshit breakfasts for children” program in Oakland while she favored it. Consequently, Cleaver had told members of the delegation to avoid Brown. Brown, A Taste of Power, 218-231.
97 Kathleen Cleaver, “Back to Africa,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, 232.
98 Cleaver had organized “the U.S. People's Anti-Imperialist Delegation” with the help of white radical and BPP supporter, Robert Scheer, the editor of Ramparts. After his visit to North Korea, according to Ronald Radosh, Scheer “talked and talked about the paradise he had seen during a recent visit to North Korea, about the greatness of Kim Il Sung, about the correct nature of his so-called Juche ideology.” See Ronald Radosh, Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), 108-109.
99 Herman Badillo and Milton Haynes, A Bill of No Rights: Attica and the American Prison System (New York: Outerbridge and Lazard, 1972), 87.
100 Cleaver, Soul on Fire, 122.
101 Kathleen Cleaver, “Back to Africa,” 232.
102 Byron Booth, “Beyond the Demarcation Line,” The Black Panther 3, no. 27 (October 25, 1969).
103 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 123.
104 Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, 58.
105 Interview of Elaine Brown, The Black Panther 5, no. 14 (October 3, 1970).
106 “Eldridge Cleaver Notebooks,” 1970, University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library, BANC MSS 91/213c, The Eldridge Cleaver Papers, 1963-1988, Carton 5, Folder 8.
107 Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 106.
108 Nelson, Body and Soul, 4.
109 Interview of Elaine Brown, The Black Panther 5, no. 14 (October 3, 1970).
110 “Eldridge Cleaver Notebooks,” 1970, University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library, BANC MSS 91/213c, The Eldridge Cleaver Papers, 1963-1988, Carton 5, Folder 8.
111 Kathleen Cleaver, “A Message to the Black G.I.'s in South Korea,” The Black Panther 5, no. 24 (December 14, 1970)
112 Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2013), 64-66.
113 Interview of Elaine Brown, The Black Panther 5, no. 14 (October 3, 1970).
114 Brown, A Taste of Power, 226.
115 “1969 Statement from the U.S. People's Anti-Imperialist Delegation to Korea,” University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library, BANC MSS 91/213c, The Eldridge Cleaver Papers, 1963-1988, Carton 5, Folder 4.
116 Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 122-123.
117 Rafalko, MH/Chaos, 119.
118 Kathleen Cleaver, “Back to Africa,” 238.
119 Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon,” 564.
120 Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon,” 563-564.
121 David Hilliard and Lewis Cole, This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993), 224.
122 “FBI Brands Black Panthers ‘Most Dangerous’ of Extremists,'” New York Times (July 14, 1970), 21.
123 As Ward Churchill asserts, COINTELPRO was so successful in disrupting the activities of the Panthers that by the end of 1971, “the BPP in the sense that it was originally conceived [in 1965] was effectively destroyed.” See Churchill, “‘To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy’,” Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, 78.
124 Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon,” 565.
125 Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 390-393.
126 Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon,” 567.
127 “Note on a Conversation with the First Secretary of the USSR Embassy, Comrade Kurbatov, on 10 March 1972 in the GDR Embassy,” Political Archive of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Obtained by NKIDP. (accessed October 1, 2013).
128 “Memorandum on the Conversation between Todor Zhivkov and Kim Il Sung,” Personal collection of former Bulgarian diplomat Georgi Mitov. Obtained by the Bulgarian Cold War Research Group. (accessed October 1, 2013).
129 Malloy, “Uptight in Babylon,” 567-569.
130 Somini Sengupta, “Memories Of A Proper Girl Who Was A Panther,” New York Times (June 17, 2000), C10.
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