The Black Panthers are Back

GONZO

”We’re looking at a hundred-year-long process of getting Africans to not work”

By Jesse Larkins · October 29, 2026 · 16 min read

“White society was taught to fear something called black rage!” yelled Blair Anderson, mid-70s, to a young group of Black Panthers. “You should be afraid of black male rage!”

“Amen!” Someone in the crowd shouted.

I raised my fist in solidarity. My camera man Tommy and I had infiltrated a meeting of the The Black Panther Honor Guard, the Metro Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party, which operates out of the General Baker Institute in the Pilgrim Village neighborhood on the West Side.

Before arriving, I stopped at Dollar Tree and bought $10 worth of laundry detergent as a peace offering. Tommy brought an expired can of bok choy and a tin of sliced olives.

The Panthers, who I assumed were a relic of the civil rights era, first popped up on my radar on August 30th, when they protested outside Pastor Lorenzo Sewell’s 180 Church in response to his affiliation with Jake Lang. In the call to action announcement for the protest, the Panthers had a time frame of 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. We arrived at noon. They had already left.

A few weeks later, on September 8th, the Panthers were supposed to attend a Highland Park City Council meeting to voice their concerns over residential water shut-offs. They provided a script for their local comrades to create pressure on the city council members. But only one actual Black Panther in a fez and tactical gear showed up. The mayor live-streamed in from her home, and at some point must have forgotten her connection was live. The entire room was subjected to her dropping her pants and taking a massive shit.

So we arrived today, September 20th, 2026, to finally attend an actual Black Panther meeting. It had been raining heavily and people were crowded under pop-up canopies on the sidewalk. A bubbly woman in her thirties with dyed orange hair, a bullring, and a ballcap sprung toward me.

“Hello! I see you brought some donations!”

She set them down on a folding table. We needed a cover story in order to have any chance whatsoever at generating any probative information from the public meeting (since the Black Panthers are a historically violent organization), so we introduced ourselves as writers for a made up lefty magazine called “Detroit Act Mag.” These people love the words “Act” and “Action,” so it worked immediately. Her face stretched with excitement. She told us she was with General Strike U.S.

“General Strike U.S. is a national coalition of community members that are trying to get people ready to go on strike when we hit a critical mass of eleven million members.”

A strung out homeless woman staggered over to us.

I asked her about Feeding the Fight’s relationship to the Panthers.

“Feeding the Fight is our community survival program. We have local mutual aid orgs, like the Black Panther Honor Guard is beside us here,” she said with a gesture to the canopy beside us.

A young black man with his hoodie up looked bored as fuck. He sat in front of a table with a cloth sheet draped over the edge that read “Black Panther Honor Guard” with the signature Panther logo underneath. The table was decked out with Panther newsletters, pamphlets, and paraphernalia. No leftist organization ever failed for lack of pamphlets.

The sleepy-eyed Panther stood at attention when we approached. Getting a closer look at the pamphlets, it became hard to stifle laughter. They were poorly stapled and looked like they were folded by toddlers.

“How much are you guys selling the newspapers for?” I asked.

“Five dollars each.”

A section called “Revolutionary Art” showed oil pastels of the seven deadly sins. Another, the “Black Panther Party Ten Point Platform and Program,” outlined a list of demands:.

• All black people be made exempt from military service.
• The immediate release of every black person being held in any kind of prison.
• That black criminals to be judged exclusively by all-black juries.
• “Land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice.”
• And finally, for the United Nations to grant them enough land to form an all-black “colony.”

“So how did you get involved with the Panthers?” I asked the sleepy Panther.

“I was living in South Carolina when I heard that Blair, from the Chicago chapter, was forming the new chapter in Detroit. I heard that, drove here, and have been with them since January.”

“What kind of work do you do with them?”

“Mainly rallies and outreach stuff. We protested the pastor who invited Jake Lang to Dearborn.”

Having just recently covered the Jake Lang protests, I was familiar with all the activist groups present. I thought: Then where were you? There was no way you guys had been there longer than an hour.

Tommy asked if he was worried about infiltration from law enforcement.

“That’s one of the things we discuss a lot with coming into contact with figures like Jake Lang. It can put a target on our back and put us on their radar. We talk a lot in Signal chats about that.”

“Oh yeah?” I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow.

“Yeah just, like, learning from the past, how we could learn from COINTELPRO to make sure that never happens again.”

We hadn’t noticed, but a pretty girl with glasses was sitting in a lawn chair tucked in the corner behind us.

“Hey I’m glad you guys said something about infiltration and all that,” she said, “I’m kind of a newer member so I’m not sure when it’s appropriate for me to say something but infiltration is something I think about a lot.”

“Yeah,” I said to the obvious Fed, “you can never be too careful.”

We shook everyone’s hands and headed into the meeting.

The entrance was covered in communist insignia. Revolutionary quotes were printed on bright colorful paper. Low-ink-in-the-printer cut outs of radicals were poorly scotch-taped to the wall. There was a “free store” composed of a single rack of clothes on hangers.

A daycare, with children yelling, running around, and doing crafts, connected to the central meeting room. The children were none the wiser to the communist decorations dangling above them like crib mobiles.

The meeting room itself was sparse. The bare concrete flooring and the sound stage decorated with abandoned instruments made it feel like a band rehearsal. There was a blood-red wall with portraits of socialist revolutionaries like Lenin and Guevara painted in stark black. Foldout tables lined the room with designated people like a leftist job fair.

On stage, in a very slow, low-pitched voice, a bald woman guided us: “Down here in our belly we have our lower diaphragm. You breathe into your lower diaphragm when you want to pull vitality from the earth and from the air.”

She pregnant-paused after every sentence and let it hang in the air. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Not wanting to be ousted from the tribe, I closed my eyes and held my hand to my stomach.

“Breathe in. Now breathe out.”

She looked right at me. I did as I was told.

After the exercise we were asked to lean back in our chairs and close our eyes. We were to let go of our fight-or-flight tension; which was a lot harder than it sounded. Tommy kept his eyes open the whole time, but I committed.

As I scanned my surroundings, I noticed there were actually a lot more whites than I’d expected. A short black woman, who I had mistaken for a man at first, came out and introduced herself as Daii.

“Thank you all for coming out to the fifth Feed the Fight this year. We want to hear from all of the groups who came out to share what’s been going on in their neck of the woods.”

A sweaty fat white guy who looked like he had been kicked out of a motorcycle club waddled to the stage and started testing the sound system. A massive amount of feedback screeched throughout the room. Everyone covered their ears, irritated by his white incompetence.

A clammy white twink took the stage. I got the feeling he had emerged from a dark closet.

“Hi, I’m Abe and I’m the founder of Engineers Against Apartheid. We’re a group of engineers that have found our workplace complicit in the ongoing genocide of Gaza and atrocities committed in WWII.”

Screaming feedback rang out from the malfunctioning speaker. He glared at the biker sound engineer.

“We have an ongoing campaign against FANUC. They make big robot arms, mainly for auto parts and vehicles. What they don’t want you to know is that FANUC robots are also being used to build bombs and weapons that are, as I speak, killing innocent families in Gaza.”

The feedback screamed again. The biker fought through the storm of confusion, frantically pushing dials and flip switches to make the mic work.

“Demand is simple: FANUC must stop providing and servicing robots for weapons manufacturing.”

The rest of the speakers took their turns announcing the names of their organizations, which were just a series of progressive-sounding leftist buzzwords like “justice” and “action” strung together with confidence. The Detroit Community Action Committee was campaigning for sanctuary policies. The Hydra Fund, formed after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, provides abortions. Motor City Mobile Wellness provides “alternative services” to people outside of the medical industrial complex, which looking at the website appears to mean head massages. Provides, provides, provides. Each group declared what it provided and then ended with a black power fist and an “All power to the people!”

Daii came back on stage to introduce the man of the hour.

“Now for a man who needs no introduction. He’s one of the OG Panthers. You’ve seen him in Judas and the Black Messiah. You all know him, you all love him. Give a hand to brother Blair Anderson.”

Blair Anderson is a former Black Panther. He was shot and seriously wounded during the infamous 1969 police raid on Fred Hampton’s Chicago apartment that killed Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark. He approached the stage and gave a speech that turned the room cold. He pumped a fist in the air, which everyone returned triumphantly.

“ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!” He bellowed.

“ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!” We repeated back.

The room went dead quiet.

A frumpy non-binary in Stephen Hawking glasses had her leg propped up on a knee scooter. During Blair’s speech she got out of her seat to use the bathroom, and several annoyed Panthers had to move their chairs out of the way for her.

“Those of you who know my story know that I was 36 years a political prisoner. I got six bullet holes in me for my revolutionary struggle. Knife wounds in the prison environment fighting against those who would rape and just plunder because they had the muscles and the power.” He stared off into the ceiling and whispered, “God the horrors I saw.”

Tommy shot me a concerned look.

“Amen!” Blair repeated back. “My seniors in the Black Panthers asked me to continue the work that Detroit had nurtured me in. When I came home from prison, they asked me if I would do a eulogy for some of the heroes of Detroit. That started something called the Black Panther Honor Guard. That is what you see today.”

It was hard to concentrate as the sounds of playing children entered through the open doorway to score the scene. Someone finally had the wherewithal to close it.

“In a few days, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panthers will be in Oakland, California. This is the last meeting of this particular kind for my generation. I'm one of the younger of the Black Panthers and I'm seventy-five. The brothers who asked me to form the Black Panther Honor Guard are in their eighties.”

I became restless as Blair started to lose steam and make his final appeal to the other Mexicans, Asians, Arabs, and Whites who swore Panther allegiance.

“All power to the people!”

We united with a raised fist. Blair took his seat and Daii replaced him.

“I’ll leave you with this,” Daii said. “They fear our solidarity. They fear our numbers and strength and diversity. There’s been a lot of work done for generations, and especially now, to pull us all apart. To make us feel like we should be pointing fingers at each other. But the real enemy is capitalism.”

She gestured over to a line of catering tables in a dark corner where tatted-up mental cases with ladles were ready to serve beans and burnt hot dogs.

“And with that, I don’t know about y’all, but I am starving! We had a comrade out there who was fighting against the rain, so it took us a minute to get the grill going but hot dogs are ready.”

Everyone lined up at the catering table and made plates. Tommy and I took the opportunity to go from organization to organization and talk to their founders.

We moved down the line to a monotone Panther-adjacent-looking man wearing all black. He told us his name was Ted Glouster, founder of the Forigin Initiative.

“We provide an after school program with kids called Skills to Assets. Middle schoolers and high schoolers. We teach them about emotional intelligence, economics, and civic engagement.”

Tommy asked, “Do you guys do any technical school programs for the kids?” This completely bewildered him.

“When you said ‘technical school programs’ can you explain?”

“Like teaching them shop class or how to work on cars. Stuff like that?”

“No, not yet.”

“Is that in your plans for the future?”

“Possibly…possibly yeah.”

We thanked him and asked to take his picture with him giving us the black power fist.

Blair was sitting at a table with one of the speakers of a group called the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP). He introduced us to its leader, Abdoul Beckwith. In addition to his work with A-APRP, Abdoul has worked as a regional field operator for the Michigan Democratic Party. He was recently caught on hidden camera by Project Veritas, revealing to an undercover journalist that Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed allegedly takes donations from overseas.

“Our main objective is to get all African people descended worldwide into a unified African nation,” he said. “We realize that Africa is the root of anti-imperialism.”

According to its website, the A-APRP engages in an ideology called Nkrumahism-Toureism-Cabralism, the principles of which include “Pan-Africanism as the primary objective of African revolutionaries throughout the world,” “Dialectical and Historical Materialism,” and “Absolute harmony between Religion and Revolution.” Its biggest accomplishment has been organizing yearly African Liberation Day commemorations where they engage in “Edutainment (education through cultural entertainment)” and marches to reaffirm their commitment to the future of Pan-Africanism.

We nodded along.

“By 2050,” he continued, “all African people descended from Africa, like just black people in general, will be the majority in the workplace.”

He said this to me vaguely like a threat.

“We’re looking at a hundred year long process of getting Africans to not work so they can dictate the economy. So it's definitely a lifelong process. It's not going to happen overnight.”

“Do you guys do rallies or any other political work?”

“To prepare the next generation to push the ideals of Fred Hampton forward and all the other Black Panthers. Blair is getting older, our other comrades are getting older as well. They really need young energy to take up that mantle to carry it for them into the next generation.”

“Thanks for talking with us. We were hoping to speak with Blair too. Will he be back soon?”

“Yeah! You’re gonna want to talk to him. Have you seen Judas and the Black Messiah?!”

“Of course.” I lied.

“This is him. He was shot during the Fred Hampton apartment raid.”

Blair returned as if he knew his name was being summoned. “Piety Hill is a twelve block city area,” he told us. “And in the next nine months or so, approximately one thousand people are moving into this area. A 45% increase in the population.”

He immediately changed his approximation.

“These twelve hundred people are moving into rent subsidized, AMI, newly remodeled apartment buildings. And what we envision is that we have an opportunity to do a measured reversal of gentrification. This neighborhood is in between the wealthiest districts in the city: Old Chicago, Wayne State, Henry Ford, and Virginia Park. So I’m advocating for concentrating and creating that liberated zone.”

“It’s a war of attrition. A war by numbers,” Tommy said.

“Exactly, yeah.”

I jumped in with, “You were saying earlier about how you were wrongfully imprisoned—”

“I was not wrongfully imprisoned.” He cut me off.

“Oh.”

“I was a revolutionary. I served my time for being a revolutionary!”

“I bet you met some wild people in prison,” I said.

“People you wouldn’t believe.”

He began to tell me a story about a shower stabbing when all of a sudden we were interrupted by the shrieking feedback from someone tapping a mic. Daii was on stage beside the knee scooter girl.

“Everyone, it's a very special day for one of our comrades. On the count of three we’re all going to sing Happy Birthday to comrade Bryce. And a one, and a two, and a three. HAPPY—”

We shook Blair’s hand.

“It was nice talking to you!” I shouted over the singing.

I got the sense that the titans of the George Floyd era have all moved on. The real grifters and operators either went corporate or rebranded as advocates for Palestine. This was the B-team. They were far less serious, but in a way a lot more genuinely committed to changing the world, with grand plans for African global domination. As the world moves on from the black moment, the dreamers who remain have only raised their demands.

A few days later I drove by a FANUC protest to see if the Panthers had shown up in solidarity like they said they would. Six brown zoomers were huddled together under umbrellas and illegible signs. There wasn’t a single Panther. I didn’t stop.