The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Black Panther Party founded in Oakland, California in 1966. Today we’ll be discussing the history of the Black Panther Party with two people that are intricately involved with the party in terms of practice, in terms of being members of the party, or being associated with members of the party. Joining me today is Dr. Joy James, author of numerous books, including The Pursuit of Revolutionary Love and Resisting State Violence and Dr. Kim Holder. We was talking off air and somebody called him a former member of the Black Panther Party and he rightly corrected and said, “No, I’m not a former member. I am a Panther.” And rightly so. Thank y’all for joining me today. Thank you.

Dr. Joy James:

Thank you.

Mansa Musa:

All right, both of you all wrote articles dealing with socialism and making an analysis as to what socialism is, how y’all looked at it from the perspective of the Black Panther Party and how it’s looked at now in terminologies. Let’s talk about the analysis of the Black communal socialism. Can you expound on this and share your assessment of the Democratic Party socialist way, including your core criticism and its progressive potential?

Dr. Joy James:

We understand that we have a critique or criticism, rightly so, of the current political parties, the official ones in the left of the Democratic Party, but still embedded in the Democratic Party. So there’s a lack of vision and I would also say there’s a lack of understanding of what we were saying before we came on air, that you can’t reform capitalism and different forms of socialism that have cropped up, particularly in academia. And so my contributions as limited as they are, are based on being academic. I was not in the party. I did not go organize in the party, but I was able to meet Holder and others decades ago, 30 plus years ago and to understand how essential the Black Panther vision was of struggle. And that has not replicated or been reproduced in the current moment and would not be something that would be the heartbeat of democratic socialism because I see it as a hybrid with AOC, with Bernie Sanders and also Cornell West, likely in the article that Kim was the primary author and I was a joint one, The Evolution of Black Communo Socialism.

We talked about AOC, we talked about a bit of Bernie and we talked about Cornell West, who became an independent presidential candidate in the last cycle. And we’ve gotten this Potus fascist in the current moment, but the demands, the articulation of what we’re dealing with that you see in the party, and Kim better than I can differentiate West Coast. And I know he says it’s not just West Coast to East Coast, but there are different factions of the party. There’s capitulation in different forms of socialism because they’re trying to accommodate capitalism, which is tied to imperialism. And I think the critique that Holder was talking about, we could talk about Ella Baker and others, that people were very dedicated to not get captured under a certain kind of democratic socialism that did not understand how violent the Repression is emanating from all factions tied to the state.

Mansa Musa:

Dr. Hold?

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

The Black Panther Party’s embracing of socialism was clearly with the acknowledgement that this was an alternative to the present condition and that this could be a foundation, but it was independent. What I see today with people is they’re trying to bring socialist politics into this bourgeois democratic political arena. And while you can utilize electoral politics to get certain things that you want, you’re not going to transform. We’re not going to get socialism through reforms in the democratic system in this country. You’re going to get them from creating institutions within the people and that those institutions overtake the institutions of government.

Mansa Musa:

What’s the importance of this conversation at this point in time in terms of moving the narrative about changing idea, raising people’s constantly and getting people to understand that right now where we at right now, we need a Black Panther Party mentality. We need to be in a space where we’re organizing our communities, we’re telling our people how to be the developer on autonomous infrastructure. We’re moving in there that way.

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

Because we got to get from where the people are today to where we would like them to be. And so right now, I look at this as kind of like the mid to early 60s where there’s a wide atent and that we could then within the context of them, for example, the mayor of New York, within that context we can get some things out of there that will help our position at this particular time. There’s resources and there’s organizational opportunities to working with these people because there’s a wide tent right now because we haven’t focused enough and we haven’t developed enough. So right now this is the anti-Trump. Well, to me, it’s very much similar to the 60s of the anti-war movement and the Civil Rights Movement. So we could take the opportunity to point out the differences and also engage and show them how those particular actions and stuff are frutal and show them within that context the things that are productive.

I’ll give you an example. So we know that the mayor of New York is not going to overthrow capitalists and kick them out, but we also know that we could take some of that food money or some of that housing money and develop programs and get the support of the system right this minute of city hall. And then when they get kicked out, we could still continue as long as we don’t base it there.

The Panthers were not against electoral politics, but it wasn’t to get elected. It was about using it as a megaphone and as an organizational tool, particularly initially, let’s be honest, up until the 70, 1970, it was a free Youi organization and that was our major thing. So we could utilize those platforms to point out the contradictions and also get some resources so we can develop those people’s institutions in the communities.

Mansa Musa:

Dr. Joy, what’s your perspective?

Dr. Joy James:

I kind of echo and maybe expand on what you both have been talking about. In part, again, I wasn’t in the movement the way both of you were. I didn’t have the experiential struggles and I didn’t have the level of risk. But based on what we’re seeing right now, I think we as a collective of people were more timid. And I think that timidity is tied in point of your first black president with Obama and others running through the Democratic Party that promise certain kind of deliveries that they weren’t going to make in terms of equality, in terms of the needs of people and also stopping these fascist wars.

Mansa Musa:

And

Dr. Joy James:

When you lose your imagination or you’re told that there was a victory around the Panthers, I think what’s happened, and you guys, you can say I’m wrong, what’s happened to the Panthers if they turned into icons. Even what Kim was saying earlier, the Free Huey movement, if I understand through Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, who are primary architects of that, was to keep him alive and make sure he came out of prison. But then if you come out of prison or like with Davis, it goes back and forth is whether or not she was a canther. But when you get acquitted or when you’re made free and then you become an icon, I think we become distracted. So as an academic, when I’m trying to teach about the Panthers or talking to my students about it, in some ways they see the Panthers some shiny beacon on the hill that’s compatible with capitalism, which I don’t even know

Mansa Musa:

How

Dr. Joy James:

They got there, but they got there

Mansa Musa:

Because

Dr. Joy James:

There’s a design to co-op the clarity of who and what the Panthers were and what they stood for. And then I’m going to make a connection, maybe they may sound weird, but through the Doge guys, those white teenagers or whoever were running with Elon Musk, they decimated over 300,000 jobs for Black women in the federal government. Now that’s a lot of pay for housing, for food, for cars, for leisure, for travel, et cetera, et cetera. But you can see how we became dependent on the state itself so that once it started to shrink or white supremacy started to become full-blown as it is now, there’s a lot of confusion and less clarity about the radicalism and the revolutionary potential of the Black Panther Party because we agreed to take certain perks from this … I mean, I have a perk because I have a job, perks from the state and for nonprofits.

A lot of that Black Lives Matter money that flowed in, people became millionaires. There are different ways that you can buy off a Black liberation movement and the state used multiple avenues to do that.

Mansa Musa:

The system is such designed such that they’re not going to concede no territory under no terms without it being taken from them. That’s just a reality. But I was saying how they was going to co-op the Black Lives Matter movement and that’s how they did it. They did it with money. I went down to the anniversary of the March on Washington. It was one of them, 30th or something. And from one end of DC Lincoln Memorial to the other end, all you seen was Black Lives Matter paraphernalia being sold. Fast forward, they didn’t create no infrastructure. They didn’t create no free breakfast program. They ain’t free no medicals. They ain’t institute no ideas that was going to get the community become more involved with their self-determination.

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

It wasn’t just Black Lives Matter and the grants and stuff. It’s also somehow or another from in the transition to the next century, the movement got tied to professionalism. And look, everybody got a job. I’ve got a job and they better pay

Mansa Musa:

Because

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

I got to live and I got people I got to feed too. So I’m getting paid, but I can’t be defined by my job. That’s why I don’t go by what I do in my job. I don’t go by Dr. Holter per se. Okay That’s my job. And somehow or another, we got this mixed up and our professionalism became the center of our organizing instead of the community.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right. And that’s a very astute observation now because that’s exactly what happened. Bobby Rush, we get in a position and we go from being anti-establishment to being-

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

To being the establishment.

Mansa Musa:

To being the establishment, then to be like to everybody’s career, everybody need a job. Everybody got to work. Everybody got to take care of their family. It’s what you do, what are you willing to sacrifice when you working? Are you willing to say certain things just to maintain the paycheck? I’m going to give you an example and I’m going to ask the next question. I was at an event and Michelle Alexander was one of the people that was there at the event that wrote the new Jim Crow and she said, “I was a coward.” And people say like, “Why you say that? ” She said, “Because when the question of the genocide that’s taking place in occupied territory was going on and people was asking them to take a position and they was heavy handed on, if you open your mouth up and say anything, you going to be scored your up.

You ain’t going to have your job, you’re going to have your tenant, you ain’t going to have nothing, we going to blackball you. ” And she said that she wouldn’t speak up because she wanted to hold onto this

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

Job

Mansa Musa:

To the image that she had created. So then she said that it got to a point where her consciousness wouldn’t let her continue down that path. So she wind up going to somebody and telling me what she gett ready to do. They said, “Man, are you crazy? You ready to commit suicide?” I

Dr. Joy James:

Mean, I respect her. She’s at Union Theological Seminary, right? And there’s a number of prominent theologians there, including Cornell West. And I know some of the people who were in the encampments in Columbia University, and especially the young brother who had to leave, go to Canada and announced back in Egypt, he was one of the organizers. And I met with or talked to some of the seminarians and they were trying to create a position for him at union, but the administration said no. And so there are a lot of ways in which I talked about 300,000 black women lost their jobs. They could have been 300,001 and a number of us. And so we got caught up in capitalism. We got caught up in middle class, upper middle class funding medical insurance

Mansa Musa:

Back,

Dr. Joy James:

Flying around to make speeches, et cetera, et cetera.That’s a purchase. And I want to give an example, because when y’all were talking, it reminded me of 2016. For whatever reason, I ended up in Philly when Bernie Sanders was going to concede to Hillary Clinton. And I was sitting up in the bleachers and then I hear people chant Black Lives Matter. And I was like, “That’s not real because nobody cares about Black people being gunned down by the police or disappeared in prisons.” But it turned out after Bill Clinton was literally booed on stage, they brought in five mothers and then there were Black mothers of children who had been slain, Trayvon Martin. We can do a whole list. And they were wearing corsages and color coordinated and they were there to advocate for Clinton, even though if you looked at Hillary Clinton’s record and her husband’s record, Bill Clinton, they are not Black friendly.

And you see what she did in Libya and elsewhere, it’s just imperial capture. But sitting there and listening to these cheers, Black Lives Matter, I was like, “That’s not real.” And then later is looking at the news and John Potesta, who’s a DNC like headheader, it turned out that he had told everybody, “Chant Black Lives Matter, but if they ask you how to stop police or state violence and killings, don’t say a word.” So everything was being orchestrated and we agreed to be in the play. And once you agree to take your character and place yourself in the play, it’s really difficult to get out. So I applaud Michelle for being honest because a lot of people know this is bullshit, but we

Mansa Musa:

Continue

Dr. Joy James:

To stick with it because there’s a payout.

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

Yeah. But also I agree 100%, but also we have to look at it too and that is that there needs to be a bridge in order to survive. You can’t just reject your job. You have to be able to

Mansa Musa:

Get

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

Strength in your center from somewhere. And so while we could criticize and we could say, “I’m a coward or so- and-so is a coward,” but we also have to look at this too, I don’t even know what community means in 2026. That’s something that the next generation really has to define, but there needs to be a connection so these people aren’t off by themselves and jeopardizing everything they’re set up, that they get healthcare from somewhere, that there has a community outside of their job and stuff. So that also has, we tend to look at it because they’re getting privileged too. Yes, that’s true. They’re getting paid, but there also has to be something for them to go

Mansa Musa:

To. George Jackson called it Autonomous Infrastructure and when he called it Autonomous Infrastructure, he was basically saying that and he linked the survival programs to this concept that he had outlined. But the concept, more importantly, what it was, was saying the things that the parties are implementing are institutions and ideas that serving people that would understand that once the people become aware of these institutions by working with them, they’ll ultimately take them over and move them forward in terms of providing quality service. So where we at with that in terms, because that’s a good point you made.

Dr. Joy James:

Well, I’m going to quote Ella Baker, Kim’s article, The Evolution of Black Communal Socialism. I don’t know if you guys are going to post it, but if you can, that might be helpful. Here’s a quote that opens the chapter and this is from Ms. Baker who highly … I mean, she’s a civil rights organizer. Let me just say a little bit about her and because the contradictions we’re talking about now are the contradictions in the 1950s too, right? So she’s in Harlem. She comes down after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she gets hired by Reverend King. He doesn’t want female leadership, but also she moves like a socialist. And so eventually when the youth were organizing and Reverend King wanted to turn the youth into a young people’s wing of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SELC, she encouraged them to become SNCC and that’s when you get Stokely Carmichael,

Yeah, you get all these radicals who understand what the Panthers mean, both the Panthers in Alabama and the Panthers on the West Coast. So here’s her quote, “You have to go back and reach out to your neighbors who don’t speak to you and you have to reach out to your friends, get them to understand that they as well as you and I cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism.” And that’s from Ella Baker speaks in 1974. Totally agree with her. You would just add imperialism given the mass murdering wars that the US has dragged us into and the funding of Israel in terms of the genocide in Gaza, and of course their genocides in Sudan and other places. But I would say reecho what I said about Baker, if we can make a kinship with people who we don’t always know or don’t always trust, but we understand that capitalism, imperialism, particularly under this regime, will burn everything down to the ground and they will take the billions and flee with it.

We have to create community that gives us the courage to take to the other steps, which the best parts of the Panthers and Panthers had contradictions, but the best part of the Panthers knew to be the pathway.

Mansa Musa:

Right.

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

I like what you said in the beginning about you’re just the megaphone for people to express themselves. We need to be able to take our skills and apply them outside of the institutions to allow people to gain control over their lives and develop people’s institutions. And that seems really abstract, but I mean, the most simplest way of looking at that is looking at the survival programs, which I think were kind of mislabeled because institution building wasn’t just for survival. It was

Mansa Musa:

Also

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

To get a sense of self-government and that you had control over stuff. There were liberation institutions-

Mansa Musa:

I agree.

Dr. K. Kim Holder:

… people’s institutions and giving the people a sense of power within that context. I think today would be even better because the way things are with technology and stuff, our ability to do things independently is so strong. The problems we had back there in terms of communication and mobility and that kind of stuff is not there anymore. I can’t even talk. I’m not of that generation. I can’t even talk. So when I talk about community, I got no clue what I’m talking about because I don’t know what community means to them today, but they got one. I