See you in Dar-es-Salaam: The rhetoric of the Heartland Black Panther Party and the repression of the Black Revolution

The purpose of this study is to examine the local rhetorical strategies of the Heartland chapters—Des Moines, Kansas City, and Omaha—of the Black Panther Party in order to discover how meanings were formed for Panther cadres and their audiences. Employing Black Revolutionary Theory and Black Radical Criticism, the study looks at ways radical rhetoric is utilized and understood from a local perspective. The study finds that racism and capitalism played a significant role in creating the social exigencies out of which the Black Panther Party rhetoric emerged. Black Panther Party rhetoric was premised upon the demand for Black equality and the attempt to gain power to determine the destiny of the African American community. The study also finds that the ideological rhetoric of the Black Panther Party in its national content and from was sometimes contradicted by the behavior of local Panther cadres with respect to the directives of the Black Panther Party central committee. Finally the study finds that the Black Revolution did have the characteristics of other anti-systemic movements in the capitalist world system