Editor’s note: We reprint here a slightly edited version of a letter from SA National Secretary Jeff Mackler to a friend who supported the New York City mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani.
[Editor’s correction: My original article incorrectly asserted that according to Glen Ford an unnamed person associated with Black Agenda Report influenced that publication to print articles friendly to the Democratic Party candidacy of Joseph Biden. That assertion was mistaken on all counts. As the article explicitly states, under Ford’s leadership BAR played a leading role in challenging the widespread support to the Democratic Party by what he termed the “Black Mis-leadership Class,” a term he coined himself. Jeff Mackler]
[Photo above: Former Black Agenda Report editor, Glen Ford]
First and foremost, thanks for your response to my email on Zohran Mamdani’s election campaign. Perhaps we can leisurely discuss our disagreements in the future.
Here I will just recall some wonderful days with Glen Ford a decade or so ago when he stayed at my Oakland house several times for several days. I am sure that you ran into Glen over the years and are aware of his views on what he termed the “Black Mis-leadership Class” and its tragically mistaken support to the capitalist-imperialist Democrats.
Glen, a brilliant writer and lifelong activist leader, was a compulsive smoker. We agreed that he would smoke outside in my backyard, where I joined him for long discussions into the wee hours of the night. .
Glen began one such discussion when he explained that “his party” had been the Black Panther Party.
Black Panthers Turn to the Democrats
This led me to explain in great detail my own experience with the Panthers decades ago, when Bobby Seale was a central leader and ran for an Oakland City Council seat. Just yesterday, I will add ironically, the Oakland City Council named a street after Seale.
At that time I was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and we also ran a candidate, Rashad Ali, for Oakland City Council but in another Oakland district.
At that time the City of Oakland sponsored public meetings where all candidates were invited. Rashad explained during one such meeting that he was running as a revolutionary socialist, independent of and against the Democrats. He added that he supported Seale as an independent revolutionary Black Nationalist fighter who was also running against the Democratic Party.
After the meeting Seale and a group of Panthers approached us and told us that Seale was NOT running as a Panther but rather as a Democrat and cautioned us that there would be consequences, impliedly violent, if we continued to state that Seale was running as a Panther.
[Photo below: Bobby Seale in November 2025 with Democratic Party Congresswomen Barbara Lee at an Oakland ceremony that named a street after Seale.]
The very next day, the Panthers organized squads across the city to glue, on top of Seale’s eight-foot long campaign posters, the word DEMOCRAT. They now read, “Vote Bobby Seale DEMOCRAT for Oakland City Council.”
Seale eventually, in 1973, ran for Mayor of Oakland as a Democrat and lost. But at that time, the Black and Latinex populations of Oakland were growing rapidly. Seale’s campaign had him in second place against the Republicans, triggering a runoff which he lost. To that point, the Democrats had never won an Oakland election. Indeed, in this election, the Democratic Party candidate came in a distant third, a very distant third.
At that time the Democratic Party machine was headed by Berkeley congressman Ron Dellums, a Democrat and a close associate of the Communist Party, as was Gus Newport, who was later elected as a Democrat as Mayor of Berkeley.
While the Republicans won the 1973 mayoral election in a runoff, it was the last time they won anything in that city. A deal was cut for the next mayoral election with the Democrats running in 1977, with Seale’s support, a conservative Black Democrat, Lionel Wilson, for mayor and winning.
Panthers Rewarded For Their Efforts
The Panthers supported Wilson and were rewarded handsomely with scores of high-paying Oakland city jobs to the Panthers. Leading Panther, running as a Democrat, Elaine Brown, was elected to head the Alameda County Board of Education.
Soon after, Jerry Brown, the former Governor’s son, became a leading Democrat and won the mayoralty post in Oakland. Brown became a leading Democratic Party candidate for the US presidency.
The Panthers were all Brown supporters and continued to keep their city jobs. They were bought and paid for by the Dellums machine.
Panthers Fail to Support Geronimo Ji Jaga’s Freedom
Soon after, the Panthers dissolved in Oakland, and subsequently, as a national party. When we organized with the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal a giant public Mission High School rally for Mumia in San Francisco, with 2,000 present, and we raised $100,000 for Mumia’s legal defense and gave it instantly to his attorney, Leonard Weinglass, Geronimo Ji Jaga [Pratt] was present, having served almost four decades in prison and, literally, just freed that day based on a court reversal of his frame-up murder conviction. We were all astounded that Geronimo’s first act, after most of his life in prison, was to hop on a plane to speak for Mumia!
The Panthers never supported Geronimo! Indeed, they refused to testify that at the time of the Los Angeles murder, for which he was falsely convicted, he was literally in Oakland, meeting with the Panthers!
In any case, Geronimo was our keynote speaker along with Mumia’s lead attorney, Leonard Weinglass.
The standing ovation celebrating Geronimo’s freedom lasted forever. No one left the room and it was after midnight when he spoke. Other speakers were Pulitzer Prize novelist Alice Walker and former political prisoner, Angela Davis, plus a Salvadoran revolutionary and a leader of the SF Central Labor Council. I chaired.
No Panthers were present, having disgracefully abandoned Geronimo years earlier.
At that time Huey Newton was back in jail, ironically, in the same prison as Geronimo. Huey was hated in prison. He and his Panthers had not only shilled for the Democrats but extorted money from local businesses to line their pockets. It was only Geronimo’s support that kept this sellout from great harm. Again, Geronimo literally came to San Francisco on the same day he was released from prison.
All of the above was new to Glen. But he accepted my explanation, and even more so when an ex-LA Asian-American Panther, who has just completed a book on the Panthers that demonstrated that some government infiltrators and others had betrayed their history and collaborated with the CIA, spoke at a Socialist Action forum on the subject.
Black Lives Matter Backs Biden: “The Black Mis-leadership Class”
Glen and I remaining close fiends and spoke on the phone frequently, including when the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement went whole hog into Biden’s campaign, not to mention its chapter leaders in its major cities being funded to the tune of millions by the Ford Foundation. From mobilizing unprecedented millions in the streets the Black Lives Matter movement, in the camp of the Democrats, proved capable of shifting this potentially powerful force into the reactionary politics of Biden’s election campaign.
Glen’s term, the “Black mis-leadership class,” became an important term with regard to whether radicals should support Democrats. He regretted that so many had deserted the anti-racist and militant Black Lives Matter cause via the Democrats. We reprinted several of Glen’s articles in our monthly newspaper, Socialist Action. I might add that a similar phenomena took place with the more recent No King’s Day mobilizations that saw some seven million people take to the streets to denounce Trump’s social policies. Initiated and led by Democratic Party elected officials across the country, barely a word was uttered from the platforms in over 50 states condemning the bi-partisan genocide in Palestine and the similarly bi-partisan ICE attacks on immigrants.
Glen was gravely disappointed in the relative collapse of many Black leaders into the Democratic Party during the Biden campaign.
Mamdani and the Democrats
Today, I see many analogies with Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign, a campaign that is rushing headlong into becoming just another left-sounding iteration of the capitalist, imperialist, racist Democrats.
Our Socialist Action Mamdani booklet has all the details, including the fact that many of the Cuomo and Ford staff are now officially onboard with Mamdani’s campaign, along with a host of leading Democrats, not to mention the DSA, which has for decades been an active component of the Democratic Party – capitalism’s central institution for derailing all potentially independent and fighting social movements.
At 85 now, I have spent an entire political lifetime opposing movements subordinating the class struggle and independent working class political action to the Democrats. I must add that this includes the Greens and the Peace and Freedom Party who regularly endorse “lesser evil” Democrats.
Being a revolutionary socialist is sometimes a lonely endeavor, especially when a candidate like Mamdani appears and sweeps almost everyone on the left into the Democrats, capitalism’s most effective betrayer of all social moments, one of the two twin parties of war, racism and repression.
Comradely, Jeff
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