Justice  /  Retrieval

North Korea's Unlikely History with Black Radicals

The two groups found common ground in the concept of Juche, or self-reliance.
Bob Fitch Photography Archive/Stanford University Libraries

In 1969, Eldridge Cleaver, then a leader of the Black Panther Party, a radical organization based in Oakland that advocated for Black self-determination, traveled to North Korea for an anti-imperialist journalists’ conference. During his trip to Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea, Cleaver became enthralled with the small Asian nation’s socialist development and anti-colonial attitude. In Cleaver’s claiming of North Korea as the new frontier of socialism, the Black Panther Party discovered a revolutionary theory, Juche, which could be fitted for the unique situation of Black America. The Black Panther Party also brought Black radical thought into direct contact with the Korean peninsula for the first time and adopted North Korea’s leader Kim Il Sung into its pantheon of revolutionary theorists. For the North Korean government, identifying the Panthers as allies had important implications for Pyongyang’s propaganda apparatus as the regime claimed Washington’s insistence on human rights was hypocritical, as the U.S government did not ensure the human rights of its Black citizens.

As an organization that connected the Black freedom struggle with global anti-colonialism, the Black Panther Party was profoundly internationalist in its political orientation. Beginning in 1970, the Panthers officially set up an international section in Algeria and coordinated diplomacy as if it was a representative government of Black America. The Panthers interacted with officials from decolonizing nations and came into contact with a wide variety of revolutionary theories that could be used for the struggle back home. This global networking pushed the Panthers to the forefront of Black radicalism and inserted the Party into the international revolutionary movement.

This unusual connection between the Black Panther Party and the regime in Pyongyang was based around the North Korean concept of Juche, typically defined as self-reliance. As a theory that undergirded North Korea’s national identity as sovereign and independent, Juche allowed Pyongyang to cleverly navigate the Sino-Soviet ideological divide that afflicted much of the communist world during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In identifying Juche as its own unique version of homegrown socialism, North Korea played the two communist powers, China and the Soviet Union, off of each other for assistance and financial support. For Kim Il Sung, Juche was his theoretical contribution to the international revolutionary movement.

The Black Panther Party, via the writings of Eldridge Cleaver, became exposed to the concept of Juche in 1969. Since their inception, the Panthers had promoted self-defense and autonomy for African-American communities. Nonetheless, the concept of Juche provided international legitimacy and a theoretical basis to the Black Panther Party’s anti-imperialist politics. The Panthers Americanized Juche for their own revolutionary agenda.