Writers would come to play a key role in reshaping the meaning of violence "away from exploitation and towards transformation" (Borstelmann 2011: 108).
Throughout most of his political life he propagated that all whites were devils, and by an inversion postulated that black people were superior. Only after a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he had prayed with Muslims from all over the world, he adapted a more tolerant and integrative mindset (cf. Spike Lee, Malcolm X). After his assassination in 1965, a severe radicalization occurred in the Black Community, manifesting itself in the formation of an organization like the Black Panther Party in 1966. One of their founders, Huey P. Newton said: "There are no laws that the oppressor makes that the oppressed are bound to respect " (qtd. in Borstelmann, 2011: 105). This statement indicates clearly that the legitimacy of the State itself was challenged by the radical wing of the movement for Black Civil Rights. .
Implicitly, as a political leverage, it meant that the monopoly of legitimate use of force of the State was rejected. I think this was a crucial point of the conflict, and had to be understood as a declaration of war by the political establishment. Hence, J. Edgar Hoover, then Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, declared in 1969 that "the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to [the] internal security of the country " (Simmons, Patton 2012). From a perspective of Cultural Studies it seems very interesting to analyze the specific govern-mentality shown in the way the U.S. administration handled these turbulent years (cf. Dean 2010: 16ff.). But unfortunately it would go beyond the scope of this essay to scrutinize the infiltration and sabotage of the Black Panther Party by the Counter intelligence Program COINTELPRO of the FBI, which had been established in the 1950 ´s to fight the Communist threat.