“The Promised Land”: The 1972 Black Panther Party Trip to China

On March 8, 1972 in Beijing, China, Dr. Tolbert Small wrote: “Free at last, home safe, unlike M.L.K, we didn’t have to die to go to the promised land.” The doctor for the Black Panther Party (BPP) in Oakland, California, Small was part of a twenty-person BPP delegation to China from March to April 1972. BPP founder Huey Newton assembled “a delegation of American people... not made up of ‘special’ individuals,” representing various races and classes. There were ten BPP-affiliated community members, such as Small, a Black nurse, a white nineteen-year-old volunteer, and a Chinese-American architect. The other half were formal party members, such as Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture. The twenty delegates witnessed China’s sociopolitical revolutions in healthcare, education, and culture.

The significance of the BPP trip is multifold, coming just days after President Richard Nixon’s visit that “opened” China. Representing the BPP’s global reputation, the delegation was the last official visit of Black American revolutionaries to China which began in 1956. Simultaneously, the delegates were the first Americans invited after Nixon. Using photos, journal entries, and memorabilia from the trip as well as transcripts of oral histories with living delegates, this poster presents the first in-depth historical analysis of the 1972 BPP China trip, detailing the delegates’ day-to-day itinerary and encounters with China’s party state and everyday people. Emphasizing the practical means of “serving the people,” the trip’s rhetoric reflected a shift in the Chinese agenda matched by the BPP’s own changing tactics, seen initially in the composition of a delegation depicting everyday American people: geopolitical alliances for a global revolution were increasingly being replaced by engagement in local community politics. This poster contends that the trip’s lasting significance rests in the solidification of the delegates’ personal commitments to everyday changemaking and offers revisions to the individual fields and intersections of African American, Sino-American, Afro-Sino, and American history.