Appropriating the Master's Tools: Sun Ra, the Black Panthers, and Black Consciousness, 1952–1973

Daniel Kreiss  


In 1971 avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra was expelled from a house in Oakland, California, owned by the Black Panther Party (Szwed 1997, 330). It was the same year that he taught a course entitled "Sun Ra 171" in Afro-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, the readings for which re- flected his eclectic interest in subjects including black literature, bible studies, ancient Egypt, the occult, etymology, and, of course, outer space (Johnson; Sun Ra). On the surface, the pairing of Sun Ra and the Black Panthers is a striking study in contrasts. The mystical Sun Ra, with his philosophies of time and space, flamboyant Egyptian and outer space costumes, and devotion to pursuing truth and beauty through music, must have seemed out-of-place to many residents of a city still watched over by leather-clad Panthers wielding a rhetoric and creating an iconography of revolutionary Marxist struggle as they engaged in direct neighborhood actions. However, at a deeper level, Sun Ra and the Black Panthers stood in relation to the broader cultural and political movements of the post-World War II era that engaged in fundamentally performative projects to change consciousness in response to the psychological alienation caused by racism and the workings of a technocratic, capitalistic society. At the same time, both appropriated technological artifacts and rhetoric and made them central to their identities in their respective projects of liberation. Yet the different artifacts they appropriated and the contrasting ways in which they redeployed and reconceived technologies reveal competing ideologies and broader conflicts over the meanings of black consciousness, politics, and social change during the 1960s.