The pseudo-Marxist appellation “critical studies” and “critical Black studies” have entrenched itself in academe. They should set off public alarm bells. “[T]he radical Left loves to lie about terrorist groups,” remarks Alexander Riley, Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI). Case in point:  the all-out effort among “scholars” to rehabilitate the image of the Black Panther movement. Indeed, Bucknell University, Dr. Riley’s own university, features Critical Black Studies as a major field of study.

The February 23rd issue of The American Mind, “Breakfast for the Kids,” contains Dr. Riley’s indictment of the Black Panther Party. But it is unlikely that his undergraduates, or anyone else’s for that matter, will ever be told the truth about this criminal organization, which had their heyday in the late 1960s and 1970s.

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One particularly absurd narrative making the rounds has the Black Panther’s extensively dispensing free breakfasts and medical care to the Black poor in the neighborhoods they controlled. He cited a thin monograph Body and Soul by Alondra Nelson, Joe Biden’s choice as acting director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as “a stellar example of the de facto propaganda that is produced by academic Black Studies.”

These so-called “clinics” did not long endure, and evidence that they even existed at all is scarce. The Black Panther movement, in addition to their mayhem, specialized by spreading propaganda about their “achievements.” “[T]he array of criminal activities that the BPP was operating, from extortion from local communities to drug dealing,” observed Dr. Riley, was “frequently [done] under the aegis of its ‘breakfast programs for children’”

Huey Newton murdered. Bobby Seal inflicted torture. Eldridge Cleaver raped. George Jackson dispatched “numerous guards” and even his “fellow prisoners” before his unsuccessful attempt at escape. “Baseless propaganda about the BPP as a liberatory and successful alternative method of health care for the black poor is what is being taught as ‘history’ in our colleges and universities.”