Transcript The Black Panthers

The Black Panther Party
• The Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense)
was an African-American organization established to promote Black Power and
self-defense through acts of social agitation. It was active in the United States
from the mid-1960s into the 1970s.
• Founded in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale on
October 15, 1966, the organization initially set forth a doctrine calling for the
protection of African American neighborhoods from police brutality
• While the organization's leaders passionately espoused socialist doctrine, the
Party's black nationalist reputation attracted an ideologically diverse
membership
• The official newspaper The Black Panther was first circulated in 1967. By
1968, the party had expanded into many cities throughout the United States,
including Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Newark, New York City,
Philadelphia, Seattle and Baltimore. That same year, membership reached
5,000, and their newspaper had grown to a circulation of 250,000
• While firmly grounded in black nationalism and begun as an organization that
accepted only African Americans as members, the party changed as it grew to
national prominence and became an icon of the counterculture of the 1960s.
The Black Panthers ultimately condemned black nationalism as "black racism".
They became more focused on socialism without racial exclusivity.
The Black Panther Party
1.
One of the first policy statements created by the panthers was the Ten Point
Program:
We want power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed
communities' education that teaches us our true history and our role in the
present day society.
2.
We want completely free health care for all black and oppressed people.
•
3.
We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people,
other people of color, all oppressed people inside the United States.
4. We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression.
5. We want full employment for our people.
6. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black Community.
7. We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings.
8. We want decent education for our people that exposes the true nature of
this decadent American society.
9. We want freedom for all black and oppressed people now held in U. S.
Federal, state, county, city and military prisons and jails. We want trials by
a jury of peers for all persons charged with so-called crimes under the laws
of this country.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and
people's community control of modern technology.
The Black Panther Party
• Inspired by Mao Zedong's advice to revolutionaries in the The
Little Red Book, Newton called on the Panthers to "serve the
people" and to make "survival programs" a priority within its
branches. The most famous and successful of their programs
was the Free Breakfast for Children Program, initially run out
of an Oakland church.
• Other survival programs were free services such as clothing
distribution, classes on politics and economics, free medical
clinics, lessons on self-defense and first aid, transportation to
upstate prisons for family members of inmates, an
emergency-response ambulance program, drug and alcohol
rehabilitation, and testing for sickle-cell disease.
• As the Black Panther Party was beginning to gain a national
presence, police began a crackdown on the party and their
activities.
• The Panther’s insistence on their right to bear arms and
radical rhetoric was threatening to the US power structure.
The Black Panther Party
• In 1967, the party organized a march on the
California state capitol to protest the state's attempt
to outlaw carrying loaded weapons in public.
Participants in the march carried rifles.
• Conflict with the law involved a handful of shootouts,
the raiding of Panther offices, and the arrest of
numerous members on trumped up charges.
• The FBI’s COINTELPRO (counter intelligence program)
was created to specifically “destabilize and
neutralize” subversive groups within the USA.
• COINTELPRO tactics included extensive spying and
infiltration, bad-jacketing or snitching/rumourmongering, and, in the case of Chicago Panthers Mark
Clark and Fred Hampton, assassination.
The Black Panther Party
• While part of the organization was already participating in local
government and social services, another group was in constant
conflict with the police.
• For some of the Party's supporters, the separation between political
action, criminal activity, social services, access to power, and grassroots identity became confusing and contradictory as the Panthers'
political momentum was bogged down in the criminal justice
system.
• A significant split in the Party occurred over disagreements among
its leaders over how to confront these challenges. Some Panther
leaders, such as Huey Newton and David Hilliard, favored a focus on
community service coupled with self-defense; others, such as
Eldridge Cleaver, embraced a more confrontational strategy.
• A small cadre of the most militant Panthers felt that the existence
of an above ground organization could no longer be maintained due
to government repression. They choose to go underground and form
the Black Liberation Army in 1971 to directly engage in urban
guerilla warfare against American capitalism and imperialism.
The Black Panther Party
• The Black Panther Party did not appear out of nowhere and
had its roots in the decades-old struggles of AfricanAmericans for civil rights, equality, and freedom.
• The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People was formed in the 1909 to advance the interests of
African-Americans and end the legalized racial segregation
embodied in Jim Crow laws.
• Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association
was formed in the 1910s and promoted Black Nationalism.
• The NAACP and its inspiring leaders such as Martin Luther
King Jr. helped fight for the desegregation of the school
system, lunch counters, and buses as well as voting rights
during the 1950s and 1960s.
• The Black Muslims in the Nation of Islam gave rise to
charismatic and militant leaders such as Malcolm X during
the 1960s.
The Black Panther Party
• As African-American gained more rights some became emboldened
by their successes. Others came to view the progress as moving too
slowly.
• Some NAACP activists like Robert Williams in North Carolina broke
with the NAACP’s doctrine of non-violence and argued for the Black
community’s right to bear arms and defend themselves against
racist attacks.
• Also, some activists in newer civil rights organizations such as SNCC
(the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee) saw that
despite their non-violent tactics, they were still being attacked with
violence by vigilantes and the state. The assassination of both
Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X further radicalized many
activists.
• The Black Panther Party was a confluence of the black radicalism
inherited from all of these movements, pushed to extremes by the
ongoing persecutions and violence against the black community, and
then heavily marinated with the Marxist rhetoric popularized during
the countercultural politics of the 1960s.