The History Of The Black Panther Party
By Olivia Renaud
The year was 1966. In spite of the 1960’s civil rights legislation that followed the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, African Americans who lived in cities throughout North America continued to face economic and social inequalities. Due to the poor living conditions residents were subjected to in poverty-stricken urban centers, an increase in police violence to control these areas occurred throughout many cities in the U.S. This combined with the recent assassination of Malcolm X, an admired black civil rights activist, in 1965, laid the foundation for an idea that had been brewing in the minds of Merritt Junior College students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.
Originally called The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the organization sought to set itself apart from African American cultural nationalist organizations like Nation of Islam.
This was mainly due to their different viewpoints regarding whites and the oppression faced by African Americans. For example, The Black Panther Party believed that there was a difference between racist whites, and non-racist whites, and created alliances with the latter. The BPP also believed that not all African Americans could be considered oppressed, as it was possible for African American capitalists and elites to oppress or exploit others, like African Americans of the working class.
THE TEN POINT PROGRAM
One of the first things the BPP did was create a Ten Point Program, which would ensure the survival of the African American community and create alliances with white radicals, as well as other POC organizations. The Program was established as follows:
1. We Want Freedom. We Want Power to Determine the Destiny of Our Black Community.
We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We Want Full Employment for Our People.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We Want An End to the Robbery By the Capitalists of Our Black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency, which will be distributed to our many communities.
4. We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter of Human Beings.
We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We Want Education for Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role in the Present-Day Society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America.
7. We Want An Immediate End to Police Brutality and the Murder of Black People.
We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality.
8. We Want Freedom For All Black Men Held in Federal, State, County and City Prisons and Jails.
We believe that all Black People should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We Want All Black People When Brought to Trial To Be Tried In Court By A Jury Of Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black Communities, As Defined By the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical, and racial background.
10. We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect of the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
THE BPP TAKES OFF
The Black Panther Party made their first step into National spotlight in May of 1967.
Led by their chair Seale, a small group of party members marched into the California state legislature in California, fully armed, roused by the idea that African Americans had a constitutional right to bear arms. Their march was also in protest of the pending Mulford Act. They saw this legislation as a political tactic to thwart their effort to combat police brutality in the Oakland community. Images of “gun-toting African Americans” were taken and later became popular with the news of Newton’s arrest after a shootout in which a police officer was killed. With this newfound publicity came the support of international chapters and the rapid growth of the BPP. Support groups in Japan, China, France, England, Germany, Sweden, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Uruguay were formed.
Later in the early 1970’s, Angela Davis, a radical scholar and activist became heavily associated with the party, though many say she never actually became an official member.
Because of her strong connection to the party, Davis taught political education classes on them. She gained her notoriety in 1970 when governor Ronald Reagan was at the head of the Board of Regents that refused to renew Davis’s lecturer appointment at the University of California, because of her political standing and association with the BPP.
CONTRIBUTIONS
While mainly challenging police brutality, the BPP launched more than 35 survival programs and provided communities with important things like education, tuberculosis testing, transportation and ambulance assistance, legal aid and providing free shoes to those in need. One of their most successful programs that still exists today is the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which began in January of 1969, and spread to every American city with a Black Panther Party chapter.
DEFEAT
Ignoring the many services provided by the BPP to the public, the group was declared a communist organization and an enemy of the U.S government. Hoover made an earlier pledge that 1969 would be the last year of the BPP, and devoted all of the FBI’s resources toward achieving this goal. COINTELPRO, or the Counter Intelligence Program used sabotage, lethal force and misinformation to eviscerate the national organization. The FBI’s plan peaked in 1969, with the five-hour shootout between police and members of the BPP at their Southern California Headquarters. In addition, an Illinois state police raid caused the death of Chicgao Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton. In fact, the measures used by the FBI to cause the downfall of the BPP were so extreme that when they were revealed years later, the director of the agency publicly apologized for “wrongful uses of power.”
Even though the main contributor to the BPP’s downfall was COINTELPRO, the dissolution of the party’s leadership also contributed to their demise.
Kathleen Cleaver earned her law degree and became a professor. After returning from his exile in Cuba, Newton was killed in a drug dispute not far from where he and Seale had founded the original BPP. Eldidge Cleaver became a clothing designer in the 1970’s and 80’s before joining the Unification Church, a route which would lead him to becoming a reborn christian and member of the Republican Party. Missing a majority of its original leaders, the BPP became an easy target for Hoover and the FBI.
LEGACY
Since its founding in 1966, the Black Panther Party has created and influenced a plethora of other organizations across the world.
Activists in Australia incorporated the works of the BPP members into their social movements. Representatives of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, who called themselves the Yellow Panthers, also used the organization as a model. Decades after the passing of the Black Panther Party, its memory has survived through the publication of memoirs from many of its members and the use of rhetoric in popular rap music. The party was reborn again in 1990 when Milwaukee Alderman Michael Mcgee, who happened to be a former member “sought to resurrect the organization when he formed the Black Panther Militia in response to the neglect of his community by local politicians and business leaders.” This group was rebranded as the ‘ New Black Panther Party.’Unfortunately, the New Black Panther Party “embraced a staunchly cultural nationalist orientation, leading some former Black Panther Party leaders to denounce it for using the Black Panther Party name and for appropriating its legacy.”
The Black Panther Party was an inspiration to an entire generation of African American and other POC’s who fought for change and equality within their communities. To this day, their legacy is spoken about and remembered with vigor and respect.
