The Black Panther Party

1
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.

2
The Black Panther Party

• 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.
• We want completely free health care for all black
  and oppressed people.
• We want an immediate end to police brutality and
  murder of black people, other people of color,
  all oppressed people inside the United States.
• We want an immediate end to all wars of
  aggression.
• We want full employment for our people.
• We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists
  of our Black Community.
• We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of
  human beings.
• We want decent education for our people that
  exposes the true nature of this decadent American
  society.
• 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.
• We want land, bread, housing, education,
  clothing, justice, peace and people's community
  control of modern technology.

3
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 Panthers insistence on their right to bear
  arms and radical rhetoric was threatening to the
  US power structure.

4
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 FBIs 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/rumour-mo
  ngering, and, in the case of Chicago Panthers
  Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, assassination.

5
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
  grass-roots 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.

6
The Black Panther Party

• The Black Panther Party did not appear out of
  nowhere and had its roots in the decades-old
  struggles of African-Americans 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 Garveys 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.

7
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 NAACPs doctrine of
  non-violence and argued for the Black communitys
  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.