The Black Panthers

INDEX:

Black Panthers Reconsidered

More on the Black Panthers

The Ten Point Plan

Are The Black Panthers Part of the "Bad Sixties"?

Black Panthers Reconsidered

by Salim Muwakkil

Published on Monday, February 28, 2000 in the “Chicago Tribune”

College students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale created the Black Panthers in November, 1966. to address the issue of police brutality in their hometown of Oakland, Calif. The city's black community was beleaguered by a systematic problem of police abuse and citizens had no powers of redress whatsoever. Seale and Newton decided to form an organization of armed volunteers to directly confront abusive police.

The idea that African-Americans could vigorously resist police mistreatment was a tonic notion to urban black youth of that era, many of whom had grown weary of watching civil-rights protesters endure humilating beatings with passivity. The non-violent style of that clergy-led movement was out of synch with their more militant sensibilities.

The Black Panther Party, with its beret-and-leather swagger, offered a more stylish alternative. But the group was more than just a change of wardrobe. The Panthers' sense of mission and disciplined audacity provided black youth with new feelings of pride and relevance. It also minimized the appeal of street gangs. By 1968, the Panthers had chapters in more than 20 cities, about 5,000 members on the books and thousands of sympathizers.

The Panthers also focused heavily on reading and intellectual work, while their policy of "serving the people" ensured that their abstractions were grounded in community needs. The models for some of today's student breakfast programs and health clinics were set by the Panthers.

The group often is caricatured as an African-American equivalent to the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, the Panthers were opposed to all racist theory; Newton and Seale crafted an evolving, patchwork ideology that was part Marxism, part black nationalism, part Frantz Fanon--the Caribbean psychiatrist/theorist whose book, "The Wretched of the Earth," was mandatory reading for Panther members--and an assortment of other doctrinal odds and ends.

What's more, the group strongly urged multiracial coalitions and had allied itself with the Puerto Rican's "Young Lords," the Mexican's "Brown Berets" and a group of white Americans who called themselves the "Young Patriots League." The Panthers also hooked-up with the Students for a Democratic Society and California's Peace and Freedom Party. All of these groups shared an ideology that targeted capitalist exploitation as the primary enemy of social justice.

Many black nationalist organizations denounced Panther members for their willingness to forge such diverse coalitions.

The group also had its internal problems. The Panthers' revolutionary rhetoric outstripped its capacity and members often provoked police needlessly, sometimes recklessly. The party made few real attempts to build institutions to meet community needs. It grew too rapidly for its own good; without adequate safeguards to monitor the quality of new members, the Black Panther name became a refuge for a multitude of sins.

The group's brazen challenge to U.S. law enforcement also set a precedent that could not stand. In 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panther Party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and developed a counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) to "neutralize" the group.

Across the country, police infiltrated chapters and killed several Panther leaders; they destroyed offices and locked up scores of members on trumped-up charges.

Some former Panthers remain incarcerated on dubious charges, while others, like Elmer (Geronimo Ji Jaga) Pratt, who was exonerated after serving 27 years, are permanently scarred by Hoover's COINTELPRO.

The crusade even transcends generations. The 30-year-old son of Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was in his mother's womb when she saw police kill his father on Dec. 4, 1969, is serving 18 years in prison for aggravated arson, which the sentencing judge called "terrorism."

There are many other African-Americans who survived the Panthers and moved to other things. I'm one of them. So is Nile Rodgers, who went on to create the 1970s' supergroup Chic and win three Grammy Awards.

Like the rap group that shares its name, the film "Public Enemy" helps debunk the hype. That alone is a history lesson of great importance.

Copyright 2000 Chicago Tribune

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More On The Black Panthers

Formed in 1966 in Oakland, California by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, the Black Panther Party is the organization that best symbolizes Black Power.

Brought up from the hopelessness and anger of the ghetto life, the Black Panthers’ main reason for establishment was to have self-defense. They proclaimed themselves the protectors of ghetto blacks against police brutality. The Black Panthers initially patrolled the black ghetto areas with guns and law books to protect blacks from police harassment.

At the same time, they provided free breakfast, opened schools and medical clinics for their neighborhoods.

Conflicts between Black Panthers and police in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to shoot outs in California, New York, and Chicago. One of these shoot outs resulted in Newton's going to prison for the murder of a patrolman.

The Panthers, were overwhelmed by the thousands of young blacks, coast to coast wanting to join. However, inflammatory rhetoric not only made the Panthers attractive to angry young blacks, but it also made the organization a target for FBI surveillance and police persecution. Across the nation, police raids on Black Panther headquarters were frequent and bloody, and the ranks of the party were decimated by police bullets or imprisonment.

By the mid-1970s, the Panthers leadership had been decimated by prison sentences (Huey Newton in Oakland), police killings (Fred Hampton in Chicago), exile (Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria)and the revolution of opinion toward pan-Africanism (Stanlev Carmicheal in Guinea)

Having lost members and fallen out of favor with many American black leaders, who objected to the party's method, the Panthers turned from violence to concentrate on conventional politics and on providing social services in black neighbor hoods.

The party was effectively disbanded by the early 1980s. Black Panther beliefs and reasons for their actions and existence is what makes the Panthers such a unique organization from other Black Power Parties. Huey Newton said it best "We stand for the transformation of the decadent, reactionary, racist system, that exists at these time...We don't like the system."

Because of their insistence to arm themselves and have frequent clashes with police, Newton explained that the Panthers assumed a defense "against violence to ultimately resolve and beget violence." Huev let it be known that the Panthers didn't believe in the American political process because "electoral politics is bankrupt and cannot solve the problems of poverty, racism, and oppression".

The Black Panther Party Platform and Program answers what they want and what they believed:

The Ten Point Plan

1. WE WANT FREEDOM. WE WANT POWER TO DETERMINE THE DESTINY OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.
We believe that Black and oppressed people will not be free until we are able to determine our destinies in our own communities ourselves, by fully controlling all the institutions which exist in our communities.

2. WE WANT FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR OUR PEOPLE.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every person employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the American businessmen will not give full employment, then the technology and 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 AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES.
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. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of our fifty million Black people. Therefore, we feel this is a modest demand that we make.

4. WE WANT DECENT HOUSING, FIT FOR THE SHELTER OF HUMAN BEINGS.
We believe that if the landlords will not give decent housing to our Black and oppressed communities, then housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people in our communities, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for the people.

5. WE WANT DECENT 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 the self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society and in the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else.

6. WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR All BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE.
We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventive medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give all Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide our selves with proper medical attention and care.

7. 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 believe that the racist and fascist government of the United States uses its domestic enforcement agencies to carry out its program of oppression against black people, other people of color and poor people inside the united States. We believe it is our right, therefore, to defend ourselves against such armed forces and that all Black and oppressed people should be armed for self defense of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces.

8. WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO ALL WARS OF AGGRESSION.
We believe that the various conflicts which exist around the world stem directly from the aggressive desire of the United States ruling circle and government to force its domination upon the oppressed people of the world. We believe that if the United States government or its lackeys do not cease these aggressive wars it is the right of the people to defend themselves by any means necessary against their aggressors.

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.
We believe that the many Black and poor oppressed people now held in United States prisons and jails have not received fair and impartial trials under a racist and fascist judicial system and should be free from incarceration. We believe in the ultimate elimination of all wretched, inhuman penal institutions, because the masses of men and women imprisoned inside the United States or by the United States military are the victims of oppressive conditions which are the real cause of their imprisonment. We believe that when persons are brought to trial they must be guaranteed, by the United States, juries of their peers, attorneys of their choice and freedom from imprisonment while awaiting trial.

10. WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE'S COMMUNITY CONTROL OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds 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 to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are most disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Are the Black Panthers Part of the "Bad Sixties"?
By Robert Self
Mr. Self teaches history at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

The Black Panther Party never fails to stir both interest and controversy, even decades after its hey day. Brilliant revolutionaries or notorious thugs? A generation's best or worst? The arguments tend to sort into such unhelpful opposites. Indeed, the objective of a recent conference on the Panthers at Wheelock College, titled "The Black Panther Party in Historical Perspective," was to nudge the historical conversation beyond simplistic either/or judgments. The more than 40 papers featured at the conference, coupled with half a dozen books in progress that touch on parts of the group's history, represent an exciting new wave of 1960s scholarship.

The conference came at an opportune time for evaluating not just the legacy of the Panthers but the broader politics and activism of the 1960s and 1970s. We tend to see figures like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, as well as the Panthers as a whole, through an entirely moral lens. Were they idealistic inheritors of the civil rights legacy of leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.? Or were they cynical street operators who exploited their popularity for material gain? We want the Panthers, like we want the sixties generally, to yield to absolute judgments of "good" or "bad."

The "good sixties" and the "bad sixties" have been contending in the nation's cultural politics for a long time. How we remember figures like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Stokely Carmichael, for instance, speaks volumes about how we position ourselves in the present. We fight over things like whether President Clinton inhaled, whether antiwar activists supported the troops in Vietnam, and whether the Panthers were "thugs" because we have never stopped seeking both penance and redemption in this most complex of decades. It is inevitable, and not necessarily wrong, to draw from the past to make sense of the present. But our understandable drive to distill lessons from the 1960s has rendered that period a flat, ersatz Forest Gump-like world of easy moralizing.

History is far more than a game of looking backward and choosing winners and losers, heroes and villains. Would it were that simple. The Black Panther Party was an extraordinarily complicated organization, with chapters in more than two dozen cities by the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, party members were feeding poor children free breakfasts from Oakland to Milwaukee, Los Angeles to New Haven. They revived the national struggle against police brutality, largely dormant since the 1940s. The Party's Ten Point Platform went around the world as a model for the liberation of oppressed people. Their local social programs helped to educate African Americans about sickle cell anemia, and their liberation schools provided an early model of black studies. All of these things were creative, pioneering, audacious.

At the same time, many of the party's leaders, perhaps especially but not solely Newton, emerged from a world of street violence they could neither abandon nor contain, especially under the strain of constant police and FBI persecution. Any sincere historical inquiry into the life and legacy of the party must not blanche in the face of this reality. The Party's infamous shoot-out with Ron Karenga's cultural nationalist group US on the UCLA campus in 1969 was destructive and ill-timed. Newton's various illegal activities and his well-known megalomania weakened the party. And the party's internal culture of male supremacy was at times deplorable. However, to foreclose any discussion of the party's contribution to African Americans, to the nation, and to the long history of civil rights and black liberation politics solely because of these failings is willfully to don historical blinders.

The Panthers inspired a generation of black intellectuals and organizers, men and woman who were among the most talented activists of their day. They also inspired, and often drew into their milieu, young toughs whose revolutionary diction was weaker than their street instinct. Both were there, side by side. But it is as intellectually dishonest to dismiss the Panthers because of some shady characters as it is to dismiss the labor movement because of Jimmy Hoffa. If we can't take on the complexity of our past, we are ill-prepared to learn from it and even less equipped to make critical judgments in the future.

Let's be honest. One of the reasons that most white Americans, and not a few black ones, are eager to minimize the importance of the Panthers is race. White Americans sought redemption by participating in the civil rights movement. When organizations emerged that did not offer such redemption, whites by and large lost interest and abandoned the movement. The Panthers' mixture of black liberation, anti-colonial solidarity, and anti-capitalist rhetoric was too provocative an alchemy to attract the mainstream. Many white Americans today cringe at images of Panther radical chic, but many African Americans embrace the party's example of dignity, self-possession, discipline, and intellectual rigor.

If we sidestep the difficult task of assessing a group like the Panthers in their full context, we reproduce the starkest polarizations of the 1960s and 1970s. That is not historical inquiry. It is raw cultural politics. Today, those who would destroy the Panther legacy without taking the party seriously - and, consequently, not taking the Civil Rights movement itself seriously - play on the same racist stereotypes that have been used for decades to discredit black activism and organizing.

There is an even deeper reason to take the Panthers seriously. They spoke the truth about the state of the nation's cities in the 1970s. Between 1972 and 1975, the party ran a series of campaigns for public office in Oakland. In those campaigns, Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown stumped as grassroots politicians on an agenda of urban reform. They pointed to the glaring contradictions at the heart of the urban crisis: rich suburban communities, poor urban ones; good suburban schools, struggling urban ones; mounting black poverty in an era of affluence. Indeed, much of their critique of the Bay Area foreshadowed the statewide debate over Proposition 13 in 1978. The Party made itself relevant to the most important socio-political conversations of the day in California.

To take the Black Panther Party seriously is to take history seriously and ultimately to take ourselves and the process of unbiased historical research seriously. We need not reflexively romanticize or condemn the Panthers in order to understand them. The party is rightly taken to task for its excessive machismo and its inability to shed association with criminal activity. Those are traits any progressive organization would strive to move beyond. But the party also modeled a profound humanism and racial pride and an optimistic, and deeply American, example of democratic community organizing