The Black Panther Party for Self Defense Was Founded Fifty Years Ago Today

[Maximus Rex]

Happy Anniversary to the Panthers

“We didn’t get covered by any of the media when we were doing these types of things, really — only when some of us would get arrested,” Mr. Wahad said in an interview.

Beginning in late 1968, fatigued by constant conflict and what they saw as sensational coverage, the Panthers refocused their efforts away from policing the police and toward providing health care and other services to the urban poor. They began in California’s Bay Area with a breakfast program for school children, and eventually developed initiatives around education and housing advocacy.

The Times did eventually report on some of these programs, but often with a tone of skepticism. An article on Dec. 7, 1968, mentioned the party’s free breakfast program, but only to suggest that it was part of a ploy to indoctrinate African-Americans. The article, “Black Panthers Growing, but Their Troubles Rise,” suggested that as the party grew, it was intimidating residents and struggling to formulate a coherent direction. When it did mention the breakfast program, the article called it merely “a means of improving its image.”

The Times painted a slightly different picture the following June, when it ran a full feature on the breakfast program, nearly nine months after the party’s official newspaper, The Black Panther, announced the initiative.

But mostly, the programs were treated as publicity stunts, or worse. The fact that The Times did respond, to some degree, to the organization’s change of focus was largely because of a growing cadre of African-American reporters. In July 1969, Earl Caldwell, who is black, wrote an article, “Panthers’ Meeting Shifts Aims From Racial Confrontation to Class Struggle,” and followed it with a piece for the Week in Review section, “Panthers: They Are Not the Same Organization.”

“One thing The Times figured out was that the Panthers were selling newspapers,” Professor Rhodes said. “The coverage of the Panthers was attracting a younger audience, maybe more of a black audience.”“Black reporters were able to do much better reporting because they had greater credibility and greater access,” she said.

But that was becoming a moot point: By 1969, the party had largely been torn asunder, its East and West Coast factions rived by distrust, largely because of the F.B.I. And in the court of public opinion, the Panthers had already lost.

A Harris Survey showed that in April 1970, just 10 percent of Americans thought that “a fairly sizable number of Black Panthers have been shot and killed by law enforcement officers” because law enforcement officers were trying to wipe out the Panthers — exactly what Hoover privately said his mission was. Three-quarters of the country said that police shootings of Panthers were due to violence started by the Panthers themselves. Just 16 percent perceived the Panthers as doing good work for disadvantaged youth.

ooking at contemporary news coverage, Professor Rhodes said progress has been made when it comes to covering race and activism. “I see organizations like The Times making a much more sustained effort at deeper coverage,” she said. But articles still tend to emphasize the conflict between the police and protesters, she said, without addressing the core principles guiding social movements such as Black Lives Matter: greater investment in public education, community control of law enforcement and economic justice.

“There’s a lot of examples to be learned from the example of the Black Panthers, in terms of taking a look at not just rhetoric and styles of protest, but also looking for some understanding of what protest means and what it intends,” she said.

 

[Maximus Rex]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party

The sweeping migration of black families out of the South during World War II transformed Oakland and cities throughout the West and the North.[20] A new generation of young blacks growing up in these cities faced new conditions, new forms of poverty and racism unfamiliar to their parents, and sought to develop new forms of politics to address them.[21] Black Panther Party membership "consisted of recent migrants whose families traveled north and west to escape the southern racial regime, only to be confronted with new forms of segregation and repression".[22] In the early 1960s, the insurgent Civil Rights Movement had dismantled the Jim Crow system of racial caste subordination using the tactics of non-violent civil disobedience, and demanding full citizenship rights for black people.[23] But not much changed in the cities of the North and West. As the wartime jobs which drew much of the black migration "fled to the suburbs along with white residents", the black population was concentrated in poor "urban ghettos" with high unemployment, and substandard housing, mostly excluded from political representation, top universities, and the middle class.[24] Police departments were almost all white.[25] In 1966, only 16 of Oakland's 661 police officers were African American.[26]

Insurgent civil rights practices proved incapable of redressing these conditions, and the organizations that had "led much of the nonviolent civil disobedience" such as SNCC and CORE went into decline.[23] By 1966 a "Black Power ferment" emerged, consisting largely of young urban blacks, posing a question the Civil Rights Movement could not answer: "how would black people in America win not only formal citizenship rights, but actual economic and political power?"[25] Young black people in Oakland and other cities developed a rich ferment of study groups and political organizations, and it is out of this ferment that the Black Panther Party emerged.[27]

In late October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense). In formulating a new politics, they drew on their experiences working with a variety of Black Power organizations.[28] Newton and Seale first met in 1962 when they were both students at Merritt College.[29] They joined Donald Warden’s Afro-American Association, where they read widely, debated, and organized in an emergent black nationalist tradition inspired by Malcolm X and others.[30] Eventually dissatisfied with Warden’s accommodationism, they developed a revolutionary anti-imperialist perspective working with more active and militant groups like the Soul Students Advisory Council and the Revolutionary Action Movement.[31][32] While bringing in a paycheck, jobs running youth service programs at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center allowed them to develop a revolutionary nationalist approach to community service, later a key element in the Black Panther Party’s "community survival programs."[33]

Dissatisfied with the failure of these organizations to directly challenge police brutality and appeal to the "brothers on the block", Huey and Bobby sought to take matters into their own hands. After the police killed Matthew Johnson, an unarmed young black man in San Francisco, Newton observed the violent rebellion that followed. He had an epiphany that would distinguish the Black Panther Party from the multitude of organizations seeking to build Black Power. Newton saw the explosive rebellious anger of the ghetto as a force, and believed that if he could stand up to the police, he could organize that force into political power. Inspired by Robert F. Williams' armed resistance to the KKK (and Williams' book Negroes with Guns),[34] Newton studied California gun law until he knew it better than many police officers. Like the Community Alert Patrol in Los Angeles after the Watts Rebellion, he decided to organize patrols to follow the police around to monitor for incidents of brutality. But with a crucial difference: his patrols would carry loaded guns.[35] Huey and Bobby raised enough money to buy two shotguns by buying bulk quantities of the recently publicized Little Red Book and reselling them to leftist radicals and liberal intellectuals on the Berkeley campus at three times the price. According to Bobby Seale, they would "sell the books, make the money, buy the guns, and go on the streets with the guns. We'll protect a mother, protect a brother, and protect the community from the racist cops."[36]

On October 29, 1966, Stokely Carmichael – a leader of SNCC – championed the call for "Black Power" and came to Berkeley to keynote a Black Power conference. At the time, he was promoting the armed organizing efforts of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in Alabama and their use of the Black Panther symbol. Newton and Seale decided to adopt the Black Panther logo and form their own organization called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.[37] Newton and Seale decided on a uniform of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, black berets.[38] Sixteen-year-old Bobby Hutton was their first recruit.[39]

 

[Maximus Rex]

Oakland patrols of police
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party

The initial tactic of the party utilized contemporary open-carry gun laws to protect Party members when policing the police. This act was done in order to record incidents of police brutality by distantly following police cars around neighborhoods. When confronted by a police officer, Party members cited laws proving they have done nothing wrong and threatened to take to court any officer that violated their constitutional rights. Between the end of 1966 to the start of 1967, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense's armed police patrols in Oakland black communities attracted a small handful of members. Numbers grew slightly starting in February 1967, when the party provided an armed escort at the San Francisco airport for Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow and keynote speaker for a conference held in his honor.

From the beginning, the Black Panther Party's focus on militancy came with a reputation for violence. The Panthers employed a California law that permitted carrying a loaded rifle or shotgun as long as it was publicly displayed and pointed at no one.[38] Carrying weapons openly and making threats against police officers, for example, chants like "The Revolution has come, it's time to pick up the gun. Off the pigs!", helped create the Panthers' reputation as a violent organization.

Rallies in Richmond, California

The black community of Richmond, California, wanted protection against police brutality. With only three main streets for entering and exiting the neighborhood, it was easy for police to control, contain, and suppress the majority African-American community. On April 1, 1967, a black, unarmed twenty-two-year-old construction worker named Denzil Dowell was shot dead by police in North Richmond. Dowell's family contacted the Black Panther Party for assistance after county officials refused to investigate the case. The Party held rallies in North Richmond that educated the community on armed self-defense and the Denzil Dowell incident.[51] Police seldom interfered at these rallies because every Panther was armed and no laws were broken. The Party's ideals resonated with several community members, who then brought their own guns to the next rallies.

Protest at the Statehouse

Awareness of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense grew rapidly after their May 2, 1967, protest at the California State Assembly. On May 2, 1967, the California State Assembly Committee on Criminal Procedure was scheduled to convene to discuss what was known as the "Mulford Act", which would make the public carrying of loaded firearms illegal. Eldridge Cleaver and Newton put together a plan to send a group of 26 armed Panthers led by Seale from Oakland to Sacramento to protest the bill. The group entered the assembly carrying their weapons, an incident which was widely publicized, and which prompted police to arrest Seale and five others. The group pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of disrupting a legislative session.

 

[Maximus Rex]

Original six members of the Black Panther Party (1966) Top left to right: Elbert "Big Man" Howard, Huey P. Newton (Defense Minister), Sherwin Forte, Bobby Seale (Chairman) Bottom: Reggie Forte and Little Bobby Hutton (Treasurer).

Happy Anniversary to perhaps the most unapologetically black organization this country has ever seen. The sort of resolve, courage, bravery, and heroism that these patriotic lovers of liberty and freedom displayed in face of racism and white supremacy is desperately need in these days and times.

 

[Copper]

How long have they been terrorizing white neighborhoods though...