Black Panther Party

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The Black Panther Party (originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was a revolutionary, Black nationalist organization in the United States founded by Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Richard Aoki. Formed in October 1966, the party grew to national prominence in the United States and is an iconic representative of the counterculture revolutions of the 1960s. The group was founded on the principles of its Ten-Point Program, which called for greater autonomy of black Americans and correction of the injustices of racism.

The group's political goals are often overshadowed by their confrontational and uncompromising views and approach toward agents of law enforcement, who the Black Panthers saw as the linchpin of racism that could only be overcome by a willingness to take up armed self-defense.

The Black Panther Party fell apart in the early 1970s under the weight of both internal feuding and the external pressures of federal, state, and local law enforcement's campaign to undermine the organization with black propaganda, infiltration by agents provocateur and outright assassination.

Contents

[edit] Formation and influences

The core of the organization at its inception in 1966 were close friends Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Richard Aoki in the city of Oakland, California. The three had witnessed a radical ferment in the United States and the Bay Area specifically, which led them to take part in protests against the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights Movement.

Similar to most of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, these three friends grew dissatisfied by the doctrine of nonviolence as espoused by mainstream civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bayard Rustin. The latter's views of integration — achieving equal rights under the present social system rather than specifically aiming to move beyond that system — struck these more militant youth as reformist.

Instead they looked to model themselves along the lines of black nationalism preached by Malcolm X and to infuse it with the further discipline and political education espoused in radical Marxism and Maoism. The group was also influenced by civil rights leaders that broke from the doctrine of nonviolence, such as the Deacons for Defense and Justice, and the exiled former NAACP chapter president Robert F. Williams's book, Negroes with Guns.

Contemporaneous to this rise in America's domestic radicalism was a rising tide of Marxist-Leninist Third World national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, giving rise to the New Left and the New Communist Movement. Seale, Newton, and Aoki held a great interest in the philosophies of various Third World revolutionaries, including Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Steve Biko.

After doing a stint in prison for assault, Huey Newton returned to the campus of Oakland City College where he had matriculated. He became dissatisfied with the inertia of the "Afro-American Association," the student group to which he and Seale had belonged. Seale and Newton discussed the need for real militancy in the face of the "oppressive social system of capitalism." The two came to an agreement over the specifics, and the 10 Point Program and Platform was born.

[edit] Origin of the name

A number of explanations for the origin of the name "Black Panthers" have been suggested. The most authoritative and likely version is that it came through Stokely Carmichael, then of SNCC and unaware of Newton and Seale's group. At the time of the Black Panther Party's formation in Oakland, Carmichael had been organizing a voter registration drive in the African American community of Lowndes County, Alabama. Following the success of the Mississippi Freedom Party, the organizers worked to create the Lowndes County Freedom Organization as an independent party.

Alabama law required the party to have a visual emblem for illiterate voters. The party chose a black panther, mascot of Clark College in Atlanta. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization became the Black Panther party, and soon there were groups named "Black Panthers" sprouting up around the nation. Many were unconnected with the SNCC, and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was not officially connected to any of the other parties or to SNCC.

According to David Hilliard, Bobby Seale learned of the Lowndes County Black Panther Party, in October 1966 through a mailing from a Mississippi black freedom group. After showing it to Newton, the two agreed that the symbol was right for their own as-yet-unnamed group.

[edit] Ten-Point Program and Platform

Party's main organizational document was its Ten-Point Program and Platform. This was a list of the Party's demands for both the survival and advancement of blacks in the United States, provided alongside an explanatory text. The distribution and popularization of the Ten Point Program and Platform in black population centers was considered by the Party to be a major component of its propaganda, education and recruitment efforts.

The first Black Panther Ten-Point Program and Platform is dated to October 1966. It subsequently underwent revision, with a second version adopted in March 1972. The Ten-Point Program and Platform became an inspiration to contemporary leftist groups. The White Panther Party, Young Lords Party, I Wor Kuen, and the Brown Berets each released their own programs in much the same style and tone.

[edit] Theory

With the death of Malcolm X in 1965, the Black Panther Party was founded with an aim toward furthering the revolutionary movement for black liberation on a mass basis. The party rejected the integrationist stance of King, and made it clear from the beginning that it sought no compromise with the (white) power structure.

The Black Panthers focused their rhetoric on revolutionary class struggle, taking many pages from Maoism. The party did turn to the works of Marx, Lenin, and Mao to inform the manner in which it should organize, as a revolutionary cadre organization. In consciously working toward such a revolution, they considered themselves the vanguard party, "committed to organizing support for a socialist revolution." Template:Ref label

However, the party did not fully agree with Karl Marx's analysis of the lumpenproletariat. Marx felt that this class lacked the political consciousness required to lead a revolution. Newton, on the other hand, was inspired by his reading of post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon and his belief that the lumpen was of utmost importance, saying about these "brothers off the block" that, "If you didn't relate to these cats, the power structure would organize these cats against you."

[edit] Nationalism, internationalism and "intercommunalism"

As it was chiefly a party of the black masses, the leadership of the Black Panthers were characterized by internal contradictions on the type and kind of black nationalism it wished to embrace.

In his book Seize the Time Bobby Seale spoke directly about the evolution of the Panthers' politics, saying "At first we were Black Nationalists," then going on to point out how, that upon realizing that more than blacks were oppressed in the United States, they became internationalist. Newton, Seale, and their supporters within the party eventually came to reject cultural nationalists as "black racists" , and dubbed those nationalists' brand of cultural nationalism as narrow and bourgeois "pork-chop nationalism". Alluding to the black nationalist United Slaves and Maulana Karenga, Black Panther Fred Hampton said, "[P]olitical power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun." ("Political power flows from the barrel of a gun" is an early quote by Mao Tse-Tung.)

Newton and Seale attempted to work in coalition with organizations representing oppressed communities in the United States (many of which took inspiration from the Black Panthers), as well as with white radical groups with whom they felt they had common interests. These included the Puerto Rican Young Lords of New York and the white Appalachian Young Patriots with whom the Panthers formed the first Rainbow Coalition in 1969. Other groups with whom the Panthers worked with included the predominantly white youth movements Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Youth International Party (Yippies); the Chicano Brown Berets; the pacifist California Peace and Freedom Party; and the post-Stonewall riot formed group, the Gay Liberation Front.

In Huey P. Newton's speech at Boston College 1970, he summed up this approach as "intercommunalism." That is to say that the Party recognized that all over the world there were "oppressed communities", many of whom shared a common oppressor. That these communities should be united across national boundaries to overthrow that common oppressor.

However, Newton's approach toward combating all forms of oppression rather than simply anti-black oppression caused friction to form between him and Panthers such as Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver. Indicative of this was Carmichael's embrace of the slogan of "Black Power" , in contrast to Newton and Seale's embrace of the slogan 'Power to the People' which they believed was of a more internationalist and Marxist character.

Though written before he joined the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver's book Soul on Ice often promoted a sexist and homophobic perspective that people erroneously associated with the Panthers. In his book, Cleaver indicates that, at one point in his life, he viewed the rape of white women as "an insurrectionary act." He also attacked black author James Baldwin for his well-known homosexuality and relationships with white men. While a member of the Panthers, however, Cleaver explicitly attacked sexism declaring that the women "have a duty and the right to do whatever they want to do in order to see to it that they are not relegated to an inferior position." Insisting that liberation must be broad, he explained that, "the women are our half. They're not our weaker half; they're not our stronger half. They are our other half."

While in exile in Algeria, Cleaver eventually demanded less emphasis on Panther community programs and more emphasis on guerrilla activity. These differences of opinion took their toll on Newton's control of the party, especially while he served a sentence in prison, and eventually these cracks grew into a full-blown split between a main, Western U.S.-based faction supporting Newton, and a breakaway, Eastern U.S.-based faction that supported Cleaver. (See Decay and disintegration below)

[edit] Action

[edit] Self-defense

One of the central aims of the BPP was to stop abuse perpetrated by local police departments. When the party was founded in 1966, only 16 of the 661 Oakland Police Department officers assigned to black neighborhoods were African American. This situation was not unique to Oakland, California. Several southern cities such as Birmingham, Alabama had police forces that openly worked with the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan. Throughout the 1960s, race riots broke out in impoverished African American communities subject to policing by disproportionately white police departments.

The BPP sought to oppose police brutality through neighborhood patrols (an approach since adopted by groups such as Copwatch). Police officers were frequently followed by armed Black Panthers who sought at times to aid African American victims of police brutality and perceived racial prejudice.

Both Panthers and police often died as a result of violent confrontations. By 1970, 34 Panthers had died as a result of police raids, shoot-outs and internal conflict.

Between 1966-1972 when the party was most active, several departments hired significantly more African American police officers. Some of these black officers played prominent roles in shutting down the Panther's activities. In Chicago in 1969 for example, Panthers Mark Clark and Fred Hampton were both killed in a police raid by Sergeant James Davis, an African American police officer in the Chicago Police Department. In cities such as New York City, black police were used to infiltrate Panther meetings. By 1972, almost every major police department was fully integrated.

[edit] Survival programs

Inspired by Mao Tse-Tung'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 a San Francisco 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 abuse rehabilitation, and testing for sickle-cell disease, which was performed on more than 500,000 African-Americans before it was recognized by medical establishments as one that affected the black community almost exclusively. Template:Citation needed

[edit] Political activities

The Party briefly merged with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, headed by the fiery Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Toure).

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.

In 1968 BPP Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver ran for Presidential office on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket with child psychologist Dr. Benjamin Spock as his [unning mate.

[edit] COINTELPRO and conflict with law enforcement

In August 1967, the FBI instructed COINTELPRO to "neutralize" what the FBI called "Black Nationalist Hate Groups" and other dissident groups. By 1969, the Black Panthers were the primary target of COINTELPRO. The goals of the program were to prevent the unification of militant Black Nationalist groups and to weaken the power of their leaders in order to reduce that probability, as well as discredit the groups to reduce their support and growth. The initial targets included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Nation of Islam. Leaders who were targeted included Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Maxwell Stanford and Elijah Muhammad.

In September of 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Black Panthers as "The greatest threat to the internal security of the country," and within the year the Black Panther Party had become the primary focus of COINTELPRO and the target of 233 out of a total of 295 authorized "Black Nationalist" COINTELPRO actions.

Although COINTELPRO was commissioned to prevent violence, many of the tactics of the FBI organization were intended to foster violence. The most telling example was the FBI's efforts to "Intensify the degree of animosity" between the Black Panthers and the Chicago gang, the Blackstone Rangers. These included sending an anonymous letter to the Ranger’s gang leader claiming that the Panthers were threatening his life, a letter with the stated intent to induce "reprisals" against Panther leadership. In Southern California similar actions were taken to exacerbate what was characterized as a "gang war" between the Black Panther Party and an organization called the United Slaves. Violent conflict between these two groups, including shootings and beatings, led to the deaths of at least four Black Panther Party members. FBI agents claimed credit for instigating some of the violence between the two groups.

It should be noted that James Adams, Deputy Associate Director of the FBI's Intelligence Division, claimed that COINTELPRO operations did not intend to foster violence nor to harm individual members of the organizations targeted. However the final report of Senate “Church Committee” which investigated the actions of COINTELPRO in 1975 and 1976 did not agree with Adams, and purported to demonstrate that the FBI “itself engaged in lawless tactics and responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting violence and unrest.”

On January 17, 1969, Los Angeles Panther Captain Bunchy Carter and Deputy Minister John Huggins were killed in Campbell Hall on the UCLA campus, in a gun battle with members of United Slaves, a rival black nationalist group, stemming from a dispute over who would control UCLA's black studies program. Another shootout between the two groups on March 17 led to further injuries. It was alleged that the FBI had made contacts with US in an alliance against the Panthers. [1]

One of the most notorious of such actions involved a Chicago Police raid of the home of talented and charismatic Panther organizer Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969. The raid had been orchestrated by the police in conjunction with the FBI, and the FBI was complicit in many of the actions involved. The people inside the home had been drugged by an FBI informant, William O'Neal, and were all asleep at the time of the raid. Hampton was shot and killed, as was the guard, Mark Clark. The others in the home were then dragged into the street and beaten and subsequently charged with assault. These charges were later dropped.

In May 1969, Alex Rackley, a twenty-four year old member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther party, was tortured and murdered because party members suspected him of being a police informant. A number of party members had taken part, and three party officers eventually admitted guilt. Party supporters alleged that George Sams, the man who identified Rackley as an informer and subsequently ordered his execution, was an agent provocateur in the employment of the FBI.

[edit] Political and legal support

Support for the Panthers became widespread and was characterized by the now famous raised fist salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics by two medalists during the playing of the American national anthem.

The Black Panthers attracted a wide variety of left-wing revolutionaries and political activists. Among others, the party was supported by former Ramparts Magazine editor, David Horowitz, before he renounced socialism and gradually drifted to the political right. Decades later, upon the death of Huey Newton (who died in a shoot-out with rival gangsters), he would remark, "He (Newton) killed a lot of people." According to Horowitz, the Black Panthers once murdered a young, white female activist named Betty van Patten, whom he had introduced to the Party and who was representing it. After raping her, Horowitz claims, the members beat the woman to death with baseball bats.

[edit] Decay and disintegration

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 Panther's political momentum was bogged down in the criminal justice system.

A significant split in the BPP occurred over disagreements within the Panther leadership about 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 while others, such as Eldridge Cleaver, embraced a more confrontational strategy. A schism was made inevitable when Cleaver publicly criticized the Party as adopting a "reformist" rather than "revolutionary" agenda and called for Hilliard's removal. Cleaver was expelled from the Central Committee but went on to lead a splinter group, the Black Liberation Army, which had previously existed as an underground paramilitary wing of the Party.

The Party eventually fell apart due to rising legal costs and internal disputes exacerbated by COINTELPRO.

In 1989, a group calling themselves the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) was formed in Dallas, TX. Ten years later, the NBPP became home to many former Nation of Islam members when the chairmanship was taken by Khalid Abdul Muhammad. Members of the original Black Panther Party have been publicly and adamantly critical of the 'new' party. For example, the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation insists that there "is no new Black Panther Party". A new National Alliance of Black Panthers was formed on July 31, 2004, inspired by the grassroots activism of the original organization, but not otherwise related. Its chairwoman is Shazza Nzingha.

[edit] Famous members

See List of former members of the Black Panther Party.

[edit] See also

[edit] Groups and trends

Contemporary left groups and trends

Descendant groups and ideological trends

[edit] Events

[edit] Notes

  1. Template:Note The Angela Y. Davis Reader on page 11 says "police, assisted by federal agents, had killed or assassinated over twenty black revolutionaries in the Black Panther Party." She cites on page 23 (citation # 26) Joanne Grant, Ward Churchill and Jim Van der Wall (see below), and Clayborne Carson. (Davis, Angela Yves. The Angela Y. Davis Reader Blackwell Publishers (1998))
  2. Template:NoteTemplate:Note label Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Black Panthers and their Legacy. edited by Kathleen Cleaver, George N Katsiaficas. Routledge UK (2001) page 29
  3. Template:Note Bobby Seale, Seize the Time. Black Classic Press; Reprint edition (September, 1997) p. 23, 256, 383.
  4. Template:Note Frank E. Smith, The Sixties and Seventies from Berkeley to Woodstock (1998) [2]
  5. Template:Note Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, p. 33 (1999) [3]
  6. Template:Note The Black Panthers by Jessica McElrath, published as a part of afroamhistory.about.com, accessed on December 17, 2005.
  7. Template:Note from an interview with Kathleen Cleaver on May 7, 2002 published by the PBS program P.O.V. and being published in Introduction to Black Panther 1968: Photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, (Greybull Press). [4]
  8. Template:Note The Senate "Church Committee" of 1975 and 1976 investigated COINTELPRO, and they discussed the FBI's actions with regards to the BPP quite a bit. COINTELPRO actions against the Black Panther Party are discussed in "Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans" of that report from pages 185-223 and can be found here. The information in this section is largely taken from the introduction of the section of that report called "The FBI's Covert Action Program to Destroy The Black Panther Party" (pages 186-189).
  9. Template:Note The FBI's involvement is mentioned in the afore discussed Church Committee Report on page 223. A fully description of the nights events can be found in Rod Bush, We Are Not What We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century. New York University Press (March, 2000) p. 216
  10. Template:Note David Horowitz's claim about van Patten's death is often discussed on blogs, and is mentioned in an American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research book review of Horowitz's Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey called All's Left in the World. Horowitz's credibility as a critic of the left and especially of the Black Panther Party is called into question in Elaine Brown's The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America. Beacon Press (February 15, 2003) pg. 250-251.
  11. Template:Note Edward Jay Epstein, The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide?. New Yorker (February 13, 1971) [5]
  12. Template:Note Ward Churchill and Jim Van der Wall, The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. South End Press; 2nd edition (July 1, 2002)
  13. Template:Note Marxist Internet Archive: The Black Panther Party. [6]

[edit] References

  • Brown, Elaine, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story, Anchor Books 1993
  • Lewis, John. (1998). Walking with the Wind. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0684810654, pg 353.
  • Dooley, Brian. (1998). Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Black America. Pluto Press.
  • Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G., (2004) Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

[edit] External links

[edit] Archives and former members

[edit] Documentary links

[edit] Critical links

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