What was the Black Panther Party?
Sunday January 26, 2003The Black Panther Party was a black militant political group founded in 1966 just a year after Malcolm X was assassinated, riots exploded in Watts, a Los Angeles neighborhood, and protests against U.S. policy in Vietnam spread across college campuses.
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale drafted the party's 10-point program in Oakland, Calif. It called for employment, decent housing and education, free health care, an end to police brutality and the ``power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed communities.''
It also called for freeing black prisoners and demanded the ``overdue debt of 42 acres and two mules,'' promised as restitution for slave labor.
The Panthers touted themselves as Marxist revolutionaries who recognized that ``the only response to the violence of the ruling class is the revolutionary violence of the people,'' according to the Black Panther newspaper. They said they stood in solidarity with Vietnamese against America, ``the world's chief imperialist.''
In 1967, Seale and a group of Panthers protested a gun control bill by parading across the California state Capitol lawn with guns in plain view, according to Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson.
The FBI's counterintelligence program disrupted the Panthers, and worsened conflicts between the party and other black nationalist groups, Carson writes in a foreword to ``The Black Panthers Speak.''
By the late 1960s, the Panthers had more than 5,000 members. They established alliances with Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, whites and Chinese-Americans.
The Panthers also ran ``survival programs'' designed to meet the everyday needs of black communities, Carson says. They included a free breakfast program for children, free medical clinics, groceries and alternative schools.
(