What are the New Black Panthers up to, and what is their next move? The New Black Panthers are in the news these days, most recently for holding a protest.The author describes how he used a study of the Black Panther’s Ten Point Program to help students assess issues in their. The #BlackLivesMatter movement clearly shows that, despite the civil rights struggles of the past, inequality and racism are still thriving in America. Bert Schneider craved rebel cachet, Huey Newton his cash. The very Hollywood tale of the producer and Black Panther. SDCC 2016: Black Panther: World of Wakanda. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay dive deep into the land T'Challa rules! Authors Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., analyze key political questions, such as why so many young black people across the country risked their lives for the revolution, why the Party grew most rapidly during the height of repression, and why allies abandoned the Party at its peak of influence. Learn about why it has been difficult to construct a clear history of the evolution of the Black Panther Party in this excerpt from the introduction.. Huey Newton and two comrades casually walked from the luxury suite down to the lobby and slipped out of the Hong Kong Hilton. Their official escort took them straight across the border, and after a short flight, they exited the plane in Beijing, where they were greeted by cheering throngs. It was late September 1. U. S. The United States was proposing a visit to China by President Nixon himself and looking toward normalization of diplomatic relations. The Chinese leaders held varied views of these prospects and had not yet revealed whether they would accept a visit from Nixon. But the Chinese government had been in frequent communication with the Black Panther Party, had hosted a Panther delegation a year earlier, and had personally invited Huey Newton, the Party. With Nixon attempting to arrange a visit, Newton decided to accept the invitation and beat Nixon to China. When Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, greeted Newton in Beijing, Newton took Zhou. Newton presented a formal petition requesting that China . Nixon for the freedom of the oppressed peoples of the world. On National Day, the October 1 anniversary of the founding of the People. Tens of thousands of Chinese gathered in Tiananmen Square, waving red flags and applauding the Panthers. Revolutionary theater groups, folk dancers, acrobats, and the revolutionary ballet performed. Huge red banners declared, . A New York Times editorial encouraged Nixon . Unlike civil rights activists who advocated for full citizenship rights within the United States, their Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U. S. The Panthers saw black communities in the United States as a colony and the police as an occupying army. In a foundational 1. Newton wrote, . There is a great similarity between the occupying army in Southeast Asia and the occupation of our communities by the racist police. But that year, everything changed. By December, the Party had opened offices in twenty cities, from Los Angeles to New York. In the face of numerous armed conflicts with police and virulent direct repression by the state, young black people embraced the revolutionary vision of the Party, and by 1. Party had opened offices in sixty- eight cities from Winston- Salem to Omaha and Seattle. The Black Panther Party had become the center of a revolutionary movement in the United States. Readers today may have difficulty imagining a revolution in the United States. But in the late 1. Black Panther Party and dedicated their lives to revolutionary struggle. Many more approved of their efforts. A joint report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Committee, and National Security Agency expressed grave concern about wide support for the Party among young blacks, noting that . Edgar Hoover famously declared, . The North Vietnamese . Cuba offered political asylum to Black Panthers and began developing a military training ground for them. In the early 1. 97. Party rapidly declined. By mid- 1. 97. 2, it was basically a local Oakland community organization once again. An award- winning elementary school and a brief local renaissance in the mid- 1. The Black Panther Party (for self Defense) was formed in October of 1966, in Oakland, California. BLACK PANTHER PARTY 1966-1982 The Black Panther party was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. From its beginnings as a local. Free black panther party papers, essays, and research papers. For most of my life, I didn't know much about the Black Panther Party. As a white kid born the same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. Party suffered a long and painful demise, formally closing its last office in 1. Not since the Civil War almost a hundred and fifty years ago have so many people taken up arms in revolutionary struggle in the United States. Of course, the number of people who took up arms for the Union and Confederate causes and the number of people killed in the Civil War are orders of magnitude larger than the numbers who have engaged in any armed political struggle in the United States since. Some political organizations that embraced revolutionary ideologies yet eschewed armed confrontation with the state may have garnered larger followings than the Black Panther Party did. But in the general absence of armed revolution in the United States since 1. Black Panthers . Why, after a few years of explosive growth, did the Party so quickly unravel? And why has no similar movement developed since? Most obvious explanations do not stand up to the evidence. Some believe the Party was a creation of the media. But most of the media attention came after the Party. Some assert that the Party. But many other black political organizations, some with similar ideologies, sought to mobilize people at the same time, and none succeeded like the Panthers. Others contend that this or that Panther leader was an unrivaled organizer and that by the force of his or her efforts, the Party was able to recruit its vast following. But most of the new recruits to the Black Panthers came to the Party asking to join, not the other way around. One common view is that the Party collapsed because it could not withstand the government. Most writers have looked at a small slice of the Party. Party sympathizers are as guilty of such reduction as its detractors are. Commentators reduce the Party to its community service programs or to armed confrontation with the police. They claim the Panthers espoused narrowly Marxist or black nationalist ideology. They maintain that Huey Newton was a genius or that he was overly philosophical, or that he was a criminal. To some people, the Party was a locus of cutting- edge debate on gender politics, and they applaud its embrace of women. But no one has made sense of the relationship among the parts, situated the varying practices of the Party in time and place, and adequately traced the evolution of the Party. As Pulitzer Prize- winning historian David Garrow recently pointed out in an extensive review of historical works on the Panthers, no one has yet offered a serious analysis of how the political practices of the Black Panther Party changed during its history or why people were drawn to participate at each juncture of its evolution. Far too much of what has been written about the . It takes time and perspective and endless sifting through often- contradictory evidence to test competing explanations and weigh the importance of divergent forces. But the lack of an overarching history of the Panthers and their politics, despite the abundance of writing on various aspects of the Party, is unusual. We suspect that the long absence of an adequate history is due, in part, to the character of state repression of the Party. Aimed specifically at vilifying the Black Panther Party, state repression powerfully shaped public understandings and blurred the outlines of the history. The federal government and local police forces across the nation responded to the Panthers with an unparalleled campaign of repression and vilification. They fed defamatory stories to the press. They wiretapped Panther offices around the country. They hired dozens of informants to infiltrate Panther chapters. Often, they put aside all pretense and simply raided Panther establishments, guns blazing. In one case, in Chicago in December 1. Edgar Hoover emphasized time and again, in different ways, that . FBI operatives forged documents and paid provocateurs to promote violent conflicts between Black Panther leaders . And COINTELPRO sought to lead the Party into unsupportable action, . In an influential article in 1. Kate Coleman and Paul Avery made a series of allegations about personal misdeeds and criminal actions by Panthers in the 1. Party had lost influence as a national and international political organization: . There appears to be no political explanation for it; the Party is no longer under siege by the police, and this is not self- defense. It seems to be nothing but senseless criminality, directed in most cases at other blacks. The major newspapers celebrated the book as a respectable history of the Party and its politics. The New York Times called the book . While many of the criminal allegations that Horowitz and his colleagues made about Huey Newton and other Panther leaders were thinly supported and almost none were verified in court, these treatments also omit and obscure the thousands of people who dedicated their lives to the Panther revolution, their reasons for doing so, and the political dynamics of their participation, their actions, and the consequences. Hoover. Today, the popular misconception persists that the Black Panther Party was separatist, or antiwhite. Many current internet postings mischaracterize the Party in this way. In fact, the Party was deeply antiracist and strongly committed to interracial coalitions. Even some newspapers got the basic story wrong, such as the Providence Journal- Bulletin, whose editorial board characterized the Party as an . Michelle Wallace first popularized this argument in her influential 1. Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman, in which she denigrates the role of Angela Davis and other revolutionary black women as . As June Jordan commented in a 1. Black Macho is . Stewarding a predominantly male organization in the beginning, some Black Panthers indeed asserted an aggressive black masculinity. But by misrepresenting this black masculinism as the totality of the Party. They erased the women who soon constituted a majority of the Panther membership and devalued the considerable struggles Panther women and men undertook to advance gender and sexual liberation within and through the Party, often progressing well in advance of the wider society.
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