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the black panther party by Matt Webster (mza@disinfo.net) - November 09, 2000 |
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| Proving that big things can come from small measures, the Black Panther Party came up from the streets of Oakland 34 years ago. Begun as a protest against police brutality and racism, they became a national movement personifying a watershed era in American black activism. Within a few years, the original group of six law students and local people grew into over forty chapters nationwide, acting on the basic principles of bringing food, clothing, shelter, and economic autonomy to the disenfranchised. Advocating a Nationalist, left-radical perspective that prominently extended the boundaries of American political discourse, their militancy reflected the immediacy of the crisis they faced. The eloquence and charisma of the group remain jarring to this day. When television cameras captured Bobby Seale and comrade striding into the California state legislature with rifles on their shoulders, the dictum of "One Nation, Under God" was proven irrelevant. The Black Liberation Movement disintegrated after years of harassment, unjust incarceration, and murder of its leaders in conjunction with the FBI's ruthless COINTELPRO campaign. Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton, a powerful speaker whose best-known achievement was a program providing free breakfasts to ghetto children, was gunned down by police as he slept beside his pregnant companion. Today, the BBC reports that one out of three African-American men aged 20-29 is in prison, on probation, or on parole. In some cities like Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, the numbers run above 50 percent, and the right to vote is suspended along with one's physical freedom. Astoundingly, the United States is home to 25 percent of the world's prison population, and it is commonly observed that we have more black men in prison than in higher education. In the parlance of the Panthers and other revolutionaries, a person who benefits individually from the white power structure's economy is a petit-bourgeois. If you know the score and sit complacent with the comforts handed down by the ruling class, you're a counter-revolutionary petit-bourgeois hypocrite. The author and firebrand Amiri Baraka once remarked that Black History Month is pretty short shrift in the face of four hundred years of violence and oppression. That same night, he also described the arrogance he and his comrades had felt, back in the Sixties, when they thought a revolution was right around the corner. Then he reminded us that social change is a grueling, drawn out struggle. If you have the stomach to make that war your own, you will see results in action, as the Black Panthers proved. mza@disinfo.net |
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Bobby Seale Homepage Angela Davis 1970 Interview Frontline Interview With Angela Davis Frontline Interview With Eldridge Cleaver Fred Hampton Sr. Fred Hampton Jr. Black Panther Coloring Book Black Panther Party Platform & Program The Black Panthers The Huey P. Newton Foundation A Brief History Of The Black Panther Party The Black Panther Newspaper Archive Angela Davis Lisa: "Thanks Tom. Governor Reagan, would you consider Angela Davis dangerous?" Disinformation Dossier On Angela Davis |
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