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Remember the Black Panthers!

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Wilson23

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Americans have a RIGHT to follow the police around WHILE CONSPICUOUSLY ARMED, which nobody in Minneapolis was doing.
 
Anyway, just keep the ICE protestors in perspective: They are not threatening ICE officers with rifles, and they have a RIGHT to DO that.
 
Before the Black Panthers pointed out that 2A applied to all Americans no matter their skin tone the NRA wasn't so militant. The thought that black people had the right to protect themselves from the KKK stirred them into where they are today.
 
briancamdudetenger2018 said:
the infamous group in the 1970s . . .
Click to expand...
The Black Panther Party was a mass revolutionary organization that arose out of the Black oppression, urban poverty, police terror and mass radicalization of the 1960s. It combined militant opposition to racist police violence with community social programs and revolutionary rhetoric.

Where capitalism’s decline and urban restructuring produced acute social misery for Black workers, the result [wonder of wonders] radicalization of black people and youth. It was in those places that the BPP gained ground.

That means that the emergence and politics of the BPP is explained by material conditions under capitalism, not by the abstract moralizing of current regime supporters trying to provide political cover for a criminal regime that has repudiated the US Republic and constitution on a de facto basis.

The BPP produced The Black Panther newspaper, its primary voice. From 1967 [well within my memory] it circulated the Party’s program, publicized community programs and exposed police crimes. Local chapters also produced leaflets, pamphlets and statements. Most notable was the BPP’s foundational political Ten-Point Program. It was widely circulated.

The Ten-Point Program joined immediate demands with broader social aims. It listed concrete democratic and social demands—employment, decent housing, education, an end to police brutality, exemption of Black men from the draft, and fair trials.

The Program ended with the damningly anti-American demand that peasants always make:

‘We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.’ It closed with the pledge for ‘power to determine the destiny of Black and oppressed communities.’

‘Land, Peace and Bread!’ The rallying cry of the Pacific party under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin! What American would want that?!?!

But while denouncing capitalism and imperialism with socialist language, its program was a mixture of militant proletarian demands for jobs and welfare alongside nationalist and self-determination elements.

The BPP used a variety of tactics. One was armed self-defense [another extremely anti-American tendency with no precedent in history] and public patrols to monitor and deter police abuses, asserting the constitutional right to bear arms where local laws allowed.

Community ‘survival programs’ [free breakfast for children, health clinics, legal aid, educational classes] built mass support among the poor, demonstrating a humiliating repudiation of Americanism with these degenerate, alternative social priorities.

Propaganda and agitation [Black Panther newspaper], rallies, and public confrontations with police formed part of their tactics. The BOP also built coalitions with other radicalized groups while insisting on Black leadership and [very wisely] maintaining independence from established liberal institutions.

At times, some layers within the BPP pursued electoral tactics and attempted negotiations with local officials. That created tactical contradictions.

The BPP movement declined as a result of various factors. One was state repression as you mentioned, the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign.

The FBI implemented very American, covert, illegal operations to disrupt, discredit and eliminate Panthers. Its tactics included infiltrations, provocations to frame-ups, and assassination [as the murder of Fred Hampton] plus mass prosecutions. Meanwhile, escalating policing and arrests were used to drain cadres and undermine organizing capacity.

That was the decisive, material force used against the BPP.

Police violence and state repression are routine and very American instruments of capitalist rule used to crush working-class resistance whatever you look like.

Internally, the BPP social composition and limited base worked against it. It did have deep roots among the poor and minority youth. But sustained, organic leadership of the broader industrial working class beyond its racial lines proved to be out of its reach.

Without the independent political organization of the working class, BPP gains were unstable and unsustainable. Trotsky warned of the need for a dialectical, class-grounded method against petty‑bourgeois eclecticism [think identity politics] that detaches theory from class realities. That ideological weakness contributed to BPP organizational collapse.

As do movements before and after it, the BPP exposes the ongoing hostility and criminality of class interests that have misshapen social, economic and political life even before the First American Revolution. The current regime with administrations preceding it stand in direct continuity with that tendency.

These sufferings are the punishments the working class brings upon its own head for its failure to organize a very powerful, worker-led Party with the United, social base necessary to sustain it.

Only when the working class mounts and sustains an ongoing class offensive against the wealth and social privilege of the ruling class can the questions of who decides how resources are to be developed, and in whose interests and on what terms this is to happen — only then will there be freedom for America.

The existing ruling class must be socially expropriated and dispossessed of all means to direct and control the affairs of state. That privilege and wealth — and no other — is the source of wars, international turmoil, hostage taking and rising political executions. Every other issue that can be named is a political distraction from that prime social task.
 
Holy_Seduction said:
The Black Panther Party was a mass revolutionary organization that arose out of the Black oppression, urban poverty, police terror and mass radicalization of the 1960s. It combined militant opposition to racist police violence with community social programs and revolutionary rhetoric.
Click to expand...
Of course it was only rhetoric -- no revolution was possible at the time. Radicals and conservatives alike spoke of revolution as imminent, or already in progress, but it was not really a revolutionary situation.

I remember clip of Panthers chanting:
Revolution is come!
OFF THE PIGS!
Time to take up the gun!
OFF THE PIGS!

Which means "Kill the police" -- you wouldn't get far now with that message -- even BLM was careful to avoid it.
 
Last edited:
The good work of some panthers was negated by the violent faction that believed they could incite a revolution by the indiscriminate murder of police. That resulted in the BPP being crushed.

Ghandi never picked up a gun but achieved national independence for India from the British Empire.
 
DraggonStone said:
The good work of some panthers was negated by the violent faction that believed they could incite a revolution by the indiscriminate murder of police. That resulted in the BPP being crushed.
Click to expand...
That ain't quite how it happened.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party
The FBI and other legal trouble
As if things weren't awful enough, Chief J. Edgar Hoover unleashed the hounds from the FBI against the Panthers and other black activist groups in August 1967, who set up a complex program of intrigues and double-crosses that would have made Joseph Stalin take notes.[7] Through infiltration, rumor-mongering, and the double murder of Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, the Chief was able to put various Panther leaders in jail or on the run.[4] In the government's most blatant example of incarceration-by-any-means-necessary, Bobby Seale went on trial as one of the original Chicago Eight, then was bound, gagged, and sent to the slammer on a four-year term for contempt of court. While he was in prison, he went on trial in the New Haven Black Panther Murders case, which involved one police informant who got killed and one hit man who either flipped or was a police informant to begin with, depending on who you choose to believe. The case was dropped after the jury failed to reach a verdict. He was released from prison in 1972. An FBI frame-up is suspected in the case of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, who spent years in prison on a discredited charge for a 1968 robbery and murder. The FBI was also able to successfully foment deadly strife between the Panthers and rival black nationalist groups using anonymous letters; in fact, COINTELPRO was involved in the 1969 deaths of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, who were shot by members of a rival group, from the Panthers' Los Angeles chapter.[7]

The FBI even opposed the Panthers' free food programs, claiming that Free Breakfast for School Children was intended as an opportunity to lessen criticism of the party and indoctrinate children as opposed to helping meet a communities' needs; consequently, the Party faced police harassment at some of its Breakfasts, and police sometimes even went door-to-door to discourage parents from sending their children to them. (While food was useful as an organizing tool for the Panthers, their primary motivation for the free food programs was that hunger was a major problem for impoverished Black communities, which suffered despite the War on Poverty from the Johnson administration.)[10] Additionally, the FBI sent anonymous letters to dentists and doctors in Portland in an attempt to dissuade them from volunteering at the Panthers' free clinics in the area.[7]

Huey Newton was frequently wrapped up in charges of violence, starting from his youthful stabbing of another man with a steak knife, which he was actually convicted for, to charges of assault and murder. In October 1967, he was in a car pulled over by a white Oakland police officer who recognized Newton and called for backup. When another officer arrived, shots were exchanged between the people in the car and the first officer, which proved fatal for said officer, named John Frey. Newton showed up at a hospital later in the day with a gunshot wound in the abdomen and was arrested and charged. The Panthers played that situation into a cause celebre for the left, rallying supporters around the "Free Huey" campaign during Newton's incarceration from September 1968 to May 1970. Newton claimed not to remember anything, the guns were never found (although in author Hugh Pearson's account, Shadow of the Panther, he claimed that Newton later admitted to him that he shot the officer), and the conviction for manslaughter by an all-white jury was overturned by the California Court of Appeals in 1970.[7]

Newton was again charged with murder in 1974 over the shooting death of a woman, allegedly because she used a childhood nickname he had a special dislike for, "baby". He was also charged with assault for allegedly beating a tailor in his Lake Merritt penthouse, again, over the use of said nickname. He fled to Cuba to avoid prosecution[5], and returned in 1977 to reclaim his post as the head of the Party and face the charges. Newton eventually beat both the charges, but the process was awfully messy and bloody. The key witness for the murder trial was the target of a botched hit by three Panthers, who attacked the wrong house and got themselves shot up instead. The Panther medic who treated one of the hitmen was himself later the target of a botched hit, shot in the back and buried in the desert. He survived but was paralyzed by the gunshot injuries, and implicated two Panthers as his assailants.[16] Newton denied involvement in these botched hits; however he was the head of the Panthers at the time, as well as the defendant in the case the witness was involved in, so go figure. But all that bloodshed paid off for Huey, as the target of the first hit was too frightened to testify after the attempt on her life and the other two witnesses in the murder trial had credibility problems. After two trials with hung juries, the case was dropped. The tailor was also beset by untimely memory problems, eventually leading to dropped charges, but Newton pled out on charges of illegal gun possession in the process.

The Aftermath

From 1978 on, the Panthers were a spent force in Oakland politics. White liberals and government funders started keeping their wallets closed after the story broke over misuse of grant funds for the Panther School. By 1980 there were only around two dozen members of the Panthers left, but Newton was able to score one last triumph, a piece of paper from UC Santa Cruz that entitled him to be called "Doctor." Newton would eventually plead no contest to cashing a $15,000 State check for personal use, for which he was sentenced to 6 months in jail and 18 months probation. Newton was shot to death in west Oakland in 1989, shortly after leaving a crackhouse, by a crack dealer who rolled with a group of disgruntled ex-Panthers. Beginning in the mid 1960's the inner city black community descended into a hell of drugs, gang violence, single motherhood, and unemployment- trends which peaked in the 1990's. The Panthers left legacies in the Crips and various Oakland political machines based on race.

New York Panther Afeni Shakur gave birth to the rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur (birth name Lesane Parish Crooks[17]) in 1972. The Panther offshoot Black Liberation Army, in which Tupac's step-auntie Assata Shakur purportedly had a leading role, originated the credo later adopted by the Black Organization for Leadership and Dignity ("...WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS!"). The BLA/BOLD credo is recited at current protests over racial issues.
 
Wilson23 said:
That ain't quite how it happened.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party
The FBI and other legal trouble
As if things weren't awful enough, Chief J. Edgar Hoover unleashed the hounds from the FBI against the Panthers and other black activist groups in August 1967, who set up a complex program of intrigues and double-crosses that would have made Joseph Stalin take notes.[7] Through infiltration, rumor-mongering, and the double murder of Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago, the Chief was able to put various Panther leaders in jail or on the run.[4] In the government's most blatant example of incarceration-by-any-means-necessary, Bobby Seale went on trial as one of the original Chicago Eight, then was bound, gagged, and sent to the slammer on a four-year term for contempt of court. While he was in prison, he went on trial in the New Haven Black Panther Murders case, which involved one police informant who got killed and one hit man who either flipped or was a police informant to begin with, depending on who you choose to believe. The case was dropped after the jury failed to reach a verdict. He was released from prison in 1972. An FBI frame-up is suspected in the case of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, who spent years in prison on a discredited charge for a 1968 robbery and murder. The FBI was also able to successfully foment deadly strife between the Panthers and rival black nationalist groups using anonymous letters; in fact, COINTELPRO was involved in the 1969 deaths of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, who were shot by members of a rival group, from the Panthers' Los Angeles chapter.[7]

The FBI even opposed the Panthers' free food programs, claiming that Free Breakfast for School Children was intended as an opportunity to lessen criticism of the party and indoctrinate children as opposed to helping meet a communities' needs; consequently, the Party faced police harassment at some of its Breakfasts, and police sometimes even went door-to-door to discourage parents from sending their children to them. (While food was useful as an organizing tool for the Panthers, their primary motivation for the free food programs was that hunger was a major problem for impoverished Black communities, which suffered despite the War on Poverty from the Johnson administration.)[10] Additionally, the FBI sent anonymous letters to dentists and doctors in Portland in an attempt to dissuade them from volunteering at the Panthers' free clinics in the area.[7]

Huey Newton was frequently wrapped up in charges of violence, starting from his youthful stabbing of another man with a steak knife, which he was actually convicted for, to charges of assault and murder. In October 1967, he was in a car pulled over by a white Oakland police officer who recognized Newton and called for backup. When another officer arrived, shots were exchanged between the people in the car and the first officer, which proved fatal for said officer, named John Frey. Newton showed up at a hospital later in the day with a gunshot wound in the abdomen and was arrested and charged. The Panthers played that situation into a cause celebre for the left, rallying supporters around the "Free Huey" campaign during Newton's incarceration from September 1968 to May 1970. Newton claimed not to remember anything, the guns were never found (although in author Hugh Pearson's account, Shadow of the Panther, he claimed that Newton later admitted to him that he shot the officer), and the conviction for manslaughter by an all-white jury was overturned by the California Court of Appeals in 1970.[7]

Newton was again charged with murder in 1974 over the shooting death of a woman, allegedly because she used a childhood nickname he had a special dislike for, "baby". He was also charged with assault for allegedly beating a tailor in his Lake Merritt penthouse, again, over the use of said nickname. He fled to Cuba to avoid prosecution[5], and returned in 1977 to reclaim his post as the head of the Party and face the charges. Newton eventually beat both the charges, but the process was awfully messy and bloody. The key witness for the murder trial was the target of a botched hit by three Panthers, who attacked the wrong house and got themselves shot up instead. The Panther medic who treated one of the hitmen was himself later the target of a botched hit, shot in the back and buried in the desert. He survived but was paralyzed by the gunshot injuries, and implicated two Panthers as his assailants.[16] Newton denied involvement in these botched hits; however he was the head of the Panthers at the time, as well as the defendant in the case the witness was involved in, so go figure. But all that bloodshed paid off for Huey, as the target of the first hit was too frightened to testify after the attempt on her life and the other two witnesses in the murder trial had credibility problems. After two trials with hung juries, the case was dropped. The tailor was also beset by untimely memory problems, eventually leading to dropped charges, but Newton pled out on charges of illegal gun possession in the process.

The Aftermath

From 1978 on, the Panthers were a spent force in Oakland politics. White liberals and government funders started keeping their wallets closed after the story broke over misuse of grant funds for the Panther School. By 1980 there were only around two dozen members of the Panthers left, but Newton was able to score one last triumph, a piece of paper from UC Santa Cruz that entitled him to be called "Doctor." Newton would eventually plead no contest to cashing a $15,000 State check for personal use, for which he was sentenced to 6 months in jail and 18 months probation. Newton was shot to death in west Oakland in 1989, shortly after leaving a crackhouse, by a crack dealer who rolled with a group of disgruntled ex-Panthers. Beginning in the mid 1960's the inner city black community descended into a hell of drugs, gang violence, single motherhood, and unemployment- trends which peaked in the 1990's. The Panthers left legacies in the Crips and various Oakland political machines based on race.

New York Panther Afeni Shakur gave birth to the rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur (birth name Lesane Parish Crooks[17]) in 1972. The Panther offshoot Black Liberation Army, in which Tupac's step-auntie Assata Shakur purportedly had a leading role, originated the credo later adopted by the Black Organization for Leadership and Dignity ("...WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS!"). The BLA/BOLD credo is recited at current protests over racial issues.
Click to expand...
The BLA unsuccessfully attempted to break Shakur's codefendant, Sundiata Acoli out of Trenton Prison. Following that incident, they were successful in breaking Shakur out of Edna Mann Prison for women. She made her way to Cuba where she recently passed.
 
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