The Black Panthers Party for Self-Defense was one of the most effective and efficient Party to reform white privilege and hate across America.  Their impact can only be measured by the response by J. Edgar Hoover, then Head of the FBI, who described them as “the number one threat to the internal security of the United States.”
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The Movement had largely been based in the South and around demands for desegregation of the busses, schools, waiting rooms and lunch counters. Hundreds of thousands were mobilized to participate in the demonstrations, sit-ins and freedom rides.  They rapidly grew to a size of 5,000 full-time workers organized in 45 chapters across the Nation.
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The Black Panther Party was created through the vision of Malcolm X who saw the limitations of both the Muslims and Martin Luther King’s strategy of non-violence. He saw the need to embrace the social and economic issues and attempted to put forward a more coherent strategy.  This was a revolutionary philosophy and militant stand but effective and efficient in helping and supporting their communities.
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The Black Panther Party was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. They met in the 1960s at Meritt Junior College in West Oakland. They argued that the economic and political roots of racism were in the exploitative capitalist system and that the Black struggle must be a revolutionary movement to overthrow the entire power structure in order to achieve liberation for all Black people.
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“cultural nationalism sees the white man as the oppressor and makes no distinction between racist whites and non-racist whites, as the Panthers do. The cultural nationalists say that a Black man cannot be the enemy of the Black people, while the Panthers believe that Black capitalists are exploiters and oppressors. Although the Black Panther Party believes in Black nationalism and Black culture, it does not believe that either will lead to Black liberation or the overthrow of the capitalist system and are therefore ineffective.”
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Under the pressure from the mass civil rights struggle, the government had made minor concessions: promoting Black officials, mayors, Congressmen etc., but no lasting improvement has taken place to the daily lives of most Black people. In fact, while segregation laws were broken down, the level of poverty had actually increased. Black unemployment was higher in 1966, after more than a decade of struggle, than in 1954.  32% of Black people were living below the poverty line in 1966; 71% of the poor living in metropolitan areas were Black; and, by 1968, two-thirds of the Black population lived in ghettos.
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“We do not fight racism with racism. We fight racism with solidarity. We do not fight exploitative capitalism with Black capitalism. We fight capitalism with basic socialism. And we do not fight imperialism with more imperialism. We fight imperialism with proletarian internationalism.”
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In October, they published a platform and program for what the Black Panther Party want and what they believe.
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1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black community.  Dr. Huey Newton later advocated that the term “white man” should be changed to “capitalist,” since at the height of its movement, the Party had a extremely large follower of “white men.”
4. We want decent housing fit for shelter of human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of Black people.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal state, county and city prisons and jails.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the constitution of the United States.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the Black colony in which only Black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of Black people as to their national destiny.
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As soon as this Program was written, they printed 1,000 copies and went out onto the streets to distribute them. Seale, Newton and their first member, Bobby Hutton put their months paychecks together to rent an old shopfront as a base for operations. They painted up a sign saying Black Panther Party for Self Defense and on January 1, 1967 the office was opened.
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They focus on a few key areas:
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Self Defence – The Panthers decided to take up their constitutional right to carry arms and to implement Malcolm X’s philosophy of self-defence by patrolling the police.  They did this at a time when severe police brutality was common in the streets where the police would beat down and kill Blacks at random.
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Also, consider that the gun has a huge psychological effect, both on the Black community and the police. For the police, it reversed the fear that they so enjoyed creating in others. But for the Black community, it fires their imagination, people feel empowered by seeing Black brothers and sisters protecting their interests.  Many came to the Panther office purely for the gun, the Black uniform, the whole image. When this happened, the Panthers would simply explain that the Black struggle was about a whole lot more than just picking up the gun: it was about educating yourself and then others, about organizing the community programs, selling the newspaper and serving the people.
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Community Programs – The programs demonstrated that politics was relevant to peoples lives by feeding a hungry child, giving- out food, clothing and medical care showed that the Panthers related to their People’s needs. It also showed what could be achieved if People were organized.  They organized dozens of community programs such as free breakfast for children, health clinics, newsletters and shoes for children.
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When achieving these successes, The FBI identified as threat number one.  On December 4, at 1:00 a.m., the police burst into Fred Hampton’s apartment and opened fire in the bedroom where he lay sleeping with his pregnant girlfriend. Another Panther called out that a pregnant sister was in the room and the police paused their firing.  In 1969 alone, 25 members of the Black Panther party were killed. But the FBI’s operations went further, aside from the constant arrests of Panther members, which disrupted the work of the organization and drained them financially, they infiltrated the Party and manufactured rivalries and disputes between different members.
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The Panthers have left us with an invaluable experiences and lessons learned. Their dedication, will and bravery in the face of insurmountable odds is a highpoint of the civil rights movement.  If I were born in the 1950s, I would have certainly would have been an active member of the Black Panthers Party for Self-Defense.
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