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The black panther party and civil rights
Why is the black panther party important essay
Why is the black panther party important essay
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The Black Panther Party
My survey paper for Assignment 4 is on the Black Panther Party. I will discuss the rise and the fall of the Black Panther Party and how Huey Newton and Bobby Seale met. I will also discuss some of the goals of the Black Panther Party, the good the party did for the black and poor communities. I will also discuss what they hoped to achieve from their movement.
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (BPP) in Oakland, California in 1966. The original name of the Black Panther Party was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Huey Newton was illiterate when he graduated from high school. Newton taught himself how to read. Seale had served in the Air Force. Newton and Seale met while both were attending Merritt Junior College in 1965. After Newton attended Merritt Junior College he studied law at the San Francisco School of Law. At Merritt Junior College they organized a Soul Student’s Advisory Council. This Council was the first group to demand that African-American studies be included in the college curriculum. The two men split with the council when Newton and Seale wanted to bring a squad of Black youths on campus to perform drills in commemoration of Malcolm X’s birthday the year after his death. This is when they formed the Black Panther Party. Newton was the Party’s Defense Minister and Seale was the Chairman. The Black Panther Party symbol, the panther, was adopted from an independent political party established by residents in Lowndes County, Alabama a year earlier. The symbol was chosen because the panther is a powerful image.
To achieve their goals, Newton and Seale had a ten-point platform that demanded full employment, exemption of black men from the military and an end to police brutality among other things. The last point, point number ten was a summary of all of the other points. One of the main goals was to protect Black citizens against police brutality. Their message was self-defense. The Party originally preached violent revolution as the only means of achieving black liberation. The party called on blacks to arm themselves for the liberation struggle. Huey Newton studied law and spoke up when the police violated the civil rights of Black people. He made sure the search warrants were legal. The Black Panther Party had their own patrols to monitor the activities of the police in Black nei...
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...n leader was shot to death while standing in the doorway of his home. The murder has never been solved.
The Black Panther Party Ten-Point System
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community.
2. We want the full employment of our people.
3. We want an end to robbery by the capitalist of our black communities.
4. We want decent housing, fit shelter of human beings.
5. We want education for our people that expose the true nature of this decadent American society. We
want education that teaches us our true history and our true history and our role in the 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 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 a 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.
Martin Luther King Jr. played a huge role for the black power movement, and many other younger black activists’ leader such as handsome Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, and Rosa Park. Martin and Rosa and many others being a symbol of the non-violent struggle against segregation were he launched voting rights campaign and peaceful protesting. Rosa Park is one of the most important female that contribute a little but a huge factor of the Black Power Movement. One day riding the bus coming from work, a white bus driver told her and other African American to move to the back to give up their seats. Rosa being fed up with it she refuse, causing here to be put in jail, causing a huge movement for a bus boycott and Freedom Riders. Unlike Malcolm X and who epitomized the “Black Power” philosophy and had grown frustrated with the non-violent, integrated struggle for civil rights and worried that blacks would lose control of their own movement. Malcom X joined the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther. Black Panther played a short but important part in the civil rights movement. Being from California, the Black Panther party had four desires: equality in education, housing, employment and civil rights. In other words they were willing to use violence to get what they wanted. Bobby Seale, one of the leader had vision Black Panther party. Seale
It includes many equal access, support, and equal education for African American. I should learn how to have confidence in leadership, achieve my many goals and confront different kinds of situations like Jamal Joseph did it in the book. Before I learned about the Black Panther from the book, I have never heard about the Black
These movements have many similarities in the goals that they wanted to achieve, however they have some differences as well. In the document written by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, they voiced their demands ...
The concepts of Reform and Revolution are nearly polarizing by their very nature, with one seeking to modify, and the other seeking to destroy and rebuild. If an organized Black movement was to find itself in an opportunistic position -whatever that may be- with which to attempt a radical movement (in either case; reform or revolution, the resulting movement would need to be large and radical if it would hope to accomplish its goals before the opportunity for change ceases to present itself) it would only serve to befall their efforts if they found themselves in a splintered state of conflicting ideologies. But, in either case, be it reform or revolution, a reconfiguring of the thought processes behind how one looks at the nature of American politics is undoubtedly necessary in order to look into the potential for future Black liberation.
This political shift materialized with the advent of the Southern Strategy, in which Democratic president Lyndon Johnson’s support of Civil Rights harmed his political power in the South, Nixon and the Republican Party picked up on these formerly blue states and promoted conservative politics in order to gain a larger voter representation. Nixon was elected in a year drenched in social and political unrest as race riots occurred in 118 U.S. cities in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s murder, as well as overall American bitterness due to the assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and the extensive student-led activist opposition to the Vietnam War. The late 1960’s also saw the advent of several movements promoting Black Nationalism to unify the African-American community through the efforts of Black Power, most notably the formation of the Black Panthers in 1967 who were dedicated to overseeing the protection of African-Americans against police brutality and the support of disadvantaged street children through their Free Breakfast for Children program. During this time, black power was politically reflected through the electorate as the 1960-70’s saw a rise in Black elected officials. In 1969 there were a total of 994 black men and 131 black women in office in the country, this figure more than tripled by 1975 when there were 2969 black men and 530 black women acting in office; more than half of these elected officials were acting in Southern States....
Many people try to think “back to the good old days,” when really they were not that good for most people who had no rights. With the advancement in technology, we were forced to open our eyes to what is going on in the world around us and the disadvantaged people face throughout the world. As a society once we start to working on damage control to clean up the mess we got into we can finally have true change. The damage control will take time and effort from all people involved on either end of the situation. One major move I feel we can make is by giving honest history lessons that cover every part of our history in schools. I feel that American History and World History should be more emphasized on in our school systems and curriculum. If the students get the full education of our history and how we got to where we are, then moving on will become easier. We expect for children to lead us into a bigger and better future, but how can we expect that without the truth coming to light for our diverse culture. We cannot expect to make this country better without knowing their full history and the mistakes we have made in our past. Looking for another way to move forward, Essence asked Dr. Joy DeGruy on what we could do moving forward, her answer was, “…more research, support, and assistance are needed to produce vital healing…that exceeds the injury
The Black Panther Party’s initial success came about without having to address these roots, but, as the Party expanded and wished to move ahead, the Party’s shifts in policy can be directly attributed to the wishes and needs of the community. Murch profiles the Oakland Community School and the People’s Free Food Program, which were social institutions created by the Black Panther Party to address the needs of the community; though these approaches were used to bring about more members and to garner support, these tactics worked because of their correlation to the needs of Oakland’s African American community.
The Party’s fight for redistribution of wealth and the establishment of social, political and social equality across gender and color barriers made it one of the first organizations in U.S. history to militantly struggle for working class liberation and ethnic minorities (Baggins, Brian). The Black Panther Party set up a ten-point program much like Malcolm X’s Nation of Islam that called for American society to realize political, economic and social equal opportunity based on the principles of socialism, all of which was summarized by the final point: "We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace" (Newton, Huey P). The Black Panther Party wanted to achieve these goals through militant force. In the words of Che Guevara, “Words are beautiful, but action is supre...
middle of paper ... ... Du Bois spoke of what every African American wished to obtain; which is the right to be free of slavery. On the other hand, Du Bois’s weakness was that his approach came off as aggressive. He felt that blacks should not wait to be told their rights, and that it’s something they deserve. He believed that blacks do not have to show that they are/can be useful in the society.
Through the history of African Americans in America, few political moments were more important than the formation of the Congressional Black Caucus. The thirteen black members of the House of Representatives founded the CBC in 1969. Their goal was to establish a voice for African Americans who felt forgotten and downtrodden. One early goals of the Black Caucus was to end the Apartheid in South Africa. During the early years of the organization, there was strife internally and externally. After the Reconstruction of America, African Americans were without organization amongst their representation in Congress until the establishment of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against empire: the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
On February 12th The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded by a multiracial group of activists, who answered "The Call," in the New York City, NY. They initially called themselves the National Negro Committee. Founded in 1909 The NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has been active in its attempts to break legal ground and forge better opportunities for African Americans. At the beginning in 1909, some twenty persons met together in New York City for the purpose of utilizing the public interest in the Lincoln Centennial in behalf of African Americans. The history, function, purpose, and current activities of the organization is important.to work on behalf of the rights of colored people including Native Americans, African Americans and Jews. (Janken 2003)
The dominant culture perceived the Black Panther Party to be a threat, prevented their success whenever possible, and greatly contributed to their ultimate demise. In 1968 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover proclaimed: “The Black Panther Party is the single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States” (156). The Party’s founder, Huey Newton, came to represent “the symbol of change for Americans, (by) questioning everything scared to the American way of life” (237).
According to statistics since the early 1970’s there has been a 500% increase in the number of people being incarcerated with an average total of 2.2 million people behind bars. The increase in rate of people being incarcerated has also brought about an increasingly disproportionate racial composition. The jails and prisons have a high rate of African Americans incarcerated with an average of 900,000 out of the 2.2 million incarcerateed being African American. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1 in 6 African American males has been incarcerated at some point in time as of the year 2001.
The Black Panther had a huge background of history, goals, and beliefs. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Ca 1966, founded the Panthers. They were originally as an African American self defense force and were highly influenced by Malcolm X’s ideas. They were named after Lowndes County Freedom Organization or LCFO. The Panthers had many goals like; giving back to the ghetto, protecting blacks from police brutality, and to help blacks get freedom and jobs. They also had many beliefs like; Malcolm X was a great person, and they believed that gun use was ok if necessary, or if people were oppressing the poor.