Black Panther Party Research Paper

The Black Panther Party were also a big concern for the government and targets in COINTELPRO due to the massive support they gained in their communities as they felt like they were being oppressed by the government and provided many activities for the neighborhood youth including free food and saturday morning class to teach Black History since at the time, no public school would want to teach it. The Black Panther Party had then director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover infamously called the group, “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and was one of the main supervisors involved with COINTELPRO which some members of the Black Panther Party became political prisoners, getting some type of blackmail to resist and suppress

their “militant” nature, and downright members of the group being murdered and the murderer getting away with the crime because police officers would murder a member of the Black Panther Party and was directed to under COINTELPRO so the courts made up an excuse so the murderer doesn’t face any charges. Curtis J.

Austin is an associate professor of history and co-director of the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi, he made a book titled Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party which chronicles the fight law enforcement had against the Black Panther Party and wouldn’t give up for their cause, had an excerpt used in Journal of African American Studies where the excerpt is titled, An Interview with Harold Taylor where Austin interviews a then-member of the Black Panther Party who joined the organization in Los Angeles where police brutalities were still rampant. Harold Taylor talks about being in the Black Panther Party as a teenager, being part of a group that he hoped would stop police officers from killing innocent African Americans, and discusses how a majority of the members had suspicions that the police or the FBI had made threats over the phone, would shoot their headquarters with sniper fire, and attempt to kidnap members of the organization for more information. Taylor talks to Austin about a time where FBI agents tried to kidnap him near the Black Panther’s Los Angeles headquarters as he states, “Yeah, I was walking down the street from my

office. I lived down the street from the office. I lived on 84th. There's a row of hedges about five houses before you get to my house. They were hidden behind the hedges—these two people— and I noticed that this van was coming down the street behind me when I was walking. I became really conscious of my surroundings. When I got to those hedges, I looked back at the van and two dudes jumped out” (161). Taylor then goes more in depth with this altercation as the two agents open the doors to their van and Taylor thought it was a life or death situation and would mean death if he got in the van, he found and struggled for his life against these two men, and when he reached for his gun, they let them go. With the FBI being this “militant” with a member of “the most militant organization in the United States of America,” it really shows how much of a threat the Black Panther Party was towards the public opinion because they fought for the injustices they faced in their communities and they fought for what they knew was the government trying to cover up the traces of many African Americans that were killed in an unjust manner, this was just one of the examples in which the FBI used to cover up their tracks by the mentality of “by absolute any means necessary” under COINTELPRO.
The many examples of the FBI doing “dirty work” within COINTELPRO and the many struggles many different organizations had to face still has it effects today in media and in some history books however, COINTELPRO is almost never covered in history books because the government assigns what books are suitable to learn in public schools and having COINTELPRO and the horrors the government and the FBI got away with, would make the government now look bad, especially with the more recent struggles the government has with people of ethnic backgrounds with groups like ‘Black Lives Matter’.

Esquire Men’s Magazine, known for their fashion trends but more importantly, their political views, wrote an article on June 4th, 2013 titled, Hip-Hop and the FBI: A Little-Known History which shows the parallels hip hop music has had with the FBI and their unjust acts under COINTELPRO and how modern day hip hop artists and rapper reflect on the horrors done under COINTELPRO. In the 2013 rap album titled Acid Rap, Chancelor Jonathan Bennett better known as hip hop artist Chance the Rapper has a song titled Cocoa Butter Kisses in which he reflects on his childhood and realizes that he missed his mother’s nurturing when he was young because of the conflicts in his life like drug use as he got older, a featured rapper by the name of Victor Kwesi Mensah known as his rapper name Vic Mensa where he has a verse in the song where he says, “Everywhere that I go, everywhere they be asking how's it

going; Say the going's well, go figure, Victor's light skinned; Jesus got me feeling like Colin Powell, all praise to the God; God knows he's a pro, he's a pro like COINTEL.” Mensah’s message in this song is that he compares himself to African-American republican Colin Powell because he faces the same criticism as he did in the Black community that Mensah doesn't suffer the same way as more darker skinned Black people do because his skin tone is lighter which is thoughtless, and the line of “he’s a pro like COINTEL” praises Colin Powell for dealing with this problem by ignoring it for the better and mentions COINTELPRO as alluding that a African American got in to a high state of power in the government even though they were the same ones who initiated COINTELPRO. The last part of the Esquire article states, “As a community, hip-hop needs to become more aware of this history of targeting and neutralization — a history that dates all the way back to Marcus Garvey in 1919. J. Edgar Hoover may no longer be with us, but the police are going to keep watching, and hip-hop needs to teach, organize, and fight back in order to avoid the fates of their cultural and political forebears.” (par.16). The FBI now is showing interest in the genre of hip hop as they are the new reporters of what is happening or what has happened in their neighborhoods and the FBI still sees the damage this can do because a great amount of people believe that the government isn’t rightfully helping out low income neighborhoods and people who need all the help they can get.
In conclusion, COINTELPRO was an act of surveillance and an investigation the FBI conducted with 15 years starting in 1956 and lasting until 1971. Even though this initiative ended in closing in on almost 50 years, it has had a huge impact on today’s society living in the United States of America because some people of ethnic backgrounds question if we are still under some type of new COINTELPRO, specifically activist groups like ‘Black Lives Matter’ because of the recent tragedies we have faced like the Trayvon Martin shooting and the murderer George Zimmerman being acquitted of second-degree murder and the death of Eric Garner who was being choked by a police officer in the NYPD for selling loose cigarettes even though choke holds are illegal for a NYPD officer to do. With so many instances of racial discrimination even happening in the year 2018 and too many African Americans losing their lives over by something they didn’t do or the police using excessive force which falls under police brutality, Americans have every right to think that we are under some type of new COINTELPRO because too many of these instances are occuring in the same matter of time which worries anybody with an ethnic background living in the United States of America. The Black Lives Matter movement is often compared to the Black Panther Party which is both wrong and right because they aren’t as militant as the Black Panther Party, but are still fighting for the same cause even 50 years later of African-Americans being wrongfully murdered by local law enforcement which shouldn’t be an issue but is with the unfortunate fact that racism will never go away because of how long specifically African-Americans having been treated in this country since their arrival and the progress we’ve seen over the years continues but halts one way or another which shouldn’t be this much of an issue. As Polish-American philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel once said “Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.”