More handpicked essays just for you.
The role of the black panther party in the civil rights movement
The role of the black panther party in the civil rights movement
An abstract on the rise and fall of the black panther party
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Close your eyes. What image comes to mind when you think of the Black Panther Party? Many people today envision a male figure with association to violence: a powerful man with a gun in hand while wearing the Panther’s signature black beret. This image is formed through the thousands of posters and t-shirts once worn as a form of propaganda. The Black Panther Party may have been seen as a prominently male organization, but to everyone’s surprise it was two-thirds female.
In Oakland, California during October in 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. This revolutionary national organization aimed to challenge police brutality, poverty, and racial injustice. It devised a ten-point platform that strived towards obtaining civil rights for African Americans, to be treated equally and given the same opportunities to succeed. In, African American Women, Civil Rights, and Black Power, Patton states “Black people have no choice but to move and move rapidly to gain their freedom, justice and all the other ingredients of civilized living that have been denied to us. This is where it is at. Check it out, Black Brothers and Sisters! This is our day!”
How the party’s leaders articulated politics is how gender was initially embodied in the organization. The first mission statement included the wording “the cream of black manhood, there for the protection and defense of our community.” This suggested that the party viewed the black man as the protector of women, children, mothers and sisters, also assuming that men would be on the front lines of the battle against oppression. What they didn’t foresee was how many women already begun developing similar traits.
Women were beginning to make a historical t...
... middle of paper ...
...where they could celebrate and explore their sexuality. This success lead to others as the party began to focus on successful community survival programs and more openly endorsed socialists as a solution to the problems of black people.
The Black Panther Party has been defined more by its failure to transform sexist ways of thinking and doing, than by the process that occurred within its organizational structures of empowering women and men to engage in antisexist politics. What the party should be defined by, is how the party was very instrumental in giving women equal rights and permitted them to play an important role at all levels. Many women today owe their success to the efforts that the Black Panther Party initiated many years ago, and thousands owe their thanks for what they stood for and the affirmative action they took in order to achieve their success.
They also held anti-capitalism ideals, such as free medical clinics, and implemented free breakfast and lunch programs—the latter of which my family and I are incredibly thankful for. I may not agree with everything the Black Panther Party did, but I am grateful for them. They served a pivotal role for black people during times of struggle and paved the way for black people today. Their main goals were to give black people basic living needs to survive: education, food, housing, and work. With this being said, it infuriates me how over the past year or so, I have seen several people and political pundits compare the Black Panther Party to the Ku Klux Klan.
Lucy eventually urged Alice that for them to succeed on their quest for suffrage, they need to continue the movement on their own. Alice went ahead to start the National Women Party (NWA). Now Alice’s party is gaining more momentum among women with
Throughout history, the black woman has always had a multitude of responsibilities thrust upon her shoulders. This was never truer than for southern black women in the period between 1865 and 1885. In this span of twenty years, these women were responsible for their children, their husbands, supporting their families, their fight for freedom as black citizens and as women, their sexual freedom, and various other issues that impacted their lives. All of these aspects of the black woman’s life defined who she was. Each of her experiences and battles shaped the life that she lived, and the way she was perceived by the outside world.
In the weekly readings for week five we see two readings that talk about the connections between women’s suffrage and black women’s identities. In Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, we see the ways that black women’s identities were marginalized either through their sex or by their race. These identities were oppressed through social groups, laws, and voting rights. Discontented Black Feminists talks about the journey black feminists took to combat the sexism as well as the racism such as forming independent social clubs, sororities, in addition to appealing to the government through courts and petitions. These women formed an independent branch of feminism in which began to prioritize not one identity over another, but to look at each identity as a whole. This paved the way for future feminists to introduce the concept of intersectionality.
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....
Amadu, K. (2007). African Americans and U.S. Politics: The Gradual Progress of Black Women in Political Representation. New York: Prentice Hall Publishers.
Although initially a Party seeking to inspire the independence of the African American community from the control of the government, this image was changed during the course of the movement in the wake of opposition and issues regarding the Party’s image. In the later years of the Party focus was placed on helping the community of Oakland, California in order to gain political ground both on the local and later national level; this was done by educating the community as well as by offering assistance to the African American population, regardless of membership. In the end the Party was successful in making some political ground but its later approach during the occupation of Merritt College and the public image of the Party’s inner circle brought about its decline and eventual dissolve in
Wasserman, Steve. "Rage and Ruin: On the Black Panthers | The Nation." The Nation. N.p., 4 June 2013. Web. 06 Dec. 2013.
“The Ten Point Plan”, written by the group called the Black Panthers, was a document created to bring out equality and social justice for all blacks in America. The Black Panthers became a political party after blacks in America started to gain more power within themselves as a group through protests, by 1966 blacks were ready to take their progress into the political arena. The Black Panther Party or BPP was created by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale who wanted a political party that would treat blacks fair and give them a voice within the government in order to help create equal laws. In “ A Huey P. Newton Story”, “The Ten Point Plan” is described as a basis for the BPP as it was a series of ten different grievances
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).
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in October 1966, in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Armed with sincerity, the words of revolutionaries such as Mao Tse-Tung and Malcolm X, law books, and rifles, the Black Panther Party fed the hungry, protected the weak from racist police, and presented a Ten Point Platform and Program of Black political and social activism. Its "survival programs"-such as food giveaways, free health clinics and free breakfast programs for children-were popular fixtures in Black neighborhoods in the early 1970s, but for the white power structure and the vast majority of the white public, the Panthers represented only anti-government militancy; a view which engendered the wrath of the police and FBI and led to the murder of several Party members by law enforcement.
A unifying figure for both the Panthers and the hippies, according to Brown, was one of the most interesting characters in the trajectory of the Black Panther Party: Huey Newton. Brown discusses at length the sort of spell Newton was able to cast over the people he met; he was an enigma of sorts, but he was also a strong and powerful leader, who was determined to make changes and be effective in terms of galvanizing racial hierarchies in America while simultaneously presenting himself as kind, loving and warm to his comrades. The event Brown discusses specifically occurred in 1970, and played an important role in the government perception of both the Panthers and the hippies going forward. Brown notes that “the domestic threat that caused
The Black Panther Party made blacks more progressive in trying to be more equal and more willing to fight for justice. Their self-determination to come together and stand up for themselves, as one was a stepping-stone for blacks to fight for themselves and the good of their people, also to make sure blacks could be treated equally both socially and politically in society. The Black Panther Party was started in Oakland, California in 1966, when “Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton took up arms and declared themselves apart of a global revolution against American imperialism” (Bloom). They wanted to empower the black people to stand up for themselves and defend themselves against the police and their unjust ways. The police were the oppressor’s that kept blacks down and kept blacks from gaining any self-rights.
The Panthers had many accomplishments while they were around, these were some of them. The Panthers gave to the need many times. They did stuff like opened food shelters, health clinics, elementary schools, patrolled urban ghettos to stop police brutality, created offices to teach young black kids, and they said that they were going to start stressing services. The Panthers had many great people join them, but one man had made a huge accomplishment that will never be forgotten. In November of 68’ the Chicago chapter of The B.P.P. was founded by Fred Hampton, he was a strong leader. The accomplishment he had made was that...
Situating Sojourning for Freedom within the conceptual framework of “black left feminism,” McDuffie traces the political lives of black radical women such Claudia Jones, Grace Campbell, Williana Borroughs, and Audley “Queen Mother” Moore. The story begins in the 1920s with the conclusion of first wave of feminism through the 1970s with the beginning of third wave feminism. Originally McDuffie looks to study black communist women as a way to stabilize the “overwhelming attention to the church, women’s clubs, and the Garvey movement” that overshadows other brands of black women’s radical activity (6–7). Instead of observing these black communist women as individual activists, McDuffie chooses to demonstrate their activities as “part of a community of black women radicals whose collective history spanned more than fifty years” (7). With this work, he proposes an “alternative genealogy of twentieth century black feminism” which places the black women radicals, instead of civil rights, black power, and feminist movements as the foremost “progenitor for the black feminism of the 1960s and 1970s” (13).