The Black Panther Party For Self-Defense (BPP)

During the late 1960s the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) took the nation and the world by storm. Styled in their black berets, black clothing, and leather jackets members of the BPP organized the Black community for a revolution. In October of 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale created the Black Panther Party Platform and Program What We Want, What We Believe a statement and doctrine which established the party as a politically revolutionary vehicle forever changing American history. Although in the past decade or so numerous amounts of articles, books and memoirs have been published in regards to the history of the Black Panther Party there have been no chronologically historical bodies of work established within the scholarship

Beginning with the creation of the Ten Point Platform and Program in 1966 established by Newton and Seale. The foundation of the Ten Point Platform and Program for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was based upon the theoretical frameworks of both Marxism and Black Nationalism. Following the media-frenzy storming of the California State Capitol to protest the Mulford Act of 1967, repealing the law allowing for public carrying of loaded firearms. The shooting of Officer John Frey and the succeeding manslaughter conviction brought upon Huey Newton in the People v. Newton case of 1967, then beginning the infamous “Free Huey” campaign. Following several assassinations of Panther members including most notably Bobby Hutton killed by police officers on April 6, 1968, and Fred Hampton also killed by police on December 4, 1969. These important events alongside the writings of Panther members most conspicuously, Newton, Cleaver and former Panther chairwoman Elaine Brown established an ongoing perspective where police brutality and the perpetuation of myths and other unrealistic notions of the party were emphasized. An example of this is largely generated in Newton’s autobiographical work Revolutionary Suicide where he is illustrated as a heroic figure and legend rather than a

Newton’s heavy drug use induced increasingly long periods of paranoia and violence in turn, facilitating a gang culture. That in which culminates the second period of BPP scholarship, the Hugh Pearson phenomenon phase. Pearson author of the game changing text, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the price of Power in Black America investigates the life of Huey Newton and his consequential actions in leadership which ultimately bring his fall and demise. Although the body of work has a very conservative tone it is important to note that the author Pearson was not a conservative yet, identified as an “independent thinker”. He narrates Newton as a community organizer, college student, intellectual and acquaintance of many “gangsters” Offering more gun-toting public defiance than political education, the Panthers grew popular among powerless Oakland blacks and sympathetic whites while cutting deals with local criminals. Pearson consistently offers shadings on a mythic history: Though police harassed the Panthers, the Party's ``breakfast programs'' also indoctrinated hatred of cops; though agents provocateurs did damage the Panthers, the party's fall was also hastened by the genuinely disillusioned within its own ranks; though Newton exhibited both a fierce intellect and sense