The Panthers used to ride around and follow the police.
So the cops would pull over some sorry black person, and get ready to rough him up, but then there were the Panthers right behind them. Watching, armed to the teeth, and citing legal statutes. It’s inspirational.
Bring it back.
Bring this back.
For real.
That’s why the FBI broke them up, isn’t it ?
That among other community initiatives. They had weapons training, self defense, their free breakfast program and ran a newspaper. They raised money to pay for bail and legal funding for people. And they used to notify the community of their rights and encourage people to know the laws and protest the one which were unjust. That type of shit irked the local police and damned sure struck a nerve with the FBI. They were taking back the streets and providing the protection the police were never interested in bringing to their neighborhoods from the very start. So it’s always fuck the FBI for me.
Also let’s be starkly clear about this: under COINTELPRO the FBI raided the homes of Black Panthers and outright murdered them. They conspired with local police forces to harass, assault, and concoct false evidence against anybody affiliated with the BPP. And they didn’t keep their operations confined to the black community directly. When a white woman working in civil rights was killed by the KKK (they were aiming at her black passenger) the FBI excused the KKK by claiming that she was a communist and slept with black men. They refused to accept the reports of white agents who said that the BPP were no threat and demanded that the agents falsify information to paint the BPP as violent domestic terrorists. The FBI was determined to quash revolutionary black movements that were chiefly devoted to community protection and development and they stopped at nothing in their attempts to reach this goal.
One thing we don’t talk about even in our own retellings and reclaimings of BPP history is that a large part of the reason the government worked to break them up wasn’t because of armed action, but because they provided so many necessary social services and programs: free breakfast for children, walking the elderly to and from banks safely to cash their social security checks, free medical centers, door-to-door sickle cell testing, blood drives, raising money for bail, clothing donations, legal aide, busing people to and from prisons to visit, commissary for prisoners. Not only did they fight back against state violence in their confrontations with police, but also by resisting the forced conditions of poverty, criminality and scarcity created by the state to further destroy their communities. J. Edgar Hoover genuinely wrote in an FBI memo that:
“The Breakfast for Children Program B represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities B to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”
When I need a good example of the antiblackness that is fundamental to this country’s history and how it persists even now, I remember that the BPP were viewed as a threat to national security, not because they were armed, but because they wouldn’t allow black children to die from starvation and malnutrition.
Desperate, hungry people are easier to control and keep subjugated.
Desperate, hungry people are more likely, in their desperation and hunger, to lash out at those closest to themselves rather than the more distant, often unseen causes of their misery.
Desperate, hungry people are easier to keep turned against each other.
1. The Black Panthers were birth like any revolution out of a necessity for change.
2. The symbolism of the Panther wasn’t just because black is beautiful.
3. In 1966, at Merritt College, Huey P. Newton & Bobby Seale created The Black Panthers.
4. After the Watts Riots of 1965, and inspired by Robert Williams’ Negroes with Guns, the organization’s intentions were to empower the black community.
5. And they did so in congruence with the law.
6. But as the law would have it…
7. But this was still a telling moment as to how politically powerful the Panthers were even at an early stage.
Commercial Break
8.
But the Panthers forged forward because this was about protecting their communities, even though they were facing the unchecked police.
9. The Panthers were considered to be a terrorist organization though.
10. And then things changed.
11. And 2 days after MLK’s assassination, the Panthers’ first recruit Bobby Hutton was gunned down. He was 17yo.
