ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
The Civil Rights Movement, which was at its height in the late 1850s and 1860s, was a time of national anger, resentment, and resistance, but it is also noted for the rise in black hope and pride. As people collaborated to stop racial discrimination against African-Americans, many organizations emerged to focus the nation on deep-seated racial issues and to force social change. Active organizations of this period, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Congress of Racial Equality, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, supported nonviolent protest, civil disobedience, and direct action, which were essential in the struggle against racism and injustice, but another organization with much more leftist ideals also brought forth the significance of black identity and defense against racial oppression: the Black Panther Party (BPP). Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the BPP in 1966 to protect and represent the oppressed black race and to protest and stop antidemocratic practices against blacks.[1] Blacks attempted to peaceably protest against the denial of their civil and human rights, but they were only met with violence from whites. The police did not protect blacks from this brutality and often perpetuated it, so blacks were left with no other option except to defend themselves.[2] BPP aimed to expose the hypocrisy of a society that professed ideals that it denied African-Americans and to liberate blacks through confrontations with government power and programs made by blacks for blacks.[3] Its commitment to using any means necessary to achieve justice created an inaccurate perception of BPP as a destructive, unpatriotic, and dangerous group because in reality, the BPP was crucial in furthering many of its and the larger Civil Rights movement’s goals by challenging the meaning of equality through the exposure of injustice. Although the government and media repeatedly condemned the organization for its methods and programs, these criticized efforts were essential in uplifting the black race.
BPP’s Ten-Point Program, a political program calling for employment, education, decent housing, and peace amongst other demands, not only exposed the basic needs of the black community, but it also demanded the specific rights and privileges that blacks had been denied for years. By pinpointing the exact items that BPP hoped to gain for the race, both blacks and whites were forced to look at the issues listed and the plans to address and solve them. The first demand BPP made was “freedom [and the] power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.”[4] Even though constitutional amendments had been made for blacks, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment, it was still not enough; white backlash to these advances prevented effective enforcement of legal protection of blacks and once again forced the race under whites’ authority. The United States, a nation based on the niggerization, which Cornel West, a civil rights activist, defines as the dishonoring and devaluing of black people and the economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement of them,[5] of African peoples, continued to neglect the value and power of an entire race and the BPP aimed to attain the long-overdue recognition of blacks as humans with rights.[6] With recognition, blacks hoped to gain “employment… and decent land, bread, housing, education, clothing” and there will be an “end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.”[7] Point seven and ten of the program highlighted the disparity of the living conditions between whites and blacks. Not only did blacks receive inferior quality items and treatment, they were also forcibly segregated from whites, enforcing the physical and supposed mental differences between the races. Public pronouncement of whites’ longstanding ill treatment of blacks serves to teach blacks that they deserved and can achieve a productive life that was equal in quality to that of whites, and to criticize whites for their intolerable oppression. |
[1] Clayborne Carson, Civil Rights Chronicle: The African-American Struggle for Freedom (Lincolnwood, IL: Publications International, Ltd., 2003), 324.
[2] Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville, ARK: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 2. [3] Judson L. Jeffries, Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 2-3. [4] BPP, “The Ten-Point Program” (circa 1966); quoted in Jim Haskins, Power to the People: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party (New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 1997), 20. [5] Cornel West, “Niggerization,” The Atlantic, 2007. [6] David Hilliard and The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), ix. [7] Haskins, 22-3. |