Books and Opinions About the Black Panthers

Can anyone at du give me some suggestions on good books about the Black Panthers? In addition, what is your opinion of the Black Panthers? A few years ago I was told that at one point the Black Panthers had some success in trying to institue some program in the Black Community that help to get young black kids fed and educated. From your knowledge is that true? Finally, in your opinion what caused the Black Panthers to become radical if they ever were not radical?

that had the government very angry at them. They weren't the only group to protest the war though. The government was in Vietnam illegally like the war in Iraq now. They lied us into war like now.

They had a draft and many young in the country did not to go to war. Many were just at college age and never did recover from the war to go on to a better life.

For holding that position most of them were killed across America by the police. While they were sleeping usually.

I remember when it was happening.

Don

Edit to add:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Clark_(Black_Panther)

The December 4th Raid

Some family members and friends say Mark Clark knew he would be assassinated in Chicago . In the pre-dawn hours of December 4, 1969, Chicago Police stormed into the apartment of BPP State Chairman Fred Hampton at 2337 W. Monroe Street, killing both Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, and causing serious bodily harm to Verlina Brewer, Ronald Satchel, Blair Anderson and Brenda Harris.

Fred Hampton and Deborah Johnson, who was eight and one-half months pregnant with their child, were sleeping in the south bedroom. Ronald "Doc" Satchel, Blair Anderson and Verlina Brewer were asleep in the north bedroom. Brenda Harris was sleeping on a bed by the south wall of the living room, and Harold Bell slept on a mattress on the floor in the middle of the room. Louis Truelock was also lying on the bed with Harris. Mark Clark was asleep in a chair in the living room. The raiders first shot Mark Clark in the heart. Clark's gun went off as he fell, according to Brenda Harris, who watched from the bed in the corner. A federal grand jury determined that the police fired between 82 and 99 shots while most of the occupants lay sleeping. Only one shot was proven to have come from a Panther gun.

Just like the militias who are all but gone today. Tim McVeigh "incident" and bombing in OK stopped them.

It's a long term attempt to bring a police state and a world government by the Neo Cons. People see that now.

Read: Tim McVeigh article in Vanity Fair by Gore Vidal.

Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver. The original BP's were a fabulous group of radicals. Read "Soul on Ice."

They never talk about that stage in the country. I remember the riots since we could heard the gun shots from my apartment in Buffalo.

You'll find out more about the Black Panthers by learning what the FBI did to them. They were a good group, militant in a time when militancy was trendy, but they did some very fine things: breakfast programs for poor kids, Big Brother-type placements, and a consistent emphasis on education as a way to better one's situation in life.

I recommend a book called "Seize The Time," by Bobby Seale. Also, "The Black Panther," by David Hilliard.

is "The Black Panthers," by Gene Marine (Signet; 1969).

Also worth reading is "Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement," by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall (South End; 1988).

there are reviews and a listmania guide for all of them. Have fun.

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Panthers-Speak-Philip-Foner/dp/0306806274

The originals were commies, mostly. Their breakfast program for little kids was so popular among the Black community that it got them onto J. Edgar's list as "the most dangerous group in America". It was obvious to Hoover that the Panthers were beginning to unify the Black community and the White power structure wasn't going to be having with any of that! N*****s were supposed to do the scut work in America and keep their mouths shut. So the Panthers became the Number One target of CHAOS and COINTELPRO (the AIM was Number Two).

The surviving members of the Panthers have nothing good to say about the ones who've recently hijacked their name and logo and are now exploiting the good will it still has among those who were around back then.

of the day)?

They were certainly marxists, and they did do the breakfast program. Or maybe the two things were unrelated. I never knew anyone who was part of the leadership, so I have no information about their thinking.

compassionate and gracious (to me) activists.

And they were militant.

The anti-globalist militia were called militants too. They disarmed them and are trying to do the same to the rest of the country. They ruined our National Guard and sent them to Iraq and Afghanistan to destroy them.

Is this not scary or what?

Impeach Cheney first and then Bush.

I just picked up my 19-year-old daughter and she asked me a question about the elections and I went off on Cheney, Bush, and the whole rotten lot of 'em. It doesn't take much to get me started on a long diatribe against the evil sons-o'-bitches! Why, I could go on for hours, it seems...

I have news for them. We all go down together...they will have no were to hide.

The BPs were very controversial, and you're going to hear more opinion than fact. Also, it happened a long time ago, and unless the person responding to you is older than his/her mid 40s, you won't be hearing about it from first hand experience and in context.

The first thing I think you need to understand is the context. By 1968-1972, the country and much of the world was on the verge of a revolution. That's why groups like the BPs, which sound kind of whacked out today, didn't sound as crazy. A lot of young people thought there was going to be a revolution, and the main question was: which groups were going to lead it.

The United States was losing a war for the first time. The troops were in open mutiny (kinda like Russia 1917). Many of the troops who weren't disobeying orders were getting too stoned to fight. In 1968, there were uprisings in Black communities and by young people on college campuses across the country, but there were also uprisings in Mexico City, Paris, even behind the "Iron Curtain" in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and even in China with the Cultural Revolution being a kind of youth rebellion that Mao coopted, expanded and exploited.

Every attempt by (small d) democratic forces in the United States had been blocked through the most violent means -- assassination. JFK had been killed, Malcolm had been killed, MLK had been killed and RFK had been killed, and despite what "conspiracy theory" "debunkers" say today, in 1969, most people weren't buying the idea that these were random killings by "lone gunmen."

The BP actually had its origins in those democratic forces. Earlier in the 1960s, as part of MLK's coalition, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had gone to the deep south to register voters. Instead, they were beaten, jailed, bombed and even killed.

At that point, many SNCC members began asking whether non-violence really could work against such blatant, widespread racist violence. Surely, they thought, they and the Black voters they were trying to organize in Mississippi could at least defend themselves, using the guns that almost every rural family, even rural Black families, already owned.

SNCC had tried everything peaceful to register voters. Every time, their registration forms were rejected. They tried to create a Mississippi delegation elected by Black voters to be seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, only to see LBJ use every political resource at the disposal of the presidency to prevent them from being seated.

Finally, in 1966, under the leadership of SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, they tried an experiment in Lowndes County, Alabama, creating a separate political party from the Democrats, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.

Under Alabama law, every political party had to have an emblem of some sort. The white Democratic Party had a white rooster as its emblem.

The Lowndes County Freedom Organization chose a black panther as its emblem. That group, not the Los Angeles group of radicals with shady backgrounds, was the real origin of the "Black Panther Party." As Carmichael humorously put it:

“ In Lowndes County, we developed something called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. It is a political party. The Alabama law says that if you have a Party you must have an emblem. We chose for the emblem a black panther, a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people...Now there is a Party in Alabama called the Alabama Democratic Party. It is all white. It has as its emblem a white rooster and the words "white supremacy" for the write. Now the gentlemen of the Press, because they're advertisers, and because most of them are white, and because they're produced by that white institution, never called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization by its name, but rather they call it the Black Panther Party. Our question is, Why don't they call the Alabama Democratic Party the "White Cock Party"? It's fair to us...”

The Black Panther Party of Lowndes County eventually registered more members than the white Lowndes County Democratic Party -- the number of registered black voters rose from 70 to 2,600 — 300 more than the number of registered white voters. But still the people of Lowndes County weren't allowed to vote.

Shortly thereafter a radical group in Los Angeles, inspired by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization/Black Panther Party named themselves the "Black Panther Party." But their goals were always more radical, and their methods were, from a contemporary perspective, bound to provoke violent responses from the police. Although they had a well written socialist political program, what they actually seemed to focus on to get press attention, was to march in public places heavily armed, for the right to use violence to defend the Black community from police violence -- a stance pretty much guaranteed to provoke fire fights with the LAPD, which is indeed what happened.

Ironically, the Black Panther Party of California recruited Stokely Carmichael to become its "Prime Minister," pretty much ending the much more populist and practical Black Panther Party/Lowndes County Freedom Organization of Alabama, and its voter registration efforts.

The BP of California operated in the context of many more radical organizations -- radical politically and culturally -- and got caught up in the unrealistically revolutionary atmosphere of the late 1960s and 1970s. But their focus on arms and self-defense pretty much guaranteed that the FBI and LAPD treated them as though they were an armed gang and used all the resources of every level of government to infiltrate, provoke, arrest, prosecute, convict or murder its leadership.

I'm mac2 and a senior...look at my posts.

thanks for all that info.

http://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/

"I was told that at one point the Black Panthers had some success in trying to institue some program in the Black Community that help to get young black kids fed and educated... Finally, in your opinion what caused the Black Panthers to become radical if they ever were not radical?"

Educating black children was a radical idea at the time.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0210482/

Thats a great place to start learning about the Black Panthers

In the 60's the police were absolutely brutal to inner city blacks and they basically took up arms to defend themselves.

They did other things to help the community.. free breakfast for children, food banks, free medical care, etc etc

This was viewed by the US government (specifically the FBI) as a major threat to the power establishment.

Pretty much every leader of the Panthers were either murdered by police or framed/railroaded and put in prison.

I highly recommend that documentary.

I attended an inner city high school in the late 60s. The black students were definitely discriminated against in the school. They were disciplined harshly for things that white kids were not. There were demonstrations and lock-downs in the school and general tension and unrest.

The Black Panthers came to the school and had a demonstration that scared the crap out of the administration. And things started changing right away. Some students joined the Panthers and were instrumental in establishing a Black Student Union. The BSU negotiated with the administration and that resulted in changes in the administration, a structure for discussion, and an end to blatant discrimination.

The Black Panthers brought to a volatile situation, focus, organization and respect. All of a sudden there was a "new group" in school - black students who were "cool" because they were now Panthers and exhibited pride and status. The new order that brought stability was due to the black students operating from a position of power rather that being dumped on.

What I saw then I realize was sort of a miracle and it was a microcosm of what the "establishment" feared the most - inclusion and equality.
I consider the destruction of the Black Panthers on a par with the assassinations of the time. They were infiltrated and destroyed.
Then as now, I saw the radicalism as a statement of unequivoval power that belongs to every black person just as it is assumed to belong to every white person.

This is of course a personal experience. Others can give you the bigger picture.

Most of the bad press about them is just that - bad press. The government was not going to allow a Black Power movement to be admired.

Seniors fighting for health care, etc. Are they still active today?