As a radical movement, the Black Panthers instilled fear in America at large, especially when members of the Black Power movement marched on the capital of California in Sacramento. The Black Panthers marched with guns to protest and testify to the prevalent police brutality against blacks in Oakland predicated on the rationale that if African Americans did not have the right to self-defense then they had no right to self-termination. As a result, the police were angered and seemingly had the opposite of the intended effects. Popular discourses proffered an image of Africans Americans carrying guns in the Black Panthers as representative of the tumultuous year of 1968 along with the image of bombs and napalm dropping in Vietnam and women throwing off their bras a protesting the “Miss America” contest. The first gun control act unsurprisingly was passed as a result of the Panther’s demonstration with guns strapped onto their shoulders in 1968. In contrast to the earlier time period in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars argue that a new type of politics emerged that are more radical and more militant, which the Black Panthers march on Sacramento with guns strapped to their shoulders. This paradigm shift took place because the Civil Rights act of 1964 stated that equality was the law in the United States, but it does not get rid of the structural racism that was present in the United States.
The Black Panther Party was founded for the purpose of self-defense against an institutional system that itself was trying to kill them. It was founded by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and David Hilliard, who were immediately rendered enemies of the state by J. Edgar Hoover despite the fact that they were very young and just in community college. In the eyes of the state, the so-called free breakfast program was threatening in 1969, which was inaugurated in the black church. By December of 1969, the Black Panthers were feeding 10,000 kids everyday and every morning in the United States. Hoover said such a program was dangerous because these kids would start thinking, becoming radicalized, get mad as a result. As such, the FBI worked to dismantle this program and discursively rendered the Black Panthers terrorists. As such, civil rights advocates created schools in the Black Panther framework, which continues to take place in the present day even. The “Doc your Block Project” refers to a study of neighborhoods from a sociological framework that created documentary films that bridged popular culture.
During this time period in which the Black Panthers were at their apex during the Civil Rights movement, there is a sense of disorder as a result of the radical movements including the Red power, the Chicano movement, Black Panthers, and the women liberation movement. People were engaging in radical politics because there is no respect for authority as various social groups directly disrespected the state. During the 1970s, various criminal prosecutions and trials took place waged against the Black Panther Party, which galvanized many members of the political Left not only from the within the Civil Rights Movement but also the salient social and cultural movements against racial injustice. As a revolutionary socialist organization that has been characterized as “Black Nationalist” in nature and was active between 1966 and 1982 in the United States, the Black Panther Party was primarily concerned in arming its members with the tools to challenge police brutality waged against subaltern groups.
Works Cited
Barker, Thomas. Black and White: The Liberal Media and the Ideology of Black Victimhood. CounterPunch, 2015. Print.
Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty!: An American History. Seagull Third ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print.
“Hoover and the FBI.” Luna Ray Rilms, LLC. PBS.org. Accessed April 28, 2015.
O’Reilly, Kenneth. Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972. Free Press, 1991.
