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What was the Black Panther Party?
Sunday January 26, 2003
The Black Panther Party was a black militant political group
founded in 1966 just a year after Malcolm X was assassinated,
riots exploded in Watts, a Los Angeles neighborhood, and protests
against U.S. policy in Vietnam spread across college campuses.
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale drafted the party's 10-point program
in Oakland, Calif. It called for employment, decent housing and
education, free health care, an end to police brutality and the
``power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed
communities.''
It also called for freeing black prisoners and demanded the
``overdue debt of 42 acres and two mules,'' promised as restitution
for slave labor.
The Panthers touted themselves as Marxist revolutionaries who
recognized that ``the only response to the violence of the ruling
class is the revolutionary violence of the people,'' according to
the Black Panther newspaper. They said they stood in solidarity
with Vietnamese against America, ``the world's chief imperialist.''
In 1967, Seale and a group of Panthers protested a gun control
bill by parading across the California state Capitol lawn with guns
in plain view, according to Stanford University historian Clayborne
Carson.
The FBI's counterintelligence program disrupted the Panthers,
and worsened conflicts between the party and other black
nationalist groups, Carson writes in a foreword to ``The Black
Panthers Speak.''
By the late 1960s, the Panthers had more than 5,000 members.
They established alliances with Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans,
whites and Chinese-Americans.
The Panthers also ran ``survival programs'' designed to meet the
everyday needs of black communities, Carson says. They included a
free breakfast program for children, free medical clinics,
groceries and alternative schools.
(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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