The Black Panthers Essays - Politics, Black Power, Identity Politics

The Black Panthers center850008549640 January 8, 2017 Perspectives of homeland security Shea Trenary1000000 January 8, 2017 Perspectives of homeland security Shea Trenary The Black Panther Party, original name Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, African American revolutionary party, founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The Party's original purpose was to patrol African American neighborhoods to protect residents from acts of police brutality. At its peak in the late 1960's Panther membership exceeded 2,000 and the organization operated chapters in several major American cities. The Panthers eventually developed into what some call a Marxist revolutionary group that called the arming of all African Americans, the exemption of African Americans from the draft and from all sanctions of so-called white America. In the 1960's civil rights legislation that followed the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), African Americans living in cities across North America continued to suffer economic and social inequality. Poverty and reduced public services characterized these urban centers , where residents were subjected to poor living conditions, joblessness, chronic illness, violence, and limited means to change their circumstances. These contributed to the urban uprisings in the 1960's (such as those in the Watts district of Los Angeles in 1965, among others) and to increase use of police violence as a measure to impose order on cities throughout North America. The Federal Bureau of Investigation declared the group a communist organization and an enemy of the U.S. government. Hoover had pledged that 1969 would be the last year of the Black Panther Party and devoted th e resources of the FBI through COINTELPRO, toward that end. In a protracted program against the Black Panther Party, COINTELPRO used agent provocateurs, sabotage, misinformation, and lethal force to eviscerate the national organization. The FBI's campaign culminated in December 1969 with the headquarter of the Black Panther organization in which Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was killed. The measures taken by the FBI were so extreme that, years later when they were revealed, the director of the agency publicly apologized for "wrongful uses of power." In the 1970's radical scholar and activist Angela Davis became widely associated with Black Panthers, she never became a standing member of the party. She had strong connections with the party and taught political education classes for it. She initially gained notoriety in 1970 when the governor of California which at that time was Ronald Reagan led the Board of Regents in refusing to renew Davis's appointment as lecturer in philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, due to her politics and her association with the party. About the same time, Davis became involved in a case of three African American inmates at Soledad Prison who had been accuses of Murdering a guard. She became deeply involved with one of the inmates, George Jackson, whose younger brother's attempt on August 7.1970, to win Jackson's release by taking hostages in the Marin county courthouse went violently wrong. Four deaths resulted, and when at least one to of the guns proved to be re gistered to Davis , she fled charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder, she went underground and became on the FBI's Top Most Wanted Fugitives list. In 1998 there was a group of shotgun- and rifle toting New Black Panther Party members to Jasper, Texas in the wake of the murder of James Byrd Jr, a 49-year-old African American man who had been dragged behind a pickup truck by three members of the Ku Klux Klan. The New Black Panther Party also became known to the public through the Million Youth March it first organized in New York in 1998. On July 7, 2016, the FBI issued a "Potential Activity Alert," for "Violence Against Law Enforcement Officers and Riots planned for 8-10 July 2016 which is a day before 12 officers were ambushed and shot, killing 5 of them in Dallas Texas. The alert stemmed from social media threats, after the Alton Sterling shooting, after that incident the calling for a planned "purge to kill all cops in Baton Rouge July 9." Everything that has happened in the United States since this shooting there have been riots, blocking freeways and