BLACK+PANTHERS

Civil Right s

BLACK PANTHERS BY: DEAN DICKSON •The Black Panther Party was founded in1966 in October

•The People who started it were Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton who were student activists at Merritt Junior College in Oakland, CA

•They were influenced by Malcolm X and the Black Power movement

•The BPP wanted to restructure the way of the American society

•The BPP was a black political organization and wanted to show that blacks had pride for being black

•This started what was called BLACK POWER which was a controversial term

•The term was used to describe the aspiration of Blacks to self-determination

•The Panthers wanted to show the american society what the blacks had done throughout history

•The BPP wanted to achieve social, political, and economical equality

•The Black Panthers wanted to support the impression that black people had the right to defend themselves against racist commands by any inescapable means, including brutality

•While what they supported was for a good case it additionally put them constantly at odds with local police and the FBI.

•The Panthers initiated patrols in black communities to monitor police activities and secure people averse to police brutality

•Also they formed structured affiliations with some of the white activists because they credited that all revolutionary groups with similar goals of reforming American Society should unite

•This caused the FBI to launch a team called COINTELPRO to restrain black militant groups from uniting and growing in mastery

•COINTELPRO is an acronym for a series of FBI counterintelligence programs

•It was designed to neutralize political dissidents

•Panther Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed by a police raid

•In 1967 Minister of defense Huey Newton was sent to prison for manslaughter after a shoot out in Oakland that killed an officer

•His incarceration started a “Free Huey” movement and in 1971 a CA Court of Appeals altered his conviction

•When Newton was released he wanted to turn the BPP away from encounters with the police to assemble support for the party.

•By the end of the 1960’s there were over 20 Panther members murdered

•There were many Panthers placed in prison for their acts

•Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver ran for president in 1968

•He fled the U.S.A. to avoid arrest because the FBI was close to being on him

• The BPP provided medical services and gave free food to schoolchildren

•After a couple of years they were serving over 10,000 students breakfast every day before school

•In 1968 Fred Hampton founded the Chicago chapter of the Panther Party

Works Cited

[] [|http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htm] []