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A tribute to the Black Panther Party

By Larry Hales

Oakland is one of the poorest cities in California as well as the entire country. It holds the dubious distinction of having been dubbed the second most violent city in California after Compton, near Los Angeles. Both cities are predominately communities of color, primarily Black and Latin@ people.

Oakland has a poverty rate of over 18 percent; 27.9 percent of its youth under 18 live below the poverty line. In Compton the poverty rate is much higher. The per capita yearly income in 2000 was $10,389, with 28 percent of the population living below the poverty line; 35.6 percent of youth under 18 live below the poverty line.

Crime heavily affects both cities. Both areas are impoverished and the residents of color suffer from police repression, occupation and brutality. The “answer” given to the conditions from which despair arises is not different from what is happening in inner city areas across the country, where the poor and people of color have lived since “white flight” began over 30 years ago.

That “answer” is to build luxury homes and condos, retail shops and other amenities that tailor to middle-and upper-middle class whites who want to move back into the city centers. Poor people and people of color are pushed to the fringes of metropolitan areas in a “liberal” form of ethnic cleansing.

Oakland, of course, has a rich history of struggle. It conjures up in the minds of most Black people an era of great militancy and revolution—when the realities of ghetto life, of the Vietnam War’s toll on the whole country and the national liberation and revolutionary movements around the world contributed to the rising fervor in the U.S.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded in 1966 in Oakland, was a group so dangerous to the U.S. ruling class that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover labeled it “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.”

The BPP was a vanguard organization fighting for self-determination for the Black nation in the U.S., but evolved over its short existence to adopt a thoroughgoing anti-imperialism, as a way for humanity to free itself from the cycles of war and oppression.

The founding document of the BPP was the Ten Point Platform and Program, which stated as the first desire and goal:

• We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community. And,

• We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

The Ten Point Platform and Program also called for “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace” and wanted exemption of Black people from military service that used Black people to “fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America.”

Rebellions and survival programs

The BPP was founded by the great revolutionary leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and was initially established to expose and fight against police brutality in Oakland.

By 1967 there had been over 100 rebellions in cities across the U.S. Many took place in some of the poorest, most oppressed and repressed cities. The rebellions were an outgrowth of the social conditions and the many contradictions rooted in capitalist society. The antagonisms that exist between the rulers and the workers and nationally oppressed were being displayed.

The BPP was partly molded after the Deacons for Defense and the armed self-determination struggle opened up by the great revolutionary Robert F. Williams, in that it asserted the right of the oppressed to defend themselves with arms against the oppressor.

Huey P. Newton would call attention to the fact that the Vietnamese people and the Black masses were fighting the same oppressor and that the struggles of the two were linked.

Many organizations that mirrored the sentiment of the BPP began to develop from other oppressed nationalities, like the Latin@-based Young Lords. Support groups of the BPP were formed by white revolutionaries and other Panther allies.

The groups that mirrored the Panthers were not simply attracted to the militancy of the Panthers. They took inspiration from the many programs established by the BPP to look after the health and well-being of Black communities, such as the free breakfast program.

There were 35 such initiatives and they came to be known as survival programs. They were not attempts to reform the system, but examples of what is possible for humanity. They were humane programs and necessary alternatives to the system, as the government of the capitalist rulers did not provide these services.

The programs were of great pride in the communities in which they flourished and were provided for under the slogan “survival pending revolution.” Some would denigrate the Panthers for organizing these programs, not understanding that the immediate needs of the people had to be met while fighting for revolutionary change.

The Free Breakfast for Children Program fed thousands. The federal government eventually co-opted the idea, while attacking the Black Panther Party’s program as being a communist agenda. While capitalist propaganda made communism out to be the great evil, imperialist aggression, an objective outgrowth of capitalism, inflamed the whole world and rained down bombs, death and destruction from Oakland to Southeast Asia.

Eventually, the brutal assault of the federal government broke the back of the BPP. Members were hunted down, framed up and imprisoned, and systematically assassinated.

The FBI created Cointelpro, an insidious program contrived to destroy national liberation and civil rights movements in the U.S., socialist and communist parties and anti-war groups. One of its main targets was the Black Panther Party.

Cointelpro was used to infiltrate the Panthers, pit members against one another, bribe, cajole, plant evidence and use every mechanism under the sun to keep the U.S. rulers’ tenuous stranglehold on workers and the oppressed from being cast off.

It is believed by many that the FBI also introduced heroin into Black communities, not far-fetched considering the toll the drug took on oppressed communities.

Though the original BPP no longer exists, its history provides lessons and examples for today’s struggle. The U.S. capitalist rulers have become more militarily adventuristic abroad and conditions of life are becoming more intolerable for the masses at home.

What will give the movements of the workers and the oppressed a boost of energy and deepen the people’s understanding of the intransigent antagonism of a common enemy? It is the theory of what is possible when the workers seize real power, based on the theories of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin along with other great socialist revolutionaries and national liberation fighters.

And, for the oppressed Black nation, a shining example was the heroic Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

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