The Black Panther Party (BPP) was created as a way to organise the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s. As the movement gained traction, organizations formed across the United States. The most influential of these organisation was formed in Oakland, California by Heuy Newton and Bobby Seal. After an inspiring lecture by Malcom X, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence was created in October 1966.
BBP: The party’s original purpose was to patrol African American neighbourhoods to protect residents from acts of police brutality.
The Black Panther Party operated “survival programs” in poor black neighbourhoods, including schools, health-care clinics, and free-breakfast programs. At the height of the organisation’s influence in 1969, they were feeding thousands of children each week.
The Panthers started the Free Breakfast Program because hunger and poverty made it difficult for many poor black children to learn in school.
In the early days of the party Heuy Newton and Bobby Seal developed a set of goals that guided the party’s organisation’s activism. These goals were known as known as the Ten-Point Platform and Program. For each simply-stated point on the platform (“What We Want”), the founders outlined their reasoning (“What We Believe”). The original platform appeared for the first time in the Black Panther newspaper on May 17, 1967.
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The task is to transform society; only the people can do that - not heroes, not celebrities, not stars.
Huey P. Newton
The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Platform and Program
We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military by whatever means necessary.
We believe that all Black People should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical, and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and we are being, tried by all-White juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community.
The Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Platform summarized the utopian goals of the party. The organisation drew many parallels between challenges that led to the American revolution and the issues that faced African Americans at the time.