Black Panther Party

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Black Panther Party
Party leader Huey Newton
founding 1966
resolution 1982
Alignment Anti-capitalism ,
Marxism-Leninism ,
anti-imperialism ,
Maoism ,
Black Power

The Black Panther Party (BPP; originally Black Panther Party for Self-Defense ) was a socialist revolutionary movement of " black nationalism " in the USA .

The organization founded in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale with the help of David Hilliard and Richard Aoki was particularly active in the 1960s and 1970s. Eldridge Cleaver joined the Panthers in December 1966. The party was formed to provide armed resistance to social oppression in the interests of African American justice, but the party's goals and philosophy changed radically over time.

Beginnings

In the history of racism against African Americans in the United States, the 1960s saw the largest civil rights movements among the black population. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were among the best-known civil rights activists of these years.

The assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 sparked serious unrest across the country, in the course of which over 300 blacks were killed by the military and police. Two young black people in West Oakland, California, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale , then founded the Black Panthers Party for Self-Defense in early 1966 to implement Malcolm X's ideas. To this end, they distributed a 10-point program among the population with the following demands:

  1. Freedom and self-determination
  2. Employment,
  3. an end to exploitation ,
  4. decent housing ,
  5. a reformed education system ,
  6. exemption from military service ,
  7. an end to arbitrary police violence,
  8. the release of all Afro-American prisoners for discrimination during the negotiations,
  9. fair trials before African American jurors and by African American prosecutors as well
  10. a referendum among the black population about their national fate

Shortly thereafter, over 100 members were registered. The group brought out its own magazine, The Black Panthers, Black Community News Service, with a circulation of 5,000. This organ grew up to 125,000 pieces. She organized social projects such as breakfast for all children, health stations , legal advice and, in some cases, the fight against drug dealers and pimps.

One of the most prominent speakers for the Black Panther Party was Angela Davis , who joined the BPP for a short time in 1969.

Propagation of movement and dissolution

BPP member at an event in Washington in 1970

In October 1967 the co-founder Huey Newton was shot by the police in Oakland and threatened during the operation. Shortly thereafter, he was arrested and charged with the murder of a police officer. This arrest sparked a wave of protests in which whites also participated. The number of members grew rapidly, and local groups were formed across the country. Other minorities also grouped, and letters of sympathy and funds came from abroad.

In 1968, the addition of self-defense was deleted because the panthers no longer had to hide from the police or the state, which came back to strike back. The FBI ( COINTELPRO program) began to infiltrate local chapters and arbitrarily arrest individual members and bring them to court with false and genuine statements. The chief of the agency, J. Edgar Hoover , described the group as the greatest threat to national security .

Two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, panther member Bobby Hutton was killed. The wave of arrests rolled on. Gun violence also escalated. In early 1969, three other members were killed and two injured by FBI agents. In December, Chicago chapter chairman Fred Hampton and one other member of the Black Panther were killed and three other members, including the pregnant fiancé Hamptons, injured.

Illegal house searches and arrests alternated with retaliatory strikes by the Panthers. Police officers and FBI agents broke into the health stations and destroyed medicines or broke up the breakfast rounds. The arrests (740) and the bail payments (around five million US dollars ) in 1968 and 1969 alone emptied the groups' coffers. Many actions had to be discontinued, as did most of the proceedings, some of them only years later. Between 1967 and 1970 around 40 members were killed and over 85 seriously injured. Former Black Panthers - like Ruchell "Cinque" Magee, who was arrested with Angela Davis - are still in jail today because they received life sentences.

At the beginning of the 1970s there were around 100 local groups. The manipulations by the FBI, such as forged letters with threats, infiltration, and drug supplies, showed the first tensions. Huey Newton, who had only recently been released from prison after the murder charges were finally dropped, and most members of the board of directors increasingly got into disputes with local groups, especially on the east coast. This led to the Black Panthers splitting into two factions in 1971. One spoke in favor of legal work in the districts, the other in favor of armed struggle. Ten years later, the movement ceased to appear in public, the number of members fell to below 30, and it was considered dissolved since 1982.

Newer development

In 1989 a " New Black Panther Party " was founded in Dallas , Texas. Members of the original party denied any connection.

In 2007, Francisco Torres and eight other men, aged around 60, were arrested by the FBI in California, New York and Florida on suspicion of being involved in bank robberies and raids on police stations while serving with the Black Panthers.

In November 2015, 40 members of the "New Black Panther Party" demonstrated in the streets of Austin, Texas for the armed resistance and equipment of their own black guard.

ideology

The Black Panther Party was programmatically anti-imperialist. While the leaders based their rhetoric on revolutionary class struggle and borrowed many ideas from the works of Marx , Lenin and Mao , the party's nationalist reputation attracted contradicting people, so that the orientation of the organization was never uniform and there were often marked differences between grassroots and grassroots Leadership came. Some of the members migrated to the Black Liberation Army , a radical splinter group. The Black Panther Party adopted anti-Semitic stereotypes that were virulent in the radical left and attacked, among other things, Zionism as “Kosher nationalism”, which is financed through Jewish gold mines in South Africa.

influence

The name Black Panthers influenced later founded clubs and movements with regard to their name:

  • Polynesian Panthers, a Māori advocacy group in New Zealand
  • Black Panthers, a protest movement within Israel who are against discrimination of Mizrahi directed
  • White Panthers, anti-racist groups in the US and England
  • The Pink Panthers, two LGBT groups that referred to the Black Panthers on the one hand and the Pink Panther on the other when they were named .

literature

  • Franziska Meister: Racism and Resistance. How the Black Panthers Challenged White Supremacy. transcript, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-8376-3857-8 .
  • Jane Rhodes: Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon. University of Illinois, Champaign 2017, ISBN 978-0-252-08264-1 .
  • Joshua Bloom, Waldo E. Martin Jr .: Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. University of California, Oakland 2016, ISBN 978-0-520-29328-1 .
  • Mumia Abu-Jamal : We want freedom. A life in the Black Panther Party. Unrast, Münster 2012, ISBN 978-3-89771-044-3 .
  • Oliver Demny: The Panther's Anger. The history of the Black Panther Party - Black Resistance in the USA. Münster 2nd edition 2004 ISBN 3-89771-003-X .
  • Mark A. Thiel: How many more years? 2000 ISBN 3-926529-22-9 .
  • Editorial collective “Right On” (Ed.): Black Power. Interviews with (ex-) prisoners from the militant black resistance . On the history of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army . Edition ID-Archiv , Berlin 1993 ISBN 3-89408-031-0 full texts .
  • Peter M. Michels: Uprising in the Ghettos. Fischer, Frankfurt 1972.
  • George Jackson: A fire in hearts . Scherz, Munich 1971.
  • Gerhard Amendt (Ed.): Black Power, Documents and Analyzes . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1970.
  • Michael "Cetewayo" Tabor: Harlem: Capitalism & Heroin = Genocide. Edited by Black Panther Solidarity Committee, Roter Stern, Frankfurt 1970 (also contains the 10-point program of the Black Panther Party from October 1966).
  • Eldridge Cleaver : Soul on Ice . Hanser, Munich 1969.
  • C. Schuler: Black Panther . Trikont, Munich undated (1969).

Movies

Web links

Commons : Black Panther Party  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peniel Joseph: Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America . Henry Holt, 2006, p. 219.
  2. ↑ William L. Van deburg: New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 . University of Chicago Press, p. 155.
  3. ^ Mark A. Thiel: How Many More Years? Life imprisonment in the US: Ruchell Cinque Magee
  4. ^ Margo V. Perkins: Autobiography As Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000
  5. ↑ Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation: "There Is No New Black Panther Party: An Open Letter From the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation" ( Memento from April 1, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau online on February 5, 2007
  7. ↑ http://worldtruth.tv/new-black-panther-party-wants-to-arm-every-us-black-male
  8. ↑ Stephen H. Norwood: Antisemitism and the American Far Left. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2013, ISBN 978-1-107-03601-7 , pp. 1f.