The “black panther” movement
- Category: Texts
- Published: Monday, 13 February 2017 12:59
Fifty years ago, in mid-October 1966, some young, black people from Oakland (California), exasperated by constant police violence, started to patrol the streets of the ghetto, literally applying the state law on arms, which authorized pistols and guns to be carried on condition they were in full view and not aimed at anyone. This is how the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense came into being. These were the years of the civil rights movement and the repeated rebellions in US ghettoes and the Black Panthers took up the teachings of Malcolm X (who had been killed a little over a year previously), radicalising the positions that were the embryo of Black Power and combining Maoism, third-worldism and black nationalism. Very soon, the party grew to a national level with strong roots in the ghettoes of the main cities (as well as in the country’s prisons) and a project for organizing and creating political awareness in the lower layers of the black population, as well as for direct assistance to the community. State repression was not long in coming and proved ferocious: from infiltration by spies and ‘agents provocateurs’ to trials with prefabricated accusations, right up to the cold-blooded murder of many of the organization’s militants. The effective lifespan of the Black Panther Party was relatively short – ten years or so – and its decline was caused partly by state repression and partly by its original frailty and theoretical ambiguity and the attempt to offset this by an organization in which militarism prevailed over political content. In view of the renewed talk of the Black Panther Party [1] since the summer 2016 “Dallas shootings” (when a black sharpshooter shot and killed some white policemen), we believe it may be useful to re-publish the article that appeared in issue n. 5, 1971, of our Italian newspaper “Il programma comunista”, clearly establishing the reality and limits of the movement.
Read more ...