What Is The Black Panther Party For Self Defense?
The formation of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was a direct response to the systematic and institutionalized racism suffered by the African American community over the course of the United States’ history. The unjust oppression of Blacks did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964; rather, the oppression took a different form: housing discrimination, disenfranchisement, job discrimination, segregation, police brutality, to name a few. Because these sorts of oppressions formed around the Black community, regardless of gender, the response to these oppressions was largely driven by men and women who did not place women’s rights and civil rights in the same arena, at least initially. The Black
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Power movement seemed to be driven by a desire to recapture the manhood of emasculated Blacks, even at the cost of equal treatment for women. While this certainly cannot be said about all chapters of the Black Panther Party—the Chicago and New York chapters were notable exceptions—a lack of respect for intersectionality, the ways in which different sorts of oppressions feed off and change each other, was crucial to the downfall of many 1960s era grassroots political organizations, including The Black Panther Party.
While Kimberlé Creshaw would not coin the feminist sociological theory until 1989, the seeds of intersectionality were already being sewn nearly a decade before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Sojourner Truth, an African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist, may have been one of the first on record to acknowledge the ways in which race and gender intertwine to create the unique oppression through which Black women live. On June 21, 1851, Truth attended the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, where she gave an extemporaneous speech addressing the ways in which the men in the audience spoke of offering women their rights, as if the women were delicate and helpless:
I want to say a few words about this matter… I have as much muscle as any man, and I can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? ... But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.
Unlike many of the upper-middle class white women in the audience, who would never have experienced firsthand anything remotely like the work Truth described, Truth came from a special intersection of oppression and experience because of her status as a Black woman.
Several years after Sojourner Truth’s speech in Akron, Ida B Wells, famous journalist, suffragette, and Civil Rights activist, published The Red Record, a pamphlet in which she documents the many lynchings suffered by the African-American community, the various ways White men tried to justify the lynchings, and the hypocrisies and fallacies of these justifications. Out of the three justifications Wells covered, the last is most crucial to the discussion of intersectionality: “the Negros had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon [white] women.” According to Wells, these sorts of assaults never occurred during slavery or “insurrection,” only beginning once white men needed a reason to “Blacken the name,” of former slaves:
To justify their own barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not possess; … no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstances placed in his power.
Lynching Black men and their families was a way for white-supremacists to protect the power structure, while the birthing of “mulatto” children proves an entirely different attitude toward Black women; while they were able to be lynched due to their skin color, they were also able to be objects of sexual desire by white men due to their gender. These two examples of Black women acknowledging the unique intersection between oppressions show that intersectionality as a concept existed long before the progressive parties of the 1960s and the Black Power movement. While the experiences of Sojourner Truth and Ida B Wells became the roots for the Black power movement, their intersectional approaches to the eradication of both racism and sexism seem to have been forgotten or overlooked in a movement that seemed bent on reclaiming traditional, patriarchal manhood for Black men. This can be seen plainly in Timothy B Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. One of the first visuals given in the book is that of a white police officer accosting a Black woman in Williams’ hometown, Monroe, North Carolina. The scene is characterized by the white police officer publicly and aggressively dragging a Black woman to jail, screaming as bits of her flesh ground away from contact with the pavement. Black men in the town merely hung their heads in awkward shame, not wanting to entangle themselves in a legal mess with the police officer either. Williams later retold this story as he drummed up support for his chapter of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina and the Black power movement as a whole. Black power rose out of direct confrontation with scenes like this, with men tired of doing too little to protect their communities, families, and children.
Thus, the idea of Black power came to a head in 1966 in Oakland with the formation of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale.
As outlined in the Black Panther’s Ten Point Program, the Black Panther Party mainly wanted self-determination for the Black community, having recognized that the system was set up against them; included on the Ten Point Program are demands as basic as employment, decent housing, proper housing, an end to police brutality, and fair trials for black prisoners. While these demands are made in reference to the Black community as a whole—not specifically to Black men—the actions of the newly formed party in Oakland suggested an almost regressive view towards women’s roles in the party and in the sought after self-determined Black communities. In its inception, the Black Panther Party was a male-only organization, one that advocated the supporting role of women in contrast to the active role of men. This is seen in first issue of the Party newspaper, The Black Panther, where founders Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver released an ad for the recruitment of new …show more content…
members:
The BLACK PANTHER PARTY FOR SELF-DEFENSE really has something going. These Brothers are the cream of Black manhood. They are there for the protection and defense of our Black community… BLACK MEN!!! It is your duty to your women and children, to your mothers and sisters, to investigate the program of the PARTY.
This advertisement shows the ways in which the early BPP called the men of the community to action, proclaiming it was essentially their duty as men to protect their women and children from harm, assuming of course that men were naturally better able to accomplish this end than women and children.
While it cannot be argued that Black men—indeed, the entire Black community—did not need building up at this point in the nation’s history especially badly after decades of too much struggle and too little progress, the choice to leave women out of the early revolution cannot be overlooked. Moreover, the decision to eliminate black women may have been due to more than an oversight on the founders’ parts: Newton and Cleaver seemed to assert in writings that black women were not only passive in the struggle for black liberation but that they were partly responsible for emasculating the black man, doing little more than waiting patiently for him to recover enough to protect the black
woman.
Some scholars have speculated that some of the male chauvinism present in the early meetings and activities of the Black Panther Party did not arise from the Party itself, but from the Party’s association with the Us Organization, founded and headed by Maulana Karenga. The Us Organization showed up to and supported many of the Black Panther Party’s events in the organization’s infancy, and Karenga’s organization advocated separate and often inequitable roles for men and women. While Karenga attended BPP events, Elaine Brown was told to wait until all of the male “warriors” had finished eating before she could begin, and Angela Davis, a prominent black scholar and civil rights and women’s rights activist, was dissuaded from pursuing a leadership role in the Party because she was a woman. However, as the BPP began to clarify its goals and beliefs, contradictions between its own beliefs and those of the Us Organization became more apparent, and the honeymoon phase for the two groups came to an end by 1970. Bobby Seale himself, upon the increased fracturing of the ties between the Us Organization and the BPP, denounced the blatantly sexist policies and practices of the Us Organization: “Cultural nationalists like Karenga are male chauvinists as well. What they do is oppress the Black woman. Their Black racism leads them to theories of male domination.”
The change in the Party through time
While the early sexism present in the Black Panther Party is startling, the rise of Black women to positions of power within the power brought change rapidly. In 1968, Eldridge Cleaver was notorious for describing himself as a rapist in his book Soul on Ice, in which he claims he “refined his technique for raping White women by ‘practicing’ on Black women,” a statement that, coupled with others, heavily suggests that Cleaver did not respect the rights of women to not have their bodies violated without permission, regardless of race. However, merely a year later when he was involved in the awareness campaign for Panther Ericka Huggins, Cleaver seemed to almost make a one-eighty: “Let it be a lesson and an example to… all of the brothers, that we must understand that our women are suffering strongly and enthusiastically as we are participating in the struggle… We go to great lengths to see to it that disciplinary action is taken on all levels against those who manifest male chauvinism behavior.”
The difference between Oakland and other chapters (Illinois, New York, New Haven, Des Moines)
Certainly, it cannot be said that the gender dynamics within the Party were uniform across the country. Rather, the Chicago chapter, the New York chapter, and chapters in Des Moines, Iowa and New Haven, Connecticut had chapters that were much more female-dominated than the Oakland chapter. In the Illinois Chapter of the Party, women were given prominent roles of leadership, such as leading programs and activities or serving as members of the Central Staff, a group of leaders in the community that made decisions on how the Party would run. Joan Gray, a prominent activist in Chicago, felt as if women were treated as the equals of men in the Chicago chapter: “It was a place where women rose to leadership… We learned how to lead organizations, how to build institutions, how to take charge, how to negotiate…We learned those skills in the Party along with the men.” Indeed, several women rose to prominent leadership positions
The reactions of some members to the chauvinism, driving them away (Njeri, Brown, Davis)
The desire of Blacks to regain control over their own communities from outside threats is understandable and a righteous cause, but focusing too heavily on lifting up the Black community by lifting up Black men—not necessarily Black women—is what may have contributed to the early end of progressive, anti-racism organizations like the Black Panther Party.
The experiences of many Black women within the Party do not reflect well on the Party’s view toward women, especially in the beginning. While it cannot be said that all chapters of the Black Panther Party
Power movement seemed to be driven by a desire to recapture the manhood of emasculated Blacks, even at the cost of equal treatment for women. While this certainly cannot be said about all chapters of the Black Panther Party—the Chicago and New York chapters were notable exceptions—a lack of respect for intersectionality, the ways in which different sorts of oppressions feed off and change each other, was crucial to the downfall of many 1960s era grassroots political organizations, including The Black Panther Party.
While Kimberlé Creshaw would not coin the feminist sociological theory until 1989, the seeds of intersectionality were already being sewn nearly a decade before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Sojourner Truth, an African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist, may have been one of the first on record to acknowledge the ways in which race and gender intertwine to create the unique oppression through which Black women live. On June 21, 1851, Truth attended the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, where she gave an extemporaneous speech addressing the ways in which the men in the audience spoke of offering women their rights, as if the women were delicate and helpless:
I want to say a few words about this matter… I have as much muscle as any man, and I can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? ... But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.
Unlike many of the upper-middle class white women in the audience, who would never have experienced firsthand anything remotely like the work Truth described, Truth came from a special intersection of oppression and experience because of her status as a Black woman.
Several years after Sojourner Truth’s speech in Akron, Ida B Wells, famous journalist, suffragette, and Civil Rights activist, published The Red Record, a pamphlet in which she documents the many lynchings suffered by the African-American community, the various ways White men tried to justify the lynchings, and the hypocrisies and fallacies of these justifications. Out of the three justifications Wells covered, the last is most crucial to the discussion of intersectionality: “the Negros had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon [white] women.” According to Wells, these sorts of assaults never occurred during slavery or “insurrection,” only beginning once white men needed a reason to “Blacken the name,” of former slaves:
To justify their own barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not possess; … no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstances placed in his power.
Lynching Black men and their families was a way for white-supremacists to protect the power structure, while the birthing of “mulatto” children proves an entirely different attitude toward Black women; while they were able to be lynched due to their skin color, they were also able to be objects of sexual desire by white men due to their gender. These two examples of Black women acknowledging the unique intersection between oppressions show that intersectionality as a concept existed long before the progressive parties of the 1960s and the Black Power movement. While the experiences of Sojourner Truth and Ida B Wells became the roots for the Black power movement, their intersectional approaches to the eradication of both racism and sexism seem to have been forgotten or overlooked in a movement that seemed bent on reclaiming traditional, patriarchal manhood for Black men. This can be seen plainly in Timothy B Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. One of the first visuals given in the book is that of a white police officer accosting a Black woman in Williams’ hometown, Monroe, North Carolina. The scene is characterized by the white police officer publicly and aggressively dragging a Black woman to jail, screaming as bits of her flesh ground away from contact with the pavement. Black men in the town merely hung their heads in awkward shame, not wanting to entangle themselves in a legal mess with the police officer either. Williams later retold this story as he drummed up support for his chapter of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina and the Black power movement as a whole. Black power rose out of direct confrontation with scenes like this, with men tired of doing too little to protect their communities, families, and children.
Thus, the idea of Black power came to a head in 1966 in Oakland with the formation of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale.
As outlined in the Black Panther’s Ten Point Program, the Black Panther Party mainly wanted self-determination for the Black community, having recognized that the system was set up against them; included on the Ten Point Program are demands as basic as employment, decent housing, proper housing, an end to police brutality, and fair trials for black prisoners. While these demands are made in reference to the Black community as a whole—not specifically to Black men—the actions of the newly formed party in Oakland suggested an almost regressive view towards women’s roles in the party and in the sought after self-determined Black communities. In its inception, the Black Panther Party was a male-only organization, one that advocated the supporting role of women in contrast to the active role of men. This is seen in first issue of the Party newspaper, The Black Panther, where founders Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver released an ad for the recruitment of new …show more content…
members:
The BLACK PANTHER PARTY FOR SELF-DEFENSE really has something going. These Brothers are the cream of Black manhood. They are there for the protection and defense of our Black community… BLACK MEN!!! It is your duty to your women and children, to your mothers and sisters, to investigate the program of the PARTY.
This advertisement shows the ways in which the early BPP called the men of the community to action, proclaiming it was essentially their duty as men to protect their women and children from harm, assuming of course that men were naturally better able to accomplish this end than women and children.
While it cannot be argued that Black men—indeed, the entire Black community—did not need building up at this point in the nation’s history especially badly after decades of too much struggle and too little progress, the choice to leave women out of the early revolution cannot be overlooked. Moreover, the decision to eliminate black women may have been due to more than an oversight on the founders’ parts: Newton and Cleaver seemed to assert in writings that black women were not only passive in the struggle for black liberation but that they were partly responsible for emasculating the black man, doing little more than waiting patiently for him to recover enough to protect the black
woman.
Some scholars have speculated that some of the male chauvinism present in the early meetings and activities of the Black Panther Party did not arise from the Party itself, but from the Party’s association with the Us Organization, founded and headed by Maulana Karenga. The Us Organization showed up to and supported many of the Black Panther Party’s events in the organization’s infancy, and Karenga’s organization advocated separate and often inequitable roles for men and women. While Karenga attended BPP events, Elaine Brown was told to wait until all of the male “warriors” had finished eating before she could begin, and Angela Davis, a prominent black scholar and civil rights and women’s rights activist, was dissuaded from pursuing a leadership role in the Party because she was a woman. However, as the BPP began to clarify its goals and beliefs, contradictions between its own beliefs and those of the Us Organization became more apparent, and the honeymoon phase for the two groups came to an end by 1970. Bobby Seale himself, upon the increased fracturing of the ties between the Us Organization and the BPP, denounced the blatantly sexist policies and practices of the Us Organization: “Cultural nationalists like Karenga are male chauvinists as well. What they do is oppress the Black woman. Their Black racism leads them to theories of male domination.”
The change in the Party through time
While the early sexism present in the Black Panther Party is startling, the rise of Black women to positions of power within the power brought change rapidly. In 1968, Eldridge Cleaver was notorious for describing himself as a rapist in his book Soul on Ice, in which he claims he “refined his technique for raping White women by ‘practicing’ on Black women,” a statement that, coupled with others, heavily suggests that Cleaver did not respect the rights of women to not have their bodies violated without permission, regardless of race. However, merely a year later when he was involved in the awareness campaign for Panther Ericka Huggins, Cleaver seemed to almost make a one-eighty: “Let it be a lesson and an example to… all of the brothers, that we must understand that our women are suffering strongly and enthusiastically as we are participating in the struggle… We go to great lengths to see to it that disciplinary action is taken on all levels against those who manifest male chauvinism behavior.”
The difference between Oakland and other chapters (Illinois, New York, New Haven, Des Moines)
Certainly, it cannot be said that the gender dynamics within the Party were uniform across the country. Rather, the Chicago chapter, the New York chapter, and chapters in Des Moines, Iowa and New Haven, Connecticut had chapters that were much more female-dominated than the Oakland chapter. In the Illinois Chapter of the Party, women were given prominent roles of leadership, such as leading programs and activities or serving as members of the Central Staff, a group of leaders in the community that made decisions on how the Party would run. Joan Gray, a prominent activist in Chicago, felt as if women were treated as the equals of men in the Chicago chapter: “It was a place where women rose to leadership… We learned how to lead organizations, how to build institutions, how to take charge, how to negotiate…We learned those skills in the Party along with the men.” Indeed, several women rose to prominent leadership positions
The reactions of some members to the chauvinism, driving them away (Njeri, Brown, Davis)
The desire of Blacks to regain control over their own communities from outside threats is understandable and a righteous cause, but focusing too heavily on lifting up the Black community by lifting up Black men—not necessarily Black women—is what may have contributed to the early end of progressive, anti-racism organizations like the Black Panther Party.
The experiences of many Black women within the Party do not reflect well on the Party’s view toward women, especially in the beginning. While it cannot be said that all chapters of the Black Panther Party