Civil Rights Movement: The Black Panther Party

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The Black Panther Party was created in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The movement thought of the black community as a colony within America and the police as occupying their space and violently controlling their own community (Bloom, 2013). Both Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, founders of the black panthers, were fueled to start a movement after the never-ending acts of police brutality (O’Boyle, 2013). As Meyer (2007) states “… for large social movements to emerge, people need to believe that participation in a protest movement is needed to get some part of they want that and that the movement might be effective, in other words, that protest is both necessary and potentially effective” (p.23). At this time, most civil right activists were …show more content…
Newton and Seale believed it was the time to start physically fighting back and if the government would not do it, they would patrol the police themselves.
The prominent event that forced Newton and Seale to begin to act on their beliefs was the assassination of Malcolm X. “When Malcolm X was gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem in February 1965, he came to symbolize the struggle for black liberation---everything the Civil Rights Movement promised but could not deliver” (Bloom, 2013, p.28). Seale was outraged and pleaded to Newton to help him begin an organization to fight back against the police and government (O’Boyle, 2013). In the beginning, there were only 14 Black Panther members including one woman. The members were trained for two months in gun safety, so they knew what their rights were and what was legal and what was not. After training, they began to walk around armed and patrol the police at night. In order to get more people involved in the Black Panther Party, they created a platform of 10 points that represented what they fought for in the movement. Many of these points talked about the fight against police brutality, while others talked …show more content…
By December of 1968, they had spread across the country with offices in twenty cities and then by the 1970s they had offices in about 68 cities in the United States (Bloom, 2013). In this time, media attention was helping the Black Panthers gain the most support and recruits. Bloom (2013) states “While the New York Panthers became heavily involved in issues of housing, schools, and welfare, as well as their program of political education, their conflicts with police were the activities that garnered the most media attention and mobilized allied support” (p.154). Young black students were the most motivated to join the Black Panthers even with the severe consequences that came attached. The party had many great leaders that influenced many young black intellectuals to find them and ask to join the organization themselves. When a young black person did not join, many of them still supported the Black Panthers. In a survey, about 43% of blacks under the age of 21 stated they heavily supported the Black Panther Party (Bloom, 2013). Many national security agencies were concerned by the amount of support the party had including the FBI and the CIA. “FBI director J. Edgar Hoover famously declared, ‘The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.’” (Bloom, 2013, p.3). Many people saw the Black Panthers as threatening, but they still had multiple
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