Huey Newton's Influence On The Black Panthers

Within the 1950s, the Black Panthers were an organization not even thought of at the time, the main focus would have been on Martin Luther King Jr. and his struggle for civil rights within the American South. These events would have been seen by people like Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and may have been a small contributing factor as to why they wanted to stop racial profiling within the North. In 1959, Huey P. Newton had just finished high school, where as Bobby Seale, the co-founder of the party had just come out of the Air-force and was earning his high school diploma at night up until 1962 at Merritt College, (where the two eventually met) Oakland. These two factors may reveal as to how and why both Seale and Newton believed that education …show more content…
However the Panthers were not fully recognised until May 2nd, 1967 when Newton and 30 other Panthers marched into the California state legislature with loaded rifles. This act was really the turning point for the Panthers, as many had realised that the struggle for power had now switch ends from the South of America, in which the racism against Black’s was occurring more often, to now the North were the focus was now just on police brutality, however more importantly the focus was on helping the “Brothers on the Block”, against a racist capitalist society. Additionally, on the same day the decision to convene the ‘Mulford Act’ was to commence, which would stop the carrying of loaded firearms in public within the state of California. Many Panthers saw this as further evidence of America’s double standards towards Black Americans. The Panthers became much more repressible because of this, and had to focus a lot less of police repression and move to more …show more content…
The Mulford Act and the COINTELPRO program are compelling evidence for this. Conversely the Black Panthers ten point program impacted the daily lives of individual African-Americans, albeit in only limited locations and for a limited time and to a limited extent yet this was sufficient to have persuaded significant individuals, such as Leonard Bernstein and Jane Fonda to help raise money for the Black Panthers, and the New York Times to provide repeated favourable media support. As is most often the case in History where the balance of this contradictory evidence lies will be determined by the perspective of the

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