Black Panther Party Look into the Future Hassan Davis
In the mid-twentieth century, many individuals and organizations pushed for more civil liberties in the African American community. Names like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and James Farmer, and organizations like SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), and NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) are among the more credited names during the heroic era of civil rights. Behind the curtain of such notable activism stands a swarm of lesser-known activist groups. Among those are the Black Panther Party (BPP). Founded by then-college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966, the BPP was an African American revolutionary organization started in Oakland, California. After the non-violent civil rights movement neared its end, minorities in America still faced severe social and economic inequalities. Although African Americans may have had more secured rights from the federal government, attacks on minority groups were still a problem at the local level. Newton and Seale believed that, through political leverage, the oppressed communities could be accepted fully into “white America.” Together, these two young reformers composed the “Ten Point Program” (TPP), which was a document created to tackle all issues of persecution that confronted America’s minority communities. The TPP established principles that would help the community shield itself not only from racism and prejudice but also police brutality, which had been plaguing the streets of minority neighborhoods. With this plan, Seale and Newton produced one of the most compelling arguments for minority advancement in American history and created a starting point for tackling issues we still face today. At the head of the BPP were two significant figures, Huey P. Newton and Robert (Bobby) George Seale. Newton was born on February 17, 1942, in Monroe, Louisiana. During this time, the country was participating in World War II, and Newton's parents, Armelia Johnson and Walter Newton, soon moved to Oakland, California, in search of new economic opportunities the war created. They did not find those opportunities, however, and Newton and his family became very poor, causing them to move constantly around the San Francisco Bay area. Young Newton was quite a handful in his teenage years, getting in constant trouble with law enforcement. Nonetheless, Newton graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1959 while being unable to read. After high school, he attended Merritt College, where he ultimately taught himself how to read.1 Learning to read sparked Newton’s curiosity, and he began to ask questions. In his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, Newton writes, "Most of all, I questioned what was happening in my own family and in the community around me."2 That questioning led him, early in his college career, to become active at his university. He joined the “Afro-American Association” (AAA), an on-campus organization that stressed black separatism and how to advance as a black individual. Newton wanted to increase the number of African American professors at Merritt, and, with the help of the AAA, he achieved that. The AAA even helped play a role in the university adopting its first African-American studies course. It was through this organization that Newton was introduced to his eventual associate, Bobby Seale.3 Robert George Seale was born on October 22, 1936, in Liberty, Texas. Just like Newton, Seale’s family migrated to Tim Findley. Huey Newton: Twenty-Five Floors From the Street. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/huey-newton-twenty-five-floors-from-thestreet-176820/ 2 Huey Newton, J. Herman Black. Revolutionary Suicide. London: Wildwood House, 1974. 3 Bobby Seale. A Lone Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale. New York: Times Books, 1978. 1
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