Police Experience in 1960s With The Black Panther Party and How It Has Evolved

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                 

                                           Black Panther Party

During World War II, tens of thousands of black people left the Southern states during the Second Great Migration, moving to Oakland and other cities in the Bay Area to find work in the war industries such as Kaiser Shipyards.  They also moved into Portland, Oregon to work in the shipyards there as well.   A new generation of young black people growing up in these cities faced new forms of poverty and racism unfamiliar to their parents, and they sought to develop new forms of politics to address them. 

In late October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense).This BPP was a Marxist-Lenist Black Power political organization founded in Oakland, California.   Black Panther Party membership "consisted of recent migrants whose families traveled north and west to escape the southern racial regime, only to be confronted with new forms of segregation and repression.

Bobby Seale and Hewey P. Newton outside their headquarters   Seale was one of the Chicago Eight charged by the US federal government with conspiracy charges related to anti-Vietnam War protests in Chicago, Illinois, during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In that trial, Seale was infamously ordered by the judge, Julius Hoffman, to appear in court bound and gagged.  Newton was known for being an advocate of self-defense and of Palestinian statehood, and for his support of communist-led governments around the world. Newton also used his position as a leader within the Black Panther Party to welcome women and LGBT people into the party, describing homosexuals as "the most oppressed people" in society.

Newton and Seale met in 1962 when students at Merritt College. and  copied groups that came before them.  They read, debated and organized their Black Panthers using Malcolm X and others for examples.                                                   

By May 1967, the Panthers invaded the State Assembly Chamber in Sacramento, guns in hand, in what appears to have been a publicity stunt. Still, they scared a lot of important people that day. 

They went from not being known about to changing that in a year and were invited to speak where radicals gathered, and seeing whites wearing buttons saying, "Honkeys for Huey."  He had been in jail since the 28th of October 1967 on the charge that he had killed a policeman.

Their program expressing wanting things immediately that they publicized on May 15, 1967.

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.                                                       
    

David Horowitz, a Jewish Leftist who was the editor of Ramparts, the New Left magazine, raised money to buy a Baptist church in East Oakland, California in 1974 and then turned it into a school for the Black Panther Party.  He also established a non-profit organization, the Educational Opportunities Corporation, to fund that school.  He recruited the bookkeeper at Ramparts, Betty Van Patter,  to maintain the school's financial ledgers

Betty discovered that the Black Panthers had doctored the books and told a few people about it.  Some reports have said that she was planning to expose the Panthers' financial improprieties, but Horowitz thought she probably wanted to protect the Panthers, not expose them because of her Leftist leanings.  However, the Panthers viewed her as a white woman who knew too much and couldn't be trusted with their secrets.

                                                

On December 13, 1974, Betty, mother of 3 children and 45 years old, was at her favorite neighborhood bar, The Berkeley Square, when someone came in and handed her a note.  She left with the messenger and was never seen alive again.  Her body was found weeks later in San Francisco Bay.  She had been raped and tortured and beaten to death.  While no one was ever charged for the crime, it has been suggested that it was committed by members of the party. She had reportedly threatened to make public her discovery that the party doctored its books and had major tax problems.

                                                 

This is when David Horowitz finally discovered that the Black Panther Party was a criminal gang engaging in extortion, arson, drug racketeering and several murders.  The Democrat Party had also been supportive of them as well as Horowitz.  They had had the support of local trade unions, and even the Oakland business concerns. All had been taken in with the helping of Blacks in this period of time while the Panthers had enjoyed their support as they engaged in all these illegal activities.  

                                                                       

The New Black Panther Party for Self Defense (not related to the original Black Panther Party, they say) is the most extreme organized racist and anti-Semitic African-American group in the United States.

The Black Panthers have evolved into the New Black Panther Party. It's also a Black nationalist organization but was founded in Dallas, Texas in 1989.  The NBPP says it is not an official successor to the old Black Panther Party.   They have wants, too, just like the old one did, which are even more extreme wants than the old party had:   

                                                   

1. They believe that Black Americans should have their own nation.  They kept the 10 Point Platform of the old group, 

2. They demand that they be given a country or state of their own within which they can make their own laws.  

3. They demand that all black prisoners in the US be released to "the lawful authorities of the Black Nation.  

4. They claim to be entitled to reparations for slavery from the US, all European countries and "the Jews."

The New Black Panther Party (NBPP)’s views are anti-white and anti-semitic. Its early leaders blamed Jews for the 9/11 terrorist attacks and slavery. The late party chairman,  Khalid Abdul Muhammad,  has said, “There are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes.”                                 

 A document on the NBPP website titled “The Nationalist Manifesto” claims that white men have a secret plan to commit genocide against non-white races. It also refers to black people who condone mixed-race relationships as the “modern day Custodians [sic] of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  They are as against mixed-colored marriages as many whites are.  

Many NBPP members are also current or former members of the Nation of Islam who vocalize deep resentment toward Jews because they think the Holocaust garnered much more sympathy and reparations for Jews than African Americans have received as the victims of “the black holocaust” —slavery and Jim Crow. They also believe Jewish businesses prey on black communities. Former NBPP Chairman Khalid Muhammad has referred to Jews as “bloodsuckers.”

The New Black Panther Party, originally founded in 1989 by Dallas radio personality Aaron Michaels, hoped to engage black citizens in community activism. One of its main goals was to increase black representation on the Dallas school board. NBPP also attempted to reduce drug dealing in certain black neighborhoods.

 In fact, the organization has officially been labeled as a hate group by the United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center for its hate speech and antiSemitism. Although this may recall the denouncing of the original Black Panthers back in the late 1960s,   Jakobi Williams, associate professor of history and African American studies at Indiana University, explained to Vox that many of the original Black Panther members he has spoken to are "disappointed and upset with the way this New Black Panther Party has used the Black Panther Party name because it reinforces stereotypes, misconceptions, and falsehoods about the Party that are not true."

A member of the Black Panthers who was convicted in the 1970 death of an Omaha police officer, Larry Minard. Minard ,  has died in prison.  Mondo we Langa, also known as David Rice, died in a Lincoln, Nebraska, prison Saturday night, the Associated Press reported. His cause of death was not immediately known, though a state prison official told the AP he had been treated for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. (Posted March 13, 2016).                                              

        Aislinn Pully, Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter (BLM)  

• Some organizations affiliated with Black Lives Matter have expressed anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian sentiments that some Jewish groups view as anti-Semitic. What we found, outside of isolated incidents involving recent Black Lives Matter protests, is concern among some Jewish leaders about statements linked to Black Lives Matter about  Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.   

• They are anti-Israel, which is really the same as being anti-Semitic since Israel is the only state in the universe that is a Jewish state, trying to exist while the Palestinians have not accepted their entrance into the land and want them driven out, knowing that the Jews were there long before Arabs were, and that they are there legally.  

  

Whoopie Goldberg was emphatic about Jews NOT being a race.  This certainly would upset the Black Groups who are anti-Semitic, fighting for Black justice only.  Most Jews have been emphatic about NOT being a race but a religion.  Facts are showing that if we are any race, we started out in the city of Ur on the Tigris-Euphrates River in Iraq, and so are of the Middle Eastern race along with our very distant cousins, the Arabs. I suppose we are of the Semite race-if that is a race.    Thanks to Abraham who was the father of both, the Abraham Accords are enjoining both groups of people into peaceful activities today.  

If you ask many current activists fighting anti-Black racism and inequity today, they’ll tell you that the influence of the Black Panthers is immeasurable. “They exist as a continual barometer to measure ourselves against—both in terms of lessons that have been garnered as well as challenges in terms of where we can improve or deepen our analysis,” Aislinn Pulley, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter (BLM) Chicago and a co-executive director of the Chicago Torture Justice Center, says.

On September 27, 1966 a white police officer shot and killed a seventeen-year-old African American teen, Matthew Johnson, Jr., as he fled the scene of a stolen car. Arthur Hippler wrote a book called Hunters Point: A Black Ghetto in which, among other things, he attempts to debunk the police account of the uprising (which was published as a pamphlet called 128 Hours). 

Countering police brutality was at the core of the Black Panthers’ mission. One of the central catalysts for their formation was the death of Matthew Johnson, an unarmed Black 16-year-old who was shot to death by police in San Francisco in 1966. In order to monitor police and discourage similar events from happening, Black Panther founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale devised a strategy in which they sent legally armed teams to observe police activity in Black neighborhoods. 

While this history might be new to many, it isn’t to the activists who have inherited many aspects of their work from the Panthers: their socialist ideals, focus on grassroots organizing, language about white supremacy and visual tactics. On a larger scale, some of the ideas that the Black Panthers espoused—including prison abolition—have begun making their way into mainstream discourse

Resource:

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/new-black-panther-party

Dark Agenda by David Horowitz

https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/new-black-panther-party

https://time.com/5938058/black-panthers-activism/