Civil Rights Movement: The Black Panthers

The Black Panthers were a famous and revolutionary organization founded in California in the 1960's, whose purpose was the protection and empowerment of the black race. Although most media attention focused around Martin Luther King Jr. as the leader of the Civil Rights movement during the 1960's, Black Power groups like the Black Panthers, who disagreed with MLK's ideology, also exerted influence, especially in poor black communities. "Founded in October 1967 in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the group had as its original purpose patrolling black neighborhoods to monitor police treatment of blacks" (American Decades 234). The party originally had fewer than one hundred members in Oakland, but it grew to a loosely connected
The unity of the Black Panthers was very strong at its core, but with time it was extinguished by both government intervention and ideological differences between leaders of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.The Black Panthers emerged as a powerful organization because of the strength and unity of their members and the support of the black community. Their co-founders, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, met while they were leftist student activists in Oakland at Merritt Junior College during the early 1960's (Burroughs). The Black Panther Party's official political platform regarded and was designed to improve the lives of poor black people. "The Black Panther Party fed the hungry, protected the weak from racist police, and presented a new paradigm of Black political and social activism" (Burroughs). The Party's survival programs, which included free health clinics, food giveaways, and free breakfast programs for children, were popular fixtures in Black neighborhoods through the early 1970s
Their promotion of arming themselves with guns in opposition to the white establishment, or the "Rhetoric of the Gun," was effective in that it gave them influence over poor blacks (Courtright 253). This power was to their advantage because much of their strength and unity as an organization came from the fact that most of the members were black men from the ghetto, and thus shared similar backgrounds. The leaders of the Black Panther Party saw this from the beginning: "[We] wanted brothers off the block brothers who had been pimping, brothers who had been peddling dope, brothers who ain't gonna take no shit, brothers who had been fighting the pigs" (Seale qtd. in Calloway 57). The use of guns and armament, the violent rhetoric, spoke to these men. "Men suffering under economic frustration, from lack of identity and dependency on whites for their daily bread, had little other than some cathartic mechanism through which they could channel their