(1/2) If you're interested in learning more about the BPP, I would recommend reading From The Bullet to the Ballot by Dr. Jakobi Williams. He is a civil rights activist and one of the leading BPP historians. Most of my information in this comment is sourced from primary/secondary sources that we utilized during a class I took with him about the history and development of the Black Panther Party. Bullet to the Ballot is an in depth look at the Chicago chapter specifically. My favorite overview is Black Against Empire by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin - comprehensive but accessible enough that I recommend it to my high school students. Kathleen Cleaver has also written a fantastic history of the BPP, titled Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party. Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey P. Newton have all written extensively. Their initial political writings laid the foundation for the BPP, and they have also all written autobiographies. The autobiographies should probably be taken with a grain of salt, particularly anything written by Newton as he was kind of a piece of shit, but the original writings are all really important for understanding the core of the BPP. The FBI has a "vault" of publicly accessible information regarding the BPP and COINTELPRO if anybody wants to view those, but the book The COINTELPRO Papers by Ward Churchill is much more informative. There are also quite a few breakdowns on the role of gender within the BPP. My favorite is Linda Lumsdens Good Mothers With Guns, but a lot of people really enjoy reading things from/about Afeni Shakur, as her son Tupac is...uh....fairly well known.

The issue with our modern perception of the BPP is twofold. One, history is told by the victors, and the BPP did not win. Two, the actions of Huey Newton after the FBI systematically dismantled the BPP from within were uh...not great. As the BPP faded away, the last actions that were widely associated with the BPP was Huey Newton being shitty. That doesn't lend itself to a positive representation. This extra sucks because Huey Newtons initial role as a founding member, and then as a martyr, was key in uniting the community. He was an initial force behind community mobilization and dissemination of information, who was then accused/convicted of a murder that most believe he did not do. His consequential imprisonment led to Free Huey campaigns and protests that spread the ideals of the BPP further than they had before. This also meant that for the most important years of the party's activity, he was an imprisoned figurehead, a martyr, and more of a rallying cry than an actual leader. His return to the BPP and actions from about 1971 - onwards did a lot of harm to the party.

In order to see the positive impacts of the Panthers, you need to look not at their downfall but at their origins. The Panthers originated from a desire within black communities to take care of their own, in the ways that the federal government refused to do. Once the party was established, different chapters were loosely linked by a name and some shared beliefs, but they didn't have a significant overarching structure. There were a few leaders and thinkers (Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton primarily) that are commonly referenced as the leaders of the BPP, but it wasn't as strict of a hierarchy as most modern interpretations would have you believe. Chapters behaved relatively independently, as the main focus was on the communities within which members lived. Independence was also encouraged under the belief that it was safer for members. Actions and beliefs could vary widely from chapter to chapter, with the 10 Point Program and Platform as the foundation. It follows:

What We Want Now!

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 and oppressed communities.
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 the 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.

What We Believe:

1. We believe that Black People will not be free until we are able to determine our own destiny.
2. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American business men will not give full employment, the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as redistribution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities: the Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered 6,000,000 Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50,000,000 Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We believe that if the White landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make a decent housing for its people.
5. We believe in an educational system that will give our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States gives us the right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.
8. We believe that all Black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peers. A peer is a persons from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical, and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of "the average reasoning man" of the Black community.
10. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, and that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such a form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accused. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, and their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards of their future security

Additional question: how 'common' was this practice? I have a hard time imagining the logistics of it. Was it really widespread or a PR thing?

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