Historical Event: The Black Panthers
The Black Panther party was a group of people that took the world by storm during 1966, when they were first founded by the leaders Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale. The party was founded on the grounds of fighting against police brutality, and protecting the rest of the black citizens from the police. However, this is not the only thing they made their mission to do with their party resources, they also provided the black communities with health, educational, and financial support. They did this by creating what they would call survival programs for the black community, in these programs they not only helps the black community with the things listed above, but also with transportation (to work, school, or any other places), but they also really spent a lot of time helping the mothers of the community by providing them with formula, diapers and other things for children. Another really important thing the Black Panthers did was to help uplift and inspire the black communities, by really empowering them to take pride in their race and not give in and give up on themselves. In addition to this they also encouraged financial empowerment and development of the black community, while they were at their most active they not only helped many other black business start up, they started and made other spaces for black people to feel safe. However, many non- black communities and people in power saw them as a threat to their way of life. To be frank many of the higher up white people of society saw them as a problem for trying to change and challenge the system they had set up around the oppression of black people for so long. It is because of this that these same people, especially the white government officials, tried their hardest to paint them as a “violent, black supremacist” group of “thugs” that did nothing but cause trouble. The government actually saw them as such a threat that they allowed the FBI to put false articles and other things in the media to help spread their false narrative of the Black Panthers. In this article by The New York Times, they were able to obtain documents that showed this. As quoted from the article, “New York is authorized to discreetly furnish data as outlined in retel to..in an effort to obtain news media publicly highlighting friction between east and west coast BPP leadership personnel”. This quote shows that the FBI not only spread false information and stories about the Black Panthers, but they also tried to instigate false fights between two chapters of the Black Panthers, which could have had dangerous effects on everyone had they not have known. While in another reading on JSTOR the then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover said the Black Panthers were “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”, simply because they fought for the police and government to treat them like human beings and not punching bags. While this event may seem to be completely disconnected to the Will Smith Oscar event, it is not that far off because people and organizers of events are now treating Will Smith like he is a national security risk in the same way.
Works cited:
Abron, J. M. (1986). The Legacy of the Black Panther Party. The Black Scholar, 17(6), 33–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41067327
The New York Times. (2016, October 15). F.B.I. memos on the Black Panther Party. The New York Times. Retrieved May 2, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/14/us/document-NYTimes10132…;
STREET, J. (2010). The Historiography of the Black Panther Party. Journal of American Studies, 44(2), 351–375. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40648818
Related Links:
The Black Man's Burden(Lulu Guy): https://studio.covecollective.org/anthologies/sp22-eng-l302-anthology/documents/the-black-mans-burden-7927b89c-f734-483f-a172-46eb5b0ab39a
https://editions.covecollective.org/chronologies/slavery-abolition-act-1833-2