Endia Beal, Sabrina and Katrina, 2015, from “Am I What You’re Looking For?”, courtesy of the artist, from “All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party,” PCNW 2018.
On October 15, 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton – two students at Laney College in Oakland, California – founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) to protect the citizens of their hometown from abuses of the state.
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Under the protection of the Second Amendment, they created armed citizens’ patrols to monitor an almost all white police force that regularly brutalised African Americans citizens with impunity. From their grassroots efforts, a nationwide movement was born – one that radicalised a new generation of youth to fight for their Constitutional rights.
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The BPP set up chapters in 68 cities in order to implement the Ten Point Platform and Program, which called for freedom, full employment, reparations, housing, education, military exemption, an end to police brutality and murder, freedom for the incarcerated, Constitutional rights during trial, and full self-determination.
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The leaders of the BPP had mastered the law, and knew exactly how to exact the rights granted by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This – combined with their ability to build coalitions with other political groups including the Young Lords, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the American Indian Movement, and the Chicano Workers Movement – created a very real threat to the systemic racism that had kept these groups vulnerable, marginalised, and living under constant threat.
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Lewis Watts, Graffiti, West Oakland, 1993, courtesy of the photographer, from “All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party,” PCNW 2018
Lewis Watts, Graffiti, West Oakland, 1993, courtesy of the photographer, from “All Power: Visual Legacies of the Black Panther Party,” PCNW 2018