I grew up in the Bay Area and was 9 years old in 1966. We learned of the Black Panthers from my parents who showed us the great things they were doing (free breakfasts, health clinics, addressing injustice). While history shows the group, like many others had internal struggles. I see the Black Panthers as having been an effective group. I still think the core values were just and good.
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What is worse- Trumps misstatements, exaggerations, about illegal Immigrants and the situation at the border or the constant didacticism of the Identity Politics left that would have us believe there has been no improvement in racial equality, that it’s worse now than 1968? That’s the same left that would probably throw Obama out of the party for the things he said pre 2013 about being Black in America.
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@Michael Holmes That's true. Thanks for bringing that up. I'm rather sick of the identity politics non-sense that the times presents as well. We've come a long way since 1968 we don't need people to try and discredit that or create a false illusion of rampant racism.
The Black Panthers were a group of radicals who sought to establish a separate society in America. They pretty much saw the country to be a foreign one that was oppressing them. Their views towards American society were exactly the same as right wing militias and people to declare themselves to be sovereign citizens, years later, as strangers in a land that had stripped them of their natural rights as people. They took a rather Hobbesian view of American society being at war with them. The police were their existential enemies who they were determined to intimidate into leaving them alone. There were a lot of young radicals in those days who thought that they were going to change the world according to their dreams but who really had no grasp of the seriousness of the forces that they might bring down on themselves by how they sought to enact change. Had they sought peaceful transformation, they would have achieved success, they were addressing real injustices.
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@Casual Observer
The black panther party was a group of engaged young people who publicly stated that black people live in a separate society from whites. They experienced enormous discrimination and police harassment. They believed that the time for injustice was over, that the unequal treatment of black people needed to be expressed without apology. They refused to be cowed by white police who tried to harass and intimidate them. Segregation and institutionalized racism were a matter of course. They could not submit silently anymore. Every movement needs a measure of anger and radical passion to succeed.