http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/09/23/3704132/how-the-black-panthers-ideology-became-mainstream/
For decades since their inception in the 1960s, members of the liberation group known as the Black Panthers were labeled thugs and hateful extremists who set out to ruin the U.S. They were considered the antithesis to Martin Luther King Jr. — armed and dangerous. And that’s how many people still remember them today.
But a new documentary, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, dives into the rise and fall of the Panthers’ political agenda, offering a counter-narrative that’s more timely than ever.
Combining interviews with former members of the party with archival footage of Panther activity, Stanley Nelson’s documentary explores the white supremacy and state-sanctioned police violence that inspired a revolutionary movement — and how that movement redefined black power and pride.
It talks about the key players — founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, one of the most vocal and recognizable Panthers, and women like Elaine Brown and Kathleen Cleaver who switched up traditional gender roles and actually dominated the party. The party created the Ten Point Program, a platform that served as the blueprint for uplifting the black community through job creation and social services.
The film pulls back the curtain on COINTELPRO, the government-backed FBI campaign initiated by J. Edgar Hoover to destroy the Panthers.
By following every move they made (via wire tapping and planting spies in the organization), falsely imprisoning them, and murdering them outright, the counterintelligence program sought “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings.”
Hoover, on behalf of the U.S. government, was hellbent on “[preventing] the rise of a messiah who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.”
exposing White America's bogeyman as not so scary and definitely not what they were painted as. i put out a neighborhood paper once in 1970 i interviewed the neighborhood chapter the only issue i have has deteriorated pages fall apart if you try to turn i them. i gave it to my mom she just put in in a drawer for 37 years before passing.
they were all about the people and defending against the racist powers that were they fed and looked out after school for kids kept crime down with patrolling not the monster scary Black guy you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley, that guy is White and calls himself militia.
