#Black pather party free

#Black pather party free

Their free breakfast program fed thousands of hungry kids before school they set up health clinics, child development centers and food pantries. While the Panthers fought against police brutality, they also invested heavily in community organizing and aid. “The fight back against police repression that the Panthers engaged in hugely has underpinnings of abolition,” Aislinn Pulley says. While the idea of abolition has proved very controversial politically, an ABC/Ipsos poll taken last June showed a majority of Americans supported the redirection of funds from police to other services. Last summer, the state was literally turning Cook County into an open casket.”Īs coronavirus outbreaks raged in prisons across the country, protesters took to the streets demanding the end of police brutality, the defunding of police or outright abolition. “We see prison as a microcosm of our community,” Hampton Jr. This summer, the group was particularly active in calling attention to the ways in which they felt the coronavirus outbreak in Chicago’s Cook County jail-which was the nation’s largest COVID-19 hotspot in April-was an the extension of the jail’s long history of oppression and violence. Over the past several decades, Fred Hampton’s son, Fred Hampton Jr., has taken up his father’s mantle of activism in his leadership of the Black Panther Party Cubs. Angela Davis, who was affiliated with the Panthers’ Los Angeles chapter, stumped for prison reform and a reimagining of what the carceral system could look like. In 1970, they proposed reorganizing the police toward a communal volunteer system. “We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails,” reads one of the bullet points of the Panther’s party platform, known as the Ten-Point Program. The Panthers’ emphasis on policing extended to the carceral system and the disproportionate jailing of Black men.

“In using camera phones so there can be no mistake about the police’s actions, there’s a direct line from the Black Panthers following the police around and observing their arrests.” “We’re in the same moment, just in a different way,” he says.

While technological advances have allowed activists to monitor police abuse with cell phones as opposed to weapons, Nelson says the underlying principle hasn’t changed. The Panthers really put focus on what so many people, especially African Americans in the North, felt and knew,” Stanley Nelson, the filmmaker who directed the 2015 documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, says.īlack Lives Matter was formed under similar circumstances, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2013. “There was no focus on police brutality in the North. Newton and Bobby Seale devised a strategy in which they sent legally armed teams to observe police activity in Black neighborhoods.Īt a time when much of the national discourse on police brutality centered on Southern cities with Jim Crow laws, the Panthers’ actions in ostensibly progressive cities were crucial toward a deeper national understanding of the depth and ubiquity of systemic racism. In order to monitor police and discourage similar events from happening, Black Panther founders Huey P.

One of the central catalysts for their formation was the death of Matthew Johnson, an unarmed Black 16-year-old who was shot to death by police in San Francisco in 1966.

Policing the PoliceĬountering police brutality was at the core of the Black Panthers’ mission. Here are the ways in which their legacy lives on. On a larger scale, some of the ideas that the Black Panthers espoused-including prison abolition-have begun making their way into mainstream discourse. While this history might be new to many, it isn’t to the activists who have inherited many aspects of their work from the Panthers: their socialist ideals, focus on grassroots organizing, language about white supremacy and visual tactics. 11, a further re-examination of their work and legacy will be spurred anew by Judas and the Black Messiah, which tells the story of Hampton and the Chicago Panthers as they work to organize, educate and feed their community while being mercilessly hunted by the FBI.