Black Power

 

Of all the changes flowing through society in the tumultuous 1960s, none caused as much concern for white America as the movement for equality by blacks.  While the moral rightness of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which together finally put the force of law behind the fundamental freedoms that supposedly had been won for black Americans a full century earlier, was undeniable for most whites, movement beyond those basic principles remained controversial.  Even the “passive resistance” of the mainstream civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was more than many whites were prepared to accept.

            Much more troubling still, then, were the more radical groups arguing for various forms of “black nationalism”.  Some of those groups went so far as to preach violence in the face of what they saw as the continued unwillingness of white-controlled society to move quickly enough to bring about meaningful change in the collective plight of black Americans.  Among the most outspoken of such groups was the Black Panther Party.  Here is the official issue platform for the Panthers. 

 

  1. We want freedom.  We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
  2. We want full employment for our people.
  3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black community.
  4. We want decent housing fit for shelter of human beings.
  5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society.  We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.
  6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
  7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and murder of Black people.
  8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
  9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer groups or people from their black communities as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
  10. We want land, bread, housing, education clothing, justice and peace.  And as our major political objective, a United Nations supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the Black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of the black people as to their national destiny.

 

 

(Source: Black Panther Party, “Ten Point Program and Party Platform” (1967), Sixties Project: Primary Documents Collection, Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, Charlottesville).

 

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