In 2021, some activists and historians are taking another look at the legacy of the Panthers through a less-freighted lens.
The Black Panther Party co-founder was feared and hated by many Americans, and party members were dismissed as racist, gun-toting militants — Black avengers who believed violence was as American as cherry pie.
But it is also true that in 2021, some activists and historians are taking another look at the legacy of the Panthers through a less-freighted lens. The Panthers, they say, were a harbinger of today’s identity politics, helped shape progressivism, and have served as grandfathers and grandmothers to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Much of the party’s story has often been overshadowed by its association with violence. The Black Panther Party has been seen as an organization that sought war with police, a group doomed by infighting, infiltration and corruption among its leaders. Together, they wrote the party’s Ten Point Program, laying out the party’s beliefs. Among their demands: Freedom to determine the destiny of the Black community, economic empowerment through full employment and wealth redistribution, an educational system inclusive of the Black experience, and an end to brutality and fatal encounters between Black people and police.
In interviews, former Panther members acknowledged that the party’s very name drove perceptions that it only operated by force and intimidation. The party eventually dropped “for Self Defense” from its name. But those words also meant nutrition, health care and political education for the Black community, said Huggins, who was the first woman to lead a chapter of the Panther Party.
Katherine Campbell, who first volunteered with the Panther newspaper and the free breakfast program in San Francisco as a teenager, said the party’s activities didn’t merit its targeting by law enforcement. “Because the Panthers sought to be the antidote to violence, they were often challenged to violence,” said former Black Panther Party attorney Fred Hiestand.
While Newton was imprisoned, more than two dozen Panthers died in violent encounters with police, including Bobby Hutton, the 16-year-old remembered as the party’s first recruit in Oakland, and Fred Hampton, leader of the party’s Illinois chapter in Chicago. “I don’t call myself a former Panther,” said Charlotte O’Neal of the Kansas City Panthers. “Once a Panther, always a Panther. It’s in our blood. As we used to say, ‘We’re gonna bop ‘til we drop.’”
That has carried over to the Black Lives Matter movement. Protesters adopted tactical confrontation with law enforcement and elected leaders in response to the deaths of Black boys, men and women at the hands of police and vigilantes: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
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