Black Panther Party
Ten Point Platform
The Black Panther Party's ten point platform in conjunction with their Survival Programs directly combated capitalism, settler colonialism, and police brutality.[1] This fact is made clear by point number one of the Party's ten point platform: "We Want Freedom. We Want Power to Determine the Destiny of Our Black Community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny," and point number ten: "We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace."[2]
The Black Panther Party combated these institutions of oppression, in-part by creating alternative mutual-aid structures[3] to acquire sustenance, education, healthcare etc, which help begin/ continue movements aimed towards Black, Latnix, & Indigenous self-determination/sovereignty.[4] Furthermore, these programs help create a framework of environmental justice vis a vis sovereignty, localized self-determination, and mutual aid:
... the BPP’s campaigns against police brutality are, in my view, clearly within the broader ambit of environmental justice. I would argue that the BPP’s work to provide free health care and health information to marginalized communities was also EJ-related activism for the same reason—it was about countering the effects of racist state and institutional violence and the long-term effects of racism and environmental racism that results in higher rates of hypertension, asthma, lead poisoning, and other illnesses. Moreover, the Free Breakfast for Children Program can be firmly placed within a long history of food justice movements, a social formation that a number of scholars have argued is firmly within the realm of environmental justice (Alkon and Agyeman 2011)..[5]
By exposing the glaring contradictions within society, where the state and corporations control who is able to acquire basic healthy food,[6] clean water,[7] the Black Panther Party drew connections between capitalism, police brutality, and Food Sovereignty. These connections were apparent when the Black Panther Party established solidarity with the United Farm Workers led by Cesar Chavez.[8] The United Farm Workers was a union made to organize primarily Mexican American farm workers to combat Low wages, unfair hiring practices, and dangerous working conditions. In 1969 the UFW began a boycott against Safeway, the largest purchaser of California grapes behind the Department of Defense at the time, because Safeway had refused to stop purchasing grapes from farms the UFW was also striking against for unfair pay and harsh conditions. During both of these strikes the Black Panther Party published support for the strikes in their weekly party newspaper, distributed nationally and internationally. In addition to supporting the strike the paper also emphasized that Safeway had never donated to the Free Breakfast Program.
The Black Panther Party's boycott of Safeway stores was a tremendous contribution to the UFW's boycott efforts. When the Panthers set up pickets at Safeway stores, they were an intimidating sight with their black leather jackets, berets, and dark glasses. UFW organizer Gilbert Padilla recalled that when he organized the grape boycott in the Los Angeles area, Panthers on the picket line acted as a restraint on police harassment because the Panthers "scared the hell out of them." More importantly, the party's boycott of Safeway was well organized and innovative. Bobby Seale, like many other Panthers, had served in the military, and drawing on his experience in the U.S. Air Force, Seale created a "motor pool" for party use that was employed in the Safeway boycott. In the evenings when people went shopping for groceries, party members would not only explain to them why they should be boycotting Safeway, but they also provided transportation to the Lucky's grocery stores, which had donated to the Free Breakfast for Children Program and had agreed not to sell California grapes.[9]
The Black Panther Party's support of the UFW strike and their motor pool forced the Safeway store located at 27th and West streets in Oakland to close. Declaring solidarity with the UFW and materially supporting the strike clearly established connections between varying races in relation to Food Sovereignty, fair treatment of workers, fair pay, police brutality, and capitalism. Beyond these connections this solidarity illustrated the power communities have in supporting one another independent of capitalism.
Through the pursuit of Food Sovereignty and the party's ten point platform a clear connection can be made to environmental justice through the right to healthy food and clean drinking water. Minority communities are far more likely[10] to be exposed to environmental harms across the so called united states and across the world; Environmental harms caused by capitalism and its inherent environment destroying extraction and pollution. Food Sovereignty and environmental justice both require the right to self-determination free from capitalist exploitation and environmental destruction.[11]
Oakland
Survival Programs
Free Breakfast For Children
See: Free Breakfast For Children
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for self-defense in 1966 in Oakland, California. The organization would grow and open branches across the so called United States. They would begin their free breakfast for children program in January, 1969, at Father Earl A. Neil’s St. Augustine Episcopal Church in Oakland, California, feeding 11 children the first day and growing to 135 children by the end of the week.[12] Less than two months later a second location for feeding children would open in San Francisco at Sacred Heart Church. As the Black Panther Party proliferated across the country they made the free breakfast program a mandatory staple of each branch. At its peak, approximately forty-five chapters across the country participated in the Breakfast Program, feeding thousands of children every day.[13] While many of the men in the party receive credit for the Breakfast Program, Women and Mothers were crucial to the implementation and execution of the program.[14]
The free breakfast program was a response to the United States federal government's War on Poverty, which was supposed to be providing food, housing, and safety to impoverished people across the country. The Black Panther party felt as though the so called War on Poverty was not taking care of the Black Community, so they chose to take matters into their own hands. [15] The free breakfast program was one of the many Black Panther Party Survival Programs, which included education programs, health clinics, shoe giveaways, clothing giveaways, and prison busing program, which helped bring family members to prisons to visit their loved ones, sickle cell anemia testing (they tested over half a million people,) and a free ambulance service in Winston Salem, North Carolina; All of the Black Panther Party survival programs were free, and were all pieces of the party's goals of Black self-determination, and liberation from the constraints of capitalism and the legacies of slavery. [16]
COINTELPRO
- ↑ https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fhamptonspeech.html
- ↑ https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/primary-documents-african-american-history/black-panther-party-ten-point-program-1966/
- ↑ https://libcom.org/article/huey-newton-introduces-revolutionary-intercommunalism-boston-college-november-18-1970
- ↑ https://emorywheel.com/the-black-panthers-and-young-lords-how-todays-mutual-aid-strategies-took-shape/
- ↑ https://www.gejp.es.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.envs.d7_gejp-2/files/sitefiles/publication/PEJP%20Annual%20Report%202018.pdf#page=11
- ↑ https://truthout.org/articles/capitalist-economies-overproduce-food-but-people-cant-afford-to-buy-it/
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/28/indigenous-americans-drinking-water-navajo-nation and shelter,
- ↑ Araiza, Lauren. “‘In Common Struggle against a Common Oppression’: The United Farm Workers and the Black Panther Party, 1968-1973.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 94, no. 2, 2009, pp. 200–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25610076. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023.
- ↑ Araiza, Lauren. “‘In Common Struggle against a Common Oppression’: The United Farm Workers and the Black Panther Party, 1968-1973.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 94, no. 2, 2009, pp. 200–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25610076. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023.
- ↑ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/racial-ethnic-minorities-low-income-groups-u-s-air-pollution/
- ↑ https://therednation.org/revolutionary-socialism-is-the-primary-political-ideology-of-the-red-nation-2/
- ↑ https://www.aaihs.org/the-black-panther-party/
- ↑ https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party
- ↑ Nik Heynen (2009) Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto for Survival: The Black Panther Party's Radical Antihunger Politics of Social Reproduction and Scale, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99:2, 406-422, DOI: 10.1080/00045600802683767
- ↑ https://www.eater.com/2016/2/16/11002842/free-breakfast-schools-black-panthers
- ↑ https://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/actions/actions_survival.html