This is Just The Story. You can read the original version with the guy linked at the bottom.
People, when kept in a state of oppression, won’t have the energy or time to help when it’s time to rebel against that oppression. This is why the Black Panther Party developed “survival programs” to help their struggling communities meet their daily needs. “Survival Pending Revolution.” Help people survive until the revolution comes. The BPP also wrote guides for how to run these programs so that they could be more easily implemented throughout the country. When these programs were allowed to spread, they did beautiful work, empowering the community to help each other.
This is scary when you need to keep people oppressed.
Fred Hampton, at only 20 years old, quickly became one of the leaders within the Black Panther Party. As a child, he was already working to better the community, like leading the fight in his school to bring in more Black teachers. After a group of youth including Fred approached their city’s council with the request for a non segregated community pool, the police stepped in to tear-gas the youth. For this act Fred was now on the J. Edgar Hoover’s list of those to monitor.
Hoover called the Black Panthers, “the greatest threat… to the internal security of the United States”, and for good reason! Here are some things the Black Panthers did.
The first survival program created was the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program in Oakland California. Any child was eligible to receive a free, hot and nutritionally balanced breakfast. By 1969, over 100 of these programs were running throughout the country.
These children though were being sent away to schools that didn’t help Black children grow their education. In 1971, the Black Panthers responded to this by starting their own school, The Intercommunal Youth Institute. The school was within a community center which also held night classes of the arts and music to families, and adult education classes.
They met people’s needs for healthcare too. The People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinic provided free healthcare for common ailments and lab testing. The Child Health Care Program provided immunizations, screenings and treatments of illnesses, including screening for sickle cell anemia, which affected Black children at a higher rate.
That isn’t all. The Black Panthers had free programs to hand out food, shoes and clothes, including work attire and warm winter clothing. They gave free ambulance rides and rides to doctor appointments. To get these items, the Panthers volunteered their time going to businesses asking for donations of unsold items, or they asked churches and people to donate.
Elderly women were being attacked and mugged and were scared to leave their homes. When the police refused to get involved and help, the Black Panthers stepped in with the SAFE program. Youth volunteers helped escort the women. This both provided safety to the women and helped keep the youth from becoming involved in things like the muggings themselves.
The Panthers also engaged in the protection of their people against the police. They would patrol the area with their own guns, watching for police brutality against the Black community. This obviously put them at high probability of arrest and police brutality themselves.
The Panthers had women in leadership positions and successfully worked organizing people across different ethnicities and political parties. Their ability to get all people, including white people, to align with them, terrified the FBI. Their anti-war stance and their support of the Vietnamese against the invading American soldiers, put the Panthers further in danger. They spoke up against the United States colonialism and fascism threatening the security of the men ruling the country.
Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, responded to the Panthers by attempting to make open carry illegal. The Panthers gathered in black with their guns at the Courthouse in an iconic image that the media used to portray the Panthers as scary.
The FBI really had no choice but to initiate tactics against the Black Panther Party. How could they just let a group of people peacefully change their community for the better?
They sent in undercover agitators attempting to get the members to behave violently so they could be arrested, or the undercover agitator behaved violently to scare the public. They made fraudulent documents to try to stir up unrest within the party, such as documents claiming actual Black Panther members were FBI undercover agents. At one point they even made a fake Black Panther coloring book in an attempt to make it look like the Black Panthers were teaching young children to be violent.
Their involvement can be found in declassified papers of COINTELPRO, a covert counterintelligence program that heavily focused on the Black Panthers. Of the 290 COINTELPRO actions, 245 were aimed at the Panthers. Despite the Black Panthers mission of helping the community, they were placed in the same category as violent, extremist hate groups like the KKK. Their community programs were referred to as operations that needed to be stopped.
Field offices were ordered to
"eradicate" those Panther programs
"disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize [the panthers]”
"exploit all avenues of creating further dissention in the ranks of the BPP,"
“Neutralize” the BPP
"isolate the organization from the majority of Americans."
that the "purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt BPP and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge." Whether facts exist.
Their greatest threat. Fred Hampton. There exist 100,000 pages of internal FBI documents on Fred alone.
On December 3rd 1969 Fred Hampton was assassinated by a raid organized by the FBI and the Chicago Police Department. An FBI agent, undercover in the Black Panthers as Fred’s bodyguard, gave the FBI a blueprint of Fred’s apartment. Someone, presumably the same undercover agent, drugged Fred with barbiturates before the raid.
The police shot first, shooting 98 shots during the raid. The Black Panthers, one.
They killed Fred Hampton.
It was attempted to be covered up, but the evidence it was an assassination was overwhelming. (Thankfully) the government was not punished for this. Instead, a deal was reached that neither the FBI nor the police would be held responsible for what happened to Fred.
Public perception remained showing the Black Panthers as scary invaders attempting to dismantle the happy American democracy. How many of us still learned that the Black Panthers mission was violence? By killing Fred, the FBI killed the spirit of the Black Panther Party. As far away as all of this seems, it’s not so distant a memory to many. There are still Black Panthers in prison TODAY.
The year after Fred’s death, an FBI memo reveals J. Edgar Hoover, when told of plans to assassinate Black Panther Huey Newton, said only not to "place the Bureau in the position of aiding or initiating a murder." He also asked that the anonymous assassination threat be reworded to ensure that the FBI could not be identified as the original source.
Survival Pending Revolution. We just need to survive until it’s time to revolt. We just need to survive long enough, but can we, or will they just keep murdering the leaders?
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Sources:
The Black Panther Party: Service to the People The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation and Cornel West
The Assassination of Fred Hampton Jeffrey Haas
The FBI’s Black Panther Coloring Book
FBI Cointelpro Discrepancies Steven Gabler
Preying on the Panther Niels Haack
Creating The Enemy CJ Frisk
You should also read:
This is some of the history more Americans need to know. Thank you