All Power to the People:The Black Panther Party and Beyond*****

[RBG Street Scholar]

All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party and Beyond is by far the solidest documentary of the Black Power Movement I have ever seen / studied." Everybody" is represented from North to South and East to west. An excellent study for those of us who want to continue to struggle together towards building a Nation in the future based on the lessons of the past. Although continuous play, it may ask you to go to You Tube after 7 clips--just click on the next clip to continue here. THE BLACK POWER MOVEMENT: A RBG Q and A Style Film Summary Below I provide an essay in question and answer format as to summarize some of the lessons you should draw from the film. It is most important for you to notice that the issues, struggles, problems and need for solutions today are exactly as they were 45 years ago. In fact, if anything, they have become more remarkable. Why did we Northern Blacks begin to support Black Power Movement ? By the 1960s many us in the North were feeling neglected. Martin Luther King and others were concentrating on ending segregation in the south and being violently opposed by racist police and white mobs. So Blacks in the north were losing patience with his peaceful methods which were not solving their problems. 1) All over the nation we suffered racial discrimination and violent attacks. In major cities like New York white policemen would regularly beat black people down in the street for no reason (this provoked a bloody uprising (riot) in the Harlem ghettos in 1964). 2) Northern Blacks were also much poorer than whites. In the north there was segregation due to money; whites moving to the suburbs and leaving blacks to live in poor ghettos. On average blacks received only half the pay of white workers. Many blacks lived in poverty and had little opportunity to improve their lives. 3) Later in the 1960s the Vietnam War encouraged even more Blacks to support the Black Power Movement. We were annoyed that blacks were being made to fight for a country that brutalized and discriminated against us. The fact that 23% of America’s Vietnam soldiers were Black but only 12% of Americans were Black made us even more angry towards a Government which we saw as clearly hypocritical. Blacks thought they were being made to do the white’s dirty work in Vietnam. (Our opposition for the War led Black Power supporters to link up with anti-war students movement and this led to increasing state violence and university uprisings of the late 1960s) How Did the Aims and Ideas of the Black Power Movement Develop ? During the early 1960s, Malcolm X, our movement’s first leader, told us to separate ourselves from ‘white values and religion’. Instead, Early on he encouraged us to join his Nation of Islam and become law abiding, vice free and hardworking. By doing this Minister Malcolm X hoped to restore pride to the black community so increasing its internal power. Stokely Carmichael (leader of the SNCC) made the movement even more radical after Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Kwame argued that we should not try to live ‘side by side’ with whites. Instead, he suggested that Blacks should separate themselves from their white oppressors; develop and live in our own hoods. To start the process Kwame banned whites from being members of his SNCC party (even if they proclaimed to supported black equality). Black Power leaders like Fred and Stokely and Rap believed that, if we controlled our own communities, we could build Black communities in which we would help each other to improve our living standards. The Black Power Movement encouraged us to use businesses owned by us so we would be helping each other to become wealthier and more powerful. Kwame knew, however, that to be truly free from oppression, we had to control the institutions of power in or own communities: i) Most importantly this meant controlling the police force in their ghetto / hood. At the time that meant appointing black police chiefs and hopefully removing all white officers from the area. ii) Black candidates had to be supported at elections. iii) Blacks needed to organize our own schools so our children would be taught to take pride in their color and the need to work together to build our community. Only by doing all this could the idea of a black community work. The Results of Black Power > Post 60s Erosion 1) Black Power ideas led many of us, frustrated with the repression of white supremacy/racism, to stand up "against our white racist oppressors". The state struck back with cointelpro, killing Malcolm and Martin and jailing and murdering Panthers. Thus, during the late 1960s Northern American cities were swept by violent uprisings / race riots that left hundreds dead. For example, during the 1965 Watts riot in LA, 34 people were killed. And in 1967 43 people were killed in Detroit riot and even more in Newark. 2) Let's be clear, the Black Power Movement never achieved its aim of a powerful, unified Black community / Nationhood with better standards of living. The Vietnam War ended and conditions improved (a little for a few). Nonetheless, large black ghettos still remain , cocaine has resulted in the devastation of the hip hop generation and we never succeeded in getting rid of the white authorities or improving living standards for the masses of our people. 3) Aluta Continua. The Black revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon once asserted that each generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover its own destiny. Then it has a choice: It may fulfill that destiny or betray it. Reference Resource Link Outs: Black Power / www.umich.edu/ THE BLACK POWER MOVEMENT/www.lexisnexis.com/academic The Civil Rights Movement and the Rise of the Black Power Movement A RBG Street Scholar Education Design