Bobby Sale And Huey Newton's Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party Platform

The Black Panther Party was founded by Bobby Sale and Huey Newton in 1966 and it remained active until 1982. The Black Panther Party was an organization with black nationalism and socialism at the core of their beliefs and ideologies. The BPP was known for its armed citizen’s patrol which they used to monitor the behaviour of officers from the Oakland Police Department in order to protect local residents from police brutality (Baggins, 2002).

The Black Party Platform or more commonly known as the Ten-Point Program was a set of guidelines of the Black Panther Party. The document was written by both Bobby Sale and Huey Newton. The document talks about their perspective on how the black community is unfairly

They also claim that black people must be able to determine their own destiny in order to be truly free. Furthermore, they claim that black people should not be forced to fight in war for the United States of America, a country that does not protect the interests of black people and that they should not fight against other minorities who are also victims at the hands of the American government. The document also states that since white American businessmen will not give members of their community jobs, then “the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community” so that their own people can give employment to other members of their community in order to achieve a higher standard of living for everyone in the community. The authors also believe that they can end police brutality by giving members of their community Black self-defence groups in order to protect the people in their community from police brutality and oppression. The document states that black people are not receiving fair trials from the courts and they call upon the 14th amendment for black people to be tried by their own peers as they believe that all-white juries have not been just in sentencing black people because they do not understand “the average reasoning man” of the Black community (Newton &Sale, 1966). The authors use their own understanding and experiences as evidence as well as examples from history throughout the document. For example, their use of the constitution in numbers 7 and 9 of the What We Believe part of the document. The authors also make use of an example involving Germans in Jewish people in order to point out how the 40 acres and two mules is a modest request seeing that American racists slaughtered almost ten times the number of Jewish people murdered by the Germans.