This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain’t going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power! Stokely Carmichael
Black power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it. We should begin with the basic fact that black Americans have two problems: they are poor and they are black. All other problems arise from this two-sided reality: lack of education, the so-called apathy of black men. Any program to end racism must address itself to that double reality. Stokely Carmichael, What We Want 22nd September 1966
Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States – and this includes the black ghettos within its borders, north and south – must be liberated. For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same – a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken. ibid.
The adoption of the concept of Black Power is one of the most legitimate and healthy developments in American politics and race relations in our time ... It is a call for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to begin to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations and to support those organizations. It is a call to reject the racist institutions and values of this society. Stokely Carmichael & Charles Vernon Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America
Political repression in the United States has reached monstrous proportions. Black and Brown peoples especially, victims of the most vicious and calculated forms of class, national and racial oppression, bear the brunt of this repression. Literally tens of thousands of innocent men and women, the overwhelming majority of them poor, fill the jails and prisons; hundreds of thousands more, including the most presumably respectable groups and individuals, are subject to police, FBI and military intelligence surveillance. The Nixon administration most recently responded to the massive protests against the war in Indochina by arresting more than 13,000 people and placing them in stadiums converted into detention centers. Angela Davis, If They Come in the Morning, 1971
Repression is the response of an increasingly desperate imperialist ruling clique to contain an otherwise uncontrollable and growing popular disaffection leading ultimately, we think, to the revolutionary transformation of society. ibid.
We believe that the most pressing political necessity is the consolidation of a United Front joining together all sections of the revolutionary, radical and democratic movements. Only a united front – led in the first place by the national liberation movements and the working people – can decisively counter, theoretically, ideologically and practically, the increasingly fascistic and genocidal posture of the present ruling clique. ibid.
In the heat of our pursuit for fundamental human rights, Black people have been continually cautioned to be patient. We are advised that as long as we remain faithful to the existing democratic order, the glorious moment will eventually arrive when we will come into our own as full-fledged human beings. But having been taught by bitter experience, we know that there is a glaring incongruity between democracy and the capitalist economy which is the source of our ills. Regardless of all rhetoric to the contrary, the people are not the ultimate matrix of the laws and the system which govern them – certainly not Black people and other nationally oppressed people, but not even the mass of whites. The people do not exercise decisive control over the determining factors of their lives. ibid.
Needless to say, the history of the United States has been marred from its inception by an enormous quantity of unjust laws, far too many expressly bolstering the oppression of Black people. Particularized reflections of existing social inequities, these laws have repeatedly borne witness to the exploitative and racist core of the society itself. For Blacks, Chicanos, for all nationally oppressed people, the problem of opposing unjust laws and the social conditions which nourish their growth, has always had immediate practical implications. Our very survival has frequently been a direct function of our skill in forging effective channels of resistance. In resisting, we have sometimes been compelled to openly violate those laws which directly or indirectly buttress our oppression. But even when containing our resistance within the orbit of legality, we have been labeled criminals and have been methodically persecuted by a racist legal apparatus. ibid.
Racist oppression invades the lives of Black people on an infinite variety of levels. Blacks are imprisoned in a world where our labor and toil hardly allow us to eke out a decent existence, if we are able to find jobs at all. When the economy begins to falter, we are forever the first victims, always the most deeply wounded. When the economy is on its feet, we continue to live in a depressed state. Unemployment is generally twice as high in the ghettos as it is in the country as a whole and even higher among Black women and youth. The unemployment rate among Black youth has presently skyrocketed to 30 per cent. If one-third of America’s white youth were without a means of livelihood, we would either be in the thick of revolution or else under the iron rule of fascism. Substandard schools, medical care hardly fit for animals, overpriced, dilapidated housing, a welfare system based on a policy of skimpy concessions, designed to degrade and divide (and even this may soon be cancelled) – this is only the beginning of the list of props in the overall scenery of oppression which, for the mass of Blacks, is the universe. ibid.
We’ve got to rise up. We’ve got to organise. We’ve got to mobilise. And we’ve got to work to solve these problems. All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party & Beyond, Martin Luther King, 1996
The Black Panther Party’s ten-point progam of platform was basically a statement of principles. And it was around these principles that we organised in the black community. ibid. Dhoruba bin Wahad
These racist gestapo pigs have to stop brutalizing our community or we’re gonna take up guns and drive them out. ibid. Black Panther
FBI director J Edgar Hoover today asserted that of the black extremist groups the Black Panthers represent the greatest internal threat to the nation. ibid. television news report
Fred Hampton et al: They [rozzers] shot that place up in ways you couldn’t believe. His wife pregnant shot up in the bed there, she survived as did the foetus but Fred’s body was riddled; the walls of the room riddled; you can count scores of bullet holes there. He never got out of the bed; he was murdered right there: 2.30 in the morning, and they claimed they’re serving a search warrant? ibid. attorney
What we see is a war against black America. ibid. dude
From iconic shots to private moments these are Tupac Shakur’s defining moments, revealed by those who were there and those who know his story best. Tupac Shakur: A Life in Ten Pictures, BBC 2021
Tupac Shakur was born on 16th June 1971 in New York City. He was raised by his mother Afeni. When this photo was taken, Afeni had recently been acquitted in a legal case. She was one of a group of Black Panthers charged with conspiracy to bomb public places. Held for a year, when the case came to court, she defended herself, and was released. Afeni raised Tupac and his younger sister in the New York outer boroughs. ibid.
Throughout his childhood Tupac was tutored by his mother in Black history and the Civil Rights movement. ibid.
When Tupac arrived on the [rap] scene, he bought street poetry with a social conscience. ibid.
Launched in 1994, Thug Life was not just an album, it was a manifesto for a whole way of life. It rooted Tupac and his work in the gang culture of Los Angeles. ibid.
Tupac maintained the case was a set-up. He was cleared of six of the charges but found guilty of three counts of sexual abuse. ibid.
Tupac’s first album for Death Row went five times platinum. Its success made front page news. ibid.
There are many theories about who shot Tupac and why. To this day no-one has been convicted. ibid.
The Black Panthers believed that the only way to stop racism in America was for black people to get power. Simply changing the law was not enough. The anger and the fear remained hidden away in millions of people’s mind. The solution was black power, and the first person to articulate this was Stokely Carmichael. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head II: Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing, BBC 2021
‘The Panther Party at that time took my rage and channelled it against them, instead of against us. They educated my mind and gave me direction, and with that direction came hope.’ ibid. Alice Feye Williams aka Afeni Shakur
One morning armed police stormed into Afeni Shakur’s apartment and arrested her. All the other members of her cell were also arrested. They were charged with what the government said was a giant plan to destroy those elements of society which the defendants called The Power Structure. It included attacking police stations and planning to bomb five large department stores and the Bronx botanical gardens. They became known as the Panther 21. Their trial was held in a state of paranoia … Three of the founding members of the group had been undercover police officers. ibid.