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At the behest of our great and noble Emperor I have started this thread about the Black Panther Party. I have included a link on Wikipedia for all the basic details, However one thing about this subject is even now it is a little hot and finding info that is not slanted one way or the other is hard to do. I mentioned a book I was nearly finished with in another thread and so I will focus a little more on that then the general history of the BPP.My Dad and his twin brother grew up poor in central California. As they were growing up they would sometimes commit petty crimes so they could go to Juvinile hall and get food. Well as that kind of life is, it usually snowballs and when they were around twenty they got in trouble for burglery and were sent to Soledad Prison in California. At that time the era of the revolutionary prisoner was in full swing, being led and promoted of course by the BPP.While there, three black inmates were shot and killed on the exercise yard by a white guard, who was not punished as the black population thought he should have been. Three incarcerated BPP members then decided to take matters into there own hands. On the night of January the 16 1970 They brutally beat a guard to death with his own flashlight and threw him off the third tier. My Father and His brother saw the whole thing. The body landed just feet from where they were standing. Of course they were called to be witnesses and were taken into protective custody as they BPP had already decided they wernt going to live to testify. To make a long story short George Jackson Was killed in an escape attempt at San Quentin in 1971, He never lived to go to trial and so my dad never had to testify. But the very fact that he was going to marked him. This was huge at the time. My dads story(or at least parts of it) Are in several books (The main one being Min S. Yee's 'Melancholy history of Soledad prison') He also Had a four page spread in Rollingstone Magazine. the ripple effect was extensive, Part of the Attica uprising was based in part on the Corruption in the California Penal system and the death of the Party Field marshall George Jackson.My life was different as well. By the time I graduated high school I had been to 50 different schools in 15 states (some I went to 2 or more times) Most involved are dead, and some are still in prison. So my dad thinks it's safe to go ahead and release his story.There is a movie coming out called Black August starring Gary Dourdan (From CSI) about George Jackson, You can see the trailer on YOUTUBE.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_panthers
That's really interesting stuff. So I'm guessing you had to move around a lot because of safety concerns, is that correct?
That's really interesting stuff. So I'm guessing you had to move around a lot because of safety concerns, is that correct?
Thats it in a nut shell.
I'm not familiar enought with the Black Panther Party, so I'm not sure whether they'd fall into the definition of “terrorists”. What were its political aims? What were its tactics? Is this the same BPP that Malcolm X was once involved with?
Terrorists? In my own opinion, yes. They did practice politically motivated violence, They were connected with the weather underground. Shootings, assassanations, bombings. Very militant. They had a 'training camp' in the santa Cruz mountians they refered to plainly as “the land”, where they trained members in hand to hand combat, the use of firearms and how to handle explosives. The kept on hand various styles of military weapons as well as c4 and dynamite (which they planned to use to break Jackson out of San Quentin) One thing, if you research Jackson at all you will over and over read about the fact that he was incarcerated at the time of his death for 11 years for taking $70 in a gas station robbery. But if they were going to tell you the rest of the story they would also tell you that once in prison he had been cited over 40 times for rule infractions including stabbing another inmate in the back. They want him to be a hero, but he was just a thug and a murderer. Here is his FBI File:http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/georgejackson.htm little long at 116 pages but it gives you the real story behind this so-called Black Panther hero.
