By now, we’ve all become familiar with the Blank Panthers, a party established in Oakland in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. The Black Panther Party’s goals included self-determination, better jobs, decent housing, and an end to police brutality. Although the Black Panthers did many things to help the black community, such as providing free breakfast programs for children and medical clinics for blacks, they were most well-known for their methods to prevent police brutality. Members of the Black Panther Party, carrying law books, tape recorders, and shotguns, would stand on the streets and overlook police-black citizen interactions. The decision to name the party Black Panther was purposeful, “The black panther was a vicious animal, who, if he was attacked, would not back up. It was a political symbol that we were here to stay and we were going to do whatever needed to be done to survive.”
The Black Panther Party was no doubt a very important part of the black civil rights movement, but it also played an important role in the Latino civil rights movement and the elderly civil rights movement. Much like how Martin Luther King Jr.’s belief in nonviolent direct action was adopted by many other civil rights groups and activists, the Black Panther Party inspired other groups of people to create their own versions of that party.
One of those versions was the Brown Berets, a group that fought for Latino rights, particularly improving farm workers’ conditions and education. Founded in East Los Angeles by David Sanchez, the Brown Berets worked to improve housing and employment for Latinos, as well as give Latinos more pride in their culture.
Another party inspired by the Black Panthers was the Gray Panthers, established in 1972 by Maggie Kuhn in Philadelphia in response to being forced to retire from the Presbyterian Church at the age of 65. The Gray Panthers spoke out against ageism, discrimination against people on the basis of age. One major accomplishment of the Gray Panthers was pushing back the required retirement age from 65 to 70 in 1978.
The Black Panthers inspiring both the Brown Berets and the Gray Panthers is just one example of how the civil rights movement managed to spread to all minorities who struggled with life in America during the 1960s and 1970s. Where else in history do we see this theme that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”?
I did not know about the symbolic meaning of the black panther as the animal that represented the group; I think that's pretty cool. Also, it's interesting to think that even though their ideology was in conflicting with the ideology of nonviolent groups, they still inspired so many other civil rights groups in their own way. I also did not know about the grey panthers or that ageism was a thing. I will have to consider that the next time I think about civil rights.
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