Life’s Transitions to the Black Panther Party

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-53
Author(s):  
Paul J. Magnarella
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Life Style ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
First Marriage ◽  
Police Abuse ◽  
Fellow Member ◽  
Black Panther

Pete O’Neal describes his failed first marriage and his inability to adapt to a standard working-class life style. Once free from marriage he achieves his 12th Street ideal by becoming a pimp, only to experience a mental and spiritual breakdown. He commits himself to working for the black community and forms the Black Vigilantes to protect blacks from police abuse. He travels to the Black Panther Party headquarters in Oakland, California, to train and then get permission to form a branch of the Party in Kansas City. He describes the Party’s personnel, structure, and workings in Kansas. Pete marries fellow member Charlotte Hill, and years later both recollect their first meeting and how the Party saved their lives.

Black Panther Party–Community Relations

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-65
Author(s):  
Paul J. Magnarella
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Family Counseling ◽  
Community Relations ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
School Breakfast Program ◽  
Black Panther

Pete O’Neal describes the Black Panther Party’s various community support programs in Kansas City, Missouri. They include a pre-school breakfast program for inner-city children, as well as clothing, food, medical support, and job and family counseling for people in need. O’Neal explains how these programs were supported by local churches and businesses. O’Neal describes ways the Panthers joined forces with other civil rights organizations such as Soul Inc., the Black Youth of America, and Students for a Democratic Society to protest city policies they deemed to be unfair to inner-city residents and to expose persons who took advantage of these same people. O’Neal also describes the Panthers’ confrontation with a “white” inner-city church (Linwood United Methodist Church) and the resulting reconciliation between the church and the Black Panther Party.

Arrest, Trial, Escape

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-102
Author(s):  
Paul J. Magnarella
Keyword(s):  
Kansas City ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Federal District ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Defense Attorney ◽  
District Court ◽  
Federal District Court ◽  
Black Panther

In chapter 5 Pete O’Neal describes his arrest in Kansas City, Missouri, for allegedly violating the Federal Gun Control Act of 1968. O’Neal travels to California to seek help from Charles Gary, the Panthers’ regular defense attorney. Rather than offering to defend O’Neal, Gary tells him he could help the Party more from inside prison. Deeply disappointed, O’Neal leaves the Black Panther Party and forms the Sons of Malcolm. He is convicted in Federal District Court with attorney Austin Shute defending and Judge Arthur J. Stanley presiding. Fearing that he would be killed in prison, O’Neal flees to Sweden with his wife, Charlotte.

Songbird

Groove Theory ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 119-146
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
Vocal Technique ◽  
Community Theater ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Black Panther

This chapter examines Khan’s development into a powerhouse singer and talented songwriter as the frontwoman of Rufus. Drawing Khan’s childhood experiences described in her memoir, as well as musicologist Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.’s notion of black community theater, the chapter demonstrates how she transposed her rebellious spirit, evidenced briefly during high school as a volunteer worker for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, into a self-conscious and contrarian artist who epitomized funk aesthetics. As one of the few women funk singers who didn’t have a gospel background or grow up in a musical family, Khan developed a jazz-inflected vocal technique and a singular, Chicago-based, rhythm-and-blues sound that became a funk trademark. At the same time, the chapter demonstrates that Khan’s interpretation of funk as a concept, particularly its nonconformity, which she exemplified in exhilarating eroticism during live performances, proved to be a double-edged sword. While she captivated music fans, Khan battled executives at ABC Records over racialized images of her sexuality. 

scholarly journals Resisting racial militarism: War, policing and the Black Panther Party

2021 ◽  
pp. 096701062199722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nivi Manchanda ◽  
Chris Rossdale
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Liberal Societies ◽  
Police Action ◽  
Black Panther

The past ten years have witnessed a revival in scholarship on militarism, through which scholars have used the concept to make sense of the embeddedness of warlike relations in contemporary liberal societies and to account for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organization of political violence. However, a persistent shortcoming has been the secondary role of race and coloniality in these accounts. This article demonstrates how we might position racism and colonialism as integral to the functioning of contemporary militarism. Centring the thought and praxis of the US Black Panther Party, we argue that the particular analysis developed by Black Panther Party members, alongside their often-tense participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, offers a strong reading of the racialized and colonial politics of militarism. In particular, we show how their analysis of the ghetto as a colonial space, their understanding of the police as an illegitimate army of occupation and, most importantly, Huey Newton’s concept of intercommunalism prefigure an understanding of militarism premised on the interconnections between racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering and the dissolving boundaries between war and police action.

Visualizing a Black Future: Emory Douglas and the Black Panther Party

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-311
Author(s):  
Colette Gaiter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Gun Carrying ◽  
The Us ◽  
Hero Archetype ◽  
Gun Culture ◽  
Black Panther

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas of Afrofuturism, which would develop years later as an expression of imagined liberated black futures.

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