Happy 81st Birthday to the late Huey P. Newton. He was the co-founder & leader of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
It was originally founded to fight police racism, they were dedicated to liberating people from white supremacism & much more. #BlackHistoryMonth
A THREAD
In the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Merritt Junior College students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense on October 15, 1966, in West Oakland, California. Shortening its name to the Black Panther Party.
The party sought to set itself apart from black cultural nationalist organizations, such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association & the Nation of Islam, to which it was commonly compared.
Although the groups shared certain philosophical positions and tactical features, the Black Panther Party & cultural nationalists differed on a number of basic points.
For instance, whereas black cultural nationalists generally regarded all white people as oppressors…
the Black Panther Party distinguished between racist and nonracist whites & allied themselves with progressive members of the latter group.
Also, whereas cultural nationalists generally viewed all black people as oppressed, the BPP believed that black capitalists & elites could and typically did exploit and oppress others, particularly the African American working class.
The party’s original purpose was to patrol black neighbourhoods to protect residents from acts of police brutality.
The Panthers eventually developed into a Marxist revolutionary group that called for the arming of all African Americans…
…the exemption of African Americans from the draft and from all sanctions of so-called white America, the release of all African Americans from jail & the payment reparations for centuries of exploitation by white Americans.
At its peak in the late 1960s, Panther membership exceeded 2,000, and the organization operated chapters in several major American cities.
The Black Panther Party outlined a Ten Point Program:
The Black Panther Party found itself squarely in the crosshairs of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO. In fact, in 1969 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered the Black Panther Party the greatest threat to national security.
The Black Panther Party came into the national spotlight in May 1967 when a small group of its members, led by its chair, Seale, marched fully armed into the California state legislature in Sacramento.
Emboldened by the view that African Americans had a constitutional right to bear arms (based on the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution), the Black Panther Party marched on the body as a protest against the pending Mulford Act.
The Mulford Act was a 1967 California bill prohibiting the public carrying of loaded firearms, named after Assemblyman Don Mulford.
The bill was signed by California Governor Ronald Reagan.
The Black Panther Party viewed the gun control bill, as a political maneuver to thwart the organization’s effort to combat police brutality in the Oakland community.
In addition to challenging police brutality, the Party launched Survival Programs and provided community help, such as education, tuberculosis testing, legal aid, transportation assistance, ambulance service, and the manufacture and distribution of free shoes to poor people.
Notwithstanding the social services, the FBI declared the group a communist organization and an enemy of the government.
The measures employed were so extreme that, years later when they were revealed, the director of the FBI publicly apologized for “wrongful uses of power”
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Dr. Huey P. Newton had a PHD in Social Science. His doctoral dissertation was entitled War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America.
66 years ago today, Mack Parker was murdered by a white mob. It’s considered one of the last civil rights era lynchings.
THREAD
Mack Charles Parker was a 23-year-old truck driver who had returned to his hometown of Lumberton, Mississippi, after receiving a general discharge following two years in the Army.
On the morning of February 24, 1959, Parker was awakened by Marshal Ham Slade and several deputies, who alleged that he had raped a young white woman, June Walters, the night before.
More than 8000 black women in Mississippi and S. Carolina were given involuntary hysterectomies (removal of uterus) between 1920s and 80s when they went to see white doctors for other complaints.
These came to be known as ‘MISSISSIPPI APPENDECTOMIES’
—A THREAD—
In 1961, Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black sharecropper and civil rights activist, entered a Mississippi hospital to remove a benign uterine fibroid tumor. She returned to her family’s shack on the Marlow plantation to recover, unaware of the life-altering procedure she endured.
While Hamer recovered, unsettling rumors spread in the plantation’s big house. Vera Marlow, the owner’s wife & cousin of the surgeon who treated Hamer, gossiped to the cook that the surgeon had removed Hamer’s uterus during the procedure, rendering her sterile without consent.
In 1780, Paul Cuffee, his brother & 5 other Black men petitioned the Massachusetts legislature demanding the right to vote.
He won free black men the right to vote in Massachusetts on the basis of "No Taxation Without Representation."
THREAD
Paul Cuffee was born Paul Slocum on Jan. 17, 1759, Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, to Kofi Slocum, a farmer & freed slave, and Ruth Moses, a native American of the Wampanog nation.
In 1766 he & his brother John inherited a 116 acre farm from their father in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts, near Dartmouth. He changed his surname to Kofi, spelled "Cuffee." The name Kofi suggests that his father came from the Ashanti or Ewe people of Ghana.
In 19th century Europe, C-sections were performed only in direst need and maternal mortality was very high. At the same time in Africa, indigenous people were performing the operation successfully saving both while Europeans mainly concentrated on saving the baby.
A THREAD
Caesarean section was considered a life-threatening procedure in England that was only to be undertaken in the direst of circumstances and facing the decision on whether to save the life of the mother or baby.
The first successful C-section done in Africa ("success" defined as both surviving) is usually credited to Irish surgeon James Barry (Margaret Ann Bulkley), who performed the operation in Cape Town, South Africa.
113 years ago today, Joseph Phillipe Lemercier Laroche died when the RMS Titanic sank. Laroche and his children were the only black passengers.
A THREAD
Joseph Phillipe Lemercier Laroche was the son of a white French army captain and a Haitian woman who was a descendant of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of independent Haiti.
Laroche’s uncle, Dessalines M. Cincinnatus, was president of Haiti from 1911 to 1912.