Community Programs

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY:

THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY'S IMPACT ON THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

COMMUNITY PROGRAMS

"I think it is. I think that it is possible for the capitalist system to have a program of full employment, but we have a spiritual and moral problem in America. Our problem is not economic or political, it is that we do not care about each other because we say hey look, my people, my group, we're first class and you guys, you're second class and you guys over there, you third class and you guys in the back right there, no ain't got no class."

–Eldridge Cleaver: Minister of Information

"We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society."

-The Ten-Point Program, 1966.

The Party's leaders shifted their focus towards community service programs to help impoverished black communities, which were still underfunded and lacked basic resources compared to white communities.

These programs included the free breakfast program for children, the Sickle-Cell Anemia Research Foundation, the Intercommunal Youth Institute, and the Intercommunal News Service.

    "A Panther serving breakfast to a group of youngers. Billy X Jennings, a former Panther who now serves as the party’s archivist, worked at the original breakfast program at St Augustine’s. “Every office was required to send two people to learn how it ran so you can open one in your area,” he said. Jennings would work at St Augustine’s early in the morning before heading to class at Laney College. Soon after, the breakfast service expanded to 23 locations around Oakland"

[Source: Great-wall-institute]

“All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but are not solutions to our problems. That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution. We say that the survival program of the Black Panther Party is like the survival kit of a sailor stranded on a raft. It helps him sustain himself until he can get completely out of that situation. So the programs are not answers or solutions, but they will help us to organize the community around a true analysis and understanding of their situation.”

–Huey P. Newton: Co-Founder of the Black Panther Party

"Central to the Party’s fight against class disparity was its belief in the importance of educating the masses. As stipulated in Point Five of the BPP’s original Ten-Point Program, the Party called for the provision of quality education to African Americans of all ages."

-Donna Jean Murch; Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California

"Students at the Black Panther Party's Intercommunal Youth Institute, the organization's first full-time elementary school: With earlier, smaller-scale iterations in Berkeley and later San Francisco, the Party opened its first full-time liberation school in Oakland in 1971, naming it the Intercommunal Youth Institute (IYI). Under the directorship of Brenda Bay, and later, Ericka Huggins, the IYI facilitated classes for twenty-eight enrollees in its first year, most of whom came from Panther families."

[Source: The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture]

"The Black Panther Party’s Franklin Lynch Peoples’ Free Health Center, circa 1970, Boston, MA."

[Source: It’s About Time Archives]

"Mary T. Bassett (left) demonstrating a finger stick for sickle cell screening at the Black Panther Party's Franklin Lynch Peoples' Free Health Center, circa 1970, Boston, MA."

[Source: It’s About Time Archives]