Panthers Have Pride Not a Klan
During Super Bowl 50’s half time show the Queen of Pop music, Beyonce, and her backup entourage paid homage to the notorious Black Panther Party. Virtually everyone on social media and beyond felt obliged to comment on the act and its ramifications. Although many took the symbolic gesture as tribute to an organization which has come to represent the struggles of Black America others felt it was promoting racial divide. Those that espoused the latter view went as far as comparing the Black Panther Party to the most infamous terrorist organization to plague mainland America for the last 150 plus years, the Ku Klux Klan. In this article we hope to challenge that assertion and to hopefully shed light on these two organizations. We will start with a brief history of the Klan and the Black Panthers discussing the circumstances of their formation and the political and social environment at the time. We shall also consider what each organization’s goals and objectives were along with how they went about in achieve said goals and objectives. Finally, we will compare the Klan and the Panthers to see if they have any remote similarity which would lead people to regard them on the same level.
What is the Ku Klux Klan and how did it rise to prominence? To answer this, we must look at the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the subsequent reconstruction of the South. The Klan was founded by the former Confederate General, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader in civilian life. Forrest rallied other former slave-owning gentry of the Reconstruction Era South as they invoked the emotion of the poor and often uneducated Whites about how the North had humiliated them in the War, taken away their pride, and destroyed their beloved Antebellum South. What truly helped to bolster their claim was the newly established Freedmen’s Bureau which was meant to ensure that the disenfranchised former slaves, were able to vote and had means to provide for themselves. Of course, Bedford and his cronies encouraged the poor Whites to see the former slaves as inferior to themselves. The Ku Klux Klan came about under such conditions and when it did it became the pride of White men in the South. The Klan terrorized Blacks in the South and any “carpet-bagging” white sympathizers often by burning crosses in front of Black homes and churches. The Klan also beat up any Blacks they could find and in many extreme cases formed lynching mobs to murder innocent Black Americans. The Klan call for White supremacy and promoted the segregation of races. In its heyday the Klan felt it had to purify America from all non-Protestants and all non-Whites. It relished the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed for the separation of races. During the Second World War the Klan supported the Third Reich as both held similar bigoted beliefs and after the dissolution of Nazi Germany the Klsn took the mantle of Neo-Nazism. The Klan has always been and will be an institution which wishes to keep others, those who are not part of their frat, from reaching their full potential as they hold on to the fallacy of the “master race”.
The Black Panther Party was founded by Black student activists, Huey P. Newton, and Bobby Seale, in 1966 at the height of the civil rights movement sweeping across the United States. For the reader to grasp the reasons which led to formation of the Panthers they must first understand the racial stigma attached to being a Black American. To be Black was to be lesser. This was the era of the Jim Crow South, a time where Blacks were “equal” yet separate. It was a time where a Black Baptist Preacher from Selma was arrested for leading a non-violent march to Montgomery. An age where an elderly black woman had to vacate her seat on a bus for a strong young white man. This was at the time when black folks and any whites that supported equal rights where tarred, burned, and/or lynched. As all this happened the Law Enforcement Agencies, instead of defending the persecuted would turn a blind eye. Other times they were among the instigators of the racist lynch mobs murdering innocent black men. These were the conditions under which Newton and Seale founded their organization which was instrumental in empowering African Americans. The Black Panthers were ambitiously determined to provide for the poor black communities particularly in inner cities with large urban populations often neglected by the government. Places like Oakland, Harlem, New Orleans, Chicago’s Southside, South Central Los Angeles where the crime rates were astronomical, and the unemployment rate followed suit. The panthers took to the streets to clean them up and to the schools to help make sure that black kids had the proper resources to compete with their white counterparts in better funded school districts. The Panthers were armed but not to intimidate whites or to be thugs on the streets rather they were armed because they had seen the police refusing to protect them. The Black Panthers were not a racist organization calling for the supremacy of Blacks but rather a militia of citizen activists reacting to the societal setbacks faced by African Americans based on racial prejudices.
Based on all this if you wish to conclude that the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panther Party are armed militant organizations which sought to advance their respective racially charged agendas then yes, they are very similar organizations. However, as we have seen this is where the similarity ends and the two could not be further from each other in terms of their respective goals and means of achieving them. The Klan is an organization representing a racist sentiment wishing to reestablish norms as practiced in the antebellum South by the way of terror and violence. While the Panthers are a group of vigilantes fighting for social, political, and economic justice for a race of people who spent the first 246 years in slavery on this continent and the last 155 trying to find their place as equals. To equate such a movement and the history which led to its inception to the most bigoted and reviled terrorist group to operate on American soil is not only ignorant but an example of how much work still needs to be done to bridge the gap between us. I leave you with a quote by Saint Augustine, “An unjust law is no law at all.” Sometimes we must defy such laws by civil disobedience like Dr. King did at other times we must fight back like the Black Panthers.
