Revolution in Our Time: Chapters 1–3

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general and the Black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the Black People disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of Black People.

Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetrated against Black people.

We believe that the Black communities of America must rise up as one man to halt the progression of a trend that leads inevitably to their total destruction.

They went as law-abiding citizens and yet were treated as an inherent threat because of the color of their skin.

May 2, 1967, marked a significant turning point—the moment when the Black Panthers’ posture of armed self-defense became a matter of national awareness. This new militancy rolled across the American landscape like an earthquake, trembling the foundation of the republic.

The major turning points of history are seismic, born of eons of slightly shifting geologic plates. They do not emerge from nowhere. They are born of deep unrest.

The European settlers regarded the Africans not as people, but as property, and bought and sold them like farm animals. Amid these acts of cruelty and degradation, geologic plates began to shift.

She built an army of young people, called kilombo, to defend Matamba, and they worked from afar to incite further rebellion within Ndongo.

As a compromise, they wrote in the Constitution that they would count each free person, but “all other persons” (which would mean non-free, or enslaved, people) would be counted as three-fifths of a person. Thus, the founders of the new America enshrined in the most integral document of the land the notion that Black people were less valuable—indeed, less human—than white people.

Many Native people were enslaved alongside (or in place of) Black people, and those individuals would have been counted based on the three-fifths clause.

Soon the nation was embroiled in a full-blown civil war, with the Confederates fighting for independence while Lincoln’s army fought to preserve the full Union.

As the Civil War concluded, the government began a process of reconstruction to bolster the ailing South, but those efforts were centered around white southerners.

The landowners were all white, and the sharecroppers’ portion of the profits offered them little more than basic subsistence.

This gathering was utterly unprecedented in American history, with white government leaders sitting down at the negotiating table alongside Black leaders, concerned for the future and the prosperity of Black Americans.

The Black leaders’ request was simple but bold: “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn and till it by our own labor,” said Rev. Garrison Frazier, the group’s spokesperson.

They proposed that each formerly enslaved family be given a small plot of this land to farm. The gift of land would represent a sort of back pay for all the years they had worked for no wages. This idea of back pay would come to be known as reparations.

They granted forty-acre parcels of this land to Black families, who were eager to get to work.

Land ownership would give Black people a chance to build wealth of their own, instead of toiling for free.

But within a year, the American government reneged on these promises, returning the land to the white landowners and leaving the newly freed Black citizens to fend for themselves in a broken economy.

The chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep.

Leaders throughout the South implemented new laws informally known as black codes. Each state had separate laws, but most included restrictions on where Black people could work and what jobs they could hold.

Seven out of the nine justices decided that as long as the public provisions for Black and white people were equal, these segregation laws were acceptable under the Constitution.

The present decision...will not only stimulate aggressions...[toward] colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible [to make laws that undermine] the Constitution.

Under segregation, those disadvantages compounded and pushed Black people further and further to the fringes of American society, especially in the southern states.

Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, the first higher-education institution specifically for Black students, which offered vocational training programs and teacher education.

The United States once again benefited from a robust Black workforce.

However, Black men who joined the military served in segregated units, which were often assigned menial or ultra-dangerous tasks because Black soldiers were perceived as less talented and less important.

Many Black men who had been able to take on jobs previously unavailable to them, and who had performed well in those roles, were forced to give those jobs back to white servicemen returning home. This was patently unfair.

Across the state, in Tulsa, the similarly thriving Greenwood District became known as Black Wall Street, due to its affluence.

On May 31, 1921, two armed, angry crowds surrounded the local courthouse after a Black man was arrested for allegedly interacting with a white woman—the Black crowd hoping to stave off a lynching, and the white crowd eager to see consequences enacted.