http://www.blackpanther.org/
The Black Panther Party (originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was an African American organization founded to promote civil rights and self-defense. It was active within the United States in the late 1960s into the 1970s.
Founded in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966, the organization initially espoused a doctrine calling for armed resistance to societal oppression in the interest of African American justice, though its objectives and philosophy changed radically throughout the party's existence. While the organization's leaders passionately espoused socialist doctrine, the party's black nationalist reputation attracted an ideologically diverse membership base. [1] Ideological consensus within the party was difficult to achieve, and some members openly disagreed with the views of the leaders.
The group was founded on the principles of its Ten-Point Program, a document that called for "Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace," as well as exemption from military service that would utilize African Americans to "fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America."[2]
While firmly grounded in black nationalism and begun as an organization that accepted African American membership exclusively, the party reconsidered itself as it grew to national prominence and became an iconic representative of the counterculture of the 1960s.[3] The Black Panthers ultimately condemned black nationalism as "black racism" and became more focused on socialism without racial exclusivity.[4] They instituted a variety of community programs to alleviate poverty and illness among the communities it deemed most needful of aid. While the party retained its all-black membership, it recognized that different communities (those it deemed oppressed by the American government) needed to organize around their own set of issues and encouraged alliances with these organizations.
The group's political goals are often overshadowed by their confrontational and even militaristic tactics, and by their suspicious regard of law enforcement agents; whom the Black Panthers perceived as a linchpin of oppression that could only be overcome by a willingness to take up armed self-defense.[5] The Black Panther Party collapsed in the early 1970s, after party membership had started to decline during Huey Newton's 1968 manslaughter trial. There have been a variety of allegations about the lengths to which law enforcement officials went in their attempts to discredit and destroy the organization; including allegations of assassination.[6]
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[edit] Foundations
In 1965, Huey Newton was released from jail, and, with his friend from Oakland City College, Bobby Seale, had joined a black power group called the Revolutionary Action Movement, which had a chapter in Oakland and followed the writings of Robert F. Williams. Originally from North Carolina, Williams published a newsletter called The Crusader from China, where he fled to escape kidnapping charges. RAM was often seen as extremely violent; in 1965, three east coast RAM members were charged with conspiring to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument. The Oakland chapter consisted mainly of students, and were not interested in this more extreme form of activism. Newton and Seale's attitude was more militant, and the pair left RAM searching for something more meaningful to them [7].
Around this time, the pair were working at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center and they also served on the advisory board. In an effort to deal with police brutality, the advisory board obtained five thousand signatures in support of the city council setting up a police review board to review complaints of police brutality. Newton was also taking classes at the City College and at San Francisco Law School, and both were active in the North Oakland Center. Thus the pair had a large number of connections and friends with whom they talked up the new organizational they had in mind. Inspired by the success of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and Stokely Carmichael's calls for separate Black political organizations,[8] they wrote their initial platform statement, the ten-point program, with the help of Huey's brother, Melvin, and decided on a uniform of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, Black Berets, and openly displayed loaded shotguns [9].

[edit] Theory
With the death of Malcolm X in 1965, the Black Panther Party saw as its purpose to further the African American civil rights movement and to fill what it perceived to be the void in leadership among the African American community. Although it eventually saw the involvement of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader, Stokely Carmichael, the party initially rejected the integrationist stance of Martin Luther King, and rejected compromise with the power structure. The Black Panthers focused their rhetoric on revolutionary class struggle, taking many ideas from Maoism. The party turned to the works of Karl Marx, Lenin, and Mao to inform the manner in which it should organize, as a revolutionary cadre organization. In consciously working toward such a revolution, they considered themselves the vanguard party, “committed to organizing support for a socialist revolution.” [10]
However, the party did not fully agree with Karl Marx's analysis of the so-called lumpenproletariat. Marx felt that this class lacked the political consciousness required to lead a revolution. Newton, on the other hand, was inspired by his reading of post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon and his belief that the lumpen was of utmost importance, saying about these "brothers off the block" that, “If you didn't relate to these cats, the power structure would organize these cats against you.” [10] Marx’s conception of the lumpenproletariat was a group that stands on the very margins of the class system because they are not wholly integrated into the division of labor. They do not accept the idea of making their living by regular work. Thus, their position within society is not marked by the fact that they are unemployed but rather by the fact that they do not seek employment:
‘the lumpenproletariat, which in all big towns forms a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu [men without hearth or home], varying according to the degree of civilization of the nation to which they belong, but never renouncing their lazzaroni character’. [11]
Though they may be swept up by a proletarian revolution and are entirely capable of “the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices”, they are equally capable of “the barest banditry and the foulest corruption”, and are much more likely to play the part of “a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” [12] Essentially, they are a malleable populace that is generally tempted into service of sight, as opportunistic and exploitative as the finance aristocracy. “The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society”, [13] Just like the aristocracy, the lumpen live off society, rather than producing for it, existing as an entirely parasitic force.
The Black Panthers' basic interpretation of the lumpenproletariat generally conforms to that of Marx. For Eldridge Cleaver, the lumpenproletariat were those who had “no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of a capitalist society.”[14] His wife Kathleen Cleaver echoed a similar sentiment, stating that the black lumpenproletariat had absolutely no stake in industrial America: “They existed at the bottom level of society…outside the capitalist system that was the basis for the oppression of black people.”[15]
Yet, the Panthers did not propose that the entire Black American population constituted a post-modern, race-based lumpenproletariate in and of itself. Instead, the Party's analysis suggested that there existed a significant "underclass" -- both urban and rural in locus -- within the masses of the oppressed whose removal from the primary means of production left that class particularly apt to engage subversive activities, both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary in potential impact. The Panthers included two distinct groups within the lumpen. Firstly the “industrial reserve army”, who could not find employment, being unskilled and unfit, displaced by mechanization and never invested with new skills, forced to rely on Welfare or receiving State Aid. They consisted of ‘the millions of black domestics and porters, nurses’ aides and maintenance men, laundresses and cooks, sharecroppers, unpropertied ghetto dwellers, welfare mothers’.[16] The second group were the so-called “Criminal Element”, who had similarly been locked out of the economy, and consisted of the ‘gang members and the gangsters, the pimps and the prostitutes, the drug users and dealers, the common thieves and murderers’.
The “Criminal Element” quite evidently displayed the key characteristics of the Lumpen, the parasite, “existing off that which they rip off”. However, the “Industrial Reserve Army” poses something of a problem, since a large proportion of this group consists of the working poor (although their jobs are “irregular and usually low paid’ they are the working poor all the same). But Marx explicitly stated that the lumpenproletariat formed “a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat.” However, the Panthers viewed the line that separated the proletariat and the lumpen as tenuous and fragile, and this resulted in a blending of the two classes. Indeed, some historians have argued that the Panthers “envisioned a lumpen more akin to a subproletariat class” that lacked the parasitical aspects of the traditional lumpen sector.[17]