The Black Panthers: Background information when reading The Beautiful Struggle

The Black Panthers

This article relates to The Beautiful Struggle

The author's father, Paul Coates, was a member of the Black Panther Party. As Coates describes in his book, the Party's original aims concerned self-defense and social justice. Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Party in 1966. Its diverse membership, however, made cohesion difficult and produced geographically clustered varieties of the socialism, counter-culturalism and Black Nationalism for which the Party became known. The Black Panthers frequently clashed with law enforcement: FBI Counter Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO), for example, investigated the group's alleged connections to communism and hate-related violence across the U.S. Many in the Black community felt that the police and government were unfairly targeting the Panthers.

Berkeley Library offers an online collection of Black Panther history and chronology.

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Beautiful Struggle. It originally ran in June 2008 and has been updated for the January 2009 paperback edition. Go to magazine.