THE BLACK PANTHER by DAVID HILLIARD

Author:DAVID HILLIARD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ATRIA BOOKS
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

All Power to the People

by Craig L. Rice

One day in the late 1960s, without fanfare, several brothers dressed in the outfits that would become eternal symbols of their rebellion dropped a newspaper on the street corners of the Twin Cities, and opened up the revolution to the Midwest and the revolutionary in me.

Revolution, revolutionary—these words, which had little life, little meaning to me at that time, roused the sense of wrong, the thirst for justice I already felt burning in my soul. Until that day when the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service emerged from the streets, I was unaware of what my feelings and impressions were, let alone any thoughts on how to express them clearly. I never understood that repression breeds resistance and resistance demands a fight. And the demands by the Panthers were the demands of all Black people in America, the simple demand of dignity and freedom.

To that end, the Black Panther Intercommunal News Service symbolized hope, and hope was valuable and scarce in the black community. It had currency, and was more precious than platinum, and like its companion dreams, unrealized hope was often at stake on the corners of Black American people’s lives where it hid, stacked away like so much kindling wood.

The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service grew to represent a physical item of hope, a totem representing possibility in the neighborhoods. Like traditional newspapers, no one discarded it. After a single read by an individual it was passed around, handed down from person to person, read and reread, referenced, argued over, debated, and recited. The papers were never trash. They were absorbed into the branches of the community like sunlight.

Growing up in the Midwest, the paper was like ice water in the desert. The hammer strikes and flames that emanated from the pages fortified my impressions of the world during my early teens. I started to see the world through the eyes of the Black Panthers. The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service was the other view, the perspective of an oppressed people, of people in search of justice but finding none, of people looking for peace and finding none, people looking for freedom but finding none. It was my introduction to the nations and political climates of the world that were not taught in the schools that I attended and were never touched upon in the national news outlets. The Third World international strategy of the Panthers introduced articles on the oppressed people of the world and showed that Black Americans were a part of this global struggle, that Black America was a nation like Viet Nam, Indonesia, Japan, India, and Peru. News of the Third World’s constant struggle was not disheartening because they were stories of people standing up against the pain, risking life, happiness, family, and comfort.

They were stories of people sacrificing their lives for betterment of the whole.

They were stories of the constant oppression by the powerful against the powerless and put the struggle into a global context; our struggle in America was far reaching and we were not alone in our plight.

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