The Black Panther Party, American Democracy, and Historical Memory

The Black Panther Party remains one of the most iconic black revolutionary groups of the 1960s. Historical memory regarding the Black Panthers remains contested. In the 1990s journalistic accounts portraying the group as violence prone and destructive gave way to more nuanced histories that challenged negative accounts of the group. Much of the scholarship over the subsequent two decades has offered detailed accounts of the Black Panthers’ anti-imperialism, the group’s structural critique of racism, and its efforts to organize anti-poverty drives in poor black communities through free breakfast programs, health clinics, and legal aid. Yet the history and memory of the Black Panthers’ efforts to engage and simultaneously confront American democracy remains underdeveloped. This paper examines the Black Panther Party’s relationship with American democracy as both a political philosophy and the way in which its practical effects shaped black lives through education, employment, neighborhoods, the criminal justice system, health care, elected officials, drug rehabilitation, and the idea of citizenship. While the Panthers’ turn toward electoral politics in the 1970s is often categorized as a move toward reform, the group’s founding documents both challenged American democracy and looked toward this political system as offering a road toward liberation.