The Black Panther Party For self Defense

[Christopher Hill]

They are/were generally Maoist, which is not a "Negative" but it seems to me that after the arrest/death of it's principal leaders much of the party fell to crippling corruption and degenerated to the racist and petty Nationalist organization which it is stereotyped as in the media, is this about right or am I wrong in concluding this?

[Karlsmith]

here I found a great detailed article about the black panther party for self-defense ,  I didn't had time to read all the article but IMO you are right about them

Here is the article: http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/

[Jimi4444]

Black Panthers have some amazing history, probably my favorite group out of the 60s. You have to really take the Panthers into the context of the time, to really understand how much the ruling class feared them. There was a report that came out about the time they were formed with showed that 2 MILLION African Americans considered themselves revolutionaries. Now imagine Hoover hearing about that and then seeing the Panthers protesting outside the capitol with guns, wish I could have seen his face! They had some amazing revolutionaries in their ranks people like Fred Hampton and Huey P Newton. There were many problems with them though, though revolutionary they had Maoist leanings (selling the "Little Red Book" is a good example of it).

the FBI did do infiltration into the group, some were killed (Fred Hampton and Bobby Hutton) and the main leaders Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale were imprisoned. Basically taking out a good chunk of the main leadership defiantly hurt them and they decreased by quite a bit while Huey and Bobby were imprisoned. In my opinion the main problem was with the lack of theory, which really made them collapse. History has shown without theory, you aren't going anywhere and that's why need to focus on building theory so much.

A good book to read about the history of the Panthers would be the "Black Panthers Speak" various articles, and gives a good jist what they stood for and some of their struggles.

[caesarscook]

The Panthers rise is to a large extent a product of the failures of the rest of the American "Left" to either take the question of Black struggle seriously on the one hand (the old SP elements) or to get their analysis and orientation right on the other (the CP and then later the representatives of the "4th" in the US, the SWP).  Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  That is not to say that the Panthers didn't contain within their ranks genuine revolutionaries, such as the aforementioned Hampton and Newton, but ultimately the effectiveness of this organization was limited by its incorrect analysis, which was a "Third Worldism" that was somewhat out-of-sync with the realities of the struggle for equality of Black workers in the US.  I would suggest this document, http://www.socialistappeal.org/content/view/580/56/, which was produced by the Workers International League in the US.  It details the historic trajectory of Black struggle in the US and the differences between an integrated struggle of the working class (the internationalist position) and a narrow nationalist perspective on the struggle.