People Are Afriad to Give Black Panther Bad Review
Fascination and Fear: Covering the Black Panthers
The Blackness Panther Political party was founded 50 years ago in Oakland, Calif., on October. 15, 1966. Within two years, it had chapters beyond the country. The Times is mark the occasion by exploring the Blackness Panthers' legacy through their i conography and how they were covered in our own pages.
50 years later, images from the Black Panther Party'due south heyday still flicker in our national memory. With their leather jackets, blackness berets and lock step formations, these youthful revolutionaries were ready-fabricated for media coverage — and for posterity.
With the heroic era of the ceremonious rights motility glimmering to a close in 1966, the Black Panthers showed that a more radical struggle for racial justice could be photogenic, fifty-fifty if it was less palatable to the mainstream.
An ironic tension emerged in the way the printing treated the Blackness Panthers: Journalists were at in one case fascinated and frightened by them. And The New York Times was no exception.
"At the same time the paper was dubious and skeptical of them, it also gave them a tremendous amount of coverage," said Jane Rhodes, a professor of African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of "Framing the Blackness Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon."
"The media, similar most of white America, was deeply frightened by their aggressive and assertive manner of protest," Professor Rhodes said. "And they were offended by information technology."
When Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party, their first goal was to face up what they saw as an epidemic of law brutality. They took to the streets with rifles, standing baby-sit over policemen on patrol. The California Assembly responded chop-chop, proposing a law to ban the open conveying of firearms.
And then the Panthers, fully armed, marched into the California state Capitol to protest the bill. The national news media took find.
The Times'south first article on the Panthers was a wire written report, "Armed Negroes Protest Gun Bill," published on May 3, 1967. The piece began, "With loaded rifles and shotguns in their easily, members of the antiwhite Black Panther party marched into the state Capitol today."
What the article did not explicitly say, though it was reported later by others, was that the Panthers had read a statement that afternoon calling "upon the American people in general" — non simply African-Americans — to help them in their push for rights.
The Times sent its ain reporter a few days later to write a profile of Mr. Newton, the party'south young co-founder. That commodity was no more measured than the outset. It barely mentioned police brutality, instead lavishing attention on the fact that the Panthers had weapons. "Political power comes through the barrel of a gun," Newton was quoted every bit maxim.
To some degree, the Panthers were responsible for presenting themselves as a boxing-ready legion. "This is how the Black Panther Party wanted to be seen," said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. "The Panthers and The Times were taking part in a coproduction."
And in subsequent articles, The Times did investigate the Panthers' broader goals a bit more closely. A Times Magazine article by Sol Stern argued that "to write off the Panthers as a fringe group of trivial influence is to miss the betoken. The group'due south roots are in the desperation and anger that no civil-right legislation or poverty program has touched in the ghetto."
But every bit tensions with law enforcement escalated into increasingly fierce clashes, the press focused with increasing intensity on violence between the Panthers and the police — especially Newton's tearing run-in with a police force officer in Oct 1967, which led to a murder trial the adjacent year. There was far less attention paid to the political party's critique of law enforcement.
What went largely unreported was the fact that these conflicts stemmed not just from the Panthers, but too from the federal government.
With chapters springing upwards in dozens of cities, the director of the Federal Agency of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, mounted a covert operation to discredit the grouping and create strife within it. He declared the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the land."
It was not until years later on that the Senate's Church Committee would show how pervasively the F.B.I. worked against the Panthers and how much it influenced press coverage. It encouraged urban police forces to confront Black Panthers; planted informants and agents provocateurs; and intimidated local community members who were sympathetic to the group.
The Panther-police conflict that inevitably followed played directly into the narrative that had been established: that the party was a provocative, unsafe organization.
This was never more apparent than in 1969, when the F.B.I.'due south campaign to undermine the party reached its peak. Twenty-one Black Panthers in New York, known every bit the Panther 21, were charged with plotting to set off bombs throughout New York City. A surge of media coverage followed, with The Times among those outlets leading the fashion.
Most ii years later, all the defendants were cleared, later it became clear that the charges stemmed virtually entirely from the provocations of three iii long-term undercover operatives with the New York City Police Department who had embedded themselves within the organization.
Internal documents made public during a lawsuit brought by Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad, one of the defendants, show that the F.B.I. had used the press — particularly the New York news media — to create strife within the party and to convey the impression that information technology was a volatile group.
Agents wrote of "an attempt to obtain news media publicity highlighting friction between east and westward coast BPP leadership personnel," co-ordinate to 1 F.B.I. memo procured in the 1980s past Mr. Wahad's legal squad. Another discusses "distributing copies of a critical article on the BPP which appeared in the 'New York Times.'"
Every bit The Times focused on the trial and other conflicts between the Panthers and the police, the party was organizing a slate of service programs for African-Americans in New York. Only they went relatively unnoticed.
"We didn't get covered past any of the media when we were doing these types of things, really — only when some of us would get arrested," Mr. Wahad said in an interview.
First in belatedly 1968, fatigued past constant disharmonize and what they saw as sensational coverage, the Panthers refocused their efforts away from policing the police and toward providing health intendance and other services to the urban poor. They began in California'south Bay Area with a breakfast program for school children, and eventually adult initiatives around education and housing advancement.
The Times did eventually report on some of these programs, but often with a tone of skepticism. An article on Dec. 7, 1968, mentioned the party's free breakfast program, just only to suggest that information technology was part of a ploy to indoctrinate African-Americans. The article, "Blackness Panthers Growing, but Their Troubles Ascent," suggested that equally the party grew, information technology was intimidating residents and struggling to codify a coherent direction. When it did mention the breakfast program, the article called it merely "a ways of improving its prototype."
The Times painted a slightly different picture the following June, when information technology ran a full feature on the breakfast plan, most nine months afterward the party's official newspaper, The Blackness Panther, announced the initiative.
Just generally, the programs were treated as publicity stunts, or worse.
The fact that The Times did respond, to some degree, to the arrangement'south change of focus was largely considering of a growing cadre of African-American reporters. In July 1969, Earl Caldwell, who is black, wrote an article, "Panthers' Meeting Shifts Aims From Racial Confrontation to Class Struggle," and followed it with a slice for the Week in Review department, "Panthers: They Are Not the Same Arrangement."
"Ane thing The Times figured out was that the Panthers were selling newspapers," Professor Rhodes said. "The coverage of the Panthers was attracting a younger audition, maybe more of a black audience."
"Black reporters were able to do much ameliorate reporting because they had greater brownie and greater access," she said.
Only that was condign a moot bespeak: By 1969, the party was beingness torn asunder, its Eastward and W Coast factions rived by distrust, largely considering of the F.B.I. And in the courtroom of public opinion, the Panthers had already lost.
A Harris Survey showed that in April 1970, but 10 percent of Americans thought that "a fairly sizable number of Blackness Panthers accept been shot and killed past police enforcement officers" because law enforcement officers were trying to wipe out the Panthers — exactly what Hoover privately said his mission was. Three-quarters of the country said that police shootings of Panthers were due to violence started by the Panthers themselves.
Just 16 percentage perceived the Panthers as doing adept work for disadvantaged youth.
Looking at contemporary news coverage, Professor Rhodes said progress has been made when information technology comes to roofing race and activism. "I see organizations like The Times making a much more sustained effort at deeper coverage," she said. But articles still tend to emphasize the disharmonize between the police and protesters, she said, without addressing the core principles guiding social movements such as Black Lives Matter: greater investment in public instruction, community command of law enforcement and economic justice.
"At that place's a lot of examples to exist learned from the case of the Blackness Panthers, in terms of taking a wait at non just rhetoric and styles of protest, simply also looking for some understanding of what protest means and what it intends," she said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/us/black-panthers-50-years.html
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