3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

Seale, the police were the enforcement agency of a racist power structure that sought to
subjugate, if not exterminate, Afro-Americans . They justified their own resort to arms as
a result of violence initiated by police~ Like RobeR Williams, the Panthers approached
self-defense pragmatically, and their conception of self-protection had less to do with
books and theory than with the immediate, personal danger posed by the Oakland Police
Department, notorious for its brutality and highly questionable methods in dealing with
the city's black ghettos u Undoubtedly, their use of guns stemmed from a very real need
to protect themselves .
In defining the Panthers, Newton addressed the growing trend of cultural
nationalism, with which he flirted and ultimately rejected . Cultural nationalism involved
turning traditionally racist understandings of black inferiority upside-down by celebrating
blackness in a new sense of spiritual and cultural awareness . Such awareness was
symbolically represented in "afro" or natural hairstyles, traditional African dress made of
kente cloth, and the adoption of African names . Newton rcjated cultural nationalism for
four main reasons . First, it failed to rccogniu the specific historical circumstances which
Kenneth O'Reilly has noted: "For many of the young men and women who joined
the Party, all social ills could be traced back to the police who patrolled the ghettoes . . .
`Off the pig!' became the 81ack Panther slogan, and it suggested to some, [J . Edgar]
Hoover included, that the party had assumed the right to liberate black people from a
police army of occupation by murdering anyone who wore a badge:' O'Reilly, $,~j,~[
2%.
`s "[The Panthers'] ideas about self-defense grew out of the realities of their own
lives," explained John Howard, professor of sociology at City College of New York in
1%9 . `"that they reached the position [Robert] Williams had come to a decade before
was due more to circumstance than design :' Williams, who evolved "a set of strategies
and tactics intended for the here and now," appealed to Newton's impetuous nature.
McCord et . al ., Life Styles in the Black Ghetto , 242, 240.
167