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

defense was a logical extension of their own personal experience into the political realm ;
however, their understanding of self-defense was different from legal, ethical, and moral
norms embraced by the majority culture. The Panthers justified any number of marginal
actions in the name of self-defense, and they ultimately strayed from any common
understanding of self-defense in justifying nominally criminal activities .
If the black panther symbolized fighting back when backed into a corner, then not
all of the members of the 81ack Panther Party fully grasped its meaning . One Party
member admired how the panther "moves quickly and quietly, how it strikes before
anyone realizes what has happened ." s~ His understanding of self-defense, and of the
panther, resembled the unjustifiable logic of the preemptive strike . Don Cox assented :
"[F]or us to talk about survival we must talk about self-defense against this
brutality and murder that is defined by the racist power structure as justifiable
homicide . So when a self-defense group moves against this oppressive system, by
executing a pig by any means, sniping, stabbing, bombing, etc ., in defense against
400 years of racist brutality and murder this can only be defined correctly as selfdefense
. . . all self-defense groups must strike blows against the slavemaster until
we have saur+ed our survival as a people and if this takes shooting every pig and
blowing up every pig sty then let's get on up.se
Nor did all of the members necessarily share Newton's original vision of an essentially
defensive organization . "We'd been in the Army, we were armed;' explained Landon
s'Anonymous, as told to Chuck Moore, iWas A Black Panther (Garden City, N.Y. :
Doubleday, 1970), 90. The author of this book concealed his identity for fear of reprisals
for telling his story.
SgCox, quoted in "The Black Panther Party : Its Origin and Development as Reflected
in Its Official Weekly Newspaper The Black Panther Black Community News Service ,"
A Staff Study by the Committee on Internal Security, U.S . Congress, House of
Representatives, 91st Congress, Second Session, October 6, 1971 (Washington, D.C. :
U.S . Governrrrent Printing Office, 1971), 26 .
17 2