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

formulating their own . Coincidentally, the name change to "Black Panther Pasty"
signified more than a change of appellation . It marked a symbolic shift toward a new
kind of civil rights movement: offensive, belligerent, and warlike. It was a change that
most people-including the Panthers-were ill prepared to face .
In the late 1960'x, confrontations between the Panthers and police officers became
a feud verging on open warfare . Policemen and Panthers shared the blame for escalated
violence . The police sometimes unfairly targeted political activists ; the Panthers, for their
part, sometimes pinned all of their hostility and frustration on hapless policemen just
trying to perform what they understood to be their duties . Studies of the police showed
that their attitudes and behaviors toward blacks differed gc+eatly from their attitudes and
behaviors toward other whites . Similar studies showed that Afro-Americans tended to
perceive the police as hostile, prejudiced, and corrupt .
Racial prejudice blended with a skewed sense of duty in some law enforcement
officers to create a strain of policemen ill-equipped for duty in black communities. These
policemen often saw blacks as people who wanted something for nothing, as a lesser race,
as "the enemy," or as the dupes of a foreign power determined to eradicate the "American
way of life ." There wetr "good guys," they t+easoned, and there were "bad guys" : they, as
"'`For more on these studies, see the President's Commission on Law Enforcement
and the Administration of Justice, Task Force Report: The Police (Washington, D.C . :
U.S . Government Printing Office, 1%7), espaially chapter 6; see also Jerome H.
Skolnick, 'n+e Politics of Protest : Violent AsQects of Pn~dst & Confronmtion (A S~ff
Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence)
(Washington, D.C. : Superintendent of Documents, U.S . Government Printing Office,
1%9), 97-135 .
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