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

with police personnel who were often indifferent to their plight and sometimes complicit
in injustices dirated against them.
In 1967, the Black Panthers not only witnessed the abuse of police privileges in
Oakland but also perceived their own rights to self-defense to be infringed by law
enforcement personnel . The Panthers, in effort, became a law unto themselves while
strotching the concept of collective self-defense to its legal and jurisdictional extremes.
Their actions made many Americans question whether rights ordinarily and justly
belonging to individual citizens may be extended to ethnic groups as a whole, and
whether in law as in fact there exists such a thing as collective self-defense .
The political postulations of the Panthers only further complicated their stand on
self-defense . In their early years, the Panthers claimed that they did not arm as a group
but only as individuals, exercising their constitutional right to bear arms. As their
ideology evolved, they claimed to be an oppressed colony with the United States, to
which they owed no allegiance . Thus, their guards, ostensibly armed for purposes of self-
defense, also constituted a military corps, of sorts : a pararrtilitary army under direction of
a Minister of Defense.
Because it is by definition an individual course of action, it was difficult before
1967 to discuss self-defense as a strategy for a social movement . The actions of Robert
Williams, and of the Deacons, and particularly of the Black Panthers, all helped to
transform self-defense from an individual prerogative into a socially conscious gesture .
As a quintessential freedom, the right to self-defense encompassed qualities of natural,
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