Thread by @jarrodmckenna

I did not expect the ending of #BlackPanther to hurt with Coates' almost nihilistic realism that I first felt at beginning of "Between the World and Me", but it did. That, the Tim Hardaway reference and Ryan Coogler's nod to Spike Lee's spinning dolly cam. 👌🏽🏆

I wish you could have been there for the opening in my neighbourhood with my son and I surround by other locals and heard the excitement from local aboriginal kids as the movie started. Their identification meant they shared in the representation and it moved me deeply.

With the release of #BlackPanther film I want to address some important but forgotten realities of the Black Panther Party (in 🇺🇸 & 🇦🇺) and confront some of the lies. The history has much to teach those of us committed to nonviolent organising for justice.

While the #BlackPanther character debuted July '66 in the Fantastic4 as the creation of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, the Black Panther Party started in Oct 66 by Huey Newton & @BobbySealecom. (@sistaelaine soon after.) The comic changed the name to the "Black Leopard" for in '71.

Re: @sistaelaine, much like the #BlackPanther film, the BPP had strong female leads from the start. According to historian @ClayborneCarson (who I once was too nervous to introduce myself to), despite the masculine image, most people in the #BlackPanther Party were women.

A later comic would have the #BlackPanther explain "I neither condemn nor condone those who have taken up the name" in reference to the incredible growth of the Black Panther Party which was largely a youth movement.

While the backdrop of #BlackPanther is Wakanda, for the BPP it was the assassination of Malcolm X, the Watts riots, Stokley Carmichael led split in SNCC, then he spoke at Berkeley in '66 & two brilliant student activists would start "The Black Panther Party for Self-Defence"

Before starting the #BlackPanther Party, Seale life was changed by #MLK's visit to San Fran 3yrs earlier which inspired him to quit his job & throw himself into community organising. But it was Carmichael's sharp critique of nonviolence that emboldened the belief in self-defence.

The #BlackPanther Party, like (but unrelated to) SNCC's Lowndes County Freedom Organization in the KKK infested Alabama county (that repeatedly murdered black people), used the symbol of a Black Panther as a dignified signifier of power that only attacks in self defence.

The #BlackPanther Party organised against police brutality in Oakland, free food program for children & social uplift. The willingness to arm themselves with law books & rifles in outraged people. They were merely claiming equal ownership in the 🇺🇸myth of redemptive violence.

Don't miss this, the #BlackPanther Party free food breakfast program served 20,000 meals *A WEEK* to poor children in 19 different communities. As this work grows and the armed self-defence begins to fade into the background, J. Edger Hoover started to attack.

J. Edger Hoover, (who's FBI a Memphis jury concluded in '99 was involved in the assassination of #MLK), called the #BlackPanther Party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" because they claimed the Second Amendment & shared in this logic of 🇺🇸 violence.

"Violence is as American as cherry pie." said Rap Brown (aka Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin). The quote is in reference to the reality that the #BlackPanther Party was just sharing in the logic of 🇺🇸 in being willing to defend themselves, violently while doing good works.

Keep in mind the 🇺🇸 department of defence also classified #MLK's Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a "hate-type" group.🤔 Many know #BlackPanther Party through a lens which condemns their guns as violent but is blind to the violent racist systems, e.g. the FBI.

Within a year of the #BlackPanther Party the FBI would launch "COINTELPRO". A program designed explicitly in the FBI's own words to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists."

$100 million = bill to 🇺🇸tax payers.

According to FBI agent M. Wesley Swearingen, "neautalize" included "making someone an informant, or putting someone in jail, or having someone killed." All of which the FBI did to the leaders of the #BlackPanther Party.

28 [youth] leaders were murdered during this period.

Stan Lee & Jack Kirby couldn't imagine foes as mendacious and menacing as the real #BlackPanther Party would face in the FBI.

Again, the threat of the #BlackPanther Party was the speed at which their social uplift programs were growing and that they were exercising their rights to bear arms in holding police accountable.

The FBI named #MLK as a danger for being seen to be a "messiah" but after his murder (that, again, a jury in Memphis in '99 ruled that the 🇺🇸 gov was involved with) they changed the focus to the #BlackPanther Party leaders, including the charismatic 21yr old Fred Hampton.

Ulysses Klaue had nothing on the terror and corruption of the FBI/Chicago police death squad "shoot-in" of young Fred Hampton. Hampton's broad coalition building first gave birth to the term "The Rainbow Coalition", later taken up by @RevJJackson.

While it was claimed that the #BlackPanther Party shot first, Chicago & the FBI would pay Hampton's relatives $1.85million settlement for his murder after it was proven 80 shots were fired, 78 from police guns and 2 from BPP which were shot in the air:
democracynow.org/2014/12/4/watc…

Rev. Phil Lawson has told me first hand of how churches assisting then #BlackPanther Party with the free food for children, medical services and school groups were strategically harassed by the FBI.

So what was the #BlackPanther Party agenda? Here are there 10 points that made them so attractive to the Black Power movement in 🇦🇺 in the 70's

You didn't know about the Australian #BlackPanther Party? Well, this is a must read article blackhistorystudies.com/resources/reso…

@IndigenousX

Enjoy the #BlackPanther film but please don't allow people to self-righteously disregard the BPP until their nonviolence is mobilising thousands of young people to feed 20,000 poor children a week, providing medical care & risking their lives for the freedom of others.

I pray my life witnesses to the reality that I'm fully committed to the liberating-NONVIOLENT-love of Calvary,
both for eschatological & practical reasons, BUT I will not cheaply tear down movements that has risk more for the poor than I have & I have no time for those that do.