Black
Panther
Movement
History of the Panthers
The Logo: the picture of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) is a crouching, snarling black panther. It was created in 1966 during the civil rights movement in Alabama. Logo design and purpose ballot symbol required by Alabama law so illiterate voters could easily identify independent candidates. The creation was drawn by activist Dorothy Zellner at the request of SNCC organizer Stokely Carmichael. It was created to oppose the white rooster logo of the racist Alabama Democratic Party, which featured the slogan "White Supremacy."
Meaning: Legacy Symbol of strength, chosen because panthers do not attack first, but become fierce and fight back when cornered.
Inspiration: served as the direct visual and ideological inspiration for the later Black Panther Party founded in California by Huey P. Newton alongside Bobby Seale.
The party’s initial aim was to patrol African American communities to safeguard it's citizens against instances of police violence. The Panthers gradually evolved into a Marxist revolutionary faction advocating for the armament of all African Americans, exemption from military drafts for African Americans, and immunity from all punitive measures of so-called white America, along with the liberation of all African Americans incarcerated and the provision of reparations to African Americans for centuries of oppression inflicted by white Americans.
At its height in the late 1960s, Panther membership surpassed 2,000, and the organization maintained chapters in numerous significant American urban centers. In the aftermath of the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, that Merritt Junior College students Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale established the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense on October 15, 1966, in West Oakland (officially referred to as “Western Oakland,” a sector of Oakland city), California. Shortening its title to the Black Panther Party, the organization promptly aimed to distinguish itself from African American cultural nationalist movements, including the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Nation of Islam, to which it was frequently compared.
Despite sharing certain philosophical viewpoints and tactical elements, the Black Panther Party and cultural nationalists diverged on several fundamental aspects. For example, while African American cultural nationalists typically viewed all white individuals as oppressors, the Black Panther Party made a distinction between racist and nonracist whites and formed alliances with progressive members of the latter category.
