![]() The Black Panthers were clients of hers, and she invited Huey over for brunch a few months after his release. Arlene became a lifelong advocate for fair housing, often posing as the buyer to help people secure loans. The Slaughters had eloped to Mexico, and once they returned to the U.S., they’d struggled to find anyone who would rent or sell them a home. Arlene was a Jewish real estate agent who’d married a Black musician in the early 1940s, when interracial marriage was against California law. It was Fredrika’s mother, Arlene Slaughter, who brought her closer to the Black Panther leader. “I thought they were going to try and recruit me,” she says. She was 18, about to leave for college, and whenever she passed the Black Panther Party’s headquarters in Berkeley, she’d gotten into the habit of crossing to the other side of the street. But she had no interest in joining the movement. When Huey was released on appeal, some of Fredrika’s activist neighbors convinced her to come along to the courthouse. Before long, Black Panther Party offices popped up all over the United States, and Huey became a revolutionary icon like Malcolm X and Che Guevara.īlack Panthers hold "Free Huey" signs at a rally at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, California, in September 1968. The slogan “ Free Huey” became a rallying cry, emblazoned on posters and buttons. His fellow Panthers eagerly took up his cause, insisting that Huey had been wrongly accused. When he’d been arrested in 1967, charged with killing a police officer, the group had only a few dozen members. Newton, at 28 years old, was the leader of the Black Panther Party, one of the most influential social movements of the 1960s. He made his way through the crowd and climbed up onto a car to make a speech, pulling off his shirt and standing bare-chested in the sun. When he came down the steps of the Alameda County Courthouse in California that afternoon of August 5, 1970, a sea of elated supporters surged around him. These pictures show the impact of the Black Panthers on America in the 1960s and ’70s.The first time Fredrika Newton saw her future husband was the day he got out of prison. By the end of the 1970s, much of the Black Panther Party had dissolved. Violent confrontations with the police left several prominent party leaders dead or in jail. They held community drives, which offered free clothes, education, food, and medical care for those in need, regardless of color - but by the end of the decade, their controversial use of guerrilla tactics to disrupt the status quo had garnered the attention of the FBI, which labeled the group as a terrorist organization that sought to overthrow the US government. In the years that followed, the Black Panthers established chapters across the country with its members totaling in the thousands. On May 2, 1967, when a new California bill threatened to limit their right to carry, a group of Black Panthers, led by Bobby Seale, stormed the state capitol with their weapons in a dramatic display of their Second Amendment rights. The right to bear arms was also seen as essential for black people's freedom and their ability to police the police. Central to its beliefs was the idea that American capitalism was fundamentally oppressive in its economic exploitation of black people and that by adopting socialist values, America could mend its racial inequalities. Later renamed the Black Panther Party, it adopted a 10-point program that outlined its agenda. Newton and Bobby Seale, formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966. In an effort to protect their own communities from racism and police brutality, two college students in Oakland, Huey P. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had outlawed segregation, racial violence and bigotry were still common throughout the country - often committed by white police officers assigned to protect black neighborhoods. In the mid-1960s, the United States was aflame with racial tensions.
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