Robert George Seale is an American engineer, political activist and author. Seale is widely known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with fellow activist Huey P. Newton. Founded as the "Black Panther Party for Self-Defense", the Party's main practice was monitoring police activities and challenging police brutality in Black communities, first in Oakland, California, and later in cities throughout the United States.
Elaine Brown is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairwoman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008.
The Black Liberation Army (BLA) was an underground Marxist-Leninist, black-nationalist militant organization that operated in the United States from 1970 to 1981. Composed of former Black Panthers (BPP) and Republic of New Afrika (RNA) members who served above ground before going underground, the organization's program was one of war against the United States government, and its stated goal was to "take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of black people in the United States." The BLA carried out a series of bombings, killings of police officers and drug dealers, robberies, and prison breaks.
The Black Guerrilla Family is an African-American black power prison and street gang founded in 1966 by George Jackson, George "Big Jake" Lewis, and W. L. Nolen while they were incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County, California.
Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour which prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.
The Polynesian Panther Party (PPP) was a revolutionary social justice movement formed to target racial inequalities carried out against indigenous Māori and Pacific Islanders in Auckland, New Zealand. Founded by a group of young Polynesians on 16 June 1971, the Panthers worked to aid in community betterment through activism and protest. Besides peaceful protests, they helped provide education, legal aid, and other social resources, such as ESOL classes and youth community programs. The group was explicitly influenced by the American Black Panther Party, particularly Huey Newton’s policy of black unity through his global call-to-action, as well as his ideology of intercommunalism. The movement galvanised widespread support during the Dawn Raids of the 1970s, and greatly helped contribute to the modern pan-Polynesian ethnic identity in New Zealand called Pasifika.
Kuwasi Balagoon, born Donald Weems, was an American political activist, anarchist and member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. Radicalised by race riots in his home state of Maryland growing up, as well as by his experiences while serving in the US Army, Weems became the black nationalist known as Kuwasi Balagoon in New York City in the late 1960s. First becoming involved in local Afrocentric organisations in Harlem, Balagoon would move on to become involved in the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, which quickly saw him charged and arrested for criminal behaviour. Balagoon was initially part of the Panther 21 case, in which 21 panthers were accused of planning to bomb several locations in New York City, but although the Panther 21 were later acquitted, Balagoon's case was separated off and he was convicted of a New Jersey bank robbery.
Red Onion State Prison (ROSP) is a supermax state prison located in unincorporated Wise County, Virginia, near Pound. Operated by the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC), it houses about 800 inmates. The prison opened in August 1998.
Contemporary slavery, also sometimes known as modern slavery or neo-slavery, refers to institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million to 49.6 million, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used. The estimated number of enslaved people is debated, as there is no universally agreed definition of modern slavery; those in slavery are often difficult to identify, and adequate statistics are often not available.
Jalil Abdul Muntaqim political activist and former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA) who served 49 years in prison for two counts of first-degree murder. In August 1971, he was arrested in California along with Albert “Nuh” Washington and Herman Bell. He was charged with the killing of two NYPD police officers, Waverly Jones and Joseph A. Piagentini, in New York City on May 21. In 1974, he was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with possible parole after 22 years. Bottom had been the subject of attention for being repeatedly denied parole despite having been eligible since 1993. In June 2020, Bottom was reportedly sick with coronavirus disease. He was released from prison on October 7, 2020, after more than 49 years of incarceration and 11 parole denials.
Russell Shoatz, also known as Maroon, was an American political activist and writer who was a founding member of the Black Unity Council, as well as a member of the Black Panther Party, and a soldier in the Black Liberation Army. In 1973, he was convicted in connection with the 1970 murder of Philadelphia (PA) police officer Frank Von Colln.
Penal labor in the United States is explicitly allowed by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Unconvicted detainees awaiting trial cannot be forced to participate in labor programs in prison as this would violate the Thirteenth Amendment.
The Black Riders Liberation Party (BRLP) is a revolutionary black power organization based in the United States. The group claims ideological continuity with the original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and, according to its official website, organizes gang members to "stop commiting [sic] genocide against each other and to stand up against white supremacy and capitalist oppression."
The New Afrikan Black Panther Party (NABPP) is a Black Power Marxist–Leninist–Maoist organization in the United States, largely based out of the Red Onion State Prison in Wise County, Virginia and referred to as the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter (NABPP-PC).
TheIncarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) is a prison-led section of the Industrial Workers of the World. Its purpose is 'a union for the incarcerated,' with the goal of abolishing prison slavery, as well as fighting to end the exploitation of working-class people around the world.
The 2016 U.S. prison strike was a prison work stoppage that began on September 9, 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising. The strike occurred in 24 states, and over 24,000 prisoners took part in the strike. The involvement of 24,000 prisoners made this strike the largest ever recorded in the U.S. Within a week, inmates from approximately 20 prisons participated. Organizations involved in coordinating the strike included the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee and the Free Alabama Movement.
The Black Panther was the official newspaper of the Black Panther Party. It began as a four-page newsletter in Oakland, California, in 1967, and was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. It was the main publication of the party and was soon sold in several large cities across the United States, as well as having an international readership. The newspaper distributed information about the party's activities, and expressed through articles the ideology of the Black Panther Party, focusing on both international revolutions as inspiration and contemporary racial struggles of African Americans across the United States.
The 2018 U.S. prison strike was a series of work stoppages and hunger strikes in prisons across the United States that began on August 21 and ended on September 9. The strike was conducted at least in part in response to the April 2018 prison riot at Lee Correctional Institution, which killed seven inmates and was the deadliest prison riot in the U.S. in the past 25 years.
Intercommunalism is an ideology which was adopted by the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party after its turn away from revolutionary nationalism in 1970. According to Huey P. Newton the development of intercommunalism was necessary "because nations have been transformed into communities of the world." Intercommunalists believe that most forms of nationalism are obsolescent, because international corporations and technologically advanced imperialist states have reduced most nations down to a series of discrete communities which exist to supply an imperial center, a situation called reactionary intercommunalism. They also believe this situation can be transformed into revolutionary intercommunalism and eventually communism if communities are able to link "liberated zones" together into a united front against imperialism. Intercommunalism is a lesser-known aspect of the Panthers' legacy as much of its development occurred at the height of the party's suppression and reorientation towards survival programs.
The Black Hammer Party, formerly the Black Hammer Organization and commonly known as the Black Hammers, is a radical African American political organization that advocates black separatism, conservatism, and political violence. The organization was founded in Atlanta, Georgia in 2019, by ex-members of the African People's Socialist Party, and has undergone a transition from far-left politics to far-right politics. It rose to prominence in the early 2020s amidst the George Floyd protests and the 2020–2023 United States racial unrest, when it attempted to construct a compound in the Rocky Mountains which it named "Hammer City."
