Black Panthers

As I was absent mindedly flipping through my newly received copy of Rolling Stone magazine a picture caught my eye. It was a black and white photograph of two African American men standing in front of an office window that reads in bold black letters Black Panther Party. one of the men was casually holding a shotgun with shotgun shells in a belt wrapped across his chest ramboesque, the other staring off into the distance with a handgun loosely hanging in its holster by his side. The thing that caught my attention, other than the blatant display of intimidating firepower, was the look in both of their eyes. Both of them have this determined, self-confident stare that just reached out and grabbed me. Their eyes just screamed out to me, " I have a cause that's worth fighting for, I know I'm right and I will do anything I have to to get what we deserve." I was hooked.

The extant of my knowledge of the Black Panthers was what I had gleaned from one scene of Forest Gump, so I had some work to do. The first spot I checked was the internet. When I typed "Black Panthers" into Google thousands of sites popped up, but I quickly realized that most were either completely worthless, extremely unreliable, or they only gave basic information. I knew I had to dig deeper, so I journeyed to the public library. I quickly found a couple of books that looked promising, and I also noticed when I searched on the library computers that they had two documentaries in stock so I checked those out too. The books were where I got most of my information and facts from, but one of the documentaries had an interviews with Bobby Seale that was very entertaining and also allowed me to connect with their struggle on a personal level. So I combined what I learned from the books, the documentaries, and the internet and came out with a decent understanding of the history of the Black Panthers and what they stood for.

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