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Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest

“What We Want, What We Believe”

by Aaron Gulyas, Keith E. Sealing

Date: 1966

Author: The Black Panther Party

Genre: Public declaration

Summary Overview

Although the Black Panthers instituted a variety of social programs aimed at improving conditions and in inner city neighborhoods throughout the country, they were perhaps best known for instituting armed citizens’ patrols and carrying out acts of violence. The Panthers exploited a California law that made it legal to carry loaded rifles and shotguns in plain sight as long as they were not pointed at anyone. Between 1967 and 1970, nine police officers were killed, and fifty-six were wounded; ten Panthers were killed in a series of confrontations. Their reputation for violence captured the attention of then Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, who instituted a widespread campaign of surveillance and infiltration. Some FBI informants were allegedly killed by the Panthers.

The Panthers had an extensive list of rules of behavior and in 1966 published “What We Know, What We Believe,” (commonly known as the Ten-Point Program), which detailed the Black Panther Party’s grievances and demands. One rule was that Panthers were expected to know this manifesto by heart. By the early 1980s the Panthers had dissolved, in large part owing to internal policy disputes but also because of continued police and FBI activity. In 1989 the New Black Panther Party was formed in Texas, but Panthers co-founder Seale does not consider the organization to be a legitimate heir to the Panther name and original organization.

Defining Moment

The nonviolent confrontation and protest, as well as the practice of passive resistance in the face of brutalization by police and the public, had been part of the civil rights movement’s playbook since the 1950s. A new generation of activists however began to question the wisdom and effectiveness of these practices. Figures such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael promoted a more aggressive, proactive stance. The right and responsibility to defend oneself against attack was an idea promoted by this new wave of activists. In addition to a skepticism about a passive resistance, this new generation of activists also questioned the viability of African-Americans aspiring only to be tolerated by white society. Perhaps, some wondered, it would be better for the black community to sustain and govern itself independently of the whims of white Americans.

Formed in the San Francisco Bay Area by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was originally constituted with the avowed purpose of protecting African American neighborhoods from police violence, which was endemic at the time—a situation that had not improved in the midst of the urban unrest that swept the nation during the mid-1960s. The Panthers spread throughout the country and, with a membership of 10,000 at their peak in 1969 and circulation of 250,000 for the Black Panther, their newspaper edited by Eldridge Cleaver, the Panthers were an internationally recognized part of the Black Power movement and the counterculture. The organization was Marxist-Socialist and originally espoused black nationalism but moved away from this position and became more focused on Socialism without regard to race.

Author Biography

The Black Panther Party, and the ten point program presented here, were developed by two men in the San Francisco Bay area: Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.

Bobby Seale was born in 1936 in Texas. The Seale family, searching for economic opportunities not available in Texas, moved to Oakland, California when Seale was a child. After three years in the US Air Force, Seale received a bad conduct discharge for fighting with an officer. He worked in the aerospace industry and attended community college in the early 1960s. In college, he joined the Afro-American Association, a group which promoted black separatism rather than the racial integration that was the focus of much of the civil rights movement at the time. It was as part of this group that Seale met Huey P. Newton.

Newton was born in 1942 to a sharecropping family in Louisiana. Like the Seale family, the Newton family moved west to the Bay area to escape the poverty of the deep south. Newton got in trouble with the law a number of times as a teenager but graduated from high school (although he had to teach himself how to read) and enrolled at Merritt College, where he met Bobby Seale.

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During this time, Seale and Newton became acquainted with the works and ideas of a number of leftist and revolutionary thinkers including Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Che Guevara. As a response to police brutality in the area, and influenced by their revolutionary studies, the pair formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1966, with Seale taking the role of Chairman and Newton the position of Minister of Defense. Soon after founding the organization, they developed the Ten-Point Program.

Historical Document

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations–supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to supper, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Glossary

cooperatives: a real estate agreement in which a group of people cooperatively own property, such as an apartment building.

decadent: moral decline

Plebiscite: a direct vote of the population on a major decision such as fundamental changes in government

prudence: caution

“the black colony”: a phrase which characterizes African Americans as a colonized people under the imperialist domination of the United States

Document Analysis

Each of the ten points in this manifesto is accompanied by a brief explanation of the deeper meaning of the demand. In Black Panther Party publications, these were often organized as two separate lists: “What We Want Now!” and “What We Believe.”

The first point is closely tied to the wider Black Power movement, a term coined by Stokely Carmichael. Here, the explanation is ver similar to the “We want” portion, basically restating the need for African Americans need political and economic power in order to control their own future.

The second point gives the first indication of the Marxist direction that the Black Panther Party would take. Their demand of “full employment” or “a guaranteed income” for “every man” (note that they do not specify a race here) is connected to a consequence of the “means of production” being seized and handed over to the community at large.

The third point demands financial restitution for the legacy of slavery in the United States. The reference to “forty acres and two mules” refers to attempts by some Union generals (such as William Tecumseh Sherman) during the Civil War to redistribute captured plantation land to the slaves of the plantation owner. Congress, however, refused to fully support the orders in the field by military officials to enable that redistribution and plantation land was, in almost all cases, restored to the original owners. This item also addresses the fact that the Federal Republic of Germany was financially contributing to the future of the Jewish people following the Holocaust, using the fact to shame the United States over its failure to provide recompense to the descendants of slaves.

The fourth point continues the theme of potential collective ownership of property, proposing that “housing and the land” should be organized into community owned housing cooperatives. The fifth section demands reforms to the education system that emphasizes the “true history” of African-Americans, emphasizing the role that the white establishment of the United States has played in oppressing them as a means of helping develop pride and cohesion.

The sixth point demands an end to compulsory military service for African-American men. The reference to killing “other people of color” relates to the Vietnam War; a war in which a disproportionate number of draftees were African-American. Here, the Black Panthers express solidarity with those people of color dying at the hands of American soldiers. This point declares that the community “will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.” This connects closely to the next, seventh, demand which calls for an end to police brutality against African-Americans. It also uses the Second Amendment as the basis for a call for African-Americans to “arm themselves for self defense” presumably against police officers.

Points eight and nine both address the racial inequalities in the American criminal justice system. Demand eight calls for the the release of all black inmates on the ground that the trials that convinced them were not “fair and impartial.” There reason for this judicial inequality is addressed by point nine, which demands that juries for black defendants be comprised of black citizens based on the requirement that defendants must be judged by a jury of their peers.

Demand ten is a summary. The call for “land” and “bread” echoes the call of the Russian Communists during the Bolshevik revolution. It also calls for a plebiscite under that authority of the United Nations. A plebiscite, in this context, is a vote on the question of whether a group within a nation should become a separate nation.

The remainder of the document is a recitation of parts of the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, establishing the idea that African0Americans in the United states are a colonized people whose rights have been violated by a government that does not share their values.

Essential Themes

“What We Want, What We Believe” took the emerging rhetoric and ideas of “Black Power” and united them with revolutionary politics and Black Nationalism, a school of thought that had been present in African-American activism throughout the twentieth century. Many of the concerns expressed in the Ten-Point Program developed by the Black Panthers are closely related to specific issues that were prevalent at the time. Demands that African-American men not be compelled to serve in the military were related directly to the disproportionate number of African-American men who were subject to the draft and being sent to Vietnam in combat roles. The demand that African-American men be released from jail and prisons as well as the call for juries consisting of the black defendant’s “peer group or people from their black communities” was connected to instances of all white juries convicting African-Americans without sufficient evidence and, in some cases, with little regard to due process.

Other issues raised by the Ten-Point Program are more general in nature and less directly related to the historical context of the time. Calls for housing and employment, For adequate food and wages that are acceptable are less directly associated strictly with the plight of African-Americans. Rather, these are concerns that orbit around broader issues of class consciousness in class conflict. The revolutionary Marxism of the Black Panther Party’s list of demands and beliefs was a departure for the civil rights movement that is illustrated the growing radicalization of protest movements in the United States.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

1 

Austin, Curtis J. Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006).

2 

Alkebulan, Paul. Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).

3 

Lazerow, Jama and Yohuru Williams, Yohuru, ed. In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2006).

4 

Murch, Donna. Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Gulyas, Aaron, and Keith E. Sealing. "“What We Want, What We Believe”." Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest, edited by Aaron Gulyas, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=DDProtest_0074.
APA 7th
Gulyas, A., & Sealing, K. E. (2017). “What We Want, What We Believe”. In A. Gulyas (Ed.), Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Gulyas, Aaron and Sealing, Keith E. "“What We Want, What We Believe”." Edited by Aaron Gulyas. Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.