It is a measure of both the Black Panthers\u2019 renown and the fear its members inspired that Ross Perot, running for president in 1992, \u201cclaimed that the Vietnamese sent some Black Panthers to kill him in 1969.\u201d Historian Street, the chief of police in Dallas, where Perot lived, refutes Perot\u2019s story, saying, \u201cThere were only about eight people here that belonged to the Black Panther Party. Two of those people worked for us.\u201d Crawling with undercover police informants, its leadership under men such as Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton problematic, the BPP nonetheless made significant contributions to Black communities around the country. One of them was the distribution of free food to needy families, one of a series of social programs that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover \u201chighlighted as the most subversive of its activities.\u201d Hoover\u2019s concern was symptomatic of the fear and loathing that the BPP excited among law enforcement officers in its short lifetime: indeed, by Street\u2019s reckoning those agents killed more than 20 Panthers, and in places as far-flung as Des Moines, Seattle, and New Orleans charges were ginned up for crimes supposedly committed by party members. That the Panthers persisted in the face of so much opposition, distributing free food and offering high-quality health care and early education programs, \u201crenders the social programs even more impressive.\u201d Although Street criticizes the supposed monetization of the BPP experience that came with the publication of several memoirs, to say nothing of the Huey Newton Foundation\u2019s hawking of a \u201cBurn Baby Burn\u201d hot sauce, he also notes the view of most surviving members that their time in the party was invaluably positive, with one even going so far as to liken the militants\u2019 charitable works to those of Jesus.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is a measure of both the Black Panthers\u2019 renown and the fear its members inspired that Ross Perot, running for president in 1992, \u201cclaimed that the Vietnamese sent some Black Panthers to kill him in 1969.\u201d Historian Street, the chief of police in Dallas, where Perot lived, refutes Perot\u2019s story, saying, \u201cThere were only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}