Some History Facts

Black Panther Party, American black revolutionary party founded in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The party's original purpose was to patrol black ghettoes to protect residents from acts of police brutality. The Panthers eventually developed into a Marxist revolutionary group that called for the arming of all blacks, the exemption of blacks from the draft and from all sanctions of so-called white America, the release of all blacks from jail, and the payment of compensation to blacks for centuries of exploitation by white Americans. At its peak in the late 1960s, Panther membership exceeded 2,000 and the organization operated chapters in several major cities.
Conflicts between Black Panthers and police in the late 1960s and early '70s led to shoot-outs in California, New York, and Chicago, one of which resulted in Newton's going to prison for the murder of a patrolman. While some members of the party were guilty of criminal acts, the group was subjected to police harassment that sometimes took the form of violent attacks, prompting congressional investigations of police activities in dealing with the Panthers. By the mid-1970s, having lost many members and having fallen out of favour with many American black leaders, who objected to the party's methods, the Panthers turned from violence to concentrate on conventional politics and on providing social services in black neighbourhoods. The party was effectively disbanded by the early 1980s.


Chicago Defender,the most influential black newspaper in the United States during the early and mid-20th century. The Defender, published in Chicago with a national editorial perspective, played a leading role in the widespread migration of American blacks from the South to the North.
Founded in 1905 by Robert S. Abbott, the Chicago Defender originally was a four-page weekly newspaper. Like the white-owned Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers, the Defender under Abbott used sensationalism to boost circulation. Editorials attacking white oppression and lynching of blacks helped increase its circulation in southern states. It urged equal treatment of black soldiers during World War I. It published dispatches contrasting opportunities for blacks in the urban North with the privations of the rural South, contributing actively to the northward migration of some 1,250,000 blacks between World War I and the Great Depression. By 1929 the Defender was selling more than 250,000 copies each week.
During World War II the Defender, like other black newspapers, protested the treatment of black servicemen and urged the integration of the armed forces. As a result the U.S. government threatened to indict black publishers for sedition; however, the Defender's publisher, John H. Sengstacke, negotiated a compromise with the Justice Department that allowed black journalists access to federal officials.
The Defender became a daily newspaper in 1956. It was noted for the quality of its writers, among them novelist Willard Motley, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and author Langston Hughes, whose "Simple" stories first appeared in the Defender column he wrote for more than 20 years, beginning in 1942. By 1995 the Defender's national influence had been substantially diminished, and its circulation had declined to less than 30,000.


I will add some more facts later.......