The White Panther Party formed in Detroit after Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton urged White allies to form revolutionary groups to help the Black cause for liberation.
The Black Panther Party gets a bad rap from non-history buffs.
Some mistakenly believe that the Black Panthers carried out hate crimes against White Americans when they actually had many White and Brown allies.
But how many know that Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton influenced the formation of the White Panther Party (WPP) to fight racism and injustice?
Since Black History and true American history are getting whitewashed to please many conservative politicians, RegalMag.com has vowed to keep stories like the Black Panther Party and the White Panther Party alive and well.
The University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s website states, “Founded in 1968 by Pun Plamondon, Leni Sinclair, and John Sinclair as a response to Huey P. Newton’s call for separate, White, anti-racist groups in support of the Black Panther Party, the White Panthers served as a countercultural group dedicated to ‘cultural revolution.’ The group was most active in Detroit, Michigan, and was connected with the porto-punk band, MC5. Though a White anti-racist organization, the White Panthers worked with a variety of other groups in what was known as the Rainbow Coalition.”
Women affiliated with the White Panther Party received the moniker the Red Star Sisters.
In 1970, the Red Stars released a statement, “The Red Star is a universal symbol of COMMUNEism, of living and working together, a symbol of righteous revolution and love for ALL humanity. We, the sisters of the White Panther Party, take the Red Star as the symbol of our own liberation, and align I ourselves with all oppressed people on the planet.”
On Nov. 21, 2021, Pennsylvania Capital-Star guest contributor Michael Cord wrote, “The founders of the WPP had been active in a Michigan-based radical arts collective known as the Detroit Artists Workshop established in 1964.
“The impetus for the WPP’s founding in 1968 was ‘The 12th Street Rebellion,’ which occurred just eight months earlier for six days from July 23 to July 28 when notoriously and blatant racist Detroit police officers began by brutalizing innocent Black patrons in a West Side bar, and along with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, the Michigan National Guard, the Michigan State Police, and the Detroit Fire Department ultimately caused the death of 43 persons and the wounding of 1,189 others.”
Cord wrote that three years prior to that rebellion, the Community Relations Division of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission conducted a study of Detroit’s police department that ended in 1968.
The report discovered that the Detroit Police Department was responsible for a “police system that was at fault for racism.”
Furthermore, the study showed that the Detroit Police Department had a history of “recruiting bigots.”
Additionally, the Kerner Commission discovered that 79 percent of White Detroit police officers working in Black neighborhoods were “extremely anti-Negro” or “prejudiced.”
In his article, Cord said that of 7,200 people arrested in the rebellion, none were White police officers, White soldiers or White firefighters “who caused, initiated, accelerated, and extended the widespread racist deaths, injuries and property destruction. In fact, those very same cops, soldiers and firemen were exactly like the vast majority of White racists who had always been in blatantly segregated Detroit—including Mayor Orville Hubbard, who in 1956 had proudly proclaimed in a local newspaper, ‘(We White) people (here) are so anti-colored, much more than you in Alabama!’”
The White citizens of Detroit who eventually created the White Panther Party realized something needed to be done after the 12th Street Rebellion.
They wanted to speak out against the racism, discrimination and oppression faced by their Black brothers and sisters.
However, they did not want to do so by becoming White patriarchal saviors who tried to tell Black Americans how to handle racism from other White people.
Therefore, the White Panther Party comprised a 10-point program on July 4, 1970, to assist in the plight of Black Americans in the years following the Civil Rights Movement.
The White Panther Party’s 10-point program was in deference to the 10-point program created by the Black Panther Party on Oct. 10, 1966.
The WPP’s 10-point program consisted of.
- “We want freedom [and the] power for all people to determine their destinies.”
- “We want justice (and) an immediate…end to all…repression of all oppressed peoples…, ‘particularly the…Black people’…”
- “We want a free (non-capitalistic) world economy…”
- “We want a clean planet…”
- “We want a free educational system…(that encourages people to) grow into…(their) full human potential.”
- “We want to (end) corporate rule and turn all the…land over to the people…”
- “We want free access to all…media and…all technology for all the people.”
- “We want…(an end to the military draft and warmongering of the) armies of the oppressor throughout the world.”
- “We want freedom for all political prisoners…”
- “We want a free planet…for everybody.”
Cord emphasized that the White Panther Party was not all talk, either.
The group was confrontational.
But Cord said that the WPP was “strategically nonviolent.”
Nevertheless, Plamondon and John Sinclair were arrested and sent to prison for their alleged involvement in a 1968 bombing of a CIA building in Michigan, not long after the formation of the White Panther Party.
The WPP members eventually won an appeal of their conviction at the United States Supreme Court.
They “successfully argued that the warrantless wiretaps that led to their conviction and incarceration were unconstitutional invasions of their Fourth Amendment right to privacy.”
Despite the victory, the WPP eventually disbanded in 1973 after raids of offices in cities like Portland and an inability to promote their values and missions during the incarceration of Plamondon and John Sinclair.
