Summary

BLACK PANTHER PARTY FOR SELF DEFENCE

TEN POINT PROGRAM

What We Want Now!

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

2. We want full employment for our people.

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

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

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.

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

7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.

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

jails.

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.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

What We Believe

1. We believe that Black People will not be free until we are able to determine our own

destiny.

2. 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 business

men will not give full employment, the 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 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 redistribution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We

will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities:

the Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for genocide of the Jewish people. The

Germans murdered 6,000,000 Jews. The American racist has taken part in the

slaughter of over 50,000,000 Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest

demand that we make.

4. 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 a decent housing for its people.

5. We believe in a educational system that will give 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 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 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 of the Constitution of the United

States gives us the right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should

arm themselves for self-defense.

8. 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 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 peers. A peer is a persons 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. When in the course of human events, it become necessary for one people to dissolve

the political bonds 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 separation. We hold these truths to be

self-evident, and that all men are created equal 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 abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such

principles and organizing its power in a such a 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 shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are

sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accused.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object,

evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, and their

duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards of their future security.