The Black Panther Party's Transnational Solidarity

The name "Black Panthers" today conjures up images of militant black power, an image carefully constructed by the Black Panther Party throughout its existence. The Panthers in popular memory are remembered as gun-toting, leather and beret-sporting embodiments of black masculinity resisting white power. (Rhodes, 2017, 13.) It was not simply the militant criticism of America and police brutality that caused the Black Panthers to be identified in 1968 by the FBI as the greatest threat to internal security. A key facet of the Black Panthers rhetoric was their relationship with the Third World and the transnational discourse that seriously challenged American Imperialism. This exhibit aims to synthesize some recent scholarship which focuses on the transnational and anti-colonial elements of the Black Panther Party, and African Americans as a whole during the Cold War. The pages in this exhibit show how the Black Panthers connected the struggle of Black Americans at home with American imperialism abroad.

Credits

Researched and created by William Jaskula, University of Ottawa (Winter 2021)