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-- free clinics for medical care;
-- a free ambulance service;
-- help for the homeless;
-- free legal aids and bussing to prisons;
-- after-school and summer classes teaching black history; and
-- voter registration drives for blacks that helped elect Oakland's first black mayor, Lionel Wilson, in the city where the Panthers were founded.
They were young, idealistic, and willing to put their lives on the line for their beliefs and activism. Their goal was to make the world a better place - for black people and everyone. They were revolutionaries, hostile to repression. In Huey Newton's words they were: "never a group of angry young militants full of fury toward the 'white establishment.' The Party operated on love for black people, not hatred of white people." Their 2000 members demanded change and struggled for it from over 30 branches nationwide.
They wanted redress of longstanding grievances - slavery, Jim Crow laws and practices, segregation, neglect and abuse, and claimed their right of self-defense against them. It was a revolutionary agenda that included ideas Jefferson preached, but for practicing them the US government targeted them for destruction and largely succeeded. The 1960s civil rights gains as well so that today blacks are repressed, impoverished, and segregated. They're stripped of their voting rights, and consigned to second class status by a society disdaining them, other people of color, and all non-Christians or Jews.
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