Disability Politics in the Black Panther Party: A Genealogical Precursor to Disability Justice Today

• In Event: Embracing the Mess, Engaging the Complex: Disability Politics and Anti-Ableist Practices among Poor and Racialized Populations

Abstract

The Black Panther Party was a revolutionary, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist organization started in Oakland, California in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The Panthers originally focused the bulk of their activities on armed self-defense and patrol of police within black communities, rapidly obtaining national and international membership and influence. Under intense scrutiny and suppression by the FBI as well as in response to changes in gun laws, the Party shifted its focus in the 1970s away from its original emphasis on armed resistance to community survival programs such as their breakfast for children program and free health clinics. Recent research on this latter era of the BPP reveals its engagement with issues of health, gender, sexuality and more. Very little scholarship, however, has explored the role of disability politics in the work of the Party. This paper will argue that disability politics were present, though often non-explicit in the Black Panthers’ activism. In particular, the paper will explore their involvement with the 504 sit-in and how we can read this involvement as a genealogical precursor to disability justice movements today.
The 504 demonstration was a major successful milestone in the disability rights movement. It was a 25 day occupation of the San Francisco regional office of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare during which over 100 protesters refused to leave until the national HEW Secretary, Joseph Califano, signed into effect regulations for Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. In most scholarly accounts of the 504 demonstration, the role of the Panthers is relegated to a brief mention that the Party provided food throughout the 25 day demonstration. Only Susan Schweik’s “Lomax’s Matrix: Disability, Solidarity, and the Black Power of 504” provides extensive scholarly engagement with this history, though recent publications by disability activists and the Longmore Institute’s Patient No More travelling and digital exhibit on the 504 demonstration have added new details on the role of the BPP as well. This chapter builds upon the above-mentioned work to add additional details about the BPP’s engagement with the sit-in and place this activism in conversation with contemporary articulations of disability justice.
Disability justice is a relatively new activist practice and framework developed in the mid-2000s by disabled people of color, disabled queer people, and disabled queer people of color. It builds upon and extends the work of the early disability rights movement, which was often very white, middle-class, and single-issue-focused. By connecting concepts in disability justice to the BPP’s work in the 1970s, I argue that disability studies scholars and activists must not only expand our understanding of what constitutes disability politics today, as disability justice activists are doing, but also what constituted disability politics in the past, especially within black and other oppressed populations.

Author

• Samantha D Schalk, University of Wisconsin-Madison