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Abstract
My dissertation is a case study of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and its continuation of the radical African American tradition of armed resistance, and its role during the Civil Rights movement. My research builds upon recent scholarship by Timothy Tyson, Lance Hill, Akinyele Umoja, and Christopher Strain. Each provides new historical frameworks for the study of Civil Rights/Black Power while integrating discussion of the use of armed resistance. All of them argue against traditional discourse that advocates 1965 as the transitional year in the shift from Civil Rights to Black Power, concluding that the era's traditional periodization is an historical misconception.
I contend that Hampton and the Chicago BPP are extensions of the Civil Rights movement who shifted the rarely used component of the nonviolent strategy, armed resistance, to its primary approach. Hampton gained leadership, mobilization, and grassroots organizing skills while leader of the NAACP Youth Council. Later as Deputy Chairman of the BPP, Hampton enhanced these skills and developed oratory tools which attracted the attention of other organizations and ethnic/racial groups. His speeches and leadership coupled with the Chicago branch's socialist and civil rights platform resulted in an alliance between the branch and various local activists and organizations that would eventually evolve into the inter-racial political entity, the Rainbow Coalition (title which would later be appropriated by Jesse Jackson's Operation Push). The BPP's Rainbow Coalition is significant because it documents the first time in Chicago history that poor ethnic groups led by (and for the first time including) African Americans organized as one entity to fight for political power that was denied to them all and to significantly reduce the rigid racial and ethnic tension between these groups which had persisted since the nineteenth century. I also propose that an examination of the Chicago branch's Rainbow Coalition demonstrates that the branch was unique and vastly different from the BPP's national headquarters primarily due to its methodology, ideology, activities, and its location.
