This is it!

Well here we are, at the end of the semester, at last! When I get to the end of a semester I always feel like it went by so fast, even though when I was going through it weeks felt like months. There is a lot to reflect on from this semester so I’ll probably miss something but here we go, a short reflection on what I’ve learned.

I think that overall I did a lot of correcting myself and what I have been taught about the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party specifically. Before this semester, if someone asked me what the Black Panther Party was and what their objectives were, I would have thought I knew a lot and could be at least somewhat informative on the subject. Wow, I just could not have been more wrong. One of the most glaring inaccuracies that I believed for far too long that the Black Panther Party was basically a political movement, similar to the Civil Rights Movement, and that its goals were to make changes in the law and in government. WRONG. While the Black Panther Party id eventually seek to create their pwn political party and to get a candidate of their own into government, mostly their goals were to educate black men and women about their history as black people in america and then to achieve self determination and autonomy as a black community.

Another thing I got wrong about the Black Power Movement is that it was a failure compared to the Civil Rights Movement. I thought that because the Civil Rights Movement achieved something tangible in government, the Civil Rights Act, so thats something people can point to and say look, we were successful, and here is the proof. With the Black Power Movement and Black Panther Party, things were a little different. Like Joseph and Ongiri said, the success of the movement is mostly measured in cultural significance. An entire black culture emerged from this movement that did not exist before. Black people learned things about their culture and history that they might not have. And, most importantly perhaps, the success of this movement can be measured in the fact that this movement made it okay to be black and told the black community to be proud of their skin and their hair, which, like ongiri said, is enough.