On this day in 1966, in the wake of spontaneous riots against police brutality, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. It was a revolutionary organization with an ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality. It was part of the Black Power movement, which broke from the integrationist goals and nonviolent protest tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The BPP name was inspired by the use of the black panther as a symbol that had recently been used by the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an independent Black political party in Alabama.
The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria. Upon its inception, the party's core practice was its open carry patrols ("copwatching") designed to challenge the excessive force and misconduct of the Oakland Police Department. From 1969 onward, the party created social programs, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.
In 1969, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), described the party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." The FBI sabotaged the party with an illegal and covert counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, all designed to undermine and criminalize the party. The FBI was involved in the 1969 assassinations of Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark, who were killed in a raid by the Chicago Police Department.
Influences
The BPP’s philosophy was influenced by the speeches of Malcolm X, the teachings of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung of the Communist Party of China, and the anti-colonialist book The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961) by the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The BPP’s practice of armed self-defense was influenced by African American activist Robert Williams, who advocated this practice against anti-black aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in his book Negroes with Guns (1962). Newton and Seale canvassed their community asking residents about issues of concern. They compiled the responses and created the Ten Point Platform and Program that served as the foundation of the Black Panther Party.
An interview with Huey P. Newton (1968)
(1966) THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY TEN-POINT PROGRAM
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what does this mean
In these specific two cases you can basically read it as "retiring", but pretty much they are under contract (I think for about 2 years in this case?) with a VTuber company, and if they don't renew the contract (or their contract is terminated) then they have to leave and their character is permanently retired. What really sucks is that while the traditional corporate VTubers get a huge initial boost and access to certain resources (including state-of-the-art motion capture studios in Japan), the "character" they portray (i.e. the name, design, and assets) as well as anything they produce during their time belongs to the company and they're under NDA so they can't say, "Hey guys, I'm leaving XYZ Corp, but please join me over at my new channel!". The intent is obvious: these companies want to extract as much money as they can from talents while at the same time not allowing talents to directly benefit from the publicity when they leave or profit off of the character that the talent popularized (because when it comes down to it, while a nice design helps, VTubers are just streamers and they are made compelling by the humans that pilot them).
The business model I discussed is the way that the two big Japanese VTuber companies (Hololive and Nijisanji) and many smaller ones operate, but it's not the only model. VShojo is an American company that (to my knowledge) operates more like a traditional talent agency. Signing a contract with them gets talents access to administrative resources (legal, financial, managerial, etc.) and they also organize group activities (e.g. convention appearances, concerts, and sponsored events). From what we've been told, I think VShojo's main source of income is merchandising, but they do not directly take a cut of talents' income from streaming like Hololive/Nijisanji do. It's still a for-profit company, of course, so it can't be all rainbows and butterflies, and they actually had three talents leave recently. But they key thing is that when those talents left, they got to keep all of their IP, control of their channels, all that important stuff, and then either stay independent or go to another talent agency.
I would love to see something like a VTuber cooperative, but given how cutthroat streaming is and the amount of starting capital you would need to make membership worthwhile, I think it'd be a tall order. The top-tier talents that would have the funds to start something like that are just not gonna stick their necks out.