Those under forty might understandably think that the desperate fight to keep the United States a White country, more specifically a White male country, is a relatively new thing,  and may not realize the panic began before they were born when Black people started getting the rights they should have had since the Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal.

The need was to fire up those who had always had their rights to see the danger in letting this happen, and the best way to do this was to present Black people with equal rights as a danger to the country, and to do this it became necessary to spread tropes, misinformation, and outright lies about Black people.

Think how GLBT people have been presented in these days each time they get close to finally getting any of the rights they should already have. Letting them marry would cause straight people to divorce in droves; buying a wedding cake would destroy the fabric of the country; letting Transgender people use the appropriate restroom will allow Jeffrey Epstein style orgies in them.

The go-to bogey man in the 1960s used to scare White people was the Black Panthers who had organized to protect the Black community and supply assistance to those who needed it but were denied it based on racial prejudice, and in the majority the stories were accepted. Blacks, especially Black men, after all, were angry, they had the right to be, and looked it, and they were doing White people things and assuming their right to do them without first seeking permission.

Here are two things about the Black Panthers you may not know because one was purposely misrepresented, and the other ignored because they did not fit the desired dangerous image.

In California, up until 1967, gun ownership was a pretty open thing, but that year a bill was introduced that would limit gun ownership.

Then, as now, the Black community faced danger from those who objected to their having their civil rights, and the objections often included physical attacks against which they needed the protection that was not coming from the police. Self protection became necessary, and to that end the Black Panthers armed themselves as the law allowed to protect their communities. This was not a free-for-all approach, but one that called for training and discipline. They were truly a well regulated militia as is required in the Second Amendment.

White people owning guns was one thing, even if they were not members of a well regulated militia, but Black people having guns?

This just could not be allowed, so, the Republican state legislature and the Republican Governor, Ronald Reagan, decided some limits were needed especially when armed Black Panthers accompanying Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, who knew firsthand the need for protection, were involved in a nonviolent confrontations with airport security officers and police in San Francisco who realized that there was no law which prohibited the Panthers from carrying loaded weapons so long as they were unconcealed.

At the time, as reported by the Associated Press, when asked about this, a Black Panther spokesman said,

“The cops asked us what we were doing and we told them. ‘We’re exercising our constitutional rights and we’re not going to take any bull.’”

This had to change.

So, in response, California Assemblyman Don Mulford of Oakland introduced a bill in April 1967 that would prohibit anyone outside of law enforcement officers from carrying loaded firearms in public, obviously in response to the militant activities of the Black Panther Party.

Obviously this was a very pointed bill designed to impose a limit on the Second Amendment right to bear arms establishing that “every person who carries a loaded firearm on his person while on a public street, or in a public place within any city or in a vehicle while in any public place or on any public street in an incorporated city or in an inhabited area of unincorporated territory is guilty of a misdemeanor.”

Knowing they were the primary targets of the bill, the Black Panthers sent an armed contingent to the state house on May 2, 1967 to protest the Mulford bill.

When they arrived, they identified themselves as members of the “Black Panther Party” from Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond there to protest the “racist Oakland police” and demonstrate for the right to bear arms. The police took the men and guns to the capitol police office, unloaded the guns, gave them back, and six from the group then went into the Assembly chamber with the returned empty rifles while the House was in session, and were peacefully escorted out 30 minutes later.

All very peaceful and disciplined.

When the bill was enacted the Black Panthers were specifically mentioned in the fictitious story that justified it.

“An organized band of men armed with loaded firearms had recently entered the Capitol of the State of California, knocked aside an Assistant Sergeant at Arms of the Assembly and invaded the Chambers of the Assembly, thereby creating a serious threat to the orderly function of the government of the state. Existing laws are not adequate to prevent such serious interruptions in the orderly processes of the government of this state and threats to the safety and welfare of the officers of this state. It is, therefore, imperative that this statute, which will make unlawful actions such of these of the armed band which invaded the State Capitol, take effect immediately.”

Assemblyman Don Mulford who sponsored a bill called what had happened. “the worst invasion of the legislature in its history.”

And that, not the true story, is what was promoted and accepted.

I hear it all the time – buying viagra uk people contacting me because they have a sore throat by the end of the day or are living with chronic hoarseness. Accurate records and evaluations are an important aspect of the plan is yourself, the parent, becoming a positive role model. cheapest tadalafil uk When you see tab viagra advertised for $2 a pill, which should raise a flag of caution somewhere in your body; it may be in your heart or brain. In other states, fetching driver’s education may permit new cialis tab drivers to get licenses without limitations. This fiction was reinforced when in 1979 Ronald Reagan, who had been the governor who signed the Mulford bill and wanted support from the NRA for his presidential bid, told the story that

“The Black Panthers had invaded the legislative chambers in the Capitol with loaded shotguns and held these gentlemen under the muzzles of those guns for a couple of hours. Immediately after they left, Don Mulford introduced a bill to make it unlawful to bring a loaded gun into the Capitol Building. That’s the bill I signed. It was hardly restrictive gun control.”

Again, the capitol police had unloaded the guns, gave them back unloaded, and only six from the group went into the Assembly chamber with the returned empty rifles, and left after30 minutes, not a couple of hours

He also claimed that, in spite of the Panthers being there to protest a bill introduced six weeks earlier, the bill was introduced after the Panthers left.

A White guy lied, misrepresented the Black guy, and reinforced the trope that Black men are dangerous.

Mulford testified that the bill had the support of the National Rifle Association.

State Senator John Schmitz, who had tried unsuccessfully to defeat the bill, wrote,

 “Members of the National Rifle Association in California should know that their organization, despite its record of opposing gun control bills in the past, favored this bill and that without NRA support it almost certainly would have been defeated.”

Although the National Rifle Association has a hard opposition to gun control, it had no problem supporting  limitations on the right to bear arms when the Black Panthers emerged as the most militant defenders of that Second Amendment right.

When Reagan spoke at the NRA convention in 1983, he vowed to “never disarm any American who seeks to protect his or her family from fear and harm” and declared doing that would be the first step toward the total confiscation of all law-abiding citizens’ guns,

The Black Panthers had been abiding by the law in 1967.

Two years after the Mulford bill, while being vilified in the media and feared by the public who blindly accepted the stories like that of the reason for that bill without question as it reinforce already accepted perception, and while ignoring the organization’s true purpose of ending police brutality and the unequal treatment of black Americans, since the federal government had yet to provide breakfast at public schools for students who would otherwise not have it, the Black Panthers began to do so from 1969 through the early 1970s with its Free Breakfast for School Children Program.

The program began in January 1969 at an Episcopal church in Oakland. Black Panthers and volunteers began going to local grocery stores to solicit donations after consulting with nutritionists on what would be a healthful breakfast for children, and prepared and served breakfast free of charge.

As studies now show when justifying the need to continue the government’s school breakfast programs, at that time, those benefiting from the Free Breakfast for School Children Program were seen to have improved their school achievement. They could pay attention to their learning and not hunger cramps.

The program spread out from Oakland to at least 45 programs nationwide and included free medical and legal clinics.

But, again, the White fear of the Black man had FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declare the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the Black Panther Party and destroy what it stands for,” and advise law enforcement to destroy it.

FBI agents began telling parents that the food was infected with venereal disease, and local law enforcement raided sites in Oakland and Baltimore while children were there eating, and in Chicago broke into the church one night where the program was held, mashing up all the food and urinating on it.

Although these actions did eventually break the program, the visibility of the Panthers’ breakfast programs resulted in putting pressure on political leaders to feed children before school, and in 1975 the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized by the USDA.

Imagine that.