Ten Point Program

1. We want freedom. We want power to
determine the destiny of our Black and
oppressed communities.

2. We want full employment for our people.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists
of our Black and oppressed communities.

4. We want decent housing, fit for the shelter
of human beings.

5. We want decent education for our people
that exposes the true nature of this decadent
American society. We want education that
teaches us our true history and our role in the
present-day society.

6. We want completely free health care for all
Black and oppressed people.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality
and murder of Black people, other people of color,
all oppressed people inside the United States.

8. We want an immediate end to all wars
of aggression. 

9. We want freedom for all Black and oppressed
people now held in U.S. federal, state, county,
city and military prisons and jails. We want trials
by a jury of peers for all persons charged with
so-called crimes under the laws of this country.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education,
clothing, justice, peace and people’s community
control of modern technology.

The community gathers and socializes with family and friends listening to speakeasy music at the local KSOL radio station. The scene of pride and happiness, joyfully posing for the Photographer who captures the radiant life and culture of the Oakland Community.

The students struggle for fully-funded public education reflecting Black history, culture, and struggle. The founders of the party, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, met at Merritt College in Oakland and began to struggle for education together with other black students. Both Laney and Grove Street campus also represented a base for organizing the neighborhood and a place to demand self-determination for Black and all oppressed people via community control of the curriculum, operations, and facilities of the College.

Grove Street College set some genuinely historic and revolutionary precedents in education. Included in its student body were Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, founders of the Black Panther Party. In 1966, shortly after meeting, Newton and Seale became instrumental in the founding of the very first Black Students Organization, The Soul Students Advisory Council.

In 1967, along with the formation of this student group came the demand for a Black Curriculum and a Black Studies Program, which was the Black Panther Party’s first campaign at Grove Street. Asians, Native Americans, and Chicanos soon joined in, demanding Ethnic Studies courses as well.

At Grove Street College, there was an African American instructor who was the student-faculty advisor to the Soul Students’ Advisory Council. He designed and implemented a Black Studies Curriculum, which became the standard for many Black colleges, as well as many other colleges and universities in America. His name was Sid Walton.
It took a while, but after many delays and racist ambushes, the Black History courses were approved for transfer credits to the University of California.

Because of the struggles that were fought for and won at Grove Street College, students across America took up the fight. Soon Black Student Unions and Black Studies Programs with credits and degrees in Black Studies had sprung up in educational institutions across America.

When remembering the unsteady combination of casual tumult and imaginative principles that defined the history of the Bay Area during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a particular degree of interest should be accorded to the patch of soil in Berkeley that became known as the People’s Park. It was there, beginning in April 1969, that one of the most famous (and, unfortunately, one of the most violent) conflicts between the freethinking counterculture and the inflexible authorities happened, pitting a stoutly determined alliance of students, hippies, and activists against the narrow-minded power of UC Regents.