Pictured is the fifth point of the draft of the Black Panther Party’s original 10 Point Program, written in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton (and handwritten by Seale), titled “What We Believe.”
The text reads (with some corrected spelling): “We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.”
Newton’s own experiences likely shaped the fifth point. Newton struggled throughout high school: when he graduated, he had been suspended over thirty times and could barely read. In an interview with Kellita Smith, then a student at OCS, Newton suggested that his disengagement from school stemmed from the lack of history, books, or discussion about Black and brown people in the curriculum. After he taught himself to read, he started learning more about the history of Africa before colonization, and his interest in himself and his education grew tremendously. Therefore, the statement that education must facilitate a “knowledge of self” asserts the necessity of learning about one’s own history and current position in society.
The fact that the original draft of the 10 point program was preserved suggests that, at the time of its creation, Newton and Seale understood the draft as a historical document, needing to be preserved.