On this day, 15 October 1966, in Oakland, California, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton met and set up the Black Panther Party for Self Defence. The Party would exist, despite heavy repression, until 1982 and ran a variety of programmes from free breakfasts for school children and community health clinics to armed citizen patrols and monitoring of the police. Another little-mentioned fact about the group is that in the 1970s it had a majority female membership. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1235981089920372/?type=3
Herman Cain’s last public appearance was appearing at Trump’s Tulsa rally without a mask. He posted an anti-mask tweet the day before that has since been deleted.
On this day, 15 October 2005, rioting broke out in Toledo, Ohio in protest at a neo-Nazi demonstration in the city being facilitated by the police. Police were escorting 14 neo-Nazis from Virginia who were demonstrating in the city, protecting them from around 1000 local residents: mostly African-Americans with some white anti-racists. When police attacked the anti-fascists, the crowd retaliated, fighting the police, setting fires, looting and forcing the Nazi demonstrators to disband. To our knowledge, they didn’t come back to Toledo, so there is a lesson there for other anti-racists.
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