Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

8-2021

School/College

College of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences (COLABS)

Degree Name

MA in History

Committee Chairperson

Nupur Chaudhuri

Committee Member 1

Gregory H Maddox

Committee Member 2

Nupur Chaudhuri

Committee Member 3

Jesse Esparza

Committee Member 4

Michael Zeitler

Keywords

African American Liberation, Black Panther Party, British colonial rule, Ghadar Party, Indian Nationalism, The Fight for Freedom.

Abstract

This study examines the activities of two revolutionaries, one Lala Har Dayal (1884-1939) who established in the U.S. the Ghadar Party as an Indian revolutionary party against the British rule in India and the other was Huey P. Newton (1942-1989) who was a founder of the Black Panther Party which violently agitated against the longstanding chokehold of the “White” rule over the African American people. Juxtaposing the two different time periods and two different continents, which are incompatible phenomena give further understanding of what caused both such movements, regarded as aggressive resistance by their peoples to their oppressive rulers, to be effectively incapable of bringing even a modicum of freedom for their peoples from chokeholds of their respective oppressive rulers. Hardayal, came to San Francisco in 1911 to work in Berkley as a lecturer in Indian Philosophy and Sanskrit. At this time, he became a cofounder of Ghadar Party which became an Indian nationalist party. The party instructed on bomb-making and the use of explosives to the Indian nationalists in in India through publications in a newspaper, edited by Hardayal. In April 1914, upon pressure from the British government, the American Government arrested him for radical publications. But Hardayal was freed on a bail and he escaped to Europe. Later on, Har Dayal returned to Oxford and received his Ph.D. degree in 1930. Huye P. Newton (1942-1989) was born on 1942 in Monroe, Louisiana. As a child, he moved to Oakland, California, with his family. In the mid1960s, he met Bobby Seal. Both of them created the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1966. They created the Ten-Point Program, which demanded better housing, employment, and education. They also wanted to stop police brutality against the public. They were combative in their actions. In 1967 Newton was arrested for supposedly killing a Police officer in Oakland. In the 1970s Black Panther Party began to disintegrate because of the disputes among the members. In 1974, Newton faced more criminal charges, and he fled to Cuba. He returned to the States in 1977 and went back to UC Santa Cruz and received his Ph.D. in Social Philosophy in 1980. In August 1989, he was shot on the street of Oakland and died. The two revolutionaries were highly educated individuals and widely traveled across the world to nurture their own views about finding a means to find relief for their own people against oppressions from the ruling power. They both advocated adoption of aggressive paths to achieve freedom for their people from the hold of the oppressive ruler. Recapturing together the ultimate fates of failures met by the two aggressive revolutionary movements, led by Har Dayal and Huey P. Newton, uncover an important fact that both the rulers have European cultural origin. This European cultural origin helped these two white groups assume a culturally superior position. Both movements for freedom, lasting only briefly without bringing any significant success to its ultimate mission, developed from a longstanding popular passive movement. The aims of Ghadar Party and Black Panther Party, although differing from each other in many ways, had one very significant common link that they were fighting against the oppressors with European cultural origin The general public from both groups rejected the violent movements and adopt a passive movement against their oppressors as a way to overcome their own conceived cultural inferiority status.

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