squelched by an open mind. Kathleen Cleaver was a member of the Black Panther Party as a result of her association with the Student Non – Violent Coordinating Committee. The Black Power Movement challenged all the preconceived notions of blacks not being able to determine their own destiny. The Party took a position of self- determination and articulated it in a local community. It had a program and a platform and an implementation through the statement of how blacks should exercise community control over education, housing, business, and the military. The Black Panther Party' s base was focused on young, out of work poor children. If the party had succeeded they would have been part of an international revolutionary movement that would have restricted the education system, taken the United States out of the role of world policeman and made it the American people' s United States. The corporations of America had the resources and the power to use the government's resources to advance their agendas, which was exactly what the Party was opposed to. They had plenty of money to silence the Black Panthers because they had commitment and the glorious belief that the spirit of the people was greater than man' s technology. Cleaver felt that the Panthers were right, and as a result of their beliefs not being consistent with the American people they were forced to disband. She feels that one of the reasons we have the largest black middle and under class in history is because of the takeover of legal and political structures by corporate interests. Information services are supposedly for the people but are now at the service of corporate interests. The educational system is supposed to be controlled by the community, although on the surface some may say that it does just the opposite. A radical gap in income and residence has occurred through suburbanization, in other words a, "donut shaped" affect. In the middle is a little bl...
