When a group of politicians proclaimed 40 years ago that America was becoming “two nations, one black, one white -- separate and unequal,” it wasn’t news to black folks.

Especially not to former Black Panther Jamal Turner.

“We believed, especially in 1968, that the Kerner Commission [the commission that studied the causes of riots that erupted in U.S. cities in the 1960s] told us what we already knew,” Turner told an audience at North Carolina A&T State University this week during a symposium looking at the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report on Civil Disorders. “And what we knew was already reflected in our 10-point program.”

That program, of course, was perhaps the most significant part of the Panthers’ mantra on black self-defense. I say this because contrary to the images of fearsome, gun-toting, beret-wearing black men, the Panthers didn’t just urge black people to arm themselves against the police who were, at that time, beating them down each day.

They urged black people to defend themselves against dependency.

Among other things, the 10-point program demanded decent housing, and said that if the government would not build it for them, then blacks should be given the means to build it for themselves. It also demanded an immediate end to police brutality.

The Panthers, by the way, didn’t just demand. They did.

They developed a free breakfast program for children in San Francisco and a school in Oakland. They created drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs. And while there certainly was disagreement and dissent within the Panthers about the strategy for liberating black communities, there was no disagreement on the goal.

Self-sufficiency.

“What we did was put concrete, viable programs in the African-American community,” Turner said. “We created shoe and clothing factories to provide employment … we weren’t thugs…we weren’t ruffians. We were highly motivated African-American men and women who had a political agenda.”

But that agenda -- black independence protected by gunpoint -- soon made them enemies of the state. Former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover created COINTELPRO to infiltrate them and to ultimately wipe them out.

Turner said he believes the Kerner Commission report, which recommended sweeping government interventions to correct the causes behind black misery but cited worries about the rise of black groups like the Panthers, accelerated their demise.

The Panthers could have been seen as partners in reversing those conditions. Instead, they were seen as obstructionists.

Turner’s comments got me thinking about the hypocrisy of this country. Of how today, blacks are blamed for being too dependent on the government, and are often preached to about how self-sufficiency is their only salvation.

But when I think about what happened to the Panthers, I wonder if America would ever be truly ready to deal with a bunch of independent black people.

History shows that it hasn’t.

Slaves were punished for learning how to read and write. The former slaves who dared to harness their own destiny during Reconstruction by daring to vote, run for office or start businesses were quickly relegated back to slave status in the Jim Crow south.

And there are legions of instances in which black examples of self-sufficiency were violently suppressed by white racists. The 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which decimated the commercial area known as the black Wall Street, was spawned by a white woman’s lie that a black man tried to attack her sexually.
 
Two years later, the prosperous farming and business community of Rosewood, Florida was burnt to the ground on the strength of a lie by a white woman who tried to cover up her adultery by claiming she had been raped by a black man.

Chances are the racists who destroyed Tulsa and Rosewood weren’t driven by the need to defend the honor of those white women as much as they were driven by their fear of black people’s prosperity.
 
Then the Panthers came along. Even though they gained white allies who had taken the time to read their 10-point program rather than just react to their speeches and controversies, they were still wiped out.

Their fate raises important questions today.

What happens when or if black people -- especially those who are trapped mentally and physically by the social and economic isolation of crime-ridden communities -- decide to take a radical approach to changing their predicament?

What happens if a bunch of highly-motivated activists decide they want to serve up some black conscientiousness along with a free breakfast? What if they get enough people in a community to donate money to make it work, and then develop a sense of pride around that?

I suspect that today, such a transformation would still be closely watched.

In any case, the rise and fall of the Panthers reveals a number of ironies about the black struggle. Among other things, it shows that self-sufficiency is okay for black people as long as it is developed within the same system that discouraged it in the first place. It says that self-sufficiency is fine for black people as long as it doesn’t scare white people.

Even though the lack of it has proven to be a lot scarier.