Civil Rights Comparison: Audience Analysis - Black Panthers' Ten Point Plan

Thursday, February 26, 2015

Audience Analysis - Black Panthers' Ten Point Plan

The Black Panther Party was a black nationalist and socialist organization. They wanted to start a revolution in America and change the way black people lived and were allowed to live. The audience of their Ten-Point Program was both black America and US government. They targeted urban black Americans to start an uprising. They wanted to build unrest in black communities to get them to take action. In order to get black people to rally around their message and join their fight, the Black Panthers Ten-Point Program ridiculed the many wrongs committed against blacks in America. However, the Program was also directed towards many white Americans because it made many demands of the US government which was dominated by white leadership. Ultimately, the Black Panthers wanted radical change in the US, and to achieve it they needed to be heard by all.

3 comments:

UnknownMarch 1, 2015 at 6:40 PM
I agree that the Ten Point Plan had an audience of different demographics and desires. Was it their intention to only ignite a fire in the black community or were they open to others coming together to fight against injustice?
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UnknownMarch 1, 2015 at 9:08 PM
Their audience was definitely not just the black community. I think they targeted the government with their plan in the pathological sense primarily, to illustrate how inhumanely the black community had been treated.
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UnknownMarch 2, 2015 at 4:30 PM
As I said in my post, their audience was both black America and the US government. And in response to Kathryn, they were mainly trying to rally support from the black community. They were Black Nationalists so they wanted, at least to some degree, separation or independence from white society. They were less about everybody coming together and more about the advancement of black people.
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Critical Introduction

Mike (Intro/Ethos)

Our names are Mike, Tommy, Ian, Jack, and Noah and we are five English 101S students at the University of Maryland, College Park. We have been studying rhetoric this semester and have been slowly becoming familiar with various rhetorical appeals. Although we are not experts on rhetoric, we have enough familiarity with the appeals to expand on them. We chose the Black Panthers 10-Point Plan and a picture of Marin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington because we felt that both of these works greatly contributed to the Civil Rights Movement through completely opposite perspectives. The Black Panthers’ 1966 “10 Point Plan” radically and aggressively depicted the wants and beliefs of the Black community, while Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington addressed the Black community’s needs through eloquence, peaceful protest, and sophisticated rhetoric. The Black Panthers’ 10-Point plan was aggressive in nature, often expressing radical views. They were not necessarily bad, as many people followed the regime. Martin Luther King Jr.’s approach was obviously more peaceful and sophisticated, thus creating more of a politically correct movement.

Jack (Major argument/Stasis)

Our blog shows that the Black Panthers’ 1966 Ten Point Plan radically and aggressively depicted the wants and beliefs of the black community, while Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington addressed the black community’s needs with eloquence, peaceful protest, and sophisticated rhetoric. We compare these different approaches to the Civil Rights Movement by analyzing the ethos, pathos, and logos of each of the texts. Furthermore, we contrasted the types of audiences each text targeted and the audiences with which each text was more successful. Overall our blog analyzes and compares the effectiveness of differing approaches used by MLK and the Black Panthers.

Tommy (Kairos)

The issues represented by the texts are still very relevant today, especially considering the events of the past year such as the riots caused by the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other similar cases. Racially charged protests are not simply a thing of the past. Determining which method of protest, whether it be a more aggressive and assertive stance of the Black Panther Party or the hope-filled non-violent stance of Dr. King, still remains a long unanswered question. Ultimately the answer probably lies in some happy medium between the two. However, we leave it up to the readers to decide which method has been more historically successful, and which approach would work better on the readers themselves.

Noah (Logos)

Our blog begins with analyses of the rhetorical situations of our texts and the major rhetorical arguments in each. We did this to introduce the texts, their backgrounds and the messages they convey to the audience. We then wrote about the rhetorical appeals used in each text to show how the authors intended to impart their arguments. Finally, we analyzed the audience that each text was designed for and the visual elements of each text. We used the analysis of the audience to show how each text was designed to target them. Overall, we introduced the texts and why they were important to get readers interested and engaged in our topic. Then we went into detail about the texts and the methods behind their reasoning and arguments to give readers insight about the texts. Lastly, we showed how the audience and visual elements of the texts further contributed to their purposes and show the impact of each text.

Ian (Pathos)

Although our blog focused on all of the appeals, we found that Dr. King and the Black Panthers especially appealed to the Pathos of their audiences. We not only wanted to examine the pathos of each text individually, but how they related to each other in a time of great social turmoil. We wanted to convey that the March on Washington was a sort of emotional high water mark of the civil rights movement; more progress towards equality was made in the coming years, but not quite to the level of expectations set in 1963. This sense of a letdown with the work of Dr. King was a strong influence in the creation of the Black Panthers. Tired of waiting, he Panthers worked to improve the lives of blacks directly rather than working for racial equality. The causation between the failures of Dr. King and the birth of the Black Panthers, especially in relation to their respective appeals to pathos, was very important, and we tried to highlight it in our blog.