In Parks' day, opponents of the Black Freedom movement-btw, that's what it actually started out being called, a man I knew who was an activist in that cause and many others told us that they switched the name of it to the "Civil Rights" movement because they figured there- correctly, most likely- that most white people would find it too scary to see the words "Black" and "Freedom" right next to each other- attacked that cause, the cause white conservatives use as a justification to lecture young Black activists about today, as a "Communist plot" and frequently used lethal force against it. Also, that cause had its owned armed security squads protecting it, like "The Deacons", a group founded by activist, organizer and songwriter and clergyman Frederick Douglass Jackson.
The only reason any white conservative praises Dr. King today is that they know he's been safely dead for over half a century now. None of the people who invoke him against Black activists today were ever part of the fight to end Jim Crow or would have been a part of it had they lived in those times.
Basically, the white conservatives referencing Dr. King today are saying to young Black activists "you need to make it easier for our side to kill you".
The Black Panthers were formed, in large degree, because more and more Black activists became convinced, with great justification, that white violence against the liberation cause was never going to be stopped- a theory that was formed out of the fact that the Kennedy Administration refused to protect Black protesters in the South from white violence, did nothing when huge numbers of Black heroes-and even a few whites- were slaughtered by white resistance.
The other reason the Panthers were formed was that the police forces in white non-Southern cities, such as Oakland, were on a violent rampage against young Black men-as in many cases they are to this day. The violence they used- other than that of the crazy adventurism of future Republican Eldridge Cleaver- was about self-defense. Who are those of us who will never live in fear of what the police might do to us if they pull us over for a trivial offense like a busted taillight to say they were unjustified in asserting a right to self-defense?
Do you really believe that every situation in which a white cop uses force against a Black person, they do so because they actually feel "scared"? That they are right to see every young Black male as either a gangter or a potential gangster?
BTW, it's not really that impressive that you live in a Black neighborhood- if I'm guessing correctly, you live in Albina, which until at least the late 20th Century was the ONLY Black neighborhood in the whole state of Oregon- I grew up in Oregon, I know- and your neighbors probably see you as a gentrifier, as someone who is part of driving everyone who lives in a historic neighborhood away and replacing them with rich white people- the sort of people who might lead a Disneyfied version of an "Albina History Tour" in twenty years, after gentrification makes the Black population of Albina into literal history. You probably didn't mean it that way, but using phrases like that is pretty much the same thing as saying "some of my best friends are...".
