What if I told you that the Black Panthers were terrorists? That they killed innocent people based on the color of their skin? They were filled with hate, anger and malice towards anyone who was not like them and anyone who tried to get in their way. A long time ago, in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Black Panthers raided the Greenwood District that was home to more than 15,000 white Americans. The went from house to house looting and burning down homes as well as businesses. More than 1,200 properties were destroyed. Greenwood was basically eradicated.

Now, did any of that sound real to you? Was that believable? Well, it should be because it is. It happened. But before you say "I told you so!" to your black friends on Facebook, there's one small lie in that story of truths.

It wasn’t the Black Panthers causing that destruction, it was the Ku Klux Klan.

The controversy surrounding Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance and the attire of her back up dancers seems to indicate that the true purpose of the Black Panthers seems to have been forgotten, or at least heavily misconstrued. Shortly after the Super Bowl, I began to see memes with sayings such as “Beyoncé is racist! If a white singer had dancers dresses up like the K.K.K. then people would be mad!” Well yes, of course people would be mad, because the K.K.K. is an organization built on hate and racism, the Black Panthers however, was not. And the reason that I refer to the K.K.K. in present tense and the Black Panthers in past tense, is because the obviously racist group, the K.K.K., still exists today, whereas the Black Panthers were disbanded in the 1980s.

The Black Panthers did have faults. They were not an organization filled with perfect human beings, but to compare them to the K.K.K. is an insult. I’ve realized that a large part of the millennial’s thought processes at this point in our lives come from what we have learned in school and not real life experiences. I remember learning about the Black Panthers in the very small section of my American History textbook that covered the Civil Rights Movement. I distinctly remember Dr. Martin Luther King receiving almost two pages dedicated to him, while the Black Panthers were given a tiny colored box in the corner of the page.

There wasn’t a lot of information about them in our text books, and that what little information was provided persuaded readers to believe that strategies and philosophies from MLK and the Black Panthers conflicted with one another. It, therefore, is not surprising that people are ignorant of all of the good that the Black Panthers have done and the obvious and numerous ways in which they differ from the K.K.K. For example:

1. Their original name was The Black Panther Party For Self-Defense.

2. They were created to challenge police brutality in Oakland, California.

3. They created community health clinics.

4. They created the Free Breakfast for School Children Program and fed over 10,000 children each day before they went to school.

5. The Chicago chapter reached out to gang members to prevent them from committing crimes.

These are only a few of the positives that the Black Panthers are truly associated with. I don’t know what other people learned in their American History classes, but I’m pretty sure that none of the facts mentioned above can be said about the KK..K. There clearly needs to be a different way to approach the teaching of Black History in our school systems. Unfortunately, most people never learn anything beyond what their American History textbooks teaches them until they get to college, and that’s if they even take an African American History course. The fact remains that the two organizations are absolutely nothing alike and, perhaps instead of making memes comparing them, that time could be better spent doing a simple Google search.

*All facts were found (by doing a simple Google search) on Wikipedia and by looking beyond my fifth grade textbook of many years ago.