Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party was founded in October 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale as an organization dedicated to protecting and uplifting the Black population of Oakland. As the organization grew this focus spread to the rest of the United States and even abroad. The armed militancy and Marxist rhetoric employed by the Black Panthers, along with their philosophy of Black self-government caught the attention of both local law enforcement authorities and the FBI. As a result, many in the Panthers' upper echelons were either arrested or went into exile. After 1971, while efforts to feed and clothe poor people of color continued, the party's major focus was on the legal problems of its leadership. Methods also shifted from armed resistance to working within the system by running candidates for local and national elections.

The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxist-Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California.[6][7][8] The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia.[9] They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria.[10][11] Upon its inception, the party's core practice was its open carry patrols ("copwatching") designed to challenge the excessive force and misconduct of the Oakland Police Department. From 1969 onward, the party created social programs, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics.[12][13][14][15] The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.[16]

In 1969, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), described the party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country."[17][18][19] The FBI sabotaged the party with an illegal and covert counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, police harassment, all designed to undermine and criminalize the party. The FBI was involved in the 1969 assassinations of Fred Hampton,[20][21] and Mark Clark, who were killed in a raid by the Chicago Police Department.[22][23][24][25] Black Panther Party members were involved in many fatal firefights with police. Huey Newton allegedly killed officer John Frey in 1967, and Eldridge Cleaver (Minister of Information) led an ambush in 1968 of Oakland police officers, in which two officers were wounded and Panther treasurer Bobby Hutton was killed. The party suffered many internal conflicts, resulting in the murders of Alex Rackley and Betty Van Patter.

Government persecution initially contributed to the party's growth among African Americans and the political left, who both valued the party as a powerful force against de facto segregation and the US military draft during the Vietnam War. Party membership peaked in 1970 and gradually declined over the next decade, due to vilification by the mainstream press and infighting largely fomented by COINTELPRO.[26] Support further declined over reports of the party's alleged criminal activities, such as drug dealing and extortion.[27]

The party's history is controversial. Scholars have characterized the Black Panther Party as the most influential black power organization of the late 1960s, and "the strongest link between the domestic Black Liberation Struggle and global opponents of American imperialism".[28] Other scholars have described the party as more criminal than political, characterized by "defiant posturing over substance".[29]
In late October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense).[8] In formulating a new politics, they drew on their work with a variety of Black Power organizations.[38] Newton and Seale first met in 1962 when they were both students at Merritt College.[39] They joined Donald Warden's Afro-American Association, where they read widely, debated, and organized in an emergent black nationalist tradition inspired by Malcolm X and others.[40] Eventually dissatisfied with Warden's accommodationism, they developed a revolutionary anti-imperialist perspective working with more active and militant groups like the Soul Students Advisory Council and the Revolutionary Action Movement.[41][42] Their paid jobs running youth service programs at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center allowed them to develop a revolutionary nationalist approach to community service, later a key element in the Black Panther Party's "community survival programs."[43]

Dissatisfied with the failure of these organizations to directly challenge police brutality and appeal to the "brothers on the block", Huey and Bobby took matters into their own hands. After the police killed Matthew Johnson, an unarmed young black man in San Francisco, Newton observed the violent insurrection that followed. He had an epiphany that would distinguish the Black Panther Party from the multitude of Black Power organizations. Newton saw the explosive rebellious anger of the ghetto as a social force and believed that if he could stand up to the police, he could organize that force into political power. Inspired by Robert F. Williams' armed resistance to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and Williams' book Negroes with Guns,[44] Newton studied gun laws in California extensively. Like the Community Alert Patrol in Los Angeles after the Watts Rebellion, he decided to organize patrols to follow the police around to monitor for incidents of brutality. But with a crucial difference: his patrols would carry loaded guns.[45] Huey and Bobby raised enough money to buy two shotguns by buying bulk quantities of the recently publicized Mao's Little Red Book and reselling them to leftists and liberals on the Berkeley campus at three times the price. According to Bobby Seale, they would "sell the books, make the money, buy the guns, and go on the streets with the guns. We'll protect a mother, protect a brother, and protect the community from the racist cops."[46]

On October 29, 1966, Stokely Carmichael – a leader of SNCC – championed the call for "Black Power" and came to Berkeley to keynote a Black Power conference. At the time, he was promoting the armed organizing efforts of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) in Alabama and their use of the Black Panther symbol. Newton and Seale decided to adopt the Black Panther logo and form their own organization called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.[47] Newton and Seale decided on a uniform of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, black berets.[48] Sixteen-year-old Bobby Hutton was their first recruit.[49]

By January 1967, the BPP opened its first official headquarters in an Oakland storefront, and published the first issue of The Black Panther: Black Community News Service.