Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was a far-left, Marxist–Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria. 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. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.

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." The FBI sabotaged the party with an illegal and covert counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, and police harassment, all designed to undermine and criminalize the party. The FBI was involved in the 1969 assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were killed in a raid by the Chicago Police Department. 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 murder of Alex Rackley.

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. Support further declined over reports of the party's alleged criminal activities, such as drug dealing and extortion.

The party's legacy is controversial. Older historical work described the party as more criminal than political, characterized by "defiant posturing over substance." Other assessments described the Party as "mainly victims of a repressive state." These older assessments have been criticized as incomplete. Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin characterized the Black Panther Party as the most influential black power organization of the late 1960s, with an "eventually tragic evolution" - collapsing due to infighting, often partly initiated by the government.

During World War II, tens of thousands of black people left the Southern states during the Second Great Migration, moving to Oakland and other cities in the Bay Area to find work in the war industries such as Kaiser Shipyards. The sweeping migration transformed the Bay Area as well as cities throughout the West and North, altering the once white-dominated demographics. A new generation of young black people growing up in these cities faced new forms of poverty and racism unfamiliar to their parents, and they sought to develop new forms of politics to address them. Black Panther Party membership "consisted of recent migrants whose families traveled north and west to escape the southern racial regime, only to be confronted with new forms of segregation and repression". In the early 1960s, the Civil rights movement had dismantled the Jim Crow system of racial subordination in the South with tactics of non-violent civil disobedience, and demanding full citizenship rights for black people. However, not much changed in the cities of the North and West. As the wartime and post-war jobs which drew much of the black migration "fled to the suburbs along with white residents", the black population was concentrated in poor "urban ghettos" with high unemployment and substandard housing and was mostly excluded from political representation, top universities, and the middle class. Northern and Western police departments were almost all white. In 1966, only 16 of Oakland's 661 police officers were African American (less than 2.5%).

Civil rights tactics proved incapable of redressing these conditions, and the organizations that had "led much of the nonviolent civil disobedience", such as SNCC and CORE, went into decline. By 1966 a "Black Power ferment" emerged, consisting largely of young urban black people, posing a question the Civil Rights Movement could not answer: "How would black people in America win not only formal citizenship rights, but actual economic and political power?" Young black people in Oakland and other cities developed study groups and political organizations, and from this ferment the Black Panther Party emerged.

In late October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense). In formulating a new politics, they drew on their work with a variety of Black Power organizations. Newton and Seale first met in 1962 when they were both students at Merritt College. 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. 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. 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."

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, 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. Huey and Bobby raised enough money to buy two shotguns by buying bulk quantities of the recently publicized Mao Zedong'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."