BLACK PANTHER PARTY

BLACK PANTHER PARTY

No group better dramatized the anger that fueled the 1960s BLACK POWER MOVEMENT than the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP).
For five tumultuous years, the Panthers brought a fierce cry for justice and equality to the streets of the largest U.S. cities. Its members flashed across TV screens in black berets and leather
coats, shotguns and law books in hand, confronting the police or storming the California Legislature. Political demands issued from the party’s newspaper; loudspeakers boomed at rallies
for jailed Panther leaders. Behind the scenes, the FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI) spent millions of dollars in a secret counterintelligence program aimed at destroying the group.
By the time a 1976 congressional report revealed
the extent of the FBI’s efforts, it was too late.
Shoot-outs with police officers, conflicts with
other groups, murder, prison sentences, and
internal dissent had destroyed the Black Panthers.
The details surrounding the 1969 shooting
deaths of two party leaders by Chicago police
remain unclear. The other party leaders split in
1972 and one of them, BOBBY SEALE, ran for
mayor of Oakland in 1973, losing in a runoff. By
1975, the last of the group, a splinter faction
under ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, had disappeared.
Before the advent of the Panthers, the mid-
1960s saw gradual progress in the struggle for
CIVIL RIGHTS. This progress was too slow for
many African Americans. Traditional civil
rights groups such as Martin Luther King Jr’s
SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE
(SCLC) were focusing their efforts on ending
SEGREGATION in the South, but conditions in
urban areas were reaching a boiling point.
Younger activists increasingly turned away from
these older groups and toward leaders such as
STOKELY CARMICHAEL, whose STUDENT NONVIOLENT
COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC)
demanded not merely INTEGRATION but economic
and social liberation for African Americans.
Black power was Carmichael’s message,
and in Mississippi, he had organized an allblack
political party that took as its symbol a
snarling black panther. The ethos of black
power spread quickly to urban areas in the
North, East, and West, where integration alone
had not soothed the problems of racism,
poverty, and violence.
Police violence against African Americans
was a common complaint in impoverished Oakland,
California. By 1966, two young men had
had enough. One was HUEY P. NEWTON, age 23,
a first-year law student. With his friend Bobby
Seale, age 30, Newton founded the BPP, with the
intent of monitoring police officers when they
made arrests. This bold tactic—already being
employed in Minneapolis by the nascent AMERICAN
INDIAN MOVEMENT (AIM)—was entirely
legal. Also legal under California state law was
the practice of carrying a loaded weapon, as long
as it was visible. But legal or not, the sight of
Newton and Seale bearing shotguns as they
rushed to the scene of an arrest had enormous
shock value. To police officers and citizens alike,
this represented a huge change from the previously
nonviolent demonstrations of civil rights
activists. Although they did not use the guns and
maintained the legally required eight to ten feet
from officers, the Panthers inspired fear. They
also quickly won respect from neighbors who
saw them as standing up to the predominantly
white police force. The law books they carried—
and from which they read criminal suspects
their rights—appeared to many in the community
to give the Panthers a kind of legitimacy.
Attracting new members through their high
visibility, the Panthers sprang to national attention
in 1967. Antagonism toward the party by
law enforcement officials had prompted California
lawmakers to consider GUN CONTROL. In
May 1967, legislators met in Sacramento, the
state capital, to discuss a bill that would criminalize
the carrying of loaded weapons within
city limits. To Seale and Newton, chairman and
minister of defense of the BPP, respectively, the
proposed law was unjust. Governor RONALD
REAGAN was on the lawn of the state legislature
as 30 armed Black Panthers arrived and entered the building. TV cameras followed the group’s progress to the legislative chambers, where they
were stopped by police officers, Seale shouting,
“Is this the way the racist government works—
[you] won’t let a man exercise his constitutional
rights?” He then read a prepared statement:
The Black Panther Party calls upon American
people in general and black people in particular
to take full note of the racist California
legislature which is now considering legislation
aimed at keeping the black people disarmed
and powerless, at the very same time
that racist police agencies throughout the
country are intensifying the terror, brutality,
murder and repression of black people.
The Panthers kept their guns, left the building,
and were subsequently disarmed by the police.
No sooner had the demonstration ended
than the national media denounced the Panthers
as antiwhite radicals. For many white U.S.
citizens, the Panthers symbolized terror. The
party denied being antiwhite, but a new political
focus now superseded its original goal of SELFDEFENSE.
In a ten-point program, the Panthers
called for full employment, better housing and
education, and juries composed of African
Americans. It denounced the war in Vietnam
and the military draft. Some of its demands
went further. Point 3 said the group wanted an
end to the robbing of the black community by
the whites. Another point called for the release
of all African American men from prison. The
group’s major political objective was self-determination.
It demanded United Nations–supervised
elections in the black community, which it
dubbed the black colony, for blacks only, so that
“black colonials” could determine their own
national destiny.

To advance its cause, the party published the Black Panther newspaper. Its articles, cartoons, and imagery reflected a hardening stance. The
police were caricatured as pigs—introducing a term of condemnation that would enter the national vernacular—and a recurring image was that of a Black Panther holding a gun to the head
of a pig in a police uniform. However extreme such rhetoric may sound today, it galvanized young African Americans coming of age in the Vietnam era. BPP chapters sprang up nationwide, and by 1968 as many as five thousand members worked from BPP offices in 25 major U.S. cities. Prominent activists, including
Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, joined the party. Cleaver had achieved national prominence for his 1967 essay collection Soul on Ice. As
the BPP’s minister of information, he had a
voice that struck exactly the tone the Panthers
wanted, a blend of determination, outrage, and
threat. “These racist Gestapo pigs,” Cleaver told
reporters, “have to stop brutalizing our community
or we are going to take up arms and we are
going to drive them out.”
On another front, the Panthers proceeded
with charitable services to African American
communities, called Serve the People programs.
They organized health clinics and schools.Holding
food drives, they rounded up groceries and
distributed them for free. Morning breakfast
programs for African American children served
food and spirituals, as kids sang “Black Is Beautiful.”
White liberals supported the Panthers,
writing supportive articles in intellectual journals
such as the New York Review of Books; writing
books that showed admiration for their
style, like Norman Mailer’s The White Negro;
and inviting them to fashionable fund-raising
parties, as did composer and conductor Leonard
Bernstein. But this support was far from unanimous;
the author Thomas C. Wolfe coined the
phrase radical chic to satirize it.
The successes achieved by the Panthers in
Oakland and beyond were soon overshadowed
by violence as tense confrontations between the
police and Panther members erupted in gunfire.
In October 1967, after a gun battle left one officer
wounded and another dead, Newton was
arrested. “Free Huey!” became a cry at protests
across the United States while Newton remained
in jail. From his cell, he told national TV audiences
that the plight of African Americans was
similar to that of the Vietnamese. “The police
occupy our community,” he said, “as a foreign
troop occupies territory.” Convicted of murder,
he remained in prison until August 1970. An
appeals court later threw out the conviction.
The violence continued, as the police began
raiding BPP offices. In 1968, a confrontation in
West Oakland left three officers and two Panther
members wounded. A 17-year-old Panther was
killed. Seale announced on television that black
people should organize so that they could retaliate
against racist police brutality and attacks.
In 1969, Seale too was in court. The police
had arrested him at an antiwar demonstration
outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention
in Chicago. He was charged with rioting.
During the trial of Seale and other demonstrators—
dubbed the Chicago Eight—federal district court judge Julius J. Hoffman ordered the
vociferous Seale handcuffed to a chair and
gagged, a move that inspired such public revulsion
that a mistrial was declared.
However, in 1970, Seale and several other
Panthers were back in court, in New Haven,
Connecticut. The charge was the 1969 alleged
murder of suspected Panther police informant
Alex Rackley. Seale and fellow Panther Erica
Huggins were ultimately acquitted, but two
other Panthers, including Warren Kimbro (who
plea-bargained), were sentenced to prison.
Seale’s controversial trial inspired a “May Day”
riot at Yale University in New Haven, prompting
the federal government to send in 2,500
NATIONAL GUARD members after a substantial
amount of mercury (a bomb-making ingredient)
was taken from a Yale chemistry lab and
several rifles were discovered missing.
The Panthers affected the highest circles of
federal law enforcement. J. EDGAR HOOVER,
director of the FBI, considered them a black
nationalist hate group. In November 1968, he
ordered FBI field agents to begin destabilizing
the group by exploiting dissension within its
ranks. This end was to be achieved through the
FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO),
a surveillance and misinformation program
widely used in the late 1960s against civil
rights, black power, and various leftist groups.
The FBI infiltrated the Panther membership
with informants, wiretapped telephones, mailed
fake letters to leaders, and spread innuendo both
inside and outside the party. Documentation of
the counterintelligence campaign would emerge
in a report issued in 1976 by the U.S. Senate
Select Committee to Study Government Operations,
titled The FBI’s Covert Program to Destroy
the Black Panther Party. The report revealed that
the FBI had gone to great lengths, some of them
illegal, to pit the Panthers against themselves
and other groups.
The destabilization worked. The FBI managed
to exacerbate a bloody feud between the
Panthers and another California-based group,
United Slaves (US). It poured resources into
making leaders suspicious of each other, notably
aggravating a rift between Newton and Cleaver.
Perhaps its most egregious involvement came
during a 1969 operation against Fred Hampton, the Chicago-based chairman of the Illinois BPP.
In late 1967, the FBI launched a disinformation
campaign against the 19-year-old, and his file in
the FBI’s Racial Matters Squad soon swelled to
over four thousand pages. When Hampton fell
under suspicion in the murder of two Chicago
police officers, an FBI informant provided
authorities with a detailed floor plan of his
apartment. On December 4, 1969, police officers
raided the apartment. Hampton and another
Panther member were killed; four others were
wounded. The Panthers alleged that the incident
was an assassination.
Several official and private inquiries were
conducted, including one led by ROY WILKINS,
executive director of the NAACP, and RAMSEY
CLARK, former U.S. attorney general. Lawsuits
brought against the FBI by the victims’ survivors
dragged through the courts until 1983, when the
federal government agreed to pay them a $1.85
million settlement.U.S. district court judge John
F. Grady imposed sanctions on the FBI for having
covered up facts in the case. For the Illinois
Panther chapter, however, the raid in 1969 had
signaled the beginning of the end.
In disarray in 1972, the Panthers soon collapsed.
Its leadership feuded, police and FBI
harassment took a heavy toll, and the black
power movement had nearly expired. Charged
with murder, Cleaver had fled to Cuba and Algeria,
where he continued to urge African Americans
on to revolution. Cleaver maintained his
Black Panther faction in exile until 1975.
Seale and Newton preferred nonviolent
solutions. After the Panthers disbanded, Seale
ran for mayor of Oakland in 1973, winning a
third of the vote. He later became a public
speaker and a community liaison on behalf of
Temple University’s African American studies
program. Newton earned a doctor’s degree from
the University of California, Santa Cruz, but his
legal problems continued. In March 1987, he
was convicted for being a felon in possession of
a firearm—despite the overturning of his original
murder conviction—and sentenced to three
years’ imprisonment. In 1989, he was again in
prison, serving time for a PAROLE violation for
possessing cocaine.He died in August 1989, after
being shot during a drug deal in the neighborhood
where he began the Panthers.
Conversely, fellow Panther Kimbro was
accepted into a graduate program at Harvard
while still in prison, and was released after serving
little more than four years of his sentence.
He became an assistant dean at a local university
and later served as director of Project More, a
halfway house and prison-alternative program
in New Haven. He was quoted in a 2000 issue of
the Christian Science Monitor as wanting to be
known as “a guy who made some mistakes,
turned his life around, and learned to help other
people.”
The legacy of Newton and Seale’s party is
debatable. Its alliance with international revolutionary
leaders—Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro,
and Ho Chi Minh, to name a few—cost it credibility
in the eyes of mainstream U.S. citizens. An
organization devoted originally to the aim of
self-defense for beleaguered urban African
Americans, it nose-dived into violence and terror.
For this reason, the BPP is customarily dismissed
as an extremist, self-destructive exponent
of the black power movement. But this transformation
owed something to the harassment of
the Panthers by law enforcement agencies. In
turn, the calculated federal and local campaigns
against the Panthers initiated the group’s most
tangible effect on U.S. law: highlighting FBI
counterintelligence against U.S. citizens was a
noteworthy gain. In the years following the
death of FBI director Hoover, pressure for
reforms dismantled the apparatus he singlehandedly
used against his political enemies.
Drawing attention to the issue of urban
police brutality was another major Panther contribution,
one that grew as a concern in subsequent
years. In addition, the group’s focus on
the questionable number of African American
men fighting the U.S. war in Vietnam inspired
black intellectuals to criticize the role of race in
the U.S. military. Moreover, in the party’s passionate
ten-point program were the seeds of
ideas that eventually took root in the U.S. legal
system: by the 1990s, juries increasingly reflected
the racial composition of the communities in
which defendants lived. As the history of the
CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT demonstrates, such
change came slowly, begrudgingly, and often at
great personal cost to the men and women who
fought for it.
The original Black Panther Party for Self-
Defense is not to be confused with an entity that
emerged in the late 1990s, calling itself the New
Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and adopting
the original STALKING panther logo. The
newer group allegedly violated a 1997 Texas state
court order prohibiting them from “referring to
themselves … by any name containing the words Panther, Black Panthers, or Black Panther Party.”
In 2003, lawyers representing some of the original
Panthers, e.g., The Black Panther Party, Inc.
(which brought the Texas action) and the Huey
P. Newton Foundation, contemplated filing a
federal TRADEMARK infringement suit after an
August 2002 cease and desist letter apparently
went unheeded.
FURTHER READINGS
Alexandri, Maya. 2003. “Stalking the New Panthers.” IP Law
& Business (January).
Baker, Naima. 2000. “May Day, May Day.” 211 Park St.
Newsletter. Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale University
(October).
Colhoun, Alexander. 2000. “Ex-Black Panther Warren Kimbro.”
Christian Science Monitor (September 7).
“A Panther Generation Gap.” 2002. Chicago Tribune (October
30).
Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, Record
Unit 16, 1996.Guide to the Inventory ofMay Day Records,
1970–1972, 1976. New Haven: Yale Univ. Library.
CROSS-REFERENCES
Black Power Movement; Civil Rights Movement; Vietnam
War.