Salem Press

African American History
Black Panther Party

Identification: African American revolutionary organization often seen as
the "vanguard" of the radical movement in the late 1960's
Date: Founded in October, 1966
Place: Oakland, California

The Black Panthers captured the imagination of both disaffected youth and the media by combining an urban paramilitary style with a program dedicated to "serving the people."

Founded in early October, 1966, at an antipoverty community center in North Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was the brainchild of Huey P. Newton, community organizer, law student, and street tough. Newton and the party's cofounder, Bobby G. Seale, an army veteran, sheetmetal worker, and aspiring comedian who also worked at the community center, had been active in black nationalist circles while they were students at Oakland's Merritt College during the early 1960's. Born in the South, they came of age in the urban ghetto, and although they were inspired by the Civil Rights movement, it was Malcolm X, not Martin Luther King, Jr., who fired their imaginations. After years of frustration with college-based African American militants who paid insufficient attention to Newton's "brothers on the block" and especially in the wake of the massive Watts riot in Los Angeles, which Newton and Seale saw as the beginning of a new era, the two formed their own organization dedicated to armed self-defense among the African American masses.

The idea for the name of the organization came from a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) project in Alabama that was spearheaded by Stokely Carmichael. This project, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, used a black panther as its symbol. "The panther is a fierce animal," Newton explained later, "but he will not attack until he is backed into a corner; then he will strike out." Other groups also took the name, in Harlem and San Francisco in 1966 and in Los Angeles the following year, but only the Oakland group survived. Black Panther membership, at the height of the group's activity in the late 1960's, is disputed; estimates range from the high hundreds to the low thousands. By 1969, the group had chapters in most major northern cities and an international division.

Party Ideology
Part of the reason for the party's success in the late 1960's--and for its failure in the 1970's--may have been the nature and evolution of its ideology, which quickly proved to be class-conscious rather than race conscious. Newton and Seale drew eclectically from foreign revolutionaries and domestic militants in fashioning a program of black liberation predicated on the legitimacy of violence: They had read Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara, who endorsed armed revolution; they were also familiar with the writings and activities of Robert F. Williams in North Carolina, the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Louisiana, and Malcolm X, all of whom advocated armed self-defense. However, as Newton explained in 1970, the Panthers became Marxist-Leninists who embraced dialectical materialism, which in four short years took them from black nationalism (liberation of the black "colony" in the United States), to revolutionary nationalism (nationalism plus socialism), to internationalism (solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world), and finally to "intercommunalism" (world revolution pitting oppressed communities against the U.S. "empire").

Newton later claimed to have undergone a slow transformation from black nationalism to socialism while he was in college in the early 1960's, based on his "life plus independent reading." Therefore, the party's original program called for full employment ("if the white American businessman will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community"), decent housing ("if the white landlord will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives"), an end to police brutality, exemption from military service, and release of all African Americans from prison.

Activities
Though one of their first campaigns was to force the city of Oakland to erect a traffic light at a dangerous intersection, initially the Panthers' political work consisted mainly of confronting law enforcement officials (whom they called an "occupying army"), especially while "patrolling the police." The activity involved groups of armed Panthers observing interactions between local residents and the police, advising the residents of their rights and, as a result, often engaging in tense confrontations with the officers. This direct attempt to confront white authority in the black community, which Newton later claimed was a way of exhausting all legal means to protect African Americans' rights in anticipation of revolutionary activity, was an enormous leap in the history of African American resistance in the United States. However, in the summer of 1967 when the California assembly passed legislation curbing the carrying of firearms, a bill aimed at the Panthers, the group stopped the patrols and dropped "for Self-Defense" from its name. As Black Panther chapters multiplied throughout the country, however, physical confrontations grew, with deaths on both sides. At the same time, the Panthers established what they called "survival programs," beginning with free breakfasts for school children and expanding into areas such as medical care, clothing, and education.

Before the California gun-control law was passed, Newton sent some thirty armed Panthers to protest at the state capitol in Sacramento. This dramatic demonstration generated some national publicity, but what set the stage for the Panthers' dramatic growth occurred early one morning in October, 1967, when the Oakland police stopped Newton after he had spent the night celebrating the end of his probation for assault. Gunfire followed, and the Panther leader was wounded, as was one policeman; another patrolman, Officer John Frey, died. Newton was charged with Frey's murder and faced possible execution. Charismatic ex-convict and writer Eldridge Cleaver, who edited the party newspaper, The Black Panther, and became its minister of information in 1967, orchestrated a national "Free Huey" campaign that made Newton a virtual icon.

Newton's celebrated 1968 trial ended in a manslaughter conviction, and the campaign to free him succeeded in 1970 when the conviction was overturned on appeal. Although these events earned for the Panthers national recognition, they also brought the attention of the authorities. The ensuing raids, prosecutions, and the promotion of internal dissension by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wrecked the Black Panther Party. By 1970, much of the national and even regional leadership had gone underground or was awaiting trial, in jail, or in exile.

Impact
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called the Black Panther Party the "greatest threat to the internal security of the country," and the U.S. government viewed them as a serious danger; however, the Panthers were more often ridiculed. According to Allen J. Matusow in his 1984 book, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960's, in one influential survey of the 1960's, the Panthers are described as a "handful of blacks with a mimeograph machine" who "existed mainly in the demented minds of white leftists." The group did attract the support of the leading militant African Americans, SNCC leaders Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and James Forman, and even managed a short-lived alliance of sorts (the Panthers called it a "merger") with SNCC in 1968. In early 1969, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--at its height but soon to be destroyed by internal factionalism--endorsed the Panthers as the vanguard of the revolution in the United States. The Panthers also provided the model for other groups such as the Brown Berets, the Young Lords, the White Panther Party, the Red Guards, and the Gray Panthers; the group's ten-point platform and program (What We Want, What We Believe) became the blueprint for other 1960's groups. Finally, the Panthers changed the popular lexicon; for example, they introduced the epithet "pig," in reference primarily to police officers but also to government officials, the rich, and sometimes evildoers.

Subsequent Events
Especially damaging was the public and bloody falling-out between Newton and Cleaver in early 1971, the climax of two years of internal splits and purges. The rift with Cleaver was a product of Newton's attempt to direct the group away from militant confrontation and to community organizing through the survival programs it had developed. Newton's continued run-ins with the law, however, resulted in his fleeing to Cuba, where he stayed from 1973 to 1977. The Black Panthers lived on in his absence and, after his return, remained a viable organization into the early 1980's, but it never regained its role as a leading revolutionary group.

Jama Lazerow

Further Reading
Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2001) edited by Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas and The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered) edited by Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998) both provide valuable insights into the Black Panther Party. Off the Pigs! (1976), edited by G. Louis Heath, provides a long historical introduction (based mostly on government sources and FBI informants), a sampling of primary documents, and an extensive bibliography. The Black Panthers Speak (1970), edited by Philip S. Foner, offers a good collection of writings and speeches. Important Panther autobiographies and memoirs include Seale's Seize the Time (1970) and Newton's Revolutionary Suicide (1973). A sympathetic journalistic account can be found in Michael Newton's Bitter Grain (1980); a particularly negative treatment is presented in Hugh Pearson's The Shadow of the Panther (1994).

See Also
Black nationalism; Black Power movement; Black United Students; Hampton-Clark deaths; Republic of New Africa; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee