The Black Panther Party

 Background and Founding Tenants

The Black Panther Party, which was originally called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Black organization founded to promote civil rights and self-defense for the Black community. It was active within the United States in the late 1960s into the 1970s.

Founded in Oakland, Calif., by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in October of 1966, the organization initially espoused a doctrine calling for armed resistance to societal oppression in the interest of Black justice, though its objectives and philosophy changed radically throughout the party's existence. While the organization's leaders passionately espoused socialist doctrines, the party's Black-nationalist reputation attracted an ideologically diverse membership base. Ideological consensus within the party was difficult to achieve and some members openly disagreed with the views of the leaders.

The group was founded on the principles of its “Ten-Point Program,” a document that called for "land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace," as well as exemption from military service that would utilize Blacks to "fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America."

While firmly grounded in Black nationalism and what began as an organization that accepted Black membership exclusively, the party reconsidered itself as it grew to national prominence and became an iconic representative of the counterculture of the 1960s. The Black Panthers ultimately condemned Black nationalism as "Black racism" and became more focused on socialism without racial exclusivity. They instituted a variety of community programs to alleviate poverty and illness among the communities it deemed most in need of aid. While the party retained its all-Black membership, it recognized that different communities, particularly those that it deemed oppressed by the American government, needed to organize around their own set of issues and encouraged alliances with these organizations.

The group's political goals are often overshadowed by their confrontational and even militaristic tactics, and by their suspicious regard of law enforcement agents; whom the Black Panthers perceived as a linchpin of oppression that could only be overcome by a willingness to take up armed self-defense. The Black Panther Party collapsed in the early 1970s, after party membership had started to decline during Newton's 1968 manslaughter trial. There have been a variety of allegations about the lengths to which law enforcement officials went in their attempts to discredit and destroy the organization; including allegations of assassination of its key members.

In 1965, Newton was released from jail, and, with his friend from Oakland City College, Seale, had joined a Black power group called the Revolutionary Action Movement, which had a chapter in Oakland. It followed the writings of Robert F. Williams. Originally from North Carolina, Williams published a newsletter called The Crusader from China, where he fled to escape kidnapping charges. RAM was often seen as an extremely violent group; in 1965, three East coast RAM members were charged with conspiring to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument. The Oakland chapter consisted mainly of students, and was not interested in this more extreme form of activism, however Newton and Seale's attitude was more militant, and the pair left RAM searching for something more meaningful to them.

Around this time, the pair was working at the North Oakland Neighborhood Anti-Poverty Center and they also served on the advisory board. In an effort to deal with the daily police brutality they witnessed, the advisory board obtained 5,000 signatures in support of the city council setting up a police review board to look over all complaints of police abuse. Newton had been taking classes at the City College and at San Francisco Law School, and both he and Seale were active in the North Oakland Center. Thus the pair had a large number of connections and friends with whom they talked up the new organization they had in mind. Inspired by the success of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and Stokely Carmichael's calls for separate Black political organizations, they wrote their initial platform statement, the Ten-Point Program, with the help of Newton's brother, Melvin, and decided on a uniform of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, black berets and openly displayed loaded shotguns.

Catalysts in World Culture

With the death of Malcolm X in 1965, the Black Panther Party saw that as its purpose to further the Black civil rights movement and to fill what it perceived to be a void in leadership among the Black community after both Malcolm and Martin Luther King Jr. had died. Although it eventually saw the involvement of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader, Carmichael, the party initially rejected the integrationist stance of Martin Luther King, and rejected compromise with the power structure of the White majority. The Black Panthers focused their rhetoric on revolutionary class struggle taking many ideas from Maoism. The party turned to the works of Karl Marx, Lenin and Mao Zhe Dong to inform the manner in which it should organize, as a revolutionary cadre organization. In consciously working toward such a revolution, they considered themselves the vanguard party, “committed to organizing support for a socialist revolution.”

However, the party did not fully agree with Marx's analysis of the so-called lumpen-proletariat. Marx felt that this class lacked the political consciousness required to lead a revolution. Marx’s conception of the lumpen-proletariat was a group that stands on the very margins of the class system because they are not wholly integrated into the division of labor. Newton, on the other hand, was inspired by his reading of post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon and his belief that the lumpen was of utmost importance, saying about these "brothers off the block" that, “if you didn't relate to these cats, the power structure would organize these cats against you.” They do not accept the idea of making their living by regular work. Thus, their position within society is not marked by the fact that they are unemployed but rather by the fact that they do not seek employment.

Though they may be swept up by a proletarian revolution and are entirely capable of “the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices,” they are equally capable of “the barest banditry and the foulest corruption,” and are much more likely to play the part of “a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” Essentially, they are a malleable populace that is generally tempted into service of sight, as opportunistic and exploitative as the finance aristocracy. Just like the aristocracy, the lumpen live off society, rather than producing for it, thereby existing as an entirely parasitic force.

The Black Panthers' basic interpretation of the lumpen-proletariat generally conforms to that of Marx. Eldridge Cleaver, another key Panther Party member, and his wife Kathleen, echoed a similar sentiment, stating that the Black lumpen-proletariat had absolutely no stake in industrial America: “They existed at the bottom level of society…outside the capitalist system that was the basis for the oppression of Black people.” Yet, the Panthers did not propose that the entire Black American population constituted a post-modern, race-based lumpen-proletariate in and of itself. Instead, the Party's analysis suggested that there existed a significant "underclass" — both urban and rural — within the masses of the oppressed whose removal from the primary means of production left that class particularly apt to engage in subversive activities, both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary in potential effect. The Panthers included two distinct groups within the lumpen:  first, the “industrial reserve army,” was one that could not find employment, being unskilled and unfit people, were displaced by mechanization and never invested with new skills, were forced to rely on Welfare or receiving state aid. They consisted of “the millions of Black domestics and porters, nurses’ aides and maintenance men, laundresses and cooks, sharecroppers, unpropertied ghetto dwellers and welfare mothers.” The second group were the so-called “criminal element,” who had similarly been locked out of the economy and consisted of the “gang members and the gangsters, the pimps and the prostitutes, the drug users and dealers, the common thieves and murderers.”

The “criminal element” category of people quite evidently displayed the key characteristics of the lumpen. However, the “Industrial Reserve Army” classification posed something of a problem, since a large proportion of this group consisted of the working poor. The Panthers viewed the line that separated the proletariat and the lumpen as tenuous and fragile, and this resulted in a blending of the two classes. Indeed, some historians have argued that the Panthers “envisioned a lumpen more akin to a sub-proletariat class” that lacked the parasitical aspects of the traditional lumpen sector.

Panther Leadership

The leadership of the Black Panthers was characterized by internal contradictions on the type and kind of Black nationalism it wished to embrace. While Seale, in his book Seize the Time, described the foundation of the organization as being based on "Black nationalism," he also described the evolution of the organization into an instrument adapting to counter what it perceived to be social oppression on an international scale. Whereas the Panthers had been founded as an institution interested in social justice for Blacks, Seale attempted to reform it to an institution for worldwide social justice, regardless of the nationality or ethnicity of the oppressed people. Internationalist mentality had strategic advantages in the alliances it could form in pursuing social change with similar like-minded organizations. Newton, Seale and their supporters within the party eventually came to reject cultural nationalists as "Black racists,” and dubbed those nationalists' brand of cultural nationalism as narrow and bourgeois "pork-chop nationalism."

Newton and Seale attempted to work in coalition with organizations representing oppressed communities in the United States, many of which took inspiration from the Black Panthers, as well as with other radical groups with whom they felt they had common interests. These included the Puerto Rican Young Lords, under the leadership of Jose “Cha-Cha” Jimenez, who spent time in training sessions at Panther headquarters in Oakland, Calif., and who with Preacherman of the White Appalachian Young Patriots joined with Fred Hampton in Chicago, and together formed the first Rainbow Coalition in 1969. Other groups with whom the Panthers also worked included the predominantly white youth movement: Students for a Democratic Society, Youth International Party, the Chicano Brown Berets, the California Peace and Freedom Party and the Gay Liberation Front.

In Newton's speech at Boston College in 1970, speaking as the head of the Black Panther Party, he declared that the party would "disclaim internationalism and become intercommunalists." What Newton envisioned was the end of all "states," all nations, and rather a worldwide social framework of "interdependent socialist communities;" communalism rather than nationalism. The Party recognized that all over the world there were "oppressed communities," and that these communities should be united across national boundaries where they found themselves to have a common oppressor. However, Newton's approach toward combating all forms of oppression rather than simply anti-Black oppression caused friction to form between him and Panthers such as Carmichael and Cleaver. Indicative of this was Carmichael's embrace of the slogan of "Black Power," in contrast to Newton and Seale's embrace of the slogan "Power to the People" which they believed was of a more internationalist and Marxist character.

Although written before he joined the Black Panther Party, Cleaver's book Soul on Ice often promoted a sexist and homophobic perspective that people erroneously associated with the Panthers. He attacked Black author James Baldwin for his well-known homosexuality and relationships with White men. While a member of the Panthers, however, Cleaver explicitly attacked sexism declaring that women "have a duty and the right to do whatever they want to do in order to see to it that they are not relegated to an inferior position." Insisting that liberation must be broad, he explained that, "the women are our half. They're not our weaker half; they're not our stronger half. They are our other half."

Cleaver was exiled to Alegria and while there, he eventually demanded less emphasis on Panther community programs and more emphasis on guerrilla activity. These differences of opinion took their toll on Newton's control of the party, especially while he served a sentence in prison, and eventually these cracks grew into a full-blown split between a main, Western U.S.-based faction supporting Newton, and a breakaway, Eastern U.S.-based faction that supported Cleaver.

Filling a Void in the Community

Inspired by Mao's Communist advice to revolutionaries in the The Little Red Book, Newton called on the Panthers to "serve the people" and to make "survival programs" a priority within its branches. The most famous and successful of the Panthers’ programs was the Free Breakfast for Children Program that was initially run out of a San Francisco church.

Other survival programs were free services such as clothing distribution, classes on politics and economics, free medical clinics, lessons on self-defense and first aid, transportation to upstate prisons for family members of inmates, an emergency-response ambulance program, drug and alcohol rehabilitation and testing for sickle-cell disease, which was performed on more than 500,000 Black people before it was recognized by the medical community as one that affected the Black community very disproportionately.

The Panthers briefly merged with the SNCC, headed by the fiery Carmichael. In 1967, the party organized a march on the California state capitol to protest the state's attempt to outlaw carrying loaded weapons in public. Participants in the march carried rifles. In 1968, the Panthers’ Minister of Information, Cleaver ran for national presidential office on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket.

One of the central aims of the Panthers was to stop abuse perpetrated by local police departments. When the party was founded in 1966, only 16 of Oakland's 661 Police Officers were Black. Accordingly, many questioned the Department's objectivity and impartiality. This situation was not unique to Oakland; this was common with police departments in major cities across the country. Throughout the 1960s, race riots broke out in impoverished Black communities that were subject to policing by disproportionately White police departments. The work and writings of the Monroe, N.C., National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter president and author of Negroes with Guns, Robert F. Williams, also influenced the Panthers’ tactics.

Panthers and Pigs

The Panthers sought to oppose alleged police brutality through neighborhood patrols, an approach that has since been adopted by groups such as, Copwatch. Police officers were frequently followed by armed Black Panthers who sought at times to aid Black alleged victims of police brutality and perceived racial prejudice. Both Panthers and police died as a result of violent confrontations. By 1970, 34 Panthers had died as a result of police raids, shoot-outs and internal conflict. Various police organizations claim the Black Panthers were responsible for the deaths of at least 15 law enforcement officers and the injuries of dozens more. Also, during those years, juries found several Panther members guilty of violent crimes.

Between 1966 and 1972, when the party was most active, several departments hired significantly more Black police officers. Some of these Black officers played prominent roles in shutting down the Panther's activities. In Chicago, in 1969, for example, Panthers Mark Clark and Hampton were both killed in a police raid, in which five of the officers present were Black, by Sergeant James Davis, a Black officer in the Chicago Police Department. In cities such as New York City, Black police officers were used to infiltrate Panther meetings. By 1972, almost every major police department was fully integrated. According to The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc, at least four officers killed by the Panthers were Black. Prominent Panther member H. Rap Brown is serving life imprisonment for the murder of Ricky Leon Kinchen, a Fulton County, Ga., sheriff's deputy, and the wounding of another officer in a gunbattle. Both officers were Black.

In August of 1967, the FBI instructed  the Counter Intelligence Program or COINTELPRO to "neutralize" what the FBI called "Black Nationalist Hate Groups" and other dissident groups. In September of 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the Black Panthers as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country," and by 1969, the Black Panthers were the primary target of COINTELPRO, and the target of 233 out of a total of 295 authorized "Black Nationalist" COINTELPRO actions. The goals of the program were to prevent the unification of militant Black Nationalist groups and to weaken the power of their leaders in order to reduce that probability, as well as discredit the groups to reduce their support and growth. The initial targets included the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the SNCC, the RAM and the Nation of Islam. Leaders who were targeted included Martin Luther King, Jr., Carmichael, Brown, Maxwell Stanford and Elijah Muhammad.

Although COINTELPRO was commissioned to prevent violence, many of the tactics of the FBI organization were intended to foster violence. The most telling example was the FBI's efforts to "Intensify the degree of animosity" between the Black Panthers and the Chicago gang, the Blackstone Rangers. These included sending an anonymous letter to the Ranger’s gang leader claiming that the Panthers were threatening his life, a letter with the stated intent to induce "reprisals" against Panther leadership. In Southern California, similar actions were taken to exacerbate what was characterized as a "gang war" between the Black Panther Party and an organization called the United Slaves. Violent conflict between these two groups, including shootings and beatings, led to the deaths of at least four Black Panther Party members. FBI agents claimed credit for instigating some of the violence between the two groups.

It should be noted that James Adams, Deputy Associate Director of the FBI's Intelligence Division, claimed that COINTELPRO operations did not intend to foster violence nor to harm individual members of the organizations targeted. However the final report of Senate “Church Committee,” which investigated the actions of COINTELPRO in 1975 and 1976, did not agree with Adams, and purported to demonstrate that the FBI “itself engaged in lawless tactics and responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting violence and unrest.”

On January 17, 1969, Los Angeles Panther Captain, Bunchy Carter, and Deputy Minister, John Huggins, were killed in Campbell Hall on the UCLA campus, in a gun battle with members of United Slaves, a rival Black nationalist group. The fight stemmed from a dispute over who would control UCLA's Black Studies Program. Another shootout between the two groups two months later led to further injuries. It was alleged that the FBI had sent provocative letter to United Slaves in an attempt to create antagonism between the group and the Panthers.

One of the most notorious of such actions involved a Chicago police raid of the home of Panther organizer Hampton on December 4, 1969. The raid had been orchestrated by the police in conjunction with the FBI, and the FBI was complicit in many of the actions involved. The people inside the home had been drugged by an FBI informant, William O'Neal, and were all asleep at the time of the raid. Hampton was shot and killed, as was Clark. The others in the home were then dragged into the street and beaten and subsequently charged with assault. These charges were later dropped.

In May of 1969, Alex Rackley, a 24-year-old member of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party, was tortured and murdered because party members suspected him of being a police informant. A number of party members had taken part, and three party officers eventually admitted guilt. But Panther supporters alleged that George Sams, the man who ratted-out Rackley as the informant ordering his execution, which he claimed was under the direct orders of Seale, was actually the informant and agent provocateur himself. The case resulted in the New Haven, Conn., Black Panther trials of 1970; The trial ended with a hung jury, and the prosecution chose not to request another trial.

A Loyal Following

National awareness, and sometimes suspicion, of the group continued to grow, especially after the arrest of Newton in the fall of 1967, and the May 2, 1967, protest involving loaded shotguns at the California State Assembly. On February 17, 1968, a large rally was held for Newton in the Oakland Auditorium. The speakers included Carmichael, Brown and James Forman. It was after this event that the size of the group really took off. From about that time, the structure of the group became more defined as well. New members had to attend a six-week training program and political education classes that were largely based in Mao's Little Red Book.

In 1968, the group shortened its name to just the Black Panther Party and sought to focus more directly on political events. Members were told to no longer carry guns, and an influx of college students joined the group, which had previously consisted largely of "brothers off the block." This created some tension in the group, as some were more interested in supporting the Panther's social programs, while there were other members who were not as interested in changing their lifestyle from before they joined. This "street mentality" meant that for many Panthers, the group was little more than a type of gang.

Widespread support for the Panthers was characterized by the now famous raised fist salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics by two medalists when the American national anthem was played. After Black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists as a symbol of Black Power, the International Olympic Committee banned them from the Olympic Games for life. Support also came from some celebrities in Hollywood, such as Jane Fonda. She supported Newton and the Black Panthers in the early 1970s, stating, "revolution is an act of love; we are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood." She called the Black Panthers "our revolutionary vanguard," and said "we must support them with love, money, propaganda and risk." The Black Panthers attracted a wide variety of left-wing revolutionaries and political activists, including former Ramparts magazine editor David Horowitz and left-wing lawyer Charles R. Garry, who often acted as the organization’s legal counsel.

Belief Systems, Brutality and Disbanding

From the start, the Black Panther Party's focus on militancy came with a reputation for violence. They often took advantage of a little known California law that allowed people to carry a loaded rifle or shotgun as long as it was publicly displayed and pointed at no one. These weapons and the public threats against police officers, for example,chants like "The revolution has co-ome, it's time to pick up the gu-un. Off the pigs!" helped cement their reputation as a violent organization. But the large part of their reputation came from particular events in which the Panthers were involved.

In October of 1967, Oakland police officer John Frey was shot to death in an altercation with Newton during a traffic stop. In the stop, Newton and backup officer Herbert Heanes also suffered gunshot wounds. Although the result was later reversed, for three years after that, Newton was imprisoned for involuntary manslaughter. This incident gained the party even wider recognition by the radical American left, and a "Free Huey" campaign ensued^.

On May 2, 1967, the California State Assembly Committee on Criminal Procedure was scheduled to convene to discuss what was known as the "Mulford Act," which would ban public displays of loaded firearms. Cleaver and Newton put together a plan to send a group of about 30 Panthers, led by Seale, from Oakland to Sacramento to protest the bill. The group entered the assembly with their weapons, an event which led to widespread publicity, but also to the arrest of Seale and five others. The group plead guilty to misdemeanor charges of disrupting a legislative session.

On April 6, 1968, Panther Bobby Hutton, who held the title Minister of Defense, was killed, and Cleaver was wounded in what both the Oakland police and the Black Panther Party have called an ambush by the each other’s group. In the event, two police officers were shot. This event, and others, furthered the Panther's reputation for violence and confrontation. The group was rivaled only by The Weathermen among large leftist organizations in this reputation. From the fall of 1967 through the end of 1969, nine police officers were killed and 56 were wounded in confrontations with the Panthers. The confrontations are believed to have resulted in 10 Panther casualties, and an unknown number of injuries. In 1969 alone, 348 Panthers were arrested for a variety of crimes.

While part of the organization was already participating in local government and social services, another group was in constant conflict with the police. For some of the Party's supporters, the separation between political action, criminal activity, social services, access to power and grass-roots identity had become confusing and contradictory. The Panthers' political momentum seemed to be bogged down in the criminal justice system. A significant split in the  Panthers occurred over disagreements within the Panther leadership over how to confront these challenges. Some Panther leaders such as Newton and David Hilliard favored a focus on community service coupled with self-defense, while others, such as Cleaver, embraced a more confrontational strategy. A schism was made inevitable when Cleaver publicly criticized the Party as adopting a "reformist" rather than "revolutionary" agenda and called for Hilliard's removal. Cleaver was expelled from the Central Committee of the Panthers, but he went on to lead a splinter group called the Black Liberation Army, which had previously existed as an underground paramilitary wing of the Party.

The Party eventually fell apart due to rising legal costs and internal disputes. Its final leader was Elaine Brown, a longtime Panther and the first and only woman to lead it. She addressed issues of sexism within the party and attempted to stave off its disintegration. The National Alliance of Black Panthers was formed on July 31, 2004; it was inspired by the grassroots activism of the original organization but is not otherwise related. Its chair is Shazza Nzingha. A 40-year reunion of the Black Panther Party was held in Oakland in October of 2006.  In January of 2007, eight men were charged by a joint state and federal task force with the 1971 murder of a California police officer.  The defendants have been identified as former members of the Black Liberation Army and two have been linked to the Black Panthers.  A similar case was dismissed in 1975 when a judge ruled that police had gathered evidence in the illegal way of torture.

In 1989, a group calling themselves the New Black Panther Party was formed in Dallas. Ten years later, the NBPP became home to many former Nation of Islam members when the chair position was taken by Khalid Abdul Muhammad. Members of the original Black Panther Party have insisted that this party is illegitimate and have vociferously objected that there "is no new Black Panther Party.”

The Ten Point Program

1. We want power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed communities.

2. We want full employment for our people.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalist of our Black Community.

4. We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings.

5. We want decent education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

6. We want completely free health care for all black and oppressed people.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people, other people of color, all oppressed people inside the United States.

8. We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression.

9. We want freedom for all black and oppressed people now held in U. S. Federal, state, county, city and military prisons and jails. We want trials by a jury of peers for all persons charged with so-called crimes under the laws of this country.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people's community control of modern technology.