The Rise and Fall of the Oakland Black Panther Party for Self-Defense

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was a Black Power political organization founded by college students Chairman Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland California. Meeting 5 years earlier at Merritt College, Newton and Seale protested the school’s “Pioneer Day” celebration, which honored the pioneers who came to California in the 1800s but omitted the role of Black Americans, they formed the Negro History Fact Group, which called the school to offer black history.

 They founded the Black Panthers in the wake of the assassination of the black nationalist Malcolm X and after police in San Francisco shot and killed Matthew Johnson, an unarmed black teen. Created to challenge police brutality against the African American community and dressed in black berets and leather jackets, the Black Panthers were an organized armed citizen patrol and at its peak in 1968, the Party had roughly 2000 members. Newton and Seale drew on Marxist ideology for the party platform, they outlined the organization’s philosophical and political views in a Ten-Point Program. The program called for an immediate end to police brutality, employment for all African Americans, and land, housing, and justice for all. They were a larger part of the Black Power movement, which emphasized black pride, community control, and unification for civil rights. 

While being portrayed as a gang, the organization was as a political party whose goal was getting more political representation by electing black officials – they were unsuccessful on that front. By the early 1970s, the organization saw its downfall at the hands of deadly shootouts, internal tensions, and FBI counterintelligence activities aimed at weakening the organization. The Party’s socialist message and black nationalist focus made them a target of the FBI counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO and in 1969, the FBI declared the Black Panthers a communist organization and an enemy of the United States. J. Edgar Hoover,  the first director of the FBI in 1968 called the group, “One of the greatest threats to the nation’s internal security.” then in Chicago 1969, police gunned down and killed Party members Fred Hampton and Mark Clarke, who were asleep in their apartment – about a hundred bullets were fired in what police described as a fierce gun battle with members of the Party, however ballistics experts later determined that only one of the bullets came from the Panthers. Although the FBI was not responsible for leading the raid, a federal grand jury later indicated that the bureau played a significant role in the events leading up to the raid. The Black Panther Party dissolved in 1982 and did, however, start several popular social programs, including free breakfast programs for school children and free health clinics in 13 black communities across the United States.

Black Americans came together to ask that they stopped being brutalized and were brutalized as punishment for begging for their lives and civil liberties – in the recent history of BLM protests it can still be seen that today Black People are still fighting for their civil liberties.