Black Panthers

Black Panthers. Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panther Party for Self‐defense soon became the best‐known revolutionary, nationalist organization of the Black Power Era. Rejecting the civil rights movement's integrationist goals and nonviolence, Panthers advocated self‐help, community control, and armed defense against police brutality. The party's youthful, urban constituency organized citizens' patrols in black neighborhoods; wore paramilitary uniforms featuring black berets and leather jackets; and operated health clinics, food pantries, “liberation schools,” and children's breakfast programs. Newton's 1967 imprisonment after his conviction (later reversed) for killing a policeman spurred a nationwide “Free Huey” campaign.

Addressing African Americans' specific problems, party leaders freely modified classical Marxism‐Leninism, moving from a black‐nationalist stance to revolutionary socialism to intercommunalism. In this revolutionary vision, a Black Power vanguard would overcome the tyrannies of race and class; lead the masses in seizing the means of production; and redistribute wealth, technology, and political power. To this end, the Panthers forged alliances with nonblack leftists and established trade‐union caucuses.

Black Panther militance frightened white America and many black moderates. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local police targeted the Panthers in a campaign against so‐called black nationalist hate groups. A joint FBI‐police raid in Chicago in 1969 left dead the head of the Illinois Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, and an associate, Mark Clark. Other Black Panthers died in police shoot‐outs, and many were imprisoned. Bobby Seale was among the “Chicago Eight” radicals tried for conspiracy in 1969. The party's minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, fled the United States to Cuba and then to Algiers. Bitter internal division and ideological disputes with other nationalist groups further weakened the party. Fading by 1972, the Panthers nevertheless inspired latter‐day activists by proving that class consciousness and the concept of black self‐rule need not be mutually exclusive.
See also Black Nationalism; Radicalism; Sixties, The; Vietnam War.

Bibliography

Bobby Seale , Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton, 1970.
Huey P. Newton , To Die for the People, 1972.
William L. Van Deburg , New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975, 1992.

William L. Van Deburg