Black Panther Party

The BPP and Imprisonment

Between 1967 and 1970, the FBI used state and local police departments, illegal wiretaps, and agent provocateurs to penetrate and destabilize the BPP. In 1967, one of the key BPP leaders, Huey Newton, was jailed on charges of killing an Oakland policeman. In New Haven, Connecticut, the FBI rounded up 14 Panthers including Bobby Seale and Erika [Page 76]Huggins and charged them with conspiracy and murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. Other members of the BPP jailed between 1971 and 1982 include Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, Herman Bell, Marshall Eddie Conway, Mark Cook, Bashir Hameed, Robert Seth Hayes, Teddy Jah Heath, Mundo We Langa, Abdul Majid, Russell Shoats, Jalil Abdul Muntagin, Baba Odinga, Ed Poindexter, and Albert Nuh Washington.

Angela Davis, a black radical activist and scholar and member of the BPP, was also incarcerated in connection with an armed takeover of a California courtroom in 1970. In 1970, Geronimo ji Jaga Pratt, a decorated war hero received a sentence of 25 years to life in prison on charges of murdering a white couple. He served 27 years before his sentence was overturned. The police had withheld information that the victim had actually accused another man of the offense and Pratt was innocent.

Ironically, incarcerating such people often provided them the opportunity to read widely and sharpen their ideologies. It also enabled the party to recruit new members from among the other prisoners. There was, in other words, a relationship between activists inside and beyond the prison walls, which sentences of confinement could not disrupt.

The Role of Women in the BPP

Black women in the United States have a long history of participation in community-based political and civil rights movements. The BPP was no exception, and women played significant roles and held leadership positions in it until 1981 when the BPP's last Oakland-based community program shut down. According to a 1969 survey, about two-thirds of the general membership of the BPP were women. As early as 1970, the BPP formally called for equality and liberation of women.

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