Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party (BPP), a revolutionary Black Nationalist organization, was cofounded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by two college students, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. They created the Black Panther Party because recently passed civil rights legislation seemed to have had little impact on the multitude of dismal circumstances facing Black communities in the United States. To this end, Newton and Seale composed their Ten Point Platform and Program, in which they outlined critical issues that were facing Black communities, among them substandard housing, police brutality, inadequate education, and a racially discriminatory legal system. Although its platform emphasized practical “bread and butter” issues, the BPP considered itself to be a revolutionary organization, one whose ultimate goal remained the total political and economic transformation of the United States. The party's cofounders drew from the works of a broad range of revolutionary theory, including Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare, and the writings of Mao Tse-tung. Newton and Seale adopted the symbol of a black panther for their fledgling organization, borrowed from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a branch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) established to secure Black voting rights in Alabama.

The Black Panther Party rapidly morphed from an Oakland-based group with fewer than 50 individual members into a national organization with more than 5,000 members in 29 states and in Washington, D.C., as well as an international chapter in Algeria. Panther chapters existed in other locations, including Seattle, Des Moines, Omaha, and Denver; they also appeared in numerous southern cities, including New Orleans, Memphis, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

During its 16-year life span, 1966 to 1982, the BPP went through five distinct stages. In the first stage, from October 1966 to December 1967, the party was a revolutionary California-based organization engaged in grassroots activism in the Oakland/San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. The second phase, January 1968 to April 1971, represents the heyday of the Black Panther Party, during which the overwhelming majority of the BPP chapters across the United States were formed. This rapid expansion led to intense political repression by the U.S. government and intrafactional conflict. In the third phase, May 1971 to July 1974, the party's leadership stressed community outreach programs and electoral politics rather than armed confrontations against the government. This deradicalization era was highlighted by the Bobby Seale-Elaine Brown campaign for political office in Oakland. This shift toward electoral politics was deemed so important that Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton decided to close all Black Panther Party chapters outside of Oakland and ordered party members to relocate to Oakland to support the campaign. This phase concluded with the departure of Chairman Bobby Seale, who resigned from the organization due to irreconcilable differences with Newton. The party's fourth stage, August 1974 to June 1977, was characterized by Newton's exile in Cuba. The official explanation put forth by the BPP was that Newton fled to Cuba to escape a contract placed on his life by the city's drug dealers. However, it is more likely that Newton left the country to avoid pending criminal charges. In his absence, Elaine Brown, a member of the central committee who had served as a minister of information to the organization, assumed leadership of the Black Panther Party, which successfully wielded its influence in Oakland politics. In the final phase, July 1977 to June 1982, the party's membership dwindled to fewer than 50 members, and the organization lacked the resources to implement many of its survival programs. The closing of the Oakland Community School in June 1982 marked the end of the Black Panther Party.

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