A Brief History Of The Black Panther Party Of Oakland

One of the most well known leftist groups of the 1960s was the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP). Striving for civil rights for black Americans, their militant imagery, rhetoric and actions propelled the Panthers into the international spotlight. From its origins on the campus of Oakland's Merritt College, the BPP was based in and influenced by the surrounding Bay Area. At the same time, the influence and legacy of the BPP on the politics and institutions of the Bay Area can be seen to this day.

The Bay Area saw an economic boom during The Second World War based around the shipbuilding and military industrial complex. By 1943 the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce called the Bay Area the "largest shipbuilding center in the world". Black Americans from the Southern United States moved to California in large numbers to take advantage of these economic opportunities. However, once the war was over, the demand for shipbuilding decreased dramatically. Many new black migrants found themselves unable to find employment. That, along with systemic racism and white flight - where whites moved out of cities and into the suburbs to escape having to live near people of color, led to a dire economic situation. By 1964 Oakland was federally recognized as an economically depressed area.

At the same time new opportunities did arise for the younger generation of blacks in California. The state had a Master Plan for Higher Education which guaranteed anyone with a high school diploma access to college and university educations for free. This bill was not aimed at helping the black population, but inadvertently led to a large number of black youth attending college. It was these college campuses that helped expose a generation of black students to the ideas of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Robert F. Williams and other black radicals. These influences were seen on every campus of the Bay Area. Numerous college based black power groups formed during the 1960s, including: The Afro-American Association, The Black Panther Party of Northern California, Soul Students Advisory Council, and The West Coast branch of the Revolutionary Action Movement.

Merritt college in Oakland was one of these campuses. At the time Merritt College was in the middle of a predominantly black neighborhood and had a relatively large and growing black student body. However in the early 1960s the faculty, staff and curriculum of the college did not reflect the diverse student body. Student activists were able to change that, first by forcing the college to hire black staff and faculty and then to create a black studies program. At one point student activist and future founder of the Black Panthers, Bobby Seale, threatened to shut down the campus. By the late 1960s The Wall Street Journal was calling Merritt a campus "where Black Power won."

Unsatisfied with the existing organizations, two Merritt students, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. They started with a ten-point program which read:

1. We want freedom.

We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community. We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

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

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

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

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want 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.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

This program was based on a statement put out by the black separatist Nation of Islam and was the backbone of the BPP's ideology.

The members for the newly formed Black Panthers wanted to begin organizing around an issue that would give them large support of the local black community, and no issue was as important to all sections of the black community as that of police discrimination and harassment. At the time, the almost exclusively white Oakland police did not need a reason to harass, beat and arrest black youth and the level of resentment towards the police in the black community was huge. After the 1965 Watts rebellion in Los Angeles the federal government did a study to see which other cities in America were likely to see a similar uprising. Partly due to the high levels of police harassment of the black community, Oakland was at the top of the list.

The BPP responded to the constant police harassment of the black community by initiating patrols of openly armed militants monitoring the actions of the police on the streets. They would follow police vehicles around and act as legal witnesses and also inform those being arrested or stopped of their rights. For obvious reasons this earned them the scorn of the police department. Their willingness to legally open carry loaded weapons also set them apart from other black power groups and prevented the police from intimidating them. Huey Newton knew the law and the constitution and wouldn't let the police get away with pushing him or anyone else around.

Though most of the attention they received was due to their militant image, the Panthers were involved in many community projects. One of the first things that the Party accomplished was getting a stop light placed into a busy Oakland intersection. After a number of school children and motorists were hurt in this intersection the community asked the local government to install a stop light into the intersection of 55th St. and Market St. The bureaucratic local government was slow to respond, so the Panthers took matters into their own hands. They simply went to the intersection and began directing traffic on their own. As soon as the city realized what was happening, the street light was put into place.

In 1967 the Panthers gained national headlines. That year a black man, Denzil Dowell, was murdered by a sheriff's deputy in the city of Richmond. The police claimed Dowell was shot two or three times while attempting to burglarize a house. However a coroner's report showed the body had ten bullet holes in it and no signs for a burglary were found. Dowell's family asked the Panthers to help. A group of armed Panthers organized a series of demonstrations in Richmond and at the sheriff's departments. This led to national press coverage for the Panthers, almost all of which was misleading and negative. While the media response was negative, the response of the black community was enthusiastically positive, and a new chapter of the Party formed in Richmond.

Because of their militancy the BPP was able to attract segments of the population that other groups had trouble connecting with. Likewise, due to the high level of media attention they attracted the BPP began to see support coming in from white-led radical groups. Unlike black separatist organizations the Panthers were willing to take on aid from white allies. On the flip side, the high level of media attention brought with it a reactionary response from law enforcement and the state. One of the first such reactions was a bill put forth in the California legislature outlawing the open carry of loaded firearms.

The Panthers reacted to the bill by staging a march in Sacramento. The Black Panthers entered the state capital carrying shotguns and were arrested for disrupting the legislative session. The bill passed the predominantly white legislature and was signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan. This bill, targeting the BPP, and the subsequent protest made international news and set the militant image that the party was never able to overcome. To this day the general public remembers the Black Panthers more so for their guns than for anything else. The idea of black militants with guns coming to America's places of power was one that many white Americans feared.

Law enforcement began to drastically increase the harassment of BPP members after their Sacramento protest. The local police began to follow members of the Party around town looking for any reason at all to stop and harass them. Much of the funds the Party was able to raise went to paying off tickets for jaywalking, driving violations and other non-political citations that police would give Party members. The BPP also became a target for COINTELPRO, the FBI's covert and illegal program used to attack domestic leftist groups. This program included forged documents, false letters, rumor spreading, house raids, wrongful imprisonment, harassment and assassinations.

On a late night in October 1967 Huey Newton was pulled over by Oakland police officers. Details of what happened next are not fully known, but the result was a shootout between Newton and the two officers. All three were wounded, and one of the officers died in the hospital. Police soon arrived at Newtons hospital bed and arrested him for the murder of the dead officer. This led to a nationwide "Free Huey" campaign. The membership and influence of the party continued to increase as did police harassment. Raids on homes of Party members became more common and the first Panthers were killed by police.

On April 6th, 1968, two days after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. the constant confrontations between the police and the Panthers led to their first fatality. A shootout broke out between Oakland police and BPP members. Seventeen year old Bobby Hutton, treasurer and the very first recruit of the Panthers was killed and Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver was wounded. Cleaver was arrested, but jumped bail and fled to Cuba and then Algeria. He was able to hold a large influence on the more militant wings of the party while overseas.

Because the party was able to recruit from a variety of social and geographic areas, including academic and street youth, this led to differences in ideology and tactics. This was beginning to become apparent as some members were steering the party towards community programs, while others were wanting to move towards more militant confrontations. This militancy was not only directed at the police and the state, but also used to intimidate other radical groups. Using forged letter and press releases the FBI was able to fuel conflict and animosity between the Panthers and other groups. The most extreme example of this animosity was a shootout which occurred in January of 1969 on the campus of the University of California in Los Angeles. The shootout was between the Panthers and a rival black power organization - the US organization and resulted in the death of two Panthers. Not long before that, the FBI's director, J. Edgar Hoover called the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country".

By that time the ideology of the Party begin to move towards a focus on class consciousness and internationalism. Community programs began to take more of a central role than street confrontations. These programs were a way for the black community to help itself where government programs failed to do so. Labeled as "self-defense" programs they included: free breakfast for children, free medical clinics, disease testing, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, educational classes, transportation for family members to visit relatives in prison and more. One of the most successful of these programs was the The Oakland Community School. A school totally free of tuition, which included free meals for the children and where the studies were focused on history from a black and working class point of view. This focus on community programs led to the Panthers working closely with older more traditional groups such as churches. It also saw an increase in the amount of women participating in the Party.

The larger focus on community programs did not stop the vehement harassment perpetrated by the government. According to J. Edgar Hoover it was these community programs, not the guns, which were the largest threat to the United States government. The COINTELPRO program continued the repression, harassment and assassinations for Black Panther Party members. After the the state murder of fred hampton and others and the literal gagging and bounding of Bobby Seale in a chicago court, many liberals came to the defense and support of the BPP.

The debate between a focus on militant confrontations and community programs eventually led to a split in the Party. The more militant members, led by Eldridge Cleaver split from the more Oakland based leadership. Many of these members were based on the East Coast of the USA and some of them moved on to form the underground militant Black Liberation Army.

Eventually, in large part due to government harassment, legal costs, and imprisonment and killings of its leaders the BPP began to decline. As membership fell some Party members moved on to electoral politics. Bobby Seale, for example, ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Oakland, California in 1973. Though the Party largely faded away, their legacy and influence lives on, especially in Oakland.