The Black Panthers began by legally following Oakland police cars
In 1966 two Oakland college friends, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, used California's open-carry law to trail police patrols and record their conduct. Within three years the Black Panther Party had chapters across America and abroad, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had branded it the greatest threat to internal security.
The party's roots lay in the Second Great Migration, when tens of thousands of Black Southerners moved to Oakland and the Bay Area for wartime jobs in shipyards. Their children met new kinds of poverty and racism, and by 1966, with nonviolent groups such as SNCC and CORE in decline, a Black Power movement was asking how to win real economic and political power rather than formal rights alone. Newton and Seale, who had met at Merritt College in 1962, founded the party in late October 1966, borrowing the panther emblem from an Alabama organisation and adopting black berets and leather jackets.
Early patrols carried rifles openly, as state law then allowed so long as they were displayed and aimed at no one, and members quoted the law to officers who challenged them. By January 1967 the party had a storefront headquarters and its own newspaper, which at its height sold a hundred thousand copies a week. When police shot an unarmed 22-year-old construction worker, Denzil Dowell, in North Richmond that April, his family turned to the Panthers after officials declined to investigate, and the party held rallies there.
Between 1968 and 1971 the organisation spread nationwide, with international chapters in Britain and Algeria. The FBI's secret COINTELPRO programme targeted it through surveillance, infiltration, perjury and harassment, and the Bureau was involved in the 1969 killings of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in a Chicago police raid. Persecution initially boosted support, and membership peaked in 1970 before declining amid hostile press coverage, infighting partly stoked by the FBI, and reports of drug dealing and extortion.
How to judge the party remains contested. Older accounts cast it as more criminal than political, others as chiefly a victim of state repression. Historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin call it one of the most influential Black Power organisations of the late 1960s, whose evolution ended tragically. It dissolved in 1982.
Source: Black Panther Party
