Editor's Pick

ON 15 OCTOBER 1966, Bobby Seale (left) and Huey P Newton (right) founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California. Newton and Seale were students at the city’s Merritt College, where they had joined the Afro-American Association, a radical group that denounced the assimilationist tendencies of the civil-rights movement and championed a distinct Black identity. After failing to secure support for an armed demonstration to demand a more robust Black history curriculum, Newton chose to shift his activism beyond the campus.

For the Black Panthers, carrying unconcealed weapons, which was permitted under the California penal code, was a means to challenge state violence. In August 1965, residents of Watts and other Black neighbourhoods in Los Angeles had torched hundreds of buildings over longstanding concerns about police misconduct and urban poverty. The Panthers organised patrols to monitor police actions in Black neighbourhoods, while also launching several “community survival” initiatives, such as free breakfast for children, legal aid, transportation assistance, ambulance services and tuberculosis testing.

J Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, considered the Panthers the greatest threat to national security and devoted considerable resources to target the group. Through COINTELPRO, a covert initiative aimed at disrupting radical groups, the FBI employed agents provocateurs, sabotage, misinformation and lethal force to crush the Panthers. With support from both major parties and the National Rifle Association, the California governor, Ronald Reagan, enacted a stringent gun control law in order to disarm them. Newton was arrested in 1967 and convicted of killing a police officer. The sentence was overturned on appeal, and the charges were dropped, in 1971, after two retrials resulted in hung juries. Seale was part of the “Chicago Eight,” who faced trial over the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Although never convicted, he spent four years in jail for contempt of court.