On this episode of the Sofa King Podcast, we go back to the 1960s and talk about the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party. It was originally founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966. They were college students fed up with the new racism in the north that the Civil Rights movement wasn’t covering. Among their biggest issues was police violence against blacks in Oakland. Their solution? Carry lots of guns and follow the cops around!

As the Black Panthers founded, Newton studied all the open carry gun laws in California at the time and started to sell communist books to white students in Berkeley to afford guns. They started to give all Panthers weapons and had them start to run patrols, following police cars to make sure nothing violent happened.

Many members of the Black Panthers were college-educated, however, so their focus was on more than just guns and cops. They started education programs, revolutionary free medical clinics, and free breakfast programs in the poorest ghetto neighborhoods. Their schools became the best it California, and they did some real positive work to strengthen weak black communities.

However, there was also violence. Lots of it. There were multiple incidents where Panthers killed police officers, and many more where police officers killed Panthers. Eventually, they gained national notoriety for bringing weapons to the California capitol to protest a new bill that would stop them from carrying guns. From here, the cause exploded and franchises popped up all over the nation. Also, J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI took notice and targeted them with their notorious COINTELPRO system, trying to frame their leaders and get all black national groups and street gangs to go to war with each other. Though it feels like a conspiracy theory, this abuse of government authority had serious results, and it even lead to the FBI staging the murder of prominent members of the Black Panther Party in Chicago.

Things started to go downhill for the Panthers when their leader Huey P. Newton went a little overboard. He had killed people before (and gotten acquitted), but now he killed a hooker and beat his tailor. He fled to Cuba for six years and came back to Panther party which was run by women. He didn’t approve and had at least one woman beaten to silence her. He also allegedly got a team of assassins to murder witnesses at the trial for the hooker. None of it went well for him or the Panther party.

This group is an interesting study. It is was violent against whites, then changed to be an international force against American oppression. It bolstered schools and chased cops with guns. It even sprouted the Crips street gang in LA when Newton closed down different branches of the Panthers. Love them or hate them, they did a lot to change what it meant to be black in America.

Visit Our Sources:

http://theblackpanthers.com/home/

https://web.stanford.edu/~ccarson/articles/am_left.htm

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-most-important-legacy-of-the-black-panthers

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/27-important-facts-everyone-should-know-about-the-black-panthers_n_56c4d853e4b08ffac1276462